Note

The Shaftesbury Chronicles was intended to be a three-volume alternative history of Shaftesbury from 1989 to 2000, in which the town would succeed Glastonbury as a New Age centre. This would be achieved by a revival of the ancient Byzant water ceremony, and the destruction of the Town Hall. And, led by a philanthropic foundation, the development of the town as both ecologically sound, and with an economy and society making use of neglected ideas from before the rationalist Enlightenment takeover in the eighteenth century, such as alchemy, the Hermetic tradition, and the work of the Elizabethan magus, John Dee. Most of this work exists only as notes.

However, I did complete volume one, The Garden, which recounts how two local boys release a Merlin-like figure from a mental and spiritual paralysis, and with him initiate and activate the process that will enable Shaftesbury to develop as a centre for the New Age. This is the text of that story.

Volume One : The Garden

PART I

Chapter 1

It had changed, of course it had. So much had happened since. But I remembered it as it was then, had dreamed about it so often, had wanted to tell Dominique, had intended to bring her here on our first walk. And yet here I was, on my own, peering through the hedge like one locked out, and Dominique was at the Centre, being appraised by my mother, flirted with by my father, while the twins explained in grave alternations the nature of their work (their “Work”) and its importance. The statues were gone. The rampant, tangled undergrowth through which we had, with such labour, cut the paths, was now trimmed and ordered. The paths themselves were laid with bark chippings, edged with wood. There was a bench, now, over the place where we’d buried the old man. On it sat a young woman, stylishly dressed, reading intently, one of the Master’s texts no doubt, her foot tap tapping on the spot where we had laid the old man’s head. I kept watching.

It had always been a place to be frightened of. When we were little the older kids would terrify us with tales of the ogre man who’d boil you in a pot until your eyeballs popped out and your brains dribbled from your ears like muesli. When we were older, we’d tell the little ones the same stories, delighted when their lips trembled and they began to sob, then scream as we dragged them towards the rusty gates as if to throw them in. We’d watch, hands over mouths, hearts dropping into our stomachs as the treacherous wind snatched our ball and carried it floating over and we’d stare through the bars at it, shiny, perfect, inaccessible. And the next day (here early), sometimes it would be back, magically returned to our side; and sometimes not, just gone, leaving a dent in the grass.

Later, when I started my solitary walks, found that walking, just walking, was the only way I could find a space around me that felt okay, and sometimes just right – so often people, family, even friends, either came too close so I felt invaded, suffocated, or kept back and left around me a gap in which I floundered and felt desperately lonely; whereas while I was walking, the air made a transparent form around me exactly my shape – this was one of the places I’d visit. I had a number of such places, each in some way special – a horse trough half way up the steep hill where I imagined the toiling beasts taking relief; a bedroom window with a gap between the curtains; the dark silent place beneath a churchyard yew tree; a viewpoint overlooking the Vale from where I could see a dreamed-of road going somewhere. Sometimes I would plan my walk from place to place to create a crescendo, or a diminuendo, or some pattern that pleased my mood. Other times I walked quickly between them, randomly, in mindless even desperate jazz improvisations. (In my – mercifully brief – Jesus phase I called them my Stations of the Cross, and ended up outside the Town Hall where I looked up at myself nailed on the high cross, everyone screaming hatred, my parents hiding, me being beatific. Once I jabbed my palm with a compass. It hurt like hell and went septic).
I liked it, the garden, being overgrown, the bright green stinging nettles everywhere, the brambles tangling everything up, the shrubs grown wild, shooting in all directions now they weren’t pruned, unrestrained, the fruit trees all blossom and no fruit. I liked the twisted gates and the rusty chain, the pillars moss-covered, askew, ready to topple. And the eagles, on top: when the pillars fell, would they fly? No, they’d crash and smash and I’d have a souvenir, a piece of wing maybe.
I liked the grass-grown drive, the stillness and decay. I imagined a little world, self-contained with the big world locked out, in which there was no future – no expectations, no disappointments, no fears. Sometimes I’d glimpse the old man, shuffling around, muttering, envy him his circumscribed world. Twice he looked up suddenly, stared straight at me as if he could see me, (I drew back instinctively), although I knew he couldn’t, then he scuttled away.

That day, the day it began, was the same day someone was writing: “The writing of this Prophecy from Alpha to Omega is completed upon the feast day of Joseph of Arimethea and St Patrick, 17th May, 1989”. My hand pushed aside the vegetation that hung like a curtain, and I peered through the hedge – and found myself face to face with someone staring at me. I leaped back in shock. It was a girl, completely naked, very still. My heart pounded. I wanted to run away. I was used to looking unobserved. I had to see her again. I approached, peered, carefully. It was a statue, pink stone. I stared at her. She was beautiful. I imagined folding her in my arms, holding her, loving her. I imagined kissing her lips, hard and cold at first but then soft and warm, yielding , her arms reaching round, her body softening, melting into mine. I pressed through the nettles and brambles to reach her, not caring about the stings and pricks, welcoming them, the price, unstoppable. And yet, as I approached her, she didn’t melt and yield. She stared back brazenly, without modesty. I suddenly felt exposed, out-faced, ridiculed. I pulled away in manufactured contempt and walked away in pretended nonchalance, denigrating her with coarse epithets.

I didn’t know what to do. I wanted a place where there was warmth and understanding. Home wasn’t it. (There had been such a place, but that had gone three years, a lifetime, before.) Mum was only interested in her new job – in the mornings she was fresh and keen, well made-up and her hair done lovely, a strong perfume I liked, dressed really well in a slim suit and white blouse. But it wasn’t for me and dad, it was for her new job. In the evenings she’d be tired, though eager to talk about work. But dad would quickly silence her, saying he had enough work at work, it was okay for her because it was new, he was tired couldn’t she see, it was more like they shared the house than were married, bla bla bla. Mum would stiffen then apparently relax and carry on as if nothing had happened. But if, sitting on the settee watching a TV programme, he cuddled up to her she would turn to stone and he would go sullen or bang out of the room. Five minutes later there’d be the sound of his exercise bike going at fifty miles an hour and mum’d be on the phone to a friend talking too loud and laughing a brittle, unnatural laugh. The livelier she became, the deader he went. He’d gone grey, all except his hair (I found the dye bottle in his cupboard). He’d sit for hours staring at the television, criticising. Sometimes he’d try to muscle in on my interests, but I wasn’t having that. The next day I went back.

She (what am I saying? – it. She) was gone. There were two new statues, visible through the gates. Facing each other, one with his back to me, the other offset so I could see her clearly. I forgot the girl. She’d been pretty, yes, but a girl, insipid. This was a woman – beautiful, magnificent, unbuttoning her dress, revealing herself, an excited look on her face, who would embrace me and crush me to her, excite me and teach me. I pushed against the gates – I’d have toppled them, pillars and all, if necessary – the rusty chain snapped, I was through. I stepped into the garden. I walked towards her, iron drawn by the magnet in her breast.
But when I got close, I saw her eyes weren’t for me, but for the other figure. I looked at him – he was broad, heavy faced, with small horns and an enormous curved prick. I started back, away. Then I saw the leer on his face, the way his hands reached rapaciously for her. I stepped between, facing him, protecting her. I pushed against him. He didn’t move. I picked up a piece of iron from the fence and held it like a defensive quarter staff. I prodded, tapped, hit him, felt a sudden surge of power and struck him blow after blow (feeling the woman safe behind me) until he began to totter and – oh glory! – like a great tree, he fell. Bits broke off. But now my blood was up and I was raining blows on him, striking limb from torso, head from neck, waiting for the touch, the whispered thanks – enough! – the embrace from behind. It didn’t come. Blow after blow – each now resounding in a terrible emptiness, on and on. Until I collapsed exhausted, into the emptiness, across the fallen figure, looking up at the standing figure who was still reaching out. But not for me.
Great spasms began tearing at my chest. Like a fist punching me from the inside. As if a demolition ball was trying to burst out of me. As if my body was trying to turn itself inside out. Sobs. I began to cry. I hadn’t cried for years, my body couldn’t understand what was going on, resisted – then remembered, and the tears came, floods of them, in great sobbing waves. I sobbed because I was alone in the world. I sobbed until I was empty of tears. I lay sprawled over broken stone, lost.

‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ A bony hand on my shoulder. A thin, confused voice. Gusts of bad breath on my cheek. My insides turned to water. I clenched my eyes shut, held my breath, wishing (three wishes – just one wish, please) he’d go for help, go away, give me chance to escape. He wasn’t going to go away. He was fascinated by this thing that had come into his world, a strange creature washed up on his beach. Words came between gasps of breath: ‘oh dear … Dionysus slain … not by Zeus … not by Semele… no … an Endicott of the rites … doesn’t care …’

‘I do care,’ I said angrily, sitting up. ‘He … She …’ But I had nothing to say. What I’d felt had disappeared with the tears, as if into sand. I just felt empty. I looked up at the woman, now just a statue, down at the shattered god, then at the old man. He blinked watery blood-shot eyes at me. There was dried white spittle at the corners of his mouth. His teeth were brown. His breath stank. He was a mess. But instead of being disgusted by him, I felt sorry. He stooped, stroked the broken statue as if it was a dead pet. He was sad and forlorn. And lonely. I imagined the loneliness I felt for maybe half an hour, that would disappear with a nice pudding or a funny television programme, I tried to imagine that going on forever. That’s how lonely he looked.

‘Can it be repaired?’ I asked, pathetically. A little kid’s question, all wishful thinking.
‘Eh?’ He turned his blue eyes, across which expressions had been passing quickly, like reflections of clouds across a window – incomprehension, the beginning of meaning, the attempt to grasp its flight, he turned them on me. He focussed on me as if I’d just appeared. But with urgency, as if he knew he had to hold onto this one thing that was real. ‘Eh? You can’t repair,’ he said slowly, as if reading each word as it appeared, ‘such as this.’ (Pause). ‘You can only – remake.’ he chuckled, pleased with himself. Then the vagueness returned.
‘Is it valuable?’ I asked, trying to move things along.
‘Priceless.’ A wheezing chuckle, and he slapped his knee.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, because that was what you were supposed to say. He leaned towards me, looking round slyly then fixing me with his blue eyes:
‘Sorry, are you? Sorry won’t pay. How will you pay? Eh? Eh? Shall I tell your father? Shall your father pay?’ Bad breath – halitosis and alcohol – puffed into my face.
‘No, don’t tell him. I’ll work.’
‘Work, will you? What can you do, eh? Can you knap a flint or flense a fox? Can you weave a basket watertight? Can you read the runes, and have you the geomancer’s art? Can you handle axe and adze and draw knife? Eh? Eh? Or can you just – press buttons?’
‘I can work. Show me. I’m going now. I’ll come back.’ I was surprised how definitely I said all this. I started to get up and he backed away, confused again.
‘Come tomorrow,’ he said. He tried, unsuccessfully, to make it sound like a command; it was more like a plea.
‘I’ll come back.’
I turned and looked at him as I stepped out between the gates. His eyes were on me. He looked lost. Then he pulled back his cuff, stared at his wrist – he wore no watch – slapped his head as if at some forgotten engagement, and walked off.

Chapter 2

I didn’t go back the next day. But I did the day after. Not because I was scared – who’d have listened to him? – but because I wanted to. Maybe to help him. Maybe to feel needed. Maybe to have something personal and secret. Maybe just to avoid revising for my GCSE’s.
He looked surprised to see me, covered up by checking his empty wrist and saying,
‘Mm, a bit late, but in time – just in time. The storm’s about to break. You must clear the channels or there’ll be flood,’ squinting up at the cloudless sky. ‘This, you see?’ waving at a patch of overgrown vegetation, ‘tangles and tares. Spirits trapped. Set them free. everything must flow.’ I gathered from this nonsense that he wanted me to clear the undergrowth. He gave me an axe, a sickle, and a knife on a stick he called a bill-hook.
‘What, with these?’ I asked. ‘Where’s the strimmer?’
‘Mm. Strimmer. Odd word. Mm,’ he said, and wandered off.

It didn’t look much and, sure I’d see it off in an hour, I laid into it with the bill hook. I began by demolishing old Marshall’s sweet shop. I kicked open the door, the bell flying off the curve of spring steel and sliding across the floor to stop at his feet, the clapper lolling like a puppy’s tongue. I filled the doorway, slapping the massive billy club into the palm of my massive hand. I was – Robocop – half man, half machine. All avenger. Marshall squinted, light glinting off his spectacles, pulled his hand through the thin strands of his hair, cowered, whimpered ‘you couldn’t … you wouldn’t … it’s my life.’
‘I can. I will. Your life has been cheating children,’ I said, my voice sonorous and measured, rattling the sweet jars with its thunder. He’d done us all in his time – short measure, short change, sweets gone yucky. I’d been seven, just starting to go into shops on my own, had just moved here, handing my 20p for a sherbet fountain, holding my hand out for the change that never came as he shook his head saying, ‘no, it was a 10p you gave me. Perhaps,’ he added, with a malicious twist, ‘you’ve already spent the other 10.’ And smiled his thin, wet-toothed smile of triumph. I was so shocked, still so believed adults, that for a moment I doubted myself; but knew I was right – could do nothing about it. I stumbled out of the shop, the bottom fallen out of my world. 
Walking home, through a world that had become suddenly enormous, monstrous, and alien, I kept repeating: ‘life should not be this unfair. When I grow up I’ll put everything right.’ Wham! A dozen sweet jars atomised, their multi-coloured contents flying as from a cluster bomb. Wham! The thick glass counter split with a single blow. Wham! The large Easter egg in the window smashed like a melon. And – ‘please, no!’ – Wham! A chocolate orange lofted into the air, slammed with perfect baseball precision through the plate glass window, the glass hanging, then falling like unhooked curtains. ‘Come in, kids. Mr Marshall is giving everything away – everything,’ I said, looking meaningfully at the sweating, drooping, nodding broken figure. My boots crunched on glass and sweets as I strode out between yelling, cheering kids.

I stood, panting, hands red raw, as my vision cleared. I looked back, at the vast swathe I must have cut. I’d hardly touched it. I’d bounced of the undergrowth as if I’d run into a fatman. It was comic, pathetic, ridiculous. The old man was stupid. His tools were useless. I stormed towards the house. He was curled up in a hammock, snoring, a thread of spittle hanging from the corner of his mouth to a damp patch on the canvas, his face content. I threw down the tools noisily. He woke with a start, smiling at me, an open smile; then collecting himself, recollecting, he shrank; before pulling himself together and slowly, deliberately, putting his feet down. It was as if he’d been dreaming he was someone else and woken to find he was just himself.
‘These tools. They’re useless,’ I said, in a ‘what are you going to do about it?’ voice.
‘Useless, eh?’ he said, rubbing his stubbly chin, the loose skin moving freely under his hand. ‘Mm,’ his eyes at first cloudy, then clearing. It was as if, hands gripping the hammock, he was, in his head, reaching out and gathering up his shredded, scattered thoughts, to piece them together to make a lost sense. It was heroic and pathetic.
‘Bill hook and axe useless. Mm. Thousands of generations. Millions of acres of forest cleared – Hercynia – thousands of acres worked as renewable resources. Now – useless.’
‘They’re out of date.’
‘Timeless. The timelessness we left behind when we stepped onto the treadmill of history, started believing the myth of progress,’ gaining a remembered articulacy. ‘Wanting a life that’s easy rather than one in which one’s at ease. The skill no longer in us but in the machine. Go on, push buttons, be a spectator all your life. Mm.’ And he turned to the side, examining the edges of the tools, tut tutting. I clenched my fists, said ‘stupid’, kicked the tools and walked off.

As I was running my red-raw hands under the cold tap, mum asked what I’d been doing. ‘Baseball. A new team’s getting together.’
‘That’s good, that you’re doing things with your friends,’ mum sure that if you spend more than two consecutive minutes on your own you’re becoming terminally weird. ‘Will you go again?’
‘Dunno. Might . Dunno.’ I dropped the towel on the draining board instead of hanging it up, and slumped down at the table.
‘Baseball,’ dad said, ‘why baseball? Cricket’s our game.’
‘That’s why everyone stuffs us.’
‘They wouldn’t if kids like you played. In the West Indies they’re playing with oranges and bits of sticks, while you’re playing an American game off the television that’s all marketing. I remember …’ Switch it off. Just look at yourself and switch it off. Four bloody Yorkshiremen. He’d hardly even played beach cricket with me.

That night I dreamed I was working at my computer when I saw a faint reflection in the screen. I turned round and a Neanderthal, all hair and skins, stone axe raised, was about to smash my head in. I woke up quick, trembling.

Chapter 3

When I got there the next day, he was sharpening the axe on a big treddle-powered stone wheel, sparks flying in long plumes.
‘You can tell by the way the sparks fly,’ he said, holding the blade against the wheel as I treadled. ‘There, see – like a pheasant’s tail. Perfect.’ He lifted and looked along it several times before pronouncing himself satisfied. He continued:
‘In Japan, an apprentice works for four years sharpening tools before he’s allowed to work on wood. But we’ve so little time. All I can teach you is how to keep an edge.’ He swept the whetstone along the blade. ‘The molecules, see – you’re stroking them out, spreading them, shaping them, thinning them to an edge an atom thick that can slice a hair. Stop often to use the whetstone. It’ll save you time.’ He tested it with his thumb. ‘Your axe would be the measure of your life – how sharp, how ready; the amount worn away showing how much work you’d done, what you’d put into your life. Your life measured by absence.’
Then he ground and honed the sickle, and handed me the two tools. ‘Axe and sickle, sun and moon, male and female; one hard and direct, one sharp and curling. You need them both. You need to know when to use each. And of course the yeoman bill-hook.’ He beamed. Then he sagged. Like a fireman’s hose when the water’s turned off. He crumpled onto the hammock, staring up at me, confused, swamped – as if he’d fallen from the thin edge of his concentration into a morass of mixed-up thoughts. He waved me away and curled up like a sick old dog.

I worked with the unfamiliar implements (but not so strange now) steadily, trying to use them as tools rather than weapons.
I threatened my ankles with the sickle, my head with a rebounding axe. I lopped and chopped and slashed. I felt as if I was burying myself in the undergrowth, like someone digging into a hillside – but when I looked back I saw I’d cleared an area, made a space, there was light and air. I was making progress.
I began to be more methodical, making separate piles of trunks and branches and brush. I differentiated sounds – the soft almost watery hush of sickle through grass, the sharper rasp through brambles, the click of branch lopping, the hard, implacable toc of axe into wood. I saw the flesh of wood laid bare; but it was necessary.
I became aware of the life in this little patch of wood, imagined the creatures having fled my monstrous arrival, now returning at my more measured presence. A slash of the sickle – and there, as if blinking in the light, a delicate crocus-like flower, purplish, pinkish, on an almost-white stem, alone, individual, hidden but now revealed in all its delicate glory, seeming to glow just for me. (I bathed myself in the “falseness in all our impressions of external things” of Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy in joyful ignorance that day). The body of a shrew, evidently dead and yet its body quivering with life – then I realised the movement was of grubs beneath the skin eating the flesh – one appeared through the ear hole; I shivered and dropped a large stone on it to conceal it forever and moved on. Fungi, food for a different sort of life. A butterfly, released from its camouflage on a fallen bough, fluttering mazily, as if drunk, then settling, sinking into another patch of bark. When I stopped to sharpen my tools – and the clean sound of stone on steel seemed to clear the air, too – I could hear rustlings, fast and slow, of creatures in the undergrowth, bird song all around, see the light brightening into beams then fading back as clouds passed, smell the green of sap, the blue of mint, the brown of earth. I imagined working with strimmer or chain saw; encased in armour, visored, deafened, all happening as on a soundless screen, at the end much done, little experienced, nothing learned.

Arms leaden, skin torn, mind fogged with fatigue, I met the tree, the big tree, the enormous tree, and with the habit of weary necessity I raised the axe – and held it there, stayed by a voice:
‘Sometimes, you know, when something stands in your path, it’s not an obstacle to be overcome but an opportunity to be taken, not a foe to be vanquished but a friend ready to help. And isn’t this tree magnificent?’
It was a voice I’d never heard before. I knew it was the old man behind me, but instead of his thin, reedy voice, this was deep and resonant, as if it was coming from deep inside a person bigger than him, someone from long ago. I opened my eyes. It was a beech tree, its grey trunk smooth and rippled, like the leg of a giant elephant, soaring up, its branches spreading wide, its roots (I could feel them) sinking deep.
‘Embrace. It has been waiting for you.’ A shiver ran up my spine, ran right through me. I wanted to run away. I wanted to fall into it. But I stepped forward, pressed against it, stretched my arms round as far as I could; felt strong arms enveloping me, protecting me, keeping me safe, strong certain arms; felt through my body pressed against the tree a dark rooted energy, a light reaching energy, ascending and descending flows of energy. I felt safe. I wanted to sink into it, lose myself in it, but it would not permit that; it would hold me, support me, give me strength; but only while my two feet were placed firmly on the ground. I held, was held, for a long time. 
The tree didn’t let me down, never would. I could imagine not being an orphan. 
When I turned round, the old man wasn’t there.
I’d cleared the patch of woodland, the tree at its centre.
‘Good,’ he said when I returned the tools and he’d checked the edges. ‘Tomorrow we can start work.’

That evening I gorged myself on junk food and watched every mindless television programme on offer. About ten I suddenly felt ill and just made it to the bathroom before I threw it all up. As I lay in bed shivering, mum said, ‘no baseball for you tomorrow – you’ve been overdoing it.’ When she brought hot lemon and honey, I asked her to get out my old night light from when I was small, a pottery house with the light shining out through the windows, like a beacon in the night, and to please leave it switched on. I imagined myself wandering through a wasteland, like the area I’d cleared, and coming upon this warmly-lit cottage, coming home. I sweated and shivered through the night, sleeping fitfully, dreaming a lot – weird dreams of giant exploding shrews, trees turning into snakes, a small sickle swinging at me. In the early hours I dreamed of the woman, the statue, a really hot (oh, delicious!) dream, and came in my pyjamas, which woke me up. I cleaned myself with tissues and then settled down, feeling much better, and slept dream-free to the morning. I was up, breakfasted and out before my parents stirred. It was Sunday.

Chapter 4

The town was empty. I cycled fast along clear streets between curtained houses heavy with sleep. Fast down the hill, my shape defined by the cool slipstream. I had somewhere to go. ‘Tomorrow we start work’. I skidded to a halt, nosed my bike between the gates – and stopped.
The garden was lost in thick mist. Cold, it shrouded everything. I shivered.
But not just at the mist. As soon as I stepped into the garden, I felt helplessness, hopelessness sweep over me. The overgrown garden, the dilapidated house, all of it neglected, from which for too long the spark of life had gone – what was I doing here? As if a voice was whispering, ‘don’t you see he’s a loser, this place is lost? Can’t you feel it sinking? He’ll pull you in and drag you down. Do you want to end up like him? Get out while you can.’ I thought of home, my room, my computer, my books. I looked around – nothing could sort this place out. The area I’d cleared, been so proud of – tiny, insignificant, the brambles already invading, drawing it back into confusion. This is his stuff, not my stuff.
I headed back towards the gate, feet lightening. And yet – the work I’d done, the feeling, the tree, the voice … I turned again, towards the house, determined.
I felt as though I was walking into a gale, wading through mud, hands grasping at me, holding me back, a threatening presence just behind me, doubt filling my mind. I got to the door, shaking, hammered, kept hammering until he opened it. Just a crack.
He looked terrified. His eyes twitched around, he kept flinching as if a flying creature was attacking him. I could feel its cold wings. ‘Things… fall apart,’ he mumbled, ‘anarchy loosed… slouching towards… to be born… the darkness – drops again,’ an idiotic, almost dreamy look coming onto his face, his eyes vague, as if he was going under. I shook his arm, poked him at each word: ‘Do something. You must do  something!’ He looked at me curiously, as if he was having difficulty seeing me. Then he focussed – I could see myself reflected in his eyes – he recognised me. ‘Yes,’ he said, his thin hand bony but alive. ‘Yes,’ he nodded. And closed the door.

I sat on the step. I filled my mind with the feel of the tools, the smell of mushroom and wild strawberry, the look of the tree. The fog thinned, to a mist through which sunbeams shone, birds flew, cleared. The panic subsided. I looked around: it was broken, but it could be fixed.

At last he came out, walking slowly, deliberately. He was like a man I’d seen on television with Parkinson’s disease who, by focussing on each action separately, by controlling each movement with intense concentration, could prevent the wild flailings of involuntary spasms, could function almost normally. When I started to speak, he put his finger to his lips. He pointed to the tools. ‘Now we can start work.’

We didn’t speak of it for a week, not until we’d finished what he called “the preparation”. I went there every day. Why? Partly because of GCSE’s. That was like being in a sausage machine, each subject a sausage, its size your mark, being extruded one by one then shrink-wrapped and labelled. I’d already determined to do the absolute minimum to get by – now I had a reason to bunk off study leave. But also I was engaged. For all his vagueness, I felt there was a plan somewhere in his head, something buried that I, archaeologist-like, could help uncover, put together; that I could be the expression for his intention. I felt useful.

So I did what he told me, cleared where he said. Usually it wasn’t areas but paths – some straight, some curved, some so sinuous and involuted that they were like mazes. And I came upon things as I cleared – a stone with markings carved, an Aztec-looking statue, an exotic tree, a small lake almost lost in undergrowth and weed. And found new places – a grotto constructed of water-worn limestone, with, above it, a little gothic sanctuary; a classical-looking summer house on a knoll, hexagonal, all glass, mostly broken. When I asked about these, he’d stare at me as if I was speaking Martian; he was so frail, had to focus so narrowly, that nothing outside that focus made sense to him. He spent a lot of time just staring, as if trying to see what had been, or what should be, trying to remember or to envision, then moaning, stamping, smacking his head so hard I’d flinch. Sometimes he’d use a pendulum. A couple of times he brought out a compass with Chinese characters on it. Between times I’d find him curled up in his hammock in an exhausted sleep. Or swinging backwards and forwards in a child’s swing singing nonsense songs. I worked obediently, strangely trusting. And with a nice sense of playing truant, of doing something that no-one else knew about. And enjoying the physical work, getting stronger, getting browner.

The next Sunday, after walking the paths and watching the pendulum and checking alignments, he nodded and said ‘put away the tools and meet me at the summer house.’

All the doors of the summer house were open, the warm air and light filled it, and on a small table were a jug of real lemonade and a large plate of hot cakes. I wolfed through the cakes, buttery and spicy, as he sipped his lemonade quietly. His face was grey, there were black rings under his eyes, he breathed in short gasps. Then, as if calling up deep, long forgotten reserves, he pulled himself up straight and looked directly at me, smiling, his eyes shining, his hand on my shoulder, gripping it. ‘Well done, young ‘un. You’ve done good work. Without you….’ He squeezed – and then staggered, as if hit by an electric shock, the glass fell from his hand and shattered. I pulled up a chair and he sank onto it, his head down, mumbling.
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘you’d better lie down. Then I’ll go.’
‘No,’ he said, swimming through the fatigue, ‘we must talk, now. We’ve stirred things up and we must act quickly. We’ve a malefic force to deal with. And it’s  only just beginning.’

Chapter 5

I’d heard such talk before, a long time (not a long time – three years – a lifetime) ago, in a world I’d closed the door on, walked away from, should walk away from now if I was to prevent that door opening, the pain – so heartbreakingly stamped on, smoothed over, sealed – returning. (You think you can do that when you’re young. But you don’t leave it behind; you drag it behind you, it slows you down, keeps you off balance, knocks you off track, poisons you. I was lucky that day, in the summer house – not that I’ve always felt it, through the stuff that followed the changes we helped precipitate that summer).

‘Last Sunday, see?’ he said, ‘I thought I understood. A number of things, all working together: the mist rising from the Vale as the sun heats it, gathering here before it’s burned off; the reaction that follows a day of action, when the novelty’s gone, both of us tired, the real hard work still to do; the effects of stirring things up – if you clear land the weeds grow quickly and profusely, and you have to keep hoeing; when you begin to meditate, all sorts of thoughts come into your mind, because the silent contemplation of nothing stirs things up, like stirring up the mud at the bottom of a clear pool in a stream – you have to keep stirring till the mud’s all gone. These things combined. But it was more than that. In clearing the paths for healing energies, we’ve drawn in a malefic force. We must find it, neutralise it.’
‘What sort of thing will it be?’
‘You know how some people get ill living under electricity lines? Well this place is sensitive, it amplifies. It’ll be recent. A satellite communication centre, maybe – there are so many satellites orbiting, transmitting, they distort the telluric forces, especially near ground stations.’
‘Of course!’ I cried, ‘Jones Hall! Jones, the financier, since the big bang and world-wide stock market trading, he’s had an enormous dish installed.’
‘You have to shut it down.’
‘What? What am I supposed to do – blow it up?’
‘Just neutralise it. I’d need two hours. I can rig up a defence in that time – but if it’s not shut down, it’d be like trying to dam a flowing stream.’
‘But what am I supposed to do?’
‘Oh,’ he flapped his arms dismissively, ‘you youngsters are into computers, and hacking – aren’t you? you’ll think of something.’
‘But that place’ll be like Fort Knox. I wouldn’t know where to begin. I only know,’ my heart sinking, ‘one person…’
‘Get him. Otherwise everything’s doomed.’
‘I have to go now.’ I slouched away, stone in my belly, knowing I had to face something I’d avoided for three years. The garden was no longer a refuge – in it I’d been brought face to face with what I thought I’d been, at last, escaping from. I didn’t look back – it was no longer just him who depended on what I did; it was me, too.

Chapter 6

I remembered the row as if it was a minute ago, the look on his face, the way he turned and walked off. Why hadn’t I called after him, run after him, put my hand on his shoulder, said sorry? You don’t when you’re young, you don’t know how to handle such things, you freeze. And you don’t believe in the irrevocable, you think things’ll sort themselves out in a couple of days. And I’m sure, too, that I was shocked by the words that had come out of my mouth unthought, unbidden, that I didn’t know what to do with feelings made real (regardless of whether true) by being uttered. Shocked, embarrassed, defensive, I just watched him, my best friend, walk away. Things didn’t just cool, they froze. Our friendship didn’t thin, it snapped, a clean break. We hadn’t spoken since. Time moved on, and our friendship disappeared into the past. And although I moved into the mainstream, had more friends than ever, while he was more than ever isolated, it was I who felt exiled, cast out.

I’d hated it when we moved here. Mum said ‘we’re only moving fifteen miles’ – but when you’re seven it might as well be fifteen thousand. It was a different world. The buildings were different, built of a forbidding dark green stone that absorbed the light, instead of the warm honey stone that I was used to, that seemed sunlit even on a cloudy day. From being in a sheltered valley with a stream, we were now in a hilltop town on an exposed dry hill. It was as though the whole of my childhood to that moment was wiped out – the ford where we paddled and fished for tiddlers, the footpath I’d learned to ride my bike on, the garden in which we’d had my birthday parties. And the house, although it was very like the one we’d left – an estate house – was the other way round, so I no longer had the sun shining round the edge of my curtains in the morning. (The breeze billowing the curtains in and flooding the room with sunlight, then dropping, and the curtains falling, and the sunlight – where had it gone? Why hadn’t it been trapped in the room to glow quietly for me? Waking early and watching for the first time, face pressed against the glass, having to keep wiping away the condensation from my breath with my pyjama sleeve, a red sunrise, terrified, awe struck, sure I was the only person who had ever seen the sun in that naked, shape-changing state, feeling ready to burst with the responsibility of holding that secret knowledge within me). Instead, it shone in the evening, making my room stuffy and keeping me awake; I’d exchanged a fresh morning sun world for a fag-end evening one. I’d moved from a world that made sense to one that didn’t. The house, the three of us, the familiar things and ways we’d brought with us, was a tiny island – like the cartoon desert island – of familiarity in a vast empty sea. I don’t suppose it lasted long – mum said I settled in within six months. But to me it didn’t last for a length of time – it just is.

And school. I’d come into existence with the kids at my first school, we’d been parked side by side in prams, wheeled together in buggies while, head to head and oblivious the mums chatted. Crawled around each other as they, still chattering, drank coffee together, gone to play school together. But here – walking into a strange-smelling school, then into a classroom of thirty five strange kids, all of them watching. It was worse than going on stage in the school play – because you never came off, there was no other world to go back to. Then you go through the process – you think you’re doing it, choosing, but later you realise you’ve been processed, sized up, it’s been decided where you fit into the scheme of things. (You watch later entrants – some come in high, all front, and then founder to their appropriate level, some start slow and move up, some come in faceless and stay that way. I’d come in angry, with fists flying). So the misfits befriend you – later you have to off-load them – and the boss kids get you into fights, test you out. And quite soon they find a label for you, and things settle down. The teachers are the same: confused until they’ve found the sentence in teacher-speak for you – ‘bright but wayward’, ‘steady and conformist’ – and they’ll treat you like that for the rest of your time at school, regardless of whether it was appropriate in the first place, of whether you change. It’s a rough and ready institution. Maybe all institutions are. Like being kitted out by a careless and capricious quartermaster. You feel it happening, you know it’s wrong, but there’s nothing you can do about it. You can fight it, you can pretend to be it, you can let yourself become it. But I chose. At seven I chose, and I’m proud of that, even though it was the unplanned act of a thoughtless moment.

I’d noticed Woody at school. You couldn’t miss him; a head taller than anyone his age, thin as a rail, with long blond hair and weird clothes – patchwork trousers, multi-coloured hand-knitted sweaters – more Robin Rainbow than Billy Bluehat. He had an earring! (A stud, actually – earrings were a risk, but girls were allowed studs. And I must say that my mum was one of the strongest in support of him being allowed one – equal rights). Often alone, happiest when putting into practice ideas he suggested to teachers – he made an ingenious device to water the pot plants over the holidays – or drawing them into discussions much beyond his age. Why are books shelved left to right when their pages go right to left? How is it that multiples of nine always add up to nine? If the universe is expanding, what’s it expanding into? (A chilly one, that, to hear when you’re seven; afterwards you lie awake in the middle of the night, hearing for the first time the emptiness of space). He was a loner; not the lonely kid who no-one’ll play with, but aloof, almost disdainful of the other kids – a mocking look as play gradually built to a whole playground thing, we were each gradually drawn in so that at last we were all part of one huge, pulsating entity, himself the only one apart, arms folded, feet set, a half-smile. Usually alone, or with his one special friend of the moment. But sometimes – no-one ever understood how it happened, whether it was spontaneous or carefully planned – he’d gather kids together, the little ones, the misfits, and then, by some sleight of hand (head scratching, how did he do that?) unseat the boss kids from their habitual position on the rubber tyres and substitute his giggling rabble with himself above them all, just as the bell went for the end of break. He was never picked on; there was something about him that deterred it.

Until that day. I was leaving school, a bit late so the lane was empty, apart from, on one side Woody, on the other four boys, tough kids who stuck together. (I’d fought one, got friendly with another). The four were pushing each other around, egging each other on, getting closer to Woody, passing remarks. I couldn’t hear what, but ‘father’ came into it. At first I thought Woody – upright, looking straight ahead – was his usual cool self. Then I saw that he was walking really stiffly, his fists clenched, his face white, barely under control. I’d meant to drop in with the four, show them my new “Star Wars” figure (Luke Skywalker in snow gear, just out, not available locally, quite a coup). Suddenly, as if I was seeing the future, I saw what was about to happen. A kicked stone skidded past Woody, bounced off a lamp post just missing him. Oohs and laughter, and them bunching up. I’d seen a nature film in which a pack of wild dogs – low creatures, each one snarling but timid, crossing and recrossing as if winding each other up, weaving a group courage, getting their blood up until, almost hysterically, they burst out of their self-made space – attacking a lone wildebeest. Of them diving in and tearing and skittering out, of the great creature slowed, stopped, sapped, and at last toppled, its great horned head striking the ground with a mighty thunder, throwing up a cloud of dust. I couldn’t watch any more and had gone out of the room. And now – they’d bait him, draw him in, defeat him. I didn’t even think. (Of such are great decisions made). I drew level, then walked past them. ‘Hey!’ Jason called, in greeting but also in warning. I gave them a cheery wave, but dropped in beside Woody. He spun round, glaring, fists raised. ‘Look,’ I said, showing him the figure, keeping walking. There were mutterings behind, a stone flew into the hedge, they closed, then dropped away. But they stayed around. At the main road I stood with him, talking, until a battered Toyota drew up and a red haired woman leaned over and opened the passenger door, he got in and the car drove off.

After that, things were different at school. I was no longer courted. There was a barely perceptible but very real withdrawing from me. The invisible cordon thrown around Woody was extended to me. I’d made my play.

He came to my house first. All he wanted to do was watch television, eat white bread – ‘can I have some more square toast, please?’ (we always had wholemeal bread, but I asked mum to get white if my friends were coming), and use the bathroom – running off to flush the toilet and wash his hands under a running tap every few minutes, and arranging everything – ornaments on shelves, chairs, place mats – in straight lines. I didn’t understand until I went to his place. In the car, he sat in the front, next to his mum, calling her by name, Celia.

Their place was amazing. It became my second home. Sometimes it felt like my first home, I’d feel miserable when I left, have tantrums. (Mum would say – if it makes you unhappy, perhaps you shouldn’t go there. She meant well but she didn’t understand). That first afternoon I wandered through it in a daze, touching, smelling, feeling.
The only comparable experience, of being sensuously, even sensually overwhelmed, of being  so taken out of myself, or plunged into myself that I felt new realms of emotion, was at a great aunt’s house. She was ancient, small and white haired, and mum sat with her drinking tea from china cups, questioning her keenly about her mother (my grandma) as a child. I soon wandered out into the hall, sliding my hand along the dado rail that ran at head height along every wall separating embossed wallpaper below from plain above, smooth, almost plastic with its years’ coats of gloss paint, my fingers exploring, as I walked along, its delicious curves. It led me up the steep, dark stairs (a runner of thin carpet between dark-stained wood) and, following its imagined line across architraves and panelled doors, along the landing. The doors were always tight shut (something I’ve never liked – being shut in, or shut out) and I’d push them quite hard. This day, as I stepped from medallion to medallion on the carpet, head down, concentrating, my hand sliding along – it suddenly gave way. A door not properly latched had given a little. I pushed. It swung slowly back. It was a dark room, heavy drapes drawn half across the window, lace curtain filtering the light. It smelt of mustiness and furniture polish. All the furniture, made of dark wood, matched. Although it was polished, it seemed to absorb the light, each piece a heavy, dark presence. It was very neat – oblongs of carpet on polished linoleum, a bed with a counterpane tucked in so tight it was like carved wood, bedside tables with glass-shaded lamps, a large wardrobe. It smelt of polish and dust. I followed the rail around, away from the bed, over a trunk with foreign labels, to the dressing table. I was surprised (it had three mirrors) by my multiple reflections, saw for the first time – a mirror in a mirror – my face as others saw me, was taken aback by this other, different face. There was a bowl of lavender and a bowl of flower petals. There were bottles and jars, a bowl of powder with a large powder puff, two hairbrushes with handles and silver backs bristled together, a matching hand mirror. I didn’t touch any of these things – they felt naked under my gaze, to touch a violation (as if an alarm would ring, or an unstoppable sequence of events set in train). I didn’t dare open the drawers (how I wanted to!) I passed on, and arrived at the wardrobe. It rose above me, vast as a cliff face. Again, the latch, a curious lift-and-turn affair, wasn’t engaged. I pulled at the edge; the door swung open on squeaking hinges; a figure leapt at me. I dived to the floor, the door swung past then slowly returned bringing with it my reflection again in the long door mirror. High above me, a shelf of hats. Below, in the well, neatly paired shoes. And in front of me, a jungle of hanging clothes, giving off, in this sudden release, waves of different  smells – a variety of perfumes, leather, fur, face powder, lavender, camphor. I climbed in, pressing myself between the tightly-packed clothes, light headed with the scents, touching and pressing my face into the textures – fine wool (soft), leather (strong), cotton (smooth), velvet (clinging), silk (slidy), fur (reassuring). I grasped a fur coat, clung to it, buried myself in it. I imagined the satin lining swathing the naked perfumed body of a woman holding me to her. I imagined the fur was a mother bear, large and protective, and me the little bear – as I’d seen in nature films set in the Rockies – trotting along behind her, along a soft path through a flowery, sunlit meadow, beside a rushing, salmon-leaping stream, beneath mountains high and snow-clad…

They found me asleep in the corner, clutching the fur coat, a pair of button bootees over my shoes. I’m sure they didn’t mean to upset me, but the sudden light and noise as clothes were thrust aside, the loud towering silhouetted figures, the grasping hands, the harsh voices, the sudden terrible separation as I was lifted out of the feels and smells… I burst into tears and wept inconsolably.

There were no doors in Woody’s place. I sometimes wonder whether there were any walls. Everywhere there were richly coloured curtains, drapes, hangings. The floors were covered with carpets, rugs, cushions (you always took off your shoes and socks when you went in), I didn’t know what were seats, what were beds, what was floor. There were short-legged tables and large paper-globed lamps hanging low casting strange shadows. There were always candles lit (carefully placed, I realise now, each islanded in water – for all her whacky ways, Celia was very practical). There were wonderful textures under my feet, in my hands, on my face. The air was filled with scents – plants, flowers, spices, herbs, perfume, tobacco, incense. I realised, then, how scentless was my house, how it thereby lacked texture, a dimension. I built a huge soft castle of scented cushions and drapes that I buried myself in, luxuriating in the soft heavy stuff on me, the scented fabric over my face. We ate cross legged from wooden bowls. There was no TV. The toilet was a chemical one outside in a lean-to, and you washed in water from a rain butt. Later things changed. Things were always changing. I liked Woody’s because it was always changing. He liked mine because it never changed. It was all so different. I was in a daze. But what I remember clearest from that first visit, as I lay in blissful contentment, was the sudden irruption into my careful castle, my pasha’s bed, of Celia, tickling, wrestling, laughing. I was annoyed at first at being interrupted, then shocked that a grown-up, a friend’s mother, should behave so. But it was fun, I enjoyed it, the flow of her body inside her clothes and the scents coming off her, and I wanted more. 

And how it began was how it went on. Going to Woody’s was like passing through a magic mirror – sometimes it was the most wonderful place, occasionally it was dreadful, but always it was different, always a bit distorted, and sometimes very much so. Always weird, often wonderful.

We would nestle against her, a head on each breast (she never wore a brassiere, and this too I found both disconcerting and pleasurable) as she read to us. Never children’s books but adult literature, with such conviction that we were transported. So we swam with whales in ‘Moby Dick’, flew over star-lit deserts with Saint-Exupery, journeyed through hell and heaven with Dante, sailed in Rimbaud’s drunken boat, lived with bushmen with Van der Post, struck off the Green Knight’s head with a single blow – and watched, as terrified as Gawain, as he picked up his head by the hair and rode off crying ‘keep your bargain, Gawain, come to the Green Chapel in a year and let me do to you as you have done to me’! (She read the original first, and I still remember ‘to fotte such a dint as thou has dalt, to be yederly yolden on New Yeres morn’. [l.252] We were ‘yelderly yoldening’ for days).

She showed us the night sky, pointing out the constellations. I loved Orion, his belt and scabbard, striding across the sky; especially after seeing a shooting star fly from his shoulder as if hurled. She took us out for a lunar eclipse and we saw the shadow of the earth on the moon (a shadow being cast a quarter of a million miles away!) We watched the curved shadow move across then cover the moon, the moon go dim and red, then move off, leaving the full moon bright and clear, cleansed even. (I imagined that shadow, released from the moon’s surface now being carried across space, seeking a surface, any surface, on which to register). Celia stared at the moon with a lost, faraway look on her face. We asked what was the matter. She came to and smiled at us, a deep sad smile, and put her hands on our shoulders and said she was homesick. What did she mean? She said you could be homesick for the place you came from, or for a place you’d visited and could never return to, or for a place you’d dreamed so vividly you were sure you’d been there; and she didn’t know which it was. As we turned to go in, she gave it a little wave. That evening she began telling us the Moon story. She told it, episode by episode, so vividly that it was our favourite story and we’d pester her for the next instalment.

She would teach us whatever she was learning at the time – she was always learning something new. So she’d have us sitting cross-legged staring at the ends of our noses meditating, chanting like Tibetan monks (‘listen to the overtones!’ she’d cry), drumming to the point of exhaustion. While we were estranged, I took to thinking of these as fads, of her as capricious, without staying power. I’ve realised since that they were part of a programme, of which I saw only part, of education, partly for herself but primarily for Woody.

At these times she was the perfect mother. At other times she was unliveable with –she’d become pinched and mean, forbid us things for no reason, attack us, sometimes physically. Woody bore the brunt of this. It was a strange relationship – at times he would look after her, protect her as if she was a wayward child who had to be pacified; at times she’d treat him like a prince to be served; most of the time they shared intuitions, like unusually close siblings. 

The situation was complicated by the men. In the middle of their bizarre house I found a minibus. Celia explained with great relish how she and baby Woody had been travelling, ‘just travelling, you know? Looking, following… waiting. Yes, that was it, waiting for it to happen. One night I pulled off into this field. The next morning, the van wouldn’t start. This was where we were meant to be. We’d arrived.’ Simple as that. She charmed the landowner, so confused the planning people that they let her be, and they settled in. From the van at the centre, the home grew, spiralling out like a snail shell. Friends came and built new rooms, greenhouses, composting privies, dug gardens. Men would move in, their skills – this one a carpenter, this one a musician, this one a Zen adept – appropriate to her and Woody’s needs. (Or maybe she was just good at adapting to what came along?) Woody had rough times with some of the men; but if there was a real problem, out they went. Things were always changing – extensions built, demolished, rebuilt differently. The furnishings might change overnight from Oriental opulent to Zen sparse. And what seemed capriciousness or opportunism I later saw was informed by the thread of destiny she believed they were following.

And there I was, part of it all for five years, from seven to thirteen, until I said what I said. I would rack my brains to understand why I said it. Only much later did I understand that, as I got older, I’d been unable to cope with the situation. Because Celia, Woody’s mum, didn’t act like other mums, because there weren’t the conventions, the distance, my love for her, as adolescence approached, had nowhere to go. I loved her passionately. I wanted her. It was impossible. And I got myself out of an impossible situation by having myself banished from her presence, cast out. 

It was a phrase I’d heard used, sniggeringly. I hated it. Woody and I were talking about conformity. He was saying that most people conform because they haven’t the courage of their convictions (if they had any), they were cowards, prepared to submerge their individuality in the herd; and that most couples stay together out of comfort not love, fidelity was fear. He sounded so smug and self-satisfied, I wanted to knock him off balance. And I felt he’d been getting at my parents recently and I was fed up, and I thought this too was aimed at them. I said, ‘well at least my mum doesn’t change men like she changes clothes. At least she’s not the town bicycle.’ It was untrue, unforgivable. Shock on his face, then pain, changing quickly  (the face, I saw to my horror, that he affected with other people), to stony indifference, an attempt at a sneer. He turned on his heel and walked away, stiff as on that first afternoon five years before.

I thought he’d be back. I thought I’d be back. But, I had other friends and turned to them, and got into a different scene. Woody hung around with older kids. Soon afterwards he began to change radically. Gone were the multi-coloured clothes, replaced by black. He dyed his hair black, had it cut brutally short, with a W shaved into it. A man moved in with Celia who he didn’t get on with and failed to dislodge, and he more or less moved out. He’d doss with friends. Then he moved into a squat. He developed a passion for computers and was soon hacking into the school network, the County network. I hear he’d built up a sophisticated computer set-up at the squat, paid for, I heard, by theft. Now I needed him. He was the only person who could help. And I had to walk into that squat. 

 Chapter 7

The squat was at the rough end of the Council estate, where broken windows were patched with cardboard, crazed dogs hurled themselves at splintered doors as you passed, gardens looked like bodies had been buried and dug up, raised voices were the small arms fire of domestic war. 
The house they’d squatted had been someone’s dream – the dream that he didn’t live on this estate. Done up with hardwood door, leaded windows, a low white fence (plastic) round the scrap of garden; he must have seen it, magnified in his mind’s eye, as if it was South Fork. The house was repossessed, the family put into b & b, and the man had disappeared, maybe to inhabit a new dream; maybe to suffer for the rest of his life, having woken up, for having dreamed. The doors and ground floor windows were nailed up with shuttering ply. I went round the back and knocked on the rough wood that covered the door. I suddenly felt nervous, fearing he’d tell me to piss off, ready to walk away without a second knock, when it opened a crack, a face I recognised from school. He made no sign that he recognised me.
‘So?’
‘I’ve come to see Woody.’
‘Who’s ‘I’?’ I told him. The door closed. I heard noise behind me. Half a dozen kids, seven or eight year olds, with hard, old faces and eyes that didn’t blink, stared over the back fence.
‘Alright?’ I said, friendly. A clod of earth flew close to my head, splashed with a soft thud on the wall.
‘Hey, you little sods, piss off!’ I yelled, making as if to run at them. They were supposed to scamper off in terror. They didn’t move. A second clod was followed by a stone. I backed up against the house, the barrage was intensifying, becoming worrying, when a hand grabbed me and pulled me inside. The missiles drummed, accompanied by yelled obscenities, a meaningless string, a coprolitic necklace, each word as hard as a fist. The battery eased. They whooped off.
‘Tough kids, eh?’ Long hair. Ultra-bright, Upper Sixth. ‘Cross your fingers no-one ever organises them as storm troopers.’
‘Why do they do that?’ I asked. He shrugged:‘They get it from their parents. We’re
different. We show them ways to change their lives but they don’t want to know. They don’t want to change. They were stubborn peasants; now they’re stubborn claimants. They’d rather be trapped, then all they have to do is snarl. When your back’s to the wall, at least you know where you are. The kids have really negative role models. They smashed the wind generator, set their dogs on the hens. Woody’s upstairs.’
On the walls were designs showing the house adapted to save 70% of running costs. Lots of glass. Lots of capital. I passed one room filled with dark, apocalyptic photographs, another with sound equipment and a mixing desk and an impossibly thin, impossibly pale girl who stood, headphones on, her fingers stabbing a keyboard to a rhythm I couldn’t hear.

I stood in the doorway of Woody’s room. He sat immobile, eyes fixed-focussed on the computer screen, face highlit by the flickering data, hands hanging over the keyboard like spiders, then scurrying over the keys like ants. I hardly recognised him. I suddenly realised I hadn’t seen him for months, that he hadn’t been at school, that I hadn’t noticed. He was thinner than ever, painfully thin in the skinny sweater, pale skin drawn tight over the bones of his face, black around his eyes, eyes that shone with a fierce, cold fire, reflecting back the screen, hard. ‘Light’ was razored into the dyed black hair of his right temple. A vein rippled across it like a snake. Alison Duncan – two years older, the impossible dream, light years more mature than we mortals, more mature than we’d ever be, helpless, helpless – watched me steadily from the bed, then uncoiled her slim body and stood in one fluid motion, pulled a long thin hand over her tightly drawn-back black hair, smoothed down her skin tight black one piece, stroked Woody’s hand and whispered in his ear as she passed (he didn’t react), stared hard at me as she left the room – a look that said, mess with Woody and I’ll tear your heart out. And meant it.
Woody stopped typing, said ‘damn’, tapped rapidly again then leaned back, half grimace, half smile. ‘They’ve got a new bloke on the County computer. He’s good. Getting everything bolted and barred. He’s one methodical gate-keeping mother. But he’s beginning to respond. I’m drawing him out. He’s in his castle, see?’  For the first time he looked at me, eyes flinching then recovering as he rolled determinedly on. ‘In his castle, I can’t touch him, so I have to draw him out. I have to work on his vanity.’ He smiled a shark smile.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m hacking into every computer system and wiping every reference to this house and its occupants. We’re lasering our tattoos. We’ll become phantoms to them, invisible, unreal because they can’t see us – their computers are their eyes –  but in the real world we’ll exist, we’ll be able to do things, we’ll be free.’
‘But why?’
‘Time of change. Next step in our evolution. Unfolding the metagenetic code. Time. And all free, courtesy a home-made blue box, a liberated modem, and some dinky work with crocodile clips on the phone box outside.’
‘But what about the people who have to pay for what you take?’ I said, suddenly prim.
‘Oh come on – what is it compared to fat cat share options and quango sinecures? There’s less and less space, and you have to make your own. Call it  “government subsidy”.’ He smiled harshly, looked at me again, fugitive expressions flitting across his face, memories and vulnerability. Silence. I began: ‘I’m sorry about…’
A mask dropped across his face. I could hear the clang. ‘Did you come here to apologise?’  he interrupted. I shook my head. ‘Begin now. Always begin now.’ Like a learned mantra, held out in front of him.
‘I have to get into Jones’s place.’ 
‘Why – did your ball go over the wall?’ Sneering.
‘This is serious! A man’s life depends on it.’ He leaned back in this chair, hands behind his head. ACCESS DENIED winked at him and he jabbed a key and a screen saver spread slowly across the screen like an opening chrysanthemum.
‘That’s tough one. It’s a fortress – fences, guards, cameras, the lot. I’ve been in for a look-see, to check it out – very hairy. And the computer system’s behind lead. What’s the problem?’
I explained about the old man. As I spoke, heard it out loud, I realised how absurd it sounded – just the ravings of a deluded old man. But Woody took it all in, going to a map on the wall as I talked, a map of the area, with added lines, symbols, geometric shapes, and studied it. When he spoke, it wasn’t to me but to the map, to the denizens of that map.

‘Of course. We always knew the Hall was significant. But we couldn’t figure out what to do when Jones bought it. It was a lock-down. We couldn’t access it. But – maybe the dower house,’ his finger traced over the old man’s house (I hadn’t realised it had once been the dower house to the Hall), its garden, ‘is the key to the Hall,’ his finger tracing similar patterns but on a larger scale over the Hall and its extensive grounds. ‘The key that opens the lock. And the old man’s been sleeping on it all this time, guarding it, and blocking it. And now he’s waking up.’ His hand was roaming rapidly over the map, like a blind man reading braille. ‘“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven” – and in heaven too. This is big, big, big. It’s the dish, isn’t it?’ he said, turning to me, focussing on me again. ‘We have to silence it.’
‘Silence it?’ I said, suddenly anxious.
‘Not permanently, you understand; just a little – break in service. And I know just the thing.’ He chuckled. Suddenly he was a mischievous kid again. Just for a moment. Then, to me, very serious:
‘But first, you have to do something.’
‘Me? What? Why?’ Alarmed. No, I couldn’t face Celia. He walked over to me, grasped my arm, looked into my eyes: ‘we’re about to do something important, significant. But before we can do it, you need to do something first. In order to move forward, you need to clear something in your past. You told me about it when we first met and ever since its been bugging you, festering in you, growing out of all proportion. A buzzing fly’s become a big dragon. Now’s the time to slay it.’ I saw very clearly, blurted, ‘what, trash Martin’s shop?’ sure, horrified, that he’d been reading my mind that first morning clearing. He smiled enigmatically. Oh he gathered them early, those powers he had later, had been gathering them unconsciously all his life (like all geniuses), was now beginning to work with them consciously. Smiling, he shook his head slowly:
‘Proportion. Take the original offence and respond in kind. No more, no less. This is not revenge; it’s the righting of a wrong. “Revenge is mine, said the Lord” – getting even’s yours. Do you know that “an eye for an eye” was originally a counsel of moderation, an injunction against escalation? Do you know that studies of conflict resolution show that the ideal strategy is to respond exactly in kind, never more? You’re not an avenging angel. You’re not Jesus on Judgment Day. You’re just balancing the books. Make no mistake, it will be painful – we like to nurse our grievances. But each of us must right the wrongs against himself, if it’s at all possible. That way lies liberation. When you’ve done that, we can proceed.’ His face was serious, deadly serious, his words to be heeded. He allowed the silence to grow for a couple of seconds, then he returned abruptly to the computer, typing rapidly, muttering, ‘now, Mister Gate-Keeper, let’s see if we can entice you out of your castle – and slip in behind.’ Alison reappeared, as silently as she’d gone, and gave me a “time-to-go time” look. I went.

I hesitated. I don’t know what he would have done if I’d refused. After all, sorting out the old man was, I now knew, part of his agenda, too. So maybe he was just bluffing. I don’t know to this day. Therein lay, lies, his art. And at first I hesitated. Not just because of my unwillingness to face old Martin – and it was true what he’d said about the perverse pleasure we get from nursing a grievance and doing nothing about it – but also because I felt I was being drawn into something that was getting ever bigger. I felt like I’d stepped onto a roller coaster that was gathering speed, I was balanced on a rock on an avalanche that was heading who knows where. What was I getting drawn into? An old man’s delusion? A drop-out’s self-dramatising theatricals? Other people’s agendas? Maybe I was happy with that, not having one of my own. And, when I listened to my inner voice, I knew that there was something real going on, that I was part of. I felt alive. I decided.

Chapter 8

‘No, Mr Martin, it was definitely 20p. Check in your till – I’ve just got these from the bank,’ I held up the paper roll of new heptagonal coins, ‘and there’s just one gone. I’m sure you’ll find it in there.’
I was exactly his height. I hadn’t noticed that before. Every time I’d come into his shop, from the first time to just now, I’d been small, looking up. Now I was exactly his height. And my eyes were holding his, unwavering. He squinted at me over his glinting glasses. He was puzzled, beginning to be anxious. He looked down into the till. I leaned over. The 20p shone, twinkled, glowed, sang the Hallelujah Chorus. 
See?’ I said. ‘Do you want to check the date?’ I added unnecessarily. He stared at it. His bald head glistened with sweat beneath the thin strands of combed-across hair. He fidgeted.
‘I was sure it was a ten you gave me,’ he said quietly, almost to himself. He stared into the till as if a transmutation had taken place within and now, having begun, might not stop. He looked up at me, suddenly stricken, as if meaning was leaking from his world, as if appealing to me to say it wasn’t so. I felt myself grow, fill the shop, look down on him from a great height. Then a light came into his eye. He twigged. He’d been tricked, he knew it, he knew I knew he knew… and there was nothing he could do about it. I returned to normal size, exactly his height. He was almost relieved. He tried to involve me in a conspiratorial look but I refused it; I settled for a shared look of understanding.‘My mistake,’ he said simply, handing me 10p change.
‘That’s okay, Mr Martin – we all make mistakes. ‘Bye,’ and walked out of the shop, stepping lightly, leaving the door bell tinkling and Mr Martin standing stock still behind his counter.

I smiled at the small boy I’d swapped the coins with, bit off the end of the liquorice tube of the sherbet fountain, sucked, and – miracle upon miracle! – it worked. The clean white taste of sherbet puffed into my mouth.
Lifted almost off my feet by the bubble of elation, I walked through town in a daze, the town never having looked so good, to reach the wide green sun-dazzled expanse of Castle Walk, with the emptiness over the open country I needed so the bubble could burst out of me in a mighty ‘Yes!’

I sat on a bench, sucking my sherbet fountain, feeling pretty good.

Chapter 10

Woody was standing in front of the mirror in a tight black outfit like the one Alison had been wearing – maybe the same one, hot thought – applying slashes of greasepaint to his face. 
‘Woa, night cricket,’ I laughed. It was the night of the raid, an hour before Woody and I were to go in; plans had been made, back-up briefed (I was amazed at his network of associates, from hunt saboteurs to country gents with occult tastes, via Luddite librarians), the old man – (we knew his name now, Johannes – a lot had happened in the last few days) – ready to operate the ‘neutralizer’ as soon as we silenced the dish; and I was apprehensive, fearful, and nervous as hell. He grunted, finished the exactly-patterned application, nodded, and sat facing me, his expression serious behind the distorting mask. We had to wait for the arranged starting-time, and he ws in story-telling mode:
‘When I was thirteen, I was initiated. The current man had trained as a shaman with the Lakota Sioux. She always chose carefully, my mother, and with my best interests at heart.’ I looked down. ‘We went to West Kennet long barrow. The barrows were places of initiation before they were burial sites. And West Kennet is part of the religious complex that includes the mother figure of Silbury Hill and the dragon figure of Avebury. We, the group of us, built a bender sweat lodge, dug a fire pit for the stones, and sweated. Light-headed from my first sweat, but feeling cleansed, I entered the barrow, naked except for the cape my mother had made for me, and with the small bag of keepsakes from all the women for comfort. Then he blocked the entrance with stone. I was to spend three days and nights alone, in total darkness, without food or water.’
‘That’s barbaric!’ I yelped.
‘Initiation is a transition, from boyhood to manhood. It has to be arduous, extreme, even risky – memorable. Better than in this society with its endlessly drawn-out ‘adolescence’. And during it you receive an incomparable gift – the vision of the totem that will be your life guide.
‘Although my skin was glowing and my head singing from the sweat, there was a dreadful finality as the stone was pushed into place – the scratching sound that suddenly stopped – and I was engulfed in silence and dark. I could see nothing and hear nothing. I tried to pull aside what was obscuring my vision but there was nothing there, tried to open eyes that were already open; I became convinced that I’d gone blind and deaf, that things were happening around me, people in the light, circling, commenting, and me stood, still, head down. I began to panic – the weight of stone around me and above me, the finality… I clutched the bag of keepsakes and shook it to make a sound – such a clamorous noise! – listened to the soft rasp of my bare feet as I walked. I sat cross-legged in the central chamber and meditated, muttering my mantra over and over, clinging to it like a life buoy as I sank… My body ceased to exist – I had thoughts and a wild beating heart but no flesh and bones. My meditation turned to prayer, hardly even a prayer, just cries – help me, please, help me, please. I was abandoned, utterly alone, crying out to someone I didn’t know, who wasn’t even there. I began to cry. I cried and cried – inside me was a black well of tears – all I was was a well from which tears rose up, overflowed, poured out, through my eyes, along my nose, down my face, into my mouth, salty as blood, salt tears dripping, onto my cape, around me, I was awash with bitter tears.

‘How long for? Forever. No time at all. I heard a voice, outside me, inside me, a strange unearthly voice that shivered up my spine, made the hairs at the back of my head bristle. The voice called, I didn’t want to go, I did. I was outside, on a hillside I knew, where we often picnicked, in bright sunshine, the grass brilliant green, splashes of yellow and pink and blue nodding flowers, a breeze soft in my face, patterning the grass; and a small figure, hunched and hairy, beckoning me, sinking into the ground, disappearing. I didn’t want to go underground again, but I had to follow. I walked to the place and there were steps in a spiral anti-clockwise down, I descended into a cavern lit only by the sparkle of jewels and gold, guarded by a dragon with ruby eyes and a smoky mouth. Ahead of me was a small square of light, like a distant window. I knew I had to reach it. I started walking, tripping over bars of gold, stumbling on jewel-encrusted boxes, ignoring them – and the shapes, the things rustling and slithering and flapping around me, against me – smooth skin of snakes and enormous worms, hairy softness of giant rats, the stretched wings of bat’s wings, flashing eyes, sudden open mouths, the stench of bad breath. They were overwhelming me, I was sinking under the weight of their presence, I wanted to roll up in a ball, hide my eyes, surrender. But there was the light, I had to keep my eyes fixed on the light, stumble towards it, lurching over uneven ground, as gradually the slitherings ceased, the ground became level, the window, filled with light, grew to the size of a doorway. I reached it. And found myself, tiny, halfway up a high smooth cliff face, with no way up or down.

‘Before I had time to ponder my situation, I heard a noise; and from the base of the cliff, below me, I saw knights riding out, armour flashing in the sun, surcoats flapping, finely-caparisoned horses snorting and mettlesome, lances high and tied with ladies’ favours and with the pennants cracking in the wind. How fine and proud and purposeful they looked! And how desperately I wanted them to take me with them! I cried out to them from my high, helpless position but none acknowledged me, none turned, they rode steadfastly, staring straight ahead, not speaking, until the last bobbing crest was out of sight, the jangle of equipment and the rumble of hooves had faded into nothingness. I stood, and waited; that was my job. The sun rose in the sky and sank towards evening and was about to set and was filling the world with red light when they began to return, straggling back, in ones and twos on slow, limping horses, their lances low, broken, the favours gone, tattered, wounded, damaged, defeated. They entered the cliff below me as though they were sinking into it, becoming part of it, stone, as if never to emerge. I watched, heart sore. And then, from the dangling bloodstained pennant of the last desolate knight, when he was in the rock and the pennant about to disappear – a red wyvern unhitched itself, flew up, flew up to me and, to my amazement, shock, grasped me in its dragon feet and lifted me off the ledge and flew upwards on powerful beating wings, gyring clockwise up.
‘I alternated between looking up admiringly at its masterful wings, its aspiring head – such noble aspiration! – and staring down in terror at the growing gulf of empty air to the diminishing earth. And then I was hanging, suspended, and the whole earth’s shining orb was beneath me – no longer beneath, before me. And, for an instant, in a flash of seeing – hardly seeing, more knowing  – Gaia, the living earth, its rocky bones, its living flesh, the animated circulations of water and living things, the crackle of vitality along energy lines. And man – at once proud inheritor and mean parricide, with his gift, and his burden: choice. And at the moment of realisation, revelation, the wyvern let go. I dropped like a stone. The earth grew. I screamed. I begged for oblivion – the whispering voice, “remember your angelic portion” – I spread my arms, my legs, I opened my eyes and found myself not falling but gliding, sailing like a long-winged albatross, swooping this way and that over the earth, observing good ways and bad, seeing patterns, mapping features, feeling a new certainty, a whole life laid out, and so pleased with myself as I swooped artfully low over the high tree canopy – that I snagged and fell from branch to branch and landed with a thump, the breath knocked out of me. 

‘I was still dazed when I felt the wind rising, peppering me with leaves and twigs, tugging at me, a hurricane blowing up from a bruised and troubled sky. I held onto the tree and my feet were lifted from under me, leaves, branches and finally trees were uprooted and blown past me. At last the wind dropped. There was silence. I looked round at a desolate, ruined world, my tree the only one standing, me quite alone. And then, from a hole high up in the tree a small bird, twittering and animated, a chip of energy and life like a spark newly struck, flew around me and landed on my shoulder. I felt its tiny claws, the vibration of life in it. And then the claws were growing, to an eagles’s, to a bear’s, were shaking me and above me was a looming figure – I flinched and cringed, then heard voices familiar and safe, felt his strong arms help me to my feet, his arm around my shoulders as he led me towards the light at the barrow’s mouth, his words – ‘I’m proud of you – now your manhood begins’.

‘It didn’t feel it. I felt unbalanced and unsure. But I did feel different. And at the entrance to the barrow I stopped, overwhelmed by the beauty of the world I was stepping into – the smell of grass, of cut hay, of honeysuckle, the animation of twittering, flitting birds, the luscious movement of leafy trees, the voluptuous curves of the grass-clothed earth, the sounds of distant sheep, the glorious dome of the sky, deep blue above my head, gold where the sun had set – flushing pink, the pink of wild roses washing across the sky, the land, my skin as I looked down at my unfamiliar hands. And then – oh, such a moment! – the moon rose full from Silbury Hill, as if born from within it, showering its silver onto the land. I looked at the moon as if for the first time, was shocked, astonished at how familiar it looked, remembered my mother carrying me here as a tiny child and pointing up and whispering ‘you were born of the moon’. And now I knew it was true.
‘He led me down – how good the cool grass felt to my bare feet – to the camp my mother and the others had made; it was Lamas, Silbury day; with benders and rugs thrown down and a leaping fire and music and good food and drink.
‘Tell me everything that happened’ he said.  As I drank and ate and the others danced and sang, I told my story. When I spoke of looking at the earth from the wyvern’s grasp, I saw Celia twitch and tears fill her eyes, as if she was remembering something. At the end of it, I waited.
‘Your totem is the sparrow,’ he said. I was devastated – why not the dragon, the knight, the wyvern – why so insignificant a creature?
‘Your totem shows you not what you will be, but how to become what you will be. Only one tree survived, and in that tree just one bird. The sparrow is the great survivor; it can live in hedgerows and houses, among men or nature. It listens. It learns. It hears tales of failure and success, and learns what is false and true in each. It knows country ways and city ways, creature ways and human ways. It is watchful, careful, cunning, when necessary ruthless, and limitlessly energetic. It is neither proud nor humble. It is everywhere and yet anonymous; and therein lies its power. And, above all, it knows what it’s doing. You are greatly favoured,  ___’, he said, giving me my secret name.
‘I lay down but slept only fitfully, images from the vision place running through my head. At some point, as I swam in and out of sleep, Celia laid her cool hand on my hot forehead and whispered ‘now it will happen’.’

Silence. My heart choked in envy. His eyes, from being far away, focused on me, he smiled, said, ‘c’mon, compadre – time to make things happen!’

Chapter 11

Nothing was happening.

We’d been sat up in the tree for half an hour, and my left leg had gone to sleep. I stretched and rubbed it until the pins and needles made me yelp.
‘Shsh,’ Woody hissed. ‘Native Americans can squat motionless for hours. You wriggle like a kid on tartrazine.’
‘That’s probably why I wasn’t born a “Native American”,’ I hissed back. ‘Why I was thrown onto the “Native American reject” pile,’ I spat, warming up, ‘ “Oh no, he can’t sit still, we can’t let him be born onto some God-forsaken Reservation where he’ll live a miserable life on Government hand-outs and die prematurely an alcoholic wreck. Let’s be really rotten to him, seeing he can’t sit still, let’s have him born into the most affluent, successful culture the world’s ever known. Poor bloody reject”. Hmph.’
‘Shsh,’ he hissed, looking scornfully at me and continuing to squat immobile.
How much longer?’ I complained. We had climbed the tree at twilight, hauling up the containers of mystery liquid and bridging over the high fence to the tree inside the estate before night fell. Night had fallen so long ago, I expected the dawn chorus to start any minute.
‘We have to wait,’ he explained slowly and with equal emphasis on each word, as to a dim child, ‘for the aniseed bombs, the radar confetti, and the protesters at the gate.’
‘Why can’t we just bash the dish with a hammer?’ prodding the heavy containers dubiously with my foot.
‘ “Appropriate action …”. ’ he gripped my arm. I stopped breathing. I couldn’t hear anything. Then I could. A faint stirring in the undergrowth, getting louder, a torch being turned this way and that, the troubled breathing of a heavy smoker, interspersed with random curses. A security guard emerged from the bushes, creaking in his leather-look jacket, passed right underneath the tree in which we were perched, was about to move on, then said ‘oh fuck ‘em’ and returned to our tree and leaned back against it with a sigh. He lit a cigarette, the match flaring like a firework. I thought I was going to faint. He jabbed his CB and said: ‘Hello? Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo Uniform, calling Slimy Bastard. All quiet on the Western Front. Hee hee hee.’ The wheezy chuckle froze on his lips and he shot to attention as an angry voice rasped from the ear piece. ‘No, Sir, yes, Sir, yes, Sir, no, Sir,’ he stammered, then, ‘Perimeter Operative Nightjar reporting from Sector Thirty Three, Situation A-Okay, I say again, Situation A-Okay. Nightjar out.’ Then, ‘oh bugger,’ as he put his radio away and trudged morosely on.

I was shaking so much I almost fell out of the tree. Woody was ice cool, focussed. I was a nervous wreck, frightened of the dogs, the guards, above all, of being caught. As I stared into the domain of a man whose business activities were a scandal, whose ruthless ambition and selfishness wrought endless harm, with the knowledge that what I was about to do was a minor piece of nuisance vandalism that would allow a lonely old man to live a happier life; I still had to face the incontrovertible fact that I was about to trespass, do criminal damage, break the law. I’d grown up with the idea of right and wrong as given. As I looked across at Woody, still as a rock, full of inner certainty, with a scale of right and wrong quite at odds with society’s, I felt disturbed, off balance, as if now I was half in two camps, entirely in neither. I felt uneasy, as if I was about to get out of my depth, that I was getting myself into something, actions with consequences, that I was unsure about –
‘BANG!’
Too late for that – now I had to wing it as rockets exploded over the Hall, aluminium confetti showered, and sounds of chanting and angry shouting came to us from the main gate. ‘Now!’ Woody said unnecessarily, as we dropped down into enemy territory.

We had torches, and Woody had shown me the layout on a map, even marking a clear route through the outer wooded area, the inner shrubbery, and then, the really risky bit, across the open lawn to the building itself. ‘That’s floodlit,’ he’d said, pointing at the map in front of us on the floor where we’d lain with our chins on our hands. ‘We’ll just have to hope Biggsy gets the power off – even so, we’ll only have a couple of minutes before the emergency generator kicks in.’
The dish was on an octagonal building that had been the library. ‘The Second Earl inherited one of the great Elizabethan libraries, and added to it assiduously. And he installed one of the first celestial telescopes on the roof. Imagine,’ he said quietly, almost dreamily, ‘spending your days in silent study of the accumulated written wisdom of the Western world, one’s nights in wrapt contemplation of the wordless mysteries of the heavens.’ I’d forgotten this side of Woody, the romantic, the contemplative. Already he was paying a price for his commitment to activism. ‘And now – the books are gone, replaced by banks of chattering computers number-crunching financial data, and the telescope’s given way to a dish that’s focussed on, lives for, the feed from satellites transmitting non-stop prices from all the world’s stock exchanges. I bet they have a big sign up saying: “We know the price of Everything”. No wonder the old man’s place, Johannes himself, have been overwhelmed. And now it’s time to do something about it.’

But torches and memorised routes were useless as we stumbled through the overgrown woods and along labyrinthine paths that took us everywhere except towards the house; once to the edge of a mist-wreathed black lake, once to a three metre high wall with a dozen stone faces grinning from niches, and once face to face with the Hound of the Baskervilles. Woody swore later that it had responded to a technique of animal communication he’d learned when he was nine; I reckon the brute was at first confused by our torches, then distracted by the thud of a late-landing but nevertheless opportune aniseed bomb and the subsequent sweet smell. Despite all of which – we reached the edge of the lawn. 

It was illuminated like a football pitch. Beautiful in the silver-blue light, but quite uncrossable. We could see lights in the Hall, doors opening, dark figures hurrying this way and that. The dish shone like the moon, and as out of reach. Woody checked his watch and frowned. ‘The power should have gone off ten minutes ago. Maybe it happened and they’re now on emergency.’
‘Let’s just hope Biggsey’s as off with his timing as us,’ I said wearily. This was all beginning to get to me. Woody looked at me sharply, was about to go into his ‘this is a complex operation’ routine, when the lights went out. There were cries of alarm from the Hall, shouted instructions, the sound of bodies clashing.
‘Biggsey, I love you! – Come on, let’s go for it!’
And, boy, we went for it, legging across the grass as best we could carrying the awkward containers, like some bizarre three-legged race, got to the building, and lugged them panting up the fire escape to the flat roof of the library and threw ourselves down behind the parapet. The sound of petrol generators starting up. The lights came back on. I lay there, out of breath but not daring to breath as I listened to the boots and shouts of the guards so terrifyingly close. A sudden thought sent a shiver down my sweat-soaked back: ‘how do we get out?’
‘Stage Two. If Mike can reach the fuel line.’
‘And if he can’t?’
‘We’ll probably be caught,’ he said simply. ‘But by then it won’t matter. We’ll have done our job. Anyway, what can they do – shoot us?’
While I thought they’d probably stop short of that, I could picture us hanging by the wrists, cartoon-like, for several decades. “Schoolboy’s mystery disappearance. ‘He was such a quiet boy,’ sobs mother”.
Then reality intruded. And reality was Jones saying, in measured tones of sweet reasonableness, that surely, as an intelligent, well-brought-up young man, I must realise that the future lay with the global economy, the digital revolution, the Information Age, and at my age, with a bright future ahead of me I should be seeking to be part of it, not fighting futilely against it? ‘Where are the hand-loom weavers now, eh?’ he ended triumphantly. It was the senior police officer saying, ‘what would happen if we all took the law into our own hands? How would I feel if someone broke into my room and damaged my possessions? The law is one and indivisible.’ It was my headmaster saying that in a democracy, while the rights of the minority must be respected, the will of the majority must be accepted, and that he was disappointed that I had not had the good sense not to allow my head to be turned by the misplaced idealism of such disaffected youth as Woody.

‘Come on, let’s get mixing.’
But this was a limited action, an appropriate response, an action on behalf of the small and weak against the big and strong, in which the benefits to one outweighed the costs to the other; we were balancing, just a little, society’s unfair scales; sometimes you have to break the law to do right. As long as you remember actions have consequences, and you’re prepared to take the consequences. I was. The figures faded. I was here, with Woody, ready to act. Acting.

‘Jesus, what is this stuff?’ as I emptied the first container into the plastic bag. It was pig slurry, so awful-smelling I almost gagged. ‘From his concentration camp of an intensive unit.’ He emptied the other. In the silver light it was oily and black. ‘Blood, from his abattoir that’s polluting the river. Now a little something from one of his Colombian tin mines – life expectancy 32 years – and in five minutes this will be a very sticky, very nasty jelly that will coat that dish’s surface and take hours to clean off.’

Tying the neck of the bag, we kneaded the contents, then lifted it carefully to the top of the dish, punched several holes in it, and dribbled it over the smooth concavity. It was already congealing. The smell was almost unbearable. I had a sudden vision of squealing, bleeding, defecating, terrified animals and a man’s desperate breathing. I just wished it was Jones who’d have to clean it off.
‘Now, we’re waiting, we’re waiting…Come on, Mike,’ Woody intoned. But immediately there were voices from the window below:

‘What do you mean, the satellite feed’s gone down? Check the relays, find out if there’s a problem with the satellite, send someone up to check on the dish. How are we supposed to operate in this madhouse?’
‘Come on, they’ll be up in seconds,’ Woody hissed.
‘Come on where?’ I wailed. He was already scampering down the rattling metal steps, and I soon joined him, pressed into the shadow cast by a buttress.

We crouched in friendly darkness, and gazed across to the other darkness that would willingly conceal us so we could make good our escape. But in between lay a zone of pitiless light, of ruthless exposure, the floodlit set for a hunting scene in which we would be the quarry. There was no way across. It was Improv. Time…
‘Run!’
I ran. I ran as if my pants were on fire, as if a dozen pit bull terriers were snapping at my heels. I ran as in a dream; bathed in intense, directionless light, the dark a remote horizon that got no nearer, running and getting nowhere, in a silent world in which the only noises were those made by my frantic, terrified body. 

‘Hey!’ Noise irrupted into the dream bubble, shouts, instructions, (‘please don’t shoot!’), and suddenly a pounding presence, the ground shaking as under a charging bull, closing from behind.
‘Split up!’ The heavy, black-clad figure followed Woody. I was close to the welcoming dark of the  massed shrubbery when I looked round and saw that Woody, weaving this way and that to evade his faster but less nimble pursuer, was losing the race. I ran towards where they’d reach the bushes; the man was getting closer with each stride, but my straight line would intersect their path, if I was quick enough. So intent was he on his pursuit – there was the beginning of a smile of triumph as again and again he almost grasped the twisting figure – that he didn’t realise I was there until, his hand about to close on Woody’s shoulder, I hit him with my shoulder. It was like shoulder-charging a wall – but, off-balance, he went sprawling. I bounced off him but kept my feet and dived into the nearest rhododendron bush, scattering petals. Peering out, I saw Woody was clear, home free… except that instead of heading for shrubbery he turned, trotted back to the winded figure, touched his head with a cry of ‘count coup!’ and only then, with a hop, a skip and a cartwheel, flung himself into the dark. ‘Woody,’ I thought, stunned, ‘your reality is not mine,’ as figures came from all sides, converging on us, cutting us off.
And then the lights went out again.

Chapter 12

We escaped.

I don’t know how – all I know is that after a deal of colliding, grasping, shouting, running, climbing, jumping, we were throwing ourselves down in the sanctuary we’d prepared for ourselves in the wood, outside the fence, back in the world.

We lay, panting like winded foxes, hearts thumping fit to burst. Waves of emotion passed through me, expressing themselves in alternate laughs and sobs. I was, after the tension, the action, the relief, a bit hysterical. Gradually the waves subsided, my heart steadied, my breathing returned to normal. I lay on my back, staring up through the interlaced branches of our covert at the black sky, the stars, smiling. I felt a huge, irrational contentment. I felt full and yet clean. I felt soft and yet sharp. I felt like I’d been in the ring with a fierce bull and left it confused and nonplussed, me whistling nonchalant. I wanted to do it again.
‘Hey, Colours , we did it,’ I said.
‘We surely did, Four Square, we surely did,’ as we leaned over and high-fived and then lay back, silent at our use of old names. ‘Quite an event. The old times, plus.’
‘Yep, the old times plus,’ I said, then added quietly, ‘I want to do it again.’
‘Take care, Four Square,’ he said, in his best big brother voice. ‘That was a high, a trip. You have to be wary of trips – they can become habits that need feeding. A while back I got into a b and e trip – y’know, breaking and entering? I started because I needed stuff. Then I found I was getting really excited before I went out. I thought it was just the necessary anticipation, but then I found myself doing weird things, foolish things, and I realised I was getting off on the thrill of being somewhere I shouldn’t, the adrenalin rush of risking capture. Trouble is, you need to take ever greater risks to get the same rush. Eventually you get so weird you’re almost trying to get caught. A bad experience pulled me out of it just in time.
‘Remember, what we did tonight had a purpose. An action defined by an objective, an objective we achieved, a mission accomplished. End of story.’ I felt put down. Jeez, that was familiar, too. But instead of biting back my resentment, I pushed myself up on one elbow and said, ‘okay, Mister so bloody reasonable – what was that ‘count coup’ business that just about got us caught?’
He chuckled, ‘it’s a Native American thing – if you touch an enemy in battle, you ‘count coup’ – the more coups, the higher your status as a warrior.’
‘So you almost landed us in it, just to put another feather in your cap? You stupid, selfish –’ and launched myself onto him and we wrestled like we used to. What surprised me, as we struggled in the dark, was that now I could hold him down. ‘Hey, Four Square’s become Five Square,’ he panted, helpless under my weight. ‘But remember, the job’s only half done; we need to check on Johannes.’ I let go, and he scrambled to his feet, held out his hand to pull me up, dumped me on my face and skipped away. I dived for his ankle, couldn’t hold it, knocked it against his other leg, he pitched over, out of the hiding place, forward rolled onto his feet, and with a ‘eat my dust, bourgeois boy,’ loped of down the track. I followed, smiling, seeing us in ten minutes standing by a proud and beaming Johannes, congratulating him on his handiwork. It was not to be. It was all coming apart in his hands.

Chapter 13

We found him standing, a lost old man again, among the copper pegs, lit by the flickering torches, staring at the confusion of wire in his hands as though it was a fascinating alien creature. ‘Oh shit,’ said Woody.

The work we’d done on the garden, the clearing, had brought a new order to his life; his belief that there was a malefic force that had to be neutralised gave him an activity to focus on. Was it true? Were there telluric energies and malefic forces? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I willingly suspended disbelief and got on with it. All I cared about was that my life had suddenly got interesting. Compared with the woolly dullness of school, the anger choked to resentment at home, this was exciting, thrilling, clear. I woke each day eager to get to the old man’s place. I went there every day. I did whatever job he gave me. I watched as he worked to produce the solution to the problem of Jones Hall.

He walked the garden endlessly, with a sense of wonder, as if revisiting a place dear to his heart that he had quite forgotten existed. Looks of shock, of pleasure, of pain. He traced lines and vortices of energy through the garden, his thumb lightly on the string of the pendulum, himself a tuning fork – sometimes quivering barely perceptibly, like a feather touched by the softest breeze, sometimes staggering as if punched, the energy draining from him; and marked them carefully on the map he had found, pinned to the wall. He was working to find a way to block the flow of energy that was disabling him from finding the way to block the flow. Heroic! (Though I took it for granted. I was young).

But there was more than that, I realised. The key that would lock the flow would be the key to open the gate onto a path he’d wandered from long before Jones had arrived. He’d muttered strange things to me. ‘The way is a walk along a razor’s edge… ah, but the Sirens, Duessas, the leopard in the dark wood – una selva oscura, una selva oscura…’ almost drifting away on the sound, then punching his palm and bumbling self-importantly off. When I asked a question, often instead of answering, he would produce, with a flourish from a top pocket (like a magician pulling out a bunch of flowers) a card and hand it to me. They read, variously, “where the sword is kept sharp/ the VOID/ gnashes its teeth”; “We are the Holy Second Chancers”; “Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius”; “the constant soul is guided by Hermes/ the inconstant soul is led astray by Puck”. I remembered them without understanding them. They’ve made sense since.

After a while he took the map indoors. He wouldn’t let me in, neither did he come out. I’d find myself jobs to do. I’d hear him raging, ‘Why have you done this to me? How could you? Such wantonness, such waste!’ I imagined a silent, worn-down wife. Then I saw him speaking to someone from long ago, railing at a faded photograph. At God himself. At last I realised, with a shudder, that the person with whom he was locked in combat (like that terrifying picture by Magritte of two fighting figures locked in one body), was himself.

One day there was a commotion surpassing all others, like the family row I’d always feared, unbearable, (I remembered fleeing as a small child from friend’s family rows) – I had a terrible vision of an immense bird in there with him, its pounding wings, its raking talons, its tearing beak. Helpless, furious, beside myself, I kicked and hammered at the nailed door, shouting ‘go on, then, get yourself killed, you stupid old man. See if I care. I’m going now, and I’m never coming back,’ and I threw the tools all over the place and stormed off, walked round and round the town.

Hours later I found myself, inevitably I suppose (where else did I have to go?), at Woody’s. The floor of his room had been entirely cleared, to the woodchip boards, and spread across it, almost filling it, was a sheet of bleached cotton. Half the sheet was blank, a snowy landscape of folds, of hills and valleys, light and shade; half was covered with patterns, geometries, arabesques, shapes within shapes, figures about to come into being that flowed off into other figures, black outlines that drew the eye in, lost it, found it again, brought it to the edge of resolution, dissolved all certainties, maddened, beguiled. Alison knelt at one side, her face close to the sheet, colouring in the shapes in the minutest detail, in the brightest of colours, working with absorbed concentration; the reflected pigments coloured her white face, which looked as if the sun was shining through a stained glass window onto it. I suddenly knew why her face was always so blank. Woody was working at the leading edge of the pattern, drawing black lines into the white as if enticing them, shaping, defining, bringing into being, working with such deftness and certainty that the placing of lines looked inevitable, as if he was making visible what was there, simply invisible; then I looked at his face, the concentration, the straining to see, to know – I knew that each was a line into the unknown. They worked silently, absorbedly on, cocooned in their world. I did not exist. I felt very lonely. When he at last looked up, focussed, I gabbled out everything, and waited. He pondered, then said, ‘sounds like Jacob time. Wrestling with the angel. All we can do is wait. Give yourself a break – go to Weymouth and gorge yourself on the pleasures of the superficial.’ Then he resumed work, as if I’d never been there.

I looked it up. “So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him there till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not throw Jacob, he struck him in the hollow of the thigh, so that Jacob’s hip was dislocated as they wrestled. The man said “let me go, for day is breaking,” but Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” He said to Jacob, “what is your name?” and he answered, “Jacob”. The man said, “your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you strove with God and with men, and prevailed.” Jacob said, “Tell me, I pray, your name.” He replied, “why do you ask my name?” but he gave him his blessing there. Jacob called the place Penuel, “because,” he said, “I have seen God’s face and my life is spared.” The sun rose upon Jacob as he passed over Penuel, limping because of his hip”.

Chapter 14

Johannes wasn’t exactly limping when he came out, but he moved stiffly, with care, as if unsure how to manipulate a body that had become alien to him. I was tending a small fire, throwing fuel on whenever it died down, enjoying the crackle and flair, my own small fire. The big door creaked slowly open and he stood, squinting in the bright sunlight, then, seeing me, walked to me. He had a pile of folders and books in his arms. I waited for him to smile, to greet me. He didn’t. He didn’t recognise me. I was just there, someone; he’d expected there to be someone, and it was me, that was all. Ouch. He handed his load to me, said, ‘it’s here, the answer. Here,’ tapping them. He was standing close to the fire. He looked so insubstantial, so papery, so tindery, I feared lest a spark should touch him, whoosh him to ash. But when I looked at his eyes, behind the reflections of the bonfire in them I saw a life I hadn’t seen before, flickering low, but there. And though his face was drawn with fatigue, there was a set to his mouth, even the ghost of a smile. He was coming back to life. He tapped a pamphlet, titled ‘”Olber’s Paradox and Astrology”, pointing at the author’s name, Johannes Van der Velde. It was dated 1974. ‘I was Johannes – am, am – I am Johannes,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ holding out his hand. I pushed mine from under the pile to receive his, feeling ridiculous. He smiled. Then a little shadow flickered across his face and he said, ‘you are the messenger, aren’t you?’ Ah. ‘Yes,’ I said firmly, ‘yes, I am.’ He smiled again and then sagged, life draining from him. I took a step forward but he waved me away, pointing at the papers, and walked, almost tottered back into the house and closed the door. The paper was headed:

‘THE SQUARE OF JUPITER AND THE STRING OF PYTHAGORAS’

Clear enough, even if it made no sense. Ten minutes later I was back at Woody’s, handing him the folders. He said come back in an hour. When I returned, the design was gone, Alison was gone, and Woody was sitting in the middle of the floor surrounded by the papers and books. He’d read, annotated, cross-referred, calculated. He shook his head. ‘This has got me beat. I’ll have to tap the Circle.’
‘Tap the Circle?’ I said. (Jeez, it’d be Ouija boards next). He was already typing rapidly on the keyboard. As he connected successively to bulletin boards, databases, libraries, individual’s terminals, he said ‘the Circle is our name for the network of like-minded organisations and individuals – the esoteric, arcane, underground, alternative, call it what you will, world. Hermes Trismegistus famously described God as “a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere”, and that’s the sort of circle we are – especially appropriate as we connect more and more in the weird dimensions of cyberspace. And it’s a pretty good description of our Conspiracy.’
‘Conspiracy!?   ‘
‘Relax. Conspiracy means breathing together, a company of those sharing the same
attitudes. Now. I have to concentrate.’
He followed leads, got snippets of information, messages flowed out of the fax machine ( ‘Property of MoD – do not remove’ ), scrawled on Johannes’ paperwork, chewed his pencil. At last a light came into his eye, he relaxed, he smiled. ‘Oh, that’s neat. Oh yes, I like that. This is going to be fun.’
‘EXPLAIN!’
Hands behind his head, he explained:
‘You know about magic squares – blocks of numbers that produce the same sum whether they’re added in rows, columns or diagonals? Well, each magic square is in fact the expression of an underlying geometric structure. Which in turn is determined by a principle of movement and growth. The Ancients associated each of the seven celestial bodies of the solar system with a particular magic square – the square of nine numbers with Saturn, thirty-six with Venus, etc. They also saw the Seven Wonders of the World as forming an astrological and geomantic system, each of the sites representing the centre of influence of its associated celestial body. As above, so below.

‘Further, each of the Wonders, as an instrument to express, or even control, that particular aspect of the cosmic energy, was constructed according to the corresponding magic square. The Great Pyramid, for example, is built on the site associated with Mercury, and is constructed according to the sixty-four number square of that planet. The evidence is there, it’s all been measured. Okay so far?
‘Well, Johannes has discovered that the key to controlling the malefic force from Jones Hall, its pertinent planetary aspect, is the square of Jupiter – that’s a 4 x4 square of sixteen numbers. Which makes sense (these things always make sense afterwards – it’s coming up with the answer in the first place that’s the difficult part ), because of Jupiter’s use of the thunderbolt. In numerology, the sixteen is associated with the images ‘the lightning-struck tower’, ‘the shattered citadel’, ‘the Tower of Babel blasted’. The Tower of Babel expresses the existing confusion at Johannes’ place. Indeed in Johannes himself. It is a citadel shattered by the thunderbolt from Jones Hall.
‘And if we reduce the number (as is usual in numerology), one plus six gives seven, the number of “The Victor” who, having been tested, emerges triumphant. Seven also represents the triumph of the spirit over matter – what better image of Johannes and Jones? Further, seven foresees the turning of the malefic force back onto the Hall, which will in turn be “the Tower of Babel (all those chattering voices!) blasted”.  Okay so far?’ My eyes must have been spinning like wheels in a slot machine, but undeterred he carried on. I wan’t I realised here to hear, even less to understand, but as a sounding board. I was okay with that.

‘So that’s the Square of Jupiter, a square of sixteen. But, how to energise it? Bring on – “The String of Pythagoras”!
‘The Pythagoreans, who were very into the relationship between number and sound, used to reproduce the sonic pattern of different energies by stretching strings between posts, which then vibrate to produce the harmony of that energy. (That was Woodhenge’s original purpose, by the way – posts connected by strings. And hence Aeolian harps, and wind chimes, whose lengths are carefully calibrated). The way to energise the magic square, Johannes concludes, is to connect the sixteen points in the sequence of numbers in the square – one to two, to three, etc.

‘So – having discovered, by pendulum dowsing, the entry point of the malefic force into the garden, his plan is to make a grid of sixteen copper spikes, and connect them with a single wire, so the square:

4   14   15   1

  9    7    6    12 

 5    11   10    8

   16    2    3    13   

would produce a web;

   Spike one’s at the entry point; the movement of the incoming energy along the wire, through the magic square, will set up resonances which will, in the short term neutralise and dissipate its malefic power, and in the longer term, develop a vibration that will channel back to Jones Hall and disrupt its energy pattern. Genius!’

Chapter 15

I liked it. I loved it. Whether this was the logic of the lunatic – internally consistent but quite detached from reality, a closed system; or the revelations of the wise – secret and thus pure knowledge from the dawn of time, didn’t, then, matter. I was enjoying it, it was exciting, I was on it.

We hammered in the sixteen pegs. We organised ordnance and support for our raid on the enemy HQ. We planned it, we executed it, we got in, did our job, and got out (just). We skipped down the road towards Johannes’ place that dark, warm, moonless night, dazzled by stars, buzzing on achievement and relief, picturing to each other in loud, laughing voices Jones’ peg-nosed employees cleaning off the nauseating goo, Jones’ panic at having his finger removed, for however brief a time, from the pulse of the financial markets. ‘Imagine if there was a crisis,’ I chortled. ‘He’d lose millions!’
‘Hey, wow, yeah – d’you know that Black Monday was just two days after the Harmonic Convergence? These things do affect.’

We headed for the magic square, expecting to find Johannes, white haired and wise, putting the final careful touches to the Pythagorean threading. Instead we found him standing in the middle of the pegs, a tangle of wire in his hands, looking both puzzled and vacant. ‘Oh shit,’ Woody said.

Woody’s prediction that Johannes was now ‘back in business’ had proved disastrously premature. He had relapsed badly after handing over his work. But then he’d rallied, and we’d thought he was up to the crowning achievement of threading the square. Now he was staring into the tangle as if he’d dropped something into its mazy structure and lost it. Probably his mind. The flambaux were burning down, an hour had passed, the dish was being cleaned. We moved him gently aside, and looked at the Gordian knot of wire. We’d have to unravel it. This way and that, false beginnings, premature endings, certain short cuts leading to knotted impasses, a return to careful, patient work. Silently screaming with frustration. At last, when determination had turned to panic and was becoming despair, the wire suddenly fell into a loose, accessible configuration. We could begin.

We had the diagram. We followed it carefully, pulling the wire tight, barrel-hitching it round each peg in turn, stepping delicately through the densening mesh, reaching, at last, sixteen, and returning across the diagonal of the square to one. The square was completed, the circuit made, we’d done it. The shiny wire, reflecting the flaring (although now guttering) torches with a rippling light, a misty sheen, created a strangely pleasing pattern – not symmetrical but almost so, somehow on the edge of transforming into a more perfect, a superior geometry. Or so it seemed to my over-stimulated and now terminally fatigued brain. Woody laid his hand on the wire surface, almost caressing it – then pulled it sharply away. ‘They’ve got the dish working again. We were just in time.’ I held my hand over the web, almost but not quite touching. I could feel something. Woody said, with quiet conviction, ‘the vibration is one of the themes in the harmony of the spheres – with it we are adding to the silence.’

I felt elated, relieved, and suddenly very, very tired. The plug had been pulled. I was deflating fast. It was three in the morning, and I was done in. We fell into each other’s arms, said good night, and I headed for home, leaving Woody to shepherd Johannes home.

Chapter 16

I walked in a fog, blind to what was outside, my legs, on automatic pilot, taking me home. I dreamed of my comfy bed, of sleeping in my light-filled room until the sun was high, the day well on, and waking slowly into its warm familiarity. I saw clearly the exact concatenation of wire and pegs, experienced again the sequential threading (how important that had been), felt the dark energy entering, passing along, slow and heavy at first but then ever faster, like the beam in a particle accelerator, until it was circulating with dazzling brightness and the malefic became, as if by some Moebius twist, beneficent. I saw the magic square in my room, the dark energy of the gloomy house being drawn in and circulating until it glowed like a star and my parents seeing the dazzling light under the door and coming in and being amazed and the light entering them and my mother becoming radiant and my father becoming brave and us being happy. I even imagined telling them everything, what we’d been doing, and mum not going on about breaking the law, and dad not saying the system’s too powerful, but instead them putting their hands on my shoulders and saying we’re proud of you and looking across at each other and smiling and holding hands and – I raved on like this until I turned the corner and saw our house, and the light on in their bedroom.

There had been no obvious reason for me to conduct my charade of the previous evening – yawning and stretching and saying, gosh, I’m tired, I think I’ll have an early night (on Friday?), putting pillows in my bed, climbing out of the window as they watched television – instead of just saying, I’m off out, I’ll stay over at Mark’s. Maybe I wanted it, what we were doing, to be an ‘adventure’, like in books you read when you’re nine but life never is when you’re young, except in retrospect, unless you make it so. Maybe I wanted to have a secret, right under their noses, more clear proof of what was becoming ever more obvious – their lack of omniscience. While they followed dull routine, comforted by picturing their predictable sleeping son, I was out there, doing great things – Spiderman! Most of all, I wanted to return to my own bed. 

To conclude the adventure according to plan, I had to climb back in through my bedroom window. I’d arranged a few things to help – a box by the garage wall, pieces of wood wedged behind the drainpipe as footholds. It’d be a doddle. Except their light was on. 

Had they, against all the rules, gone into my room and found me gone? I’d left a note telling them not to worry, but that wouldn’t stop them worrying. (‘ “We have kidnapped your son, pay us lots of money.” Er, actually, no – I had to go out, everything’s fine, I’ll explain later. See you.’ ) Was one of them ill? Or simply couldn’t sleep – it was a bedside light. No way of knowing. Cat burglar mode. The Shadow returns. All I have to do is climb carefully and silently. I climbed carefully and silently, up the wall, in through the window, out of my clothes, into bed ( sorry, teeth. ) As the thump of my heart subsided, I lay there, staring up in the dim light at the familiar posters on the ceiling, and thought – returning under their noses, while they’re awake: perfecto. I lay wide awake, smiling.

They were talking, quietly. At first it was just murmuring. Then sounds began to differentiate. First their voices: mum’s steady and even, definite, as it was when she was making a point she was clear about and ready to defend forcefully; dad’s varying, sometimes a mumble too low to make out, sometimes rising, both in pitch and in volume, as if his feelings were barely under control. Then words. Whether they were talking louder, or my hearing was becoming attuned, soon I could make out most of what they were saying. I knew I shouldn’t be listening, but I couldn’t help myself. Dad said, ‘not so loud, he might hear.’ Mum gave a short laugh, said, ‘nothing wakes him once he’s asleep, we both know that. Why do you mention him – to remind me of my “responsibilities”?’ Dad’s reply was inaudible. ‘Because I am aware, you know,’ she continued. ‘This isn’t a fancy, a whim. It’s been coming for a long time – but I’ve only just realised. I suppose I’d always thought I’d hang on until he went to university. Six years, five years, four years, three years… I didn’t expect this to happen, I didn’t plan it, but now it has I can’t ignore it. I can’t turn away from love.’ ‘Love?’ my dad cried, ‘what do you call what we have, you and me, the three of us?’
‘Of course it was real. I’ve never loved anyone like I’ve loved you. And him – he’s my son, for goodness’ sake! I gave birth to him, I love him with my life.
‘One of the reasons I have to do this is to stay alive for him.
You and me – of course we loved each other, love each other, always will. But we buried ourselves in our love, you and me, face to face, getting lost in each other, then the three of us, our tight triangle. I couldn’t breath. I felt as if not just my love but my capacity to love was being suffocated.
‘But when I got this job, a real job like I used to do, not those crappy make-up-the-money jobs, I began to breathe again. And now, with him – I didn’t want it, I didn’t mean it to happen, but it has happened; and with him I can do more than breathe – I can do all the things you can do with breath.’
‘Don’t’
‘I’m sorry, I have to be honest. Brutally so if it’s necessary to make you understand.’
‘I know things weren’t right. For me as much as you. I thought if we can just hang on, when he goes to university we can start again, you and I, find each other, get to know each other again.’
‘And I, oh dear, what kept me going was the thought that the day he left for university was the day I’d go,’ she said, her voice hollow and sad. ‘Amazing, isn’t it, that two people could live so close with such different ideas in their heads?’
‘I could have been more adventurous,’ dad said, almost desperately. ‘I wanted to be. I didn’t want us to get stuck here. But when the Collective collapsed, getting pregnant – I thought you wanted me around, needed me close. I had plans. But…’
‘Now you’ll be able to do those things.
‘I wanted to do them for us. Now he’ll need me more than ever.’
‘He’ll still have me.’
‘Anyway, it’s too late. I’m tired.’‘It’s not too late! You’re tired because you’re bored.’
‘The best years gone. Wasted. Shit, what a mess.’ A pause. ‘What will you do?’
‘It’s up to you, really. I’ve told you because I didn’t want to be underhand about – about it. I’ll only leave if you want me to. Otherwise, we can work something out. Plenty of people do.’
‘So you can have the best of both worlds? he said, bitterly.‘Not really, no. You understand so little. But, as I say, I’m aware of my responsibilities. All of them.’ A short laugh from dad, then a long silence, a long, long silence before he said:
Maybe if we’d made love more often, we’d have been closer?’
And maybe if we’d been closer, we’d have made love more often.’ She, sadly.
‘And now, at this moment?’
‘Come _’

I wrapped the pillow round my ears, didn’t want to hear her finish the sentence, what they did or didn’t do. Even if they came together, all I would hear was them splitting apart.
I lay there, fists clenched, in a fury. Selfish bastards! They have each other, even if only to row with. What about me? Who do I have? At least with the three of us, the triangle, I was part of something. Now – if they separate, the triangle will be gone, I’ll be in the middle. What would I be then – a shuttlecock to be batted between them? The middle term that connected them and kept them apart? What about me? I’d have to choose, separate. But my feelings were all mixed up, this good, this bad. I didn’t want to separate them, assign this to him, that to her. It was impossible. It was intolerable. And it wasn’t fair. I wouldn’t do it.
And yet, lying there, on my own, I could feel a cracking in me, a fissure as real as a fault line in rock – not separating, but splitting, not between different feelings but across them, through them. I felt I was being torn apart. No. I held my fist against my solar plexus, pressed hard. No! I saw the Jupiter square (King of Gods! Hurler of Thunderbolts!), felt it in me, saw the energy, yes, felt it circulating, faster and faster, hotter and hotter, brighter and brighter, inside me, in my solar plexus, the energy radiating through me, illuminating me, uniting me, being me, me, me!

I lifted my fist. I lay still. The house was silent. I was alone, in a way I’d never been before. And I was not alone, in a way I’d never been before. I heard these words: “that which is out there, is inside me – if I want it to be”. They were words of comfort, a lullaby that sang me to sleep.

I awoke slowly, rose slowly from sleep into wakefulness. Outside, the sounds of kids playing, splashes of garden pools. Inside, the sounds of saturday domesticity. Mum and dad doing the Saturday jobs, chatting amiably, even laughing sometimes. Had I dreamed it? I felt the fault line inside me; I felt the radiant energy: no, I hadn’t dreamed it. Nor what we’d done, Woody and I. Actions have consequences. They’d done it. We’d done it. I was waking to a changed world, in which things had shifted, were shifting, sliding like tectonic plates, certainties were breaking up like ice floes, there was exhilaration, fear, confusion. I braced myself, got up, slouched down – to yet another changed world. No Children’s Television, no Chart Show; instead, the events of Tianenmen Square.

Chapter 17

The evening before I’d watched, with dad, the man stand in front of the tank, the first in the column of tanks, watched it turn clumsily to the left to avoid him, he moved to stand in front, to the right, he moved to stand in front, watched it stop. As if at a loss, confused, the futile whirring of disengaged machinery. I’d watched him climb nimbly on, talk to the crew through slits, drape a banner and jump off and disappear into the crowd. ‘You see?’ dad had said excitedly, ‘one man, one real, flesh and blood, courageous man has stopped an army, has reduced a carapaced system to helpless confusion. A Si-In! A Statue of Liberty! In China! It’s wonderful. The world’s changing, the world’s changing at last.’ And I’d taken into myself that image of the man stopping the tanks, as a symbol of David against Goliath, man against machine, the individual against the corporate – us against Jones – had carried it inside me on the assault.
But now – gone was the daylight, the clear perspective view, the orderly column of tanks, the vision and the symbol of the nimble man. Now it was night, film shot shakily from hotel windows, flashes and bangs, lurid red and yellow light, looming night shapes, running handcarts with bloody bodies, reports of tanks rolling over tents full of sleeping students, bulldozers clearing away the crushed and bloody mess. This was the response of the machine provoked, the revenge of the powerful mocked, the terror of unleashed power. I clung to the chair thinking – Jeez, what have we done?

Beside me, dad was in tears. ‘How could they do it? It’s like Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1967. Why? Why? How could they?’ And although I knew that some of the tears were for himself, I knew, too, that some were for what was happening in Beijing, in the world.

Chapter 18

‘Woody’s not here,’ said the woman at the door of his room.
‘Celia!’ Astonished, I took a step back, couldn’t run, had to face it, her, now.

Confusion within confusion. Sitting there, watching the Tianenman situation unfold – and suddenly, on the regional news, the bland-faced news reader was talking about an ‘unexplained incident’ at Jones Hall. It became, what we’d done, instantly both more and less real – objectified, it was now fact. But somehow different from what we’d done, viewed now from outside. Dad said, ‘good for them – shake up that huckster.’ The door bell rang and I jumped, seeing two burly policemen and a waiting squad car. It was Mark. I said no, I’m busy. He went off, miffed. I escaped to my room, shaking. Mum shouted up the stairs, ‘I’m going to the office for a couple of hours – urgent meeting.’ I knew he would be there. Dad said, ‘try not too be too long,’ a plea in his voice. Mum said, firmly, ‘it depends on how long it takes.’ I hated him, that other man. I lay on my bed, head in a spin. Mum went out. Dad played Fine young Cannibals too loud, repeat playings of “She Drives me Crazy”, “Ever fallen in love with someone (you shouldn’t have fallen in love with)”, “I’m not the man I used to be” – singing lugubriously along. Just, for sanity’s sake, don’t get your sodding Leonard Cohen records out. But no, when the record finished, he made a sandwich ‘d’you want cheese and tomato?’ ‘Please – can you leave it at the bottom of the stairs?’ – and went down to the garden shed and threw back the cover sheet from the motor bike he hadn’t touched in years. I could see him squatting beside it, imagining himself into its workings. My head spun on. What was I getting into with Woody? Being on the news had really shocked me, brought me up short. And Mark was a really good friend, the summer holidays were coming up, we were a good group, male and female, mates. And now my parents, my father especially… I wanted to back out, I wanted to go on. I needed to talk to Woody.

‘Is it..? It is! My, how you’ve – no, I mustn’t say that. It’s good to see you.’ Celia held out her hands. Stunned, successively, by Woody not being there, at seeing Woody’s mum for the first time in years, and by the change in her appearance, I just stood there. She walked to me, put her arms round me. I was glad to wrap my arms around her, awkward as I felt, because that way she couldn’t see me and all my confusion.

She held me, and I held on, for a long time. I was struggling through my memory for any familiarity, any similarity between this and the remembered woman. Of course I’d grown. Long gone was the age when an embrace from Celia pressed my head upon the perfumed cushion of her breasts. Now I was inches taller than her, and it was her head that was against my shoulder. Now they were my arms that enfolded her, while hers hardly reached across my back. I felt an aching loss, a yearning for past and gone-forever times of wriggling onto her lap and sinking against her.

But she had changed too – heavens, how she’d changed! Gone were the flowing curls of softest copper; now the shaved angularities of her skull, topped by a spiky brush of hair. Gone the swirls and folds of russet and green and gold with their various textures and manifold perfumes; now a T-shirt, leather-belted jeans, and Doc Martins. Gone the fleshy softness, now a spare, sinewy, muscled tautness. Gone (gone!) the breasts, shrunk to nothing. Gone the roundness of cheek and chin; now a hard, jutting jaw, sculpted cheek bones, eyes that flared and flashed. Gone the apple and blackberry and almond body lotion scents; now tobacco and, just faintly, sweat. Searching, as I embraced her, fearing that at any moment my hands would return to me, having passed through her, all gone, all gone – but then, at last, just there, distant, fugitive, almost the memory of a familiar scent, one last, lingering, tenuous connection to the past, so strong then, so faint now, but still there, still there; patchouli. I focussed on that scent, followed it down the tight dark tunnel of time-passed until at last it opened out into that past time, that warm, flickering, glowing, rich place. I dwelt there as long as I could, soaking up, absorbing, filling myself up with sights and sounds, the richness – until, a faint tug, the pull of a thread, a real voice heard in a dream, drew me back along that dark road and deposited me in the here and now, in this bright place, holding this strange and yet known woman. She had been holding me, sustaining me, allowing me all the time I needed to make that journey across the desert of her absence from my life, bringing that desert to life, returning me to the present. She let go and stepped back.

‘Come and sit beside me,’ she said briskly, patting the bed. ‘Now – talk.’
I opened my mouth. I stared at her, dumb. I recognised her eyes, and felt mine fill with tears. She touched the back of my gripped fist with three fingers of a sinewy, work-stained hand, a gentle touch, then removed them.
‘Home?’ I nodded.
‘You did good work, last night. You were brave and solid. Especially with Woody playing the fool. Yes, he’s told me all about it. Now – tell me everything.’

I talked. I talked about the statues, the old man, working in the garden, contacting Woody, the action, wiring the pegs, the feeling of achievement and fulfilment; and then hearing my parents and feeling drawn back in, responsible for them, for us. How, when it was right, the three of us, all of us different, it fizzed, full of life, this wonderfully alive triangle. But when it was wrong – and it had been wrong a lot recently – it was all locked up and nothing moved. Then they’d communicate through me, and I felt all the bad stuff in what they said but I filtered it as it passed through me before passing it on. So I was like a mollusc in  polluted water, heavy with their poison. Of how, when they were close, when their attention was on each other sometimes I’d felt excluded, and when their combined attentions were on me, sometimes I’d felt suffocated. ‘You see, there’s always two of them, and only one of me. It’s hard, sometimes.’ And how when they were estranged I was the link, the one holding it together. ‘And now, now this is happening, I’ll be needed more that ever. My dad especially – he’d be lost without me. But then again, this stuff with Woody – what am I getting into? Where’s it leading? What about my friends, that world – I can’t, don’t want to, just walk away from it. I just don’t know what to do. And another thing…’ and on and on.

I talked until I had nothing left to say. I talked until I was empty, there were no more words, just silence. No-one had ever heard me out before. She allowed the silence that filled me to fill the space between, around us, the room. It was a  palpable, unthreatening silence.
‘How do you feel now?’
‘Empty.’
‘That’s good. Really feel it. Now. Tell me the first thing that enters the emptiness.’ Nothing. Then suddenly my fist leapt to my solar plexus, the image was clear, I said without thinking, ‘the Jupiter square.’ She nodded. Again the silence. When she spoke, she was speaking not to me, but into the silence.

‘When I was your age, I left home. It was 1967, the “Summer of Love” – yeh, bells, flowers, the whole hippy thing. I even lived in a teepee for a while. They found me and took me back. We were always trying to escape, my generation. We always had some dream we imagined making come true. To us, our parents were blinkered and rigid. In fact they were exhausted – cowed by the Depression, overworked during the war, ground down by post-war austerity. Their dreams were reduced to a secure job, a safe home, a predictable future. We didn’t see that, us bright, bushy-tailed, boom-time, Welfare State kids. We took it all for granted, saw only their rigidity, their negativity, the way they corrected what was wrong rather than encouraged what was right, saw education as putting right weaknesses rather than identifying and building on strengths. We had real  dreams – of changing consciousness, of changing being, and through that, the world. But the world closed in – having a family makes you conservative, fearing for your job makes you conservative. But maybe the dreams, the dreams of my generation, maybe they’re still there. And as you kids grow up, maybe the dreams’ll stir into life, they’ll get in touch with their dreams, do something. Maybe that’ll happen with your parents.’
‘That’s not their job,’ I said, shocked and a little alarmed, too. ‘Their job is to be there for me!’
‘Just listen to yourself!’ she said with a laugh. ‘You and kids like you have had more thought, care and attention expended on them by their parents than any kids ever. Maybe it’s time you got off your arse and did something for yourself.’ I felt as if she’d slapped me. Just getting warmed up, she went on,
‘You feel the weight of it on you – get out from under it. You have a cause – don’t you? I wasted years rebelling before I found what I had to do. You already have that. You know what you have to do. Leave them to it. If they behave like children, having you parent them isn’t going to help them. Or you. Don’t get drawn into being used by either side, no matter what sense of power it gives you. Because it’d be an illusory power. You don’t need to feel needed.
‘Try and understand them, if you want, but don’t get drawn in. It’s lousy, what’s going on. And you’ve had very little preparation – our culture has lost its rites of passage. This is a crash course in growing up. A problem and an opportunity are the same thing seen differently. You’ve got work to do. Do it.’

She got up abruptly, went quickly to the window, stared out, her thin shoulders round, her body shaking. She pulled out cigarettes, lit one, took rapid drags, put it out and away, stared out, nail tapping rapidly on the glass. I’d only been remembering the warm, ample, serene mother. I’d forgotten the harsh, demanding woman who’d say – we do this, and we do it now  – regardless of food or rest. As if she’d suddenly been reminded of a clock ticking, time passing, a necessary schedule to be kept up with. And we’d do it.
I’d forgotten it, but I’d missed it too, demands being made; I’d missed being driven. But now – now I was pissed off at her lack of sympathy. Now I wanted to hurt her.

‘Is that why you left Woody – to chase a dream?’
She turned round, smiling such a brilliant smile that it lit up her face even though she was silhouetted against the window. A brightness full of light but without warmth. I realised what it was costing her, to do what she was doing, and wished I hadn’t asked the question.
‘Left him? Heavens, no. It’s part of the process, of our destiny. Each of us has a destiny. It’s a life, a real, clear life, going on parallel to our own, that we can connect with at any time. Some people never connect to it – they lead muffled lives that never, somehow, come to life. Others seem to be born in, live directly connected to, their destinies – great artists, leaders, visionaries. Sometimes an incident connects us to our destiny – then life has an inevitability about it. No matter how hard, you know what you have to do. That’s what happened to me when I entered the Kohoutek project.’
‘The moon story? I thought that was just a story.’
‘Oh no, it was real. As real as the Face of Cydonia on Mars, as real as … It was real. Since then I’ve known what to do, for me, for Woody.
‘Sometimes I’d lose the connection; then it was hard. Then I’d get it again; and often it was harder. The men were helpers, necessary at various stages, stepping stones. Some knew, some didn’t. Then it was difficult, they got hurt – they were clinging to our destiny because they hadn’t found their own. As Dylan says, ‘leave your stepping stones behind, something calls to you.’
‘And then _ then came the time when our destinies, Woody’s and mine, separated. I didn’t want it to happen. I fought against it, It was the most painful thing I’ve ever undergone. But it was necessary.’ Her face wiped clean of all expression.

‘What are you doing now?’
‘I work with “Guerrillas for Gaia” – the resistance against the culture of rape. We fight road-building projects. Direct action. Each one we hold up, we make the next one less likely. We make people think – like Greenham did. And like Greenham we’re raising consciousness. There’s nothing like linking arms in front of a tree as a bulldozer bears down on you to change people’s view of the world. Grass roots action. It’s the way forward, in a society where there’s only consensus politics.
‘I’m in a feminist collective. The Amazons. We each share something with our ancient sisters; but whereas they chose, we… Their elite chose to have a breast removed so they shoot the warrior bow. We shoot the warrior bow because we’re each a victim of society’s barbarism.’ She pulled up her T-shirt to reveal her skinny chest, on one side a small breast, teardrop shaped, with a dark, puckered nipple, and on the other – nothing. An absence. A horizontal line like a closed eye, and nothing.
I looked quickly down, but I’ve never forgotten that small, delicate breast, and that terrible, howling emptiness. She pulled her T-shirt down. ‘The medical establishment’s misogyny, yet again. Other treatments for breast cancer are just as effective, but no, radical mastectomy, their revenge upon women. “Soldier Blue” in the operating theatre. “Theatre”, oh yes, the gorping students. As barbaric as doctors amputating hands in Iraq. After all, they’re older women, aren’t they? What do they need breasts for? Another way of dewomanising women.
‘But, you see, for the Amazons it was a sign of warrior status. So that’s what we’ve taken it as. Our wound has become our mark. We’ve made of our victimhood a weapon. Celia’s gone – I’m Molpadia now. Whenever I get tired, I feel the absence, what was taken – and the fire returns. Because what they did to me, they’re doing to the earth. And we’ll fight for the earth like Amazons.’

There was more. She talked on, wanted to talk. She talked herself out of bitterness, into fierceness, that magnificent fierceness I remembered – but a fierceness fuelled now (nicotine-stained fingers, bitten nails) on nervous energy. ‘I’m on the run, by the way, so I’ve not been here, okay? A small matter of a close encounter between the fuel tank of a half million quid earth mover and a pound of sugar.’

At last she stopped. Her fists unclenched. Her eyes, from being hard and glittery softened, focussed on me. She held out her arms and we embraced again. She said, ‘it’s been good seeing you. You were always my other son. I’d have been sad if I hadn’t seen you again.’ For a moment she let me hold her; then her energy reasserted itself and she was gripping me fiercely and saying,
‘Go for it, kid. And look out for each other – Woody and you, you’ve got something special.’ And she was heading for the door. I took a deep breath. It was now or never. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for – what I said. To Woody. I’m sorry.’ My eyes filling. She turned. I waited. She smiled. A Celia smile.
‘Thanks, darling. Thanks for saying that. You were forgiven, long ago – but I’m glad to be able to do it. There,’ reaching out one finger and making a light rubbing gesture, as if removing a mark from my forehead, and smiled. I suddenly remembered the way the three of us used to forgive each other by imitating the angel in Dante’s Purgatorio. The sudden memory jolted me, with the knowledge that all that was in the past, would never be again. But I felt forgiven.

‘Oh, by the way,’ she said, turning at the door, ‘the solar plexus chakra is the seat of the emotions, and it’s where the astral energy enters the etheric body. It’s not a bad place to begin. Have a good life. You will. ‘Bye.’ And she was gone.

I just stood there. I felt as if a tornado had swept through me, thrown everything inside me up into the air, then it had all returned exactly to the place it had been. Everything was as it had been. And utterly changed. And I felt, among all the upheaval, that some long-ago hurt had begun to heal.

Chapter 19

Woody knocked on the door, banged the heavy knocker, iron against iron, thudding through the thick wood, knocked stubbornly, unstoppably, until Johannes opened the door a crack, looking guilty and frightened.
‘You must let us in,’ Woody said firmly.
‘I know,’ he said, and shut the door.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
‘I will, I will.’

A week had passed. Seeing Celia – Molpadia – had restored me, returned me to the place I should be, the garden. I felt a new calmness there, a new vitality.
But Johannes kept himself locked away. I didn’t understand, then. I have since – imprisoned, he could rail against his fate; now, with the prison door swinging open, he had to choose to step outside and take upon himself the different constraints of freedom. From being a closed system, he had to choose to patch himself into a larger world, an open system, to become open again. Each day Woody banged on the door. Each day we got the same response.

I didn’t care. I was happy. Exams were over (they’d passed in an unreal hazy blur, but somehow, functioning on some sort of automatic pilot, I’d managed to revise, to turn up, to concentrate for the necessary couple of hours), school was out (officially I’d left – you had to rejoin for the Sixth Form).
And every day, after I’d done my few hours at the supermarket, I’d throw off grey coat, dark trousers, tie, white shirt, pull on shorts and T-shirt, jump on my bike and speed down the hill, through the gate, into our world, the world we had saved, and begun to restore.
Each day the vegetation was denser and greener, the bird song richer and louder, there were more butterflies of greater variety, more flowers of brighter hue and stronger scent, everywhere there was unfolding, thrusting growth; and above all the hot sun shone in a cloudless sky. It was June, a heat-wave time in what would become a long, hot summer.

But Woody was frustrated. He wanted to get into the house. That was where the answers were to the questions, the big questions this place raised. That was where he would find out where it fitted into the larger scheme of things, that he took as given. Each day he would study maps, take measurements, pace the grounds, sit for long periods; but always at some point he’d break off and swear and stride to bang on the door.

I just enjoyed working there. I’d start work, get into what I was doing, then pass into my daydream. And the daydream I returned to – it became my own personal soap opera that I resumed each day, with the sense of anticipation the fan feels as he clicks on the TV and hears the first notes of the signature tune, a Pavlovian salivating – was of love. And the object of my love was Fiona Ferringham.

I’d been stuck on her since I was six, our first day at our new school when, left by our mothers, and suddenly bewildered as we stood there, so small and abandoned, she reached out and slipped her hand into mine, like the gift of a palpitating bird, and looked at me, such a big-eyed look. And then we were shepherded off in different directions, our arms stretching and at last parting, she with a look over her shoulder of absolute trust. I was soon – I held out for a while; she was the only girl at my eighth birthday party – relentlessly betraying that trust. I adopted the crude machismo of the playground, ignoring her if she spoke, jeering with my friends if she approached, pulling her hair as she passed. So that when the hormonal thing kicked in and I was really fancying her, I was an easy target; and she enjoyed taking revenge with a knowing pleasure. Which didn’t stop me thinking of her, dreaming of her, imagining us together. And this would be where we would be together.

The garden. Our Eden. Which Woody and I had cleansed, ejecting the malefic serpent, and were now recovering from wilderness, revealing the lost civilisation (each day a new discovery – a gargoyle debouching water, a pattern of exotic stones ), imagining the new world we would bring into being. I remembered what Celia used to say: we must learn to live on earth as if we’ve just arrived, in a new and sustaining way, like visitors, respecting what’s given, including the works of man, valuing, making use of, without exploiting. For we, deracinated (how that word resonated when she explained it ) though we are, are still the heirs, the inheritors, to make of it what we will. Here we could come into our inheritance. We would have our houses here, the Gothic and the Classical. The four of us represented the elements – my earthly stolidness, Fiona’s airy flowing energy, Alison’s watery adaptability, Woody’s fiery power. Perfect symmetry!

One day, after a long day of hard work (dredging thick weed from the pond), sprawled outside the summer house, eating vegetarian sausages that we’d burnt on green twigs over a fire whose embers, becoming ashen, still glowed, spuds baking, drinking water from the spring we’d found, the air soft on my sun-hot skin, a red sun in a dusty pink sky about to set behind silhouetted trees that were like vigorous charcoal marks across the sky, I said, without thinking, wiping grease from my chin, ‘wouldn’t it be great to invite the girls here.’ (‘The girls’! – I hadn’t spoken to Fiona for years!). He looked up from the map on which he was marking our latest finds, and gave me what I came to call his “basilisk stare”. Instantly, the world I had imagined into being shrank to teen-magazine banality. But I held onto it. To him, this garden was an element in a much vaster, more complicated picture; for me, just then, it was everything.

The next morning Johannes opened the door, stood, abashed, to one side, and let us in.

Chapter 20

Woody crossed the threshold like a dog unleashed, faltered, stepped back. I, more circumspect, got no further. The stench hit us in a wave, broke over us, a putrescent wave of awfulness. Single smells, no matter how horrid, you can focus on, isolate, deal with. But this mix of smells, this place full of things decaying, each with its smell that, as soon as you focused on it slid away behind another smell, mixed with it, changed into it, was the smell of corruption, dissolution, chaos. I saw seething maggots. I saw inside Johannes’ head. He stood, head down, submissive. He had put himself into our hands. Revulsion yielded to pity. ‘We have to save him,’ I murmured. Woody, from gazing vainly beyond the mess that confronted us, the domestic chaos, to the further mess beyond, the intellectual chaos, as if hoping in a single glance for a moment of insight, of revelation, to see within all this The Answer, shrugged, looked at what faced us, what we had to clear first, and said, resignedly, ‘that we must, good buddy. It’s the mission we’ve chosen to accept.’ Then, with a yip; ‘it’s Augean stable time – divert the river Alpheus and restore the land!’

No such Herculean short cut was available to us. It was rolled-up sleeves and rubber gloves time.
But, too, we were archaeologists, stripping off the layers from the kitchen midden, the tell that had buried Johannes, searching for answers to questions; or maybe just for the questions themselves. When we disinterred the answers, questions, then he’d begin to be healed. And beyond that, the big issues, the key to which Woody was sure, was here. Woody was now on a mission; and, as with all his missions – at seven, moving slugs and snails off footpaths and roads after rain so they wouldn’t be crushed, at nine, campaigning, placard high, on behalf of whales – it was a mission to save the world.

We began in the kitchen. every surface was covered, piled high with pots, pans, crockery, rubbish. And at the top of that – at some point Johannes had given up all notion of domestic functions as cyclical – a stratum of paper plates, plastic spoons, opened packets and cans, uneaten food. The lower layers were hard, locked, lithified. But the upper layers – the menace of alien life, the stomach-turning nature of the familiar made unfamiliar, the age-old fear of unsleeping creeping life working patiently to take over – lived. Familiar shapes, a cup and spoon and plate, covered in mould like green fur; solid food liquefying in putrescence and trickling slowly; a piece of meat heaving with the slow seethe of maggots gorging themselves to transition into; bluebottles that rose with ominous buzz, in sullen menacing clouds, as we entered the kitchen, a menace accentuated by the prismatic shine of their bodies. We gagged, fled outside, built a bonfire, lit it – a June day, brilliant sunshine, hot – covered ourselves with bin liners and then, psyched up like SAS storm troopers, ran yelling in and threw everything burnable out, onto the fire, watched with panting satisfaction as maggots boiled and wing-burned flies dropped like raisins and popped, and melting plastic (sorry, world) burped CFCs up to the ozone layer.

At last our terror subsided. We excavated down to the kitchen range, lit it, and began boiling water with the fanaticism of midwives. We uncovered the sink, itself a poem to filth, and, using detergents strong enough to take chrome off steel, washed everything in sight. If there were patterns on the plates before we began, there were none when we’d finished; the crockery emerged from the water like bones from an acid bath. We cleaned surfaces – shelves, table, and eventually the floor – with stiff brushes and fuming detergents. We were kitchen tyrants, scullery martinets. By the end of the first day, we had the kitchen functioning.

The next day we turned our attention to Johannes. Having cleaned the bath, itself subject enough for an epic, we sat him in, and kept the water changing, until it was no longer mud-coloured and opaque. We scrubbed him with loofahs, and left him to soak until he was wrinkled like a new-born baby while we washed his clothes. As we washed, we could hear him splashing happily and singing Blake songs. The clothes dried in seconds in the fierce sun, and cracked like cardboard when we folded them; but they were of good quality, and most survived. Dressed, he stood fidgeting, as if testing the familiarity of the garments.  He nodded when we asked if he wanted his hair cut, his beard trimmed. I thought it must be hard for him to bear this. But he seemed resigned, accepting, to allowing these things to happen, now that he’d chosen to put himself in others’ hands.

Over the next days, we reintroduced him to soap, toothbrush, comb – and mirror. He flinched when he saw his reflection, then stared curiously, as if wondering who this old man was. His eyes filled with tears when he connected the image with himself, realised they were one. Thereafter he mostly avoided mirrors. But sometimes we’d find him staring at his reflection, examining it minutely, as if looking for evidence of what had happened between then and now.

After a few days’ patient repetition, he was pretty much grooved into the diurnal cycle of personal hygiene, changing his clothes, washing up after himself. He did everything carefully, with concentration, like someone who’s lost his memory of these actions but finds he knows how to perform them. Sometimes he would stop in mid-action – putting his jacket on, for example – and just stand there, patient as a tortoise, like a clockwork toy whose action has become separated from the mechanism, waiting for whirring cogs to re-engage; which they would do eventually, and the arm slide into the sleeve. Or, while washing up he would suddenly hold up a knife, gleaming with wetness, turn it to catch the light, his own fleeting reflection – then plunge it back deep into the hot water with a shudder.

He began to go outside. At first tentatively, looking around suspiciously, with quick looks back to make sure the door was still within sight and open. He  couldn’t look up at the sky, only glance at it; once he did, and suddenly flinched, staggered, grabbed a tree trembling, stroked the bark, stared fiercely at the close leaves, whispered, ‘I was falling into – its emptiness,’ and shuddered. Gradually he went further afield.

Sometimes he walked slowly, softly, turning around as he walked, looking at everything with delighted astonishment, as if seeing it all for the first time, fresh and new – but with shadows sometimes across his face, as of memories deeply forgotten but there. Sometimes he would set off at a great pace, head down, legs snapping like scissors, along paths we’d cleared, round and round – then maybe we’d find him stopped, staring at an impenetrable thicket, like a motorised toy whirring against a skirting board. We’d soon find the path that had once been there, and clear it. Sometimes we would find him staring at something, a carved stone maybe, his fingertips moving over it, like a blind man’s, whispering to it, as if asking (pleading?) for answers. And sometimes we would find him sobbing, great waves of emotion surging through him, as if too big for him to contain, about to burst out of him, tears like raindrops falling from his eyes, helpless in his desolation, staring down at a big eyed scrawny chick – dead – that had fallen from a nest. Or at a broken flower.

Once we came upon him sitting at the summer house, leaning back against a column, smoking a cigarette, the smoke wreathing around his face, his eyes far away, not just leaning but pressing his back against it, as if trying to match his vertebrae to the segments of the column. He was staring out, over the lake, over the trees to where the evening sun was setting the sky on fire. He spoke quietly, intensely, as if trying to convince someone, as if trying to convince himself:
‘It happens, suddenly, just like that. You’re young, you’re going through life on the path you’ve been set down on, vaguely dissatisfied but with no strong enough reason to change it. There have been premonitions, but you never noticed them. Then it happens. A book that you fall into. A face whose person you must follow. Or, as in my case, a mountain. For the first time, everything fits; and nothing’s ever the same again. Your train’s hit a stone on the rail and – whooh – you have a destination. You’re Lord Buckley, with his own railroad.
‘But you’re high up and your destination, shining, distant, is high, and between are forests and cities and rivers and deserts. And you have to go down, following a narrow path, often losing sight of the destination. And sometimes it’s only there in your mind’s eye. And sometimes it’s not there at all – and then you have only faith to cling to. And intense, aching dreams. You doubt – perhaps you imagined it? There are distractions – nice places to stay, clearings, pretty buildings, friendly villages, places to settle, that draw you off the way, good people, a person … You hear the throng of people, the flow of traffic, on the broad highway, so close, so easy, and you ask yourself why you’re striving to keep to this overgrown, almost lost path; although you know the highway doesn’t go to your destination – close, but not to. You swim a river, and it carries you miles downstream. In what you thought would be the clarity of the desert, your clear view is distorted by day by mirages and hallucinations, at night by the sheer number of stars, in which the familiar constellations are lost. Cliffs, crags, hanging on by your finger ends in blizzards, inching up … And all, alone. It’s not easy, you know,’ looking at us fiercely, defensively, as if we were silent accusers. ‘And it’s not just weakness. Things can happen, just happen to you, and it’s not your fault!’ He ground out the cigarette under his sandal and walked away from us, upright and defiant.

Another time we found him sitting on the large slab of rock that jutted out over the pool like a diving board. The water was black and still. He was holding a fine fishing line, the line descending to the surface, then mirrored reflexively. He was staring down, at the point where the line touched the meniscussed water. As I approached his motionless form, I felt as though part of him wasn’t there, that something had left his body and that part of him, his awareness, had slid down the line into the depths. He held the line delicately, precisely, laid across his index finger, thumb on it, ready to sense the slightest touch. Nothing moved. Then he twitched the line slightly, almost imperceptibly; ripple after ripple spread outwards, in perfect running expanding circles, until the first hit the bank, reflected back, hit the next circle, the next, the whole soon a complex rippling turbulence, hardly visible in water smooth as oil, but there.
‘The drugs, you see,’ he said, staring down at the line. ‘Acid especially. It didn’t seem like a short cut; it seemed the way. It was the Sixties, see – we still believed in technology, the technological fix, then. Test tube babies. Test tube satori. I’d read about it, in the Bhagavad Ghita, the writings of mystics – the visionary experience, objects glowing with an inner light, transcendental illumination … and now it could be mine, on a sugar cube. I was almost forty, with a lifetime’s greyness that jazz and CND and family couldn’t colour for me enough, a life of being too much myself and not myself enough. And suddenly – I was everything and everything was me in a weird and wonderful and entirely normal-seeming oneness. With eyes closed, the most amazing eyelid movies – shapes, colours, landscapes, creatures, worlds, clearer and brighter and more extraordinarily alive than anything I’d ever experienced. And, to eyes open, everyday objects – cubes of ice turning in a glass of coke, cheese melting on top of a hamburger – were utterly beautiful, and wondrous, in their is-ness.
‘But of course it wasn’t a path, much less a short cut. It was a trip. And afterwards I was back where I’d started, except a few million brain cells had been burnt out and my dissatisfaction was greater and I wanted the same again, just as easy. I was too avid – I didn’t want it just to show me the view through cleansed doors; I wanted it to take me through the door. That way madness lies.’

Another time we found him kneeling by a strangely-shaped stone, all subtle curves, moss-covered in places, in others smooth as marble. His eyes were closed, his hands were moving over the stone, just above the surface, following its shape exactly without touching it, leaning his face close, as if listening for something, or feeling for a radiance with his cheek.
‘When she left, the sky blew away. I’d been so intent on my work I’d paid her too little attention. I hadn’t realised how much she contributed, was part of it, how much I’d taken her for granted. But, as Otis sings, “you don’t miss your water till your well runs dry”. She never had enough of me – then she’d had enough of me. As soon as she was gone, I knew I’d lost the only thing I wanted. You have it, you don’t value it, you lose it, you’re lost without it. I thought – but there’s still the work – I lost her because of the work, hadn’t I? But when she’d gone I could no longer do the work. And the pain – it felt like the eagle’s wing sacrifice, my chest ripped open, my heart torn out and thrown into the fire, me alive and watching, unable to die … I tried to make a shrine to her, keep her alive in the landscape. When that failed I tried to return to the work – but by then it was too late, I’d lost touch, lost the thread. Then it was false paths, dead ends, entanglement in thickets of confusion. Day after day after …’ Huge tears were falling from his eyes, running over the smooth stone, being absorbed by the moss. He was weeping for his life. There was nothing he could do. When at last he stopped, he stared at the stone for a long time, then he looked up at us, the expression on his face a battleground of fear and determination. 

The next day he greeted us at the door. His hair was drawn back into a small pony tail, his hands were ink stained. He was wearing clothes we hadn’t seen before – a thin tie-dye sweatshirt, worn at the elbows, faded rainbow trousers. His working clothes. He ushered us in, saying, ‘time to find our way back to the beginning. Come in.’  

PART II

Chapter 1

It was strangely shaped, the main room, his work room – not domed, exactly. Familiar and yet odd, its smooth lines disfigured, broken by bending shelves of papers and books, pinned-up charts and pictures, strange shapes – geometries, weird machines – hanging, the floor and tables piled high with tottering dust-thick paper. Having led us into the room with authority, in there he faltered, opened his mouth – and instead of words coming out, carefully prepared words to dance brilliantly along the intricate path – all that, that chaos of accumulation, that undigested mass compressing under its own weight to meaninglessness, all that rushed in, stuffed him, silenced him. His mouth opened and closed. His eyes swivelled in terror. He stuttered. At last, this:
‘The priest’s cell, you see? Master of the cauldron, keeper of the wand, his cell, at the place of power, was here, simple. But they built. First upward. Then on a larger scale, the big house. Thinking they add with size, with accumulated knowledge – no, they built Babel, confusion. “Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth”.
‘But we, we found it. We were here, after Kohoutek, the marriage of earth and moon, the blasphemy healed, we almost … Seventy-four, seventy-five – Saigon, Watergate, change. The witnesses – Dylan, you see,’ picking up a piece of paper, reading from it, ‘ “the palace of mirrors, where dog soldiers are reflected, the endless road and the wailing of chimes, the empty rooms where her memory is protected, where the angel voices whisper to the souls of previous times”. Thom Gunn,’ reading from another sheet, ‘ “but beneath the superior cellars others reach downward, floor under floor, Babel reversed. Opening doors I discover the debris of sorcery interrupted. Bone structures like experiments”. Seventy-four, seventy-five. In the air. They felt it without knowing it. But we …  And Sinclair,’ almost desperately flourishing a document, ‘ “the geometry of opposition was staked out, the work begun … these are the centres of power for those territories; sentinel, sphinx-form, slack dynamos abandoned as the culture they supported goes into retreat. The power remains latent, the frustration mounts on a current of animal magnetism. And victims are still claimed”. And we were ready. But we…’ He stopped, mouth open. We waited. Nothing. Then he withdrew.

To me this was nonsense. But not to Woody. ‘The early Seventies weren’t just the fag end of the Sixties,’ he said, ‘the hippy-tripper consumerism squelched by the oil crisis. Real stuff was going on. And now it’s coming round again. And we’re here.’

Chapter 2

Nineteen seventy-four. I was born. The line became a triangle. Euclid went spatial.

At first I thought it had been destroyed, that triangle, the night I lay in bed listening to them, that triangle with the hole in the middle that at times had gaped and made as if ready to swallow us all. It was my mother who’d begun to shake it, frustrated at its rigidity, wanting to rattle it to – what? Destruction? Until some new life was shaken into it? I’ve thought about that triangle we lived with for my first fifteen years. Distort a square? It becomes a diamond. Distort a triangle? Can’t be done. Connect the vertices of square, polygon, you get a network of lines. Connect the vertices of a triangle and you get – the same triangle. It’s the stubbornest of shapes. (No wonder Bucky Fuller loved it!). Would she, with all her shaking, have broken the triangle? Probably not. She wouldn’t have gone that far. Because I was, to her, the lynch pin. Her attention focused on me; so did his. It may not have been right, but it was true. Maybe that was why, after hearing them talk that night, at the same time as I was feeling the magic square whirling inside me, and having for the first time a different focus – no longer looking into the empty centre of the triangle, maybe that’s why, quite consciously, I removed myself, the lynch pin. And watched it flop wildly, out of control, not sure whether it was trying to shake itself to pieces, or into some new, amazing form.
My mother, released, flew like a bird – or rather, like a kite. For always at the moment she trembled at the extreme, she would swoop back into the almost-forgotten world. I’d come home to find her, rubber-gloved, aproned, turbaned, cleaning, restocking shelves, cooking an immense and sumptuous and familiar-smelling meal. Then she’d look at me with sudden intensity, and make some comment – that I was too thin, or looked puffy, I was straining myself, or I needed more exercise. I’d just grunt. She saw me changing and couldn’t get a handle on it; and I wasn’t about to help her.
While my father became more than ever withdrawn, sinking into slobbish despond, hanging on through the week for the weekend, when he’d initiate with great energy some activity that fizzled out, like a bomb that only the fuse of works. That was his problem, not mine.
I watched them, interested, fascinated, but with a new detachment. I felt immune. I no longer felt responsible. They’d screwed up, it was their shit. I had a new focus, my own thing. Whenever either of them tried to talk to me about it (family stuff), I’d cut them off with ‘I know’ or ‘I don’t want to know’, arbitrarily.

Mum hadn’t moved out of the house, or even their bedroom. It was dad who moved into the spare room. And we passed the whole summer like that, in that strange suspension that a hot summer can bring, each with our own room (knock and wait), while the common areas were uneasily shared. Sometimes with an impatience that failed to veil raw resentment and suppressed violence – a thwack on the bathroom door, ‘haven’t you finished yet?’ An exasperated ‘where have you put those car keys?’ Sometimes a poignant ballet as each prepared a meal in the small kitchen while contriving neither to talk nor touch, as if two unrelated dances were taking place simultaneously. Sometimes a clumsy attempt at communication, when one would invite the other to share a meal (my mother with a brisk ‘let’s be civilised about this’ manner, my father with a doggy wish to please). But it was always the wrong time, they were always passing in opposite directions; and mum would stiffen, and dad get angry. Tension, of course, often volcanic, but at least without the locked heaviness, the terrible inertness. Maybe it was just ordinary family life, but with the gloves off. But it was strange.

Three people, three rooms. Mum made the bedroom neater, more formal, more girlish, too. (It reminded me of the room of a school friend’s serious sister). When she asked me to help her move furniture, I was shocked to see the double bed (in which I’d snuggled so often between them) gone, replaced by a narrow divan with flowered bed linen. A quick look of alarm when she saw my expression, then her face settled into the set, determinedly calm expression that was becoming so familiar. We set the furniture neatly and symmetrically (if not symmetrical, in balanced composition) along the walls – an artfully draped shawl softened the plain wall – with her desk (her father’s dark roll-top) at the window, and on it her grandmother’s glass shell–shade lamp, framed photographs of her parents, her brother, me, files from work close by, a single shelf of books, the clear expanse of carpet (vacuumed every Sunday evening) islanded with carefully placed family and personal objects – a big bowl and jug, a box camera, a wooden hippopotamus (Montmorency), a china dog (Cecil). On the mantle shelf half a dozen keepsakes, and her framed degree certificate on the wall. Her whole life was there, winnowed to essentials, right up to date – her membership card for the health club stuck in the corner of the mirror, jauntily askew.

My room hadn’t changed since we’d moved here. Now it couldn’t  change, so much had accumulated. Shelves, as my collections had grown, (I was a great collector, loving completeness), desk, sound system, toy boxes, comic boxes, book boxes, so that now my bed was boxed in, the entire floor occupied except for narrow access paths between functions. I’d saved everything, thrown nothing away, had complete sequences of comics and books, from “Care Bears” to “The Far Side”, from “Transformers” to the “Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy” books. There were posters on every wall, all over the ceiling, three or four deep, from the Muppets to Madonna. Nothing had changed. Nor would it, until the end of the summer.

My father emptied the spare room, pulled up the carpet, was disappointed to find chipboard not floorboards, painted the whole room white. He moved in a futon and sleeping bag (mumbling ‘Gary Snyder’), and placed beside it “Zen and the art of Archery”, “The Tao of Physics”, and Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations”. He was silent in there for three days. Then he took in his guitar, his song books, twanged and wailed, recorded, groaned at the playbacks, hung up his guitar to regather dust. He got his old record player out. At first he’d return each record carefully to its alphabetical place in the sitting room; then he  kept them in his room, leaning against the wall. He played sequences of tracks, mood programmes. He’d write notes in shorthand notebooks, pulling books from the shelves and piling them in his room. He cut pictures out of Sunday supplements and made collages. He stuck up posters, postcards, quotations (“life is one long process of getting tired”, “Oh, Mama, can this really be the end – to be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again”, that sort of thing). Notebooks piled up. Books, records, newspapers piled up. He slowed down. Just before he seized up, buried, he had a clear out, to bare walls and floor, put his exercise bike in the middle of the room, ran each evening. Once I saw him out running, close to Johannes’ place, in a field, on a circuit he’d laid out. He ran hard, light footed, relentlessly, on his face the strangest expression, a wild, naked look, simultaneously of terror and ecstasy. As if what he was fleeing from was almost upon him, what he was running towards nearly in his grasp … He had a chart, his best mile times since he was eleven – his fastest was at 21; his current time was the same as when he was fourteen. He pushed the exercise bike into the corner. Some evenings, when mum was out, he’d look through an old address book and make phone calls and have hesitant conversations and ring off. When I went past the sitting room he’d be sat there, with a tumbler of whisky, looking sad.

On Friday evenings mum would dress in new casual clothes (all her clothes were new, new office clothes, new casual clothes, stylish and smart and of the moment) and leave with a weekend case, to be picked up at the end of our close. Dad would put away his office clothes, dress in scruffy gear, and live like “The Young Ones” for the weekend. (They say the old have second childhoods – the middle-aged were having second adolescences). The day Johannes opened up to us, I knocked on dad’s door. He said ‘come in’. He was sprawled on the futon, beer bottle in one hand, cigarette in the other. He’d just entered his Bukowski phase. I think I didn’t worry because he was always smart for Monday morning. He waved me to sit down, I cleared a space, sat, made to speak – he lifted his hand, pointing at the record player. Dylan. He was going through his scratchy bootleg collection. ‘Moonshiner’ – about an old alcoholic, full-bore downer. (He used Dylan like a diver uses weights, to carry him down. What for? Maybe just to see how dark it gets. But he always came back up – bed-sitter romantic). “…the world is a bottle, and life’s just a dram. When the bottle is empty, it ain’t worth a damn.” Lift, settle, click, silence. He shook the inverted, empty bottle. yes, Dad, I think we’ve got it. But he was hurting. Said, ‘I saw him singing that, at Bunjies, after his Festival Hall Concert in ‘64. He sang like he’d already lived his life. Maybe he’d already imagined it. I sang that night – in front of Bob Dylan! I borrowed Martin Carthy’s guitar. Beautiful action. “Silver in the Stubble” – at 17! Ridiculous. We were so old  – dressed in ties and hats and coats and carrying umbrellas. Then we got younger, and then somehow never grew up – we’d been copies of adults, never the real thing. Weird. Maybe if I’d stayed with the music … I was pretty good…’ Enough already! ‘Not 1964, dad – nineteen-seventy four,’ I cut in.
He looked wildly around, as if the world had suddenly disappeared. Then he rallied, found it again. He’d had a few but he wasn’t drunk, just off-centre, out of whack. Maybe the time to catch him.
‘You were born,’ he said simply.
‘Yeees – I know that, I was there,’ I said patiently. He sat quietly, staring ahead, eyes out of focus, as if he was conjuring it up, as if he was staring into a crystal ball, seeing it again.
‘I remember a morning in London. We’d talked through the night – it’d started as a party, I don’t know what for, maybe someone’s birthday. Or we’d just finished a project. Of course, the eco-house! … solar wall, water recycling, hydroponics beds … Oh, it was beautiful, and – intelligent. And there we were, inside it, celebrating it having come together … One of those nights when strands, of different colours, textures, are braiding, plaiting … You’re simultaneously outside it, watching it happen, witnessing, and inside, part of it, you see it, feel it, it’s happening … Such a collection of believers  – AT engineers, city farmers, co-op and street democracy activists, squatters, geomancers talking about labyrinths under London and Hawksmoor churches, street theatre people – even the crazy situationist, with his mantra that the SI is the thought of the collapse of a world, and that world’s collapsing now, now, now! made sense.
‘We talked and drank and smoked and danced and felt triumphant in the splendour of the glass tetrahedron, proud of its transparency. We felt we’d cracked it, there on the Isle of Dogs.
‘I fell asleep surrounded by dancing and movement. I woke to silence, bodies lying as if they’d fallen on the spot under a spell. Heaven knows what I’d drunk, smoked, taken; I felt clear and empty, like glass.

‘I went out, found myself walking through the empty night streets, found myself heading through the flat docklands towards Greenwich Park, beyond the river, a mountain I had to go up. I spiralled down the metal steps under the glass dome and set off under the river along the dead straight, dead white tunnel. Half way along, when I couldn’t see back to the steps, or on to the steps, when my whole world was white tunnel, the lights went out. I walked on. The darkness was thick but the walls were gone. I felt the thick wet earth above me, the weight, the river flowing, the emptiness all around me, the thick darkness flowing into my mouth, filling my throat. I felt like Gilgamesh. I wanted to cry out, didn’t dare, sure that if I started I wouldn’t stop, walked on and on. Felt nothing. Felt something, cold, watery air, metal steps up, stars through a glass dome, gulping in the air and light, emerged.

‘The night sky sprang into view, star-filled, the masts and spars and rigging of the Cutty Sark silhouetted against it. It was one of the power cuts in the three-day week, everywhere dark. I walked up through the Park and sat by the Observatory, on the zero meridian.
‘The vast metropolis was dark and silent (that was a trick of the wind – it was amazing not to hear the perpetual rumble of traffic. There’d been car-free Sundays in Holland, the streets liberated to pedestrians and cyclists, and we’d dreamed the same). It lay like an enormous machine, lifeless, inert, because the plug had been pulled. Only the people lived. The machine was falling apart – the oil crisis, the miners’ strike (the successful one), the three-day week, hyperinflation, terrorist bombs. It would soon be Beirut, primitive survival in the shell of modernity. It would soon be Phnom Pen, watches ground underfoot, the rural sea flooding the cities. And we were ready – as the concrete split apart, our flower would bloom. Politicians, people, would see that our way – the alternative, eco way – was a positive way forward, the way to go.
‘As the sky lightened I could see our place, the place we’d made, that brought new life among the abandoned dereliction of the empty docks – buildings, whole streets that we’d squatted, done up, housed homeless people in, street farms we’d started, allotments, alternative energy projects – and in the middle of it, like a crystal blade thrust up from below, lit by its own power, like a glass flower bursting up through the concrete and tarmac, the eco-house.

‘Oh, dreams. Before my eyes the lights flicked on, the machinery hummed into life, the light changed and our place was lost to view.
‘What felt like the end of the beginning turned out to be the beginning of the end. The shaken powers-that-be reasserted control. I can’t believe how blinkered and naive we’d been, how lost in our own world, how innocent, romantic, utopian, to believe that our alternative, that undermined every vested interest, would be adopted simply because it made sense. Shaken, they, those in power, set about making sure this situation never reoccurred. It led to Thatcher, a system, if a little subtler, as implacable in its repressiveness of a certain sort of dissent as the system that ended the Prague Spring. So the miners were crushed. And the Stonehenge solstice celebrations were crushed – by the same police who’d been bussed up to fight the miners at Orgreave, who returned battle hardened. A warning. “Pour encourager les autres”.
‘And now, to celebrate 200 years of the French Revolution, in the land that once proclaimed permanent revolution, we have Tiananmen Square.’ He looked at me, raised empty hands, smiled helplessly.

‘You’ve never told me any of this.’ I was taken aback. I felt affronted, deceived, as if he been leading a secret life I’d just found out about. But a little proud, too, that he had a past. Discovering the past changes the present.
‘It was a long time ago. Before you were born, most of it. A different world. “The past is another. I no longer live there”. Circumstances change. You do the best with what you’ve got.’
‘Was mum there, in London, with you?’
‘No.’ He stopped, then resumed, ‘of course, that was why I was telling of that day. It was the point of the story.
‘No. It was strange how we met. And nice. Serendipitous.’ He smiled, relishing the shape of the word in his mouth. ‘Or rather, met again. We’d met first at university, at a party, spent an evening together – a night – really liked each other, left the party at midnight and spent the night walking, talking, all around the city. It all looked different that night, as if I’d never looked at it before, never really lived in it, that city I’d spent three years in. It came alive.
‘We ended up in a cafe sat opposite over a formica table eating enormous fried breakfasts, in love with the workmen and cleaners eating there and bemoaning our fate that we hadn’t met till now, the last day of our final year. Later that day she was to fly to America for the summer, and by the time she returned I’d be gone to London to start my research post. What to do? What to do?
‘And sat there, incongruous in our party clothes, our talk an island of stillness and high seriousness amid the shouted orders, the banter, the clatter of crockery, the busyness and steam and cigarette smoke, we decided, solemnly, to do – nothing. We each had things that we had to do. This was a time of breaking not making connections. The time was not right. If we were meant to be together, we’d meet again. We would put ourselves in the hands of fate. Looking back, and often afterwards, it looked like we were putting ourselves in the hands of pushing our luck. And then, several years later, we did meet, in the unlikeliest of places.’ He flipped the top off a bottle, offered it to me, I shook my head, he took a swig. He was enjoying this, telling a story; he was a story teller who lacked an audience.

‘Out of my research grew the project on the Isle of Dogs, but that outgrew University funding – became “political” – was taken up by a foundation that also supported a self-sufficiency project in the country. The purpose was to have each as a test-bed of ideas, techniques of use in the post-Industrial world. City and country, interacting, feeding back, each a source of wisdom for the other.
‘I went there one weekend – and Philippa was there.’ It was the first time he’d used her name, not called her ‘your mum’, for ages. ‘Doing a WWOOF weekend. Was working in PR, high pressure, successful, just beginning to question the hot air, imagey world she moved in. We met. The time was right. I sat there that morning in Greenwich Park and saw the moon sailing high and thought of the same moon shining on Pippa in Dorset, beams through a window onto a sleeping face. It’s strange the way we think like that about the moon – that the same moon is shining on someone else. It’s just the same with the sun, but that doesn’t … mean the same. We made plans. We were excited. We’d both worked incredibly hard in the city, it was time for a change, we’d be at the front edge of the new wave flowing out to revive the country life. After all, if the cities were about to collapse, there’d be an awful lot of country life. There was a Cohen song we’d sing to each other: “oh come with me, my pretty one, and we will find that farm, and grow us grass and apples there, and keep all the animals warm”. And, that morning, two other lines from the same song came to me: “with one hand on a hexagram, and one hand on a girl, I balance on a wishing well that all men call the world…”.’ He was rambling.

‘1974,’ I said firmly. ‘Kohoutek.’
‘Heavens, the comet thingy. I’d forgotten that. Christmas 1973, it was going to be the brightest ever. A sign from above. There were books written about it.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Nothing, really. It was a big non-event. Like Halley’s a couple of years ago. The heavens have forgotten us. No more signs. We’re on our own. Which suited me, suits me – all alone on our lonely rock in space, doing what we can with what we’ve got, making do, trying not to screw up. The nuts-and-bolts view of life. I remember there were a couple of ceremonies. In support of something that was going on. But I was more concerned with keeping the machinery working, making the farm viable. Which it wasn’t.
‘The group fell apart, the charity withdrew its support. We had nothing to go back to, you were a tiny baby, suddenly all the jobs I might have got dried up in Healey’s IMF squeeze, I got what I could, we scrambled into a mortgage, did the best we were able. No time for ideals, just day-to-day reality. A shock for pampered Sixties kids.

‘And now, just when I thought we’d worked our way onto an even keel, ready to lift our heads a bit, look around, this happens.’ He lapsed back, sighing. Mister Pessimism. He pissed me off when he got pathetic and self-pitying like this. Self indulgent old bugger. I left.

Chapter 3

I went straight to Woody, didn’t want to think about things, just wanted to pass on information. He was surprised. ‘I never realised that. I always thought I liked your house so much because it was so straight. But there had to be something more, some feeling. Hey, maybe they’ve got a secret room, where they dress in kaftans, and they smoke dope, and they play Incredible String Band records, and they read ‘Trout Fishing in America’, and they…’
‘What “they”?’ I exploded. ‘There is no “they”. There’s him and there’s her, and he’s over in one direction and she’s over in another and I’m standing in this horrible bare place and the ground’s splitting under me, between my feet, splitting apart, and pulling me apart – and I don’t want to jump, I just want to pull it back together, but I can’t. And I didn’t do anything, it wasn’t me, I haven’t done anything really wrong. So why’s it happening to me?’
I was surprised, shocked at my vehemence, at the hot pricking in my eyes, at the wrenching inside me, the pain of it, the gasps that shook through me, my refusal to cry. I stood, fists clenched, waiting for him, waiting for his ‘what about me? I’ve got no-one,’ for some stuff from his initiation about suffering and purification. One word and I’d flatten him. What the hell was I doing here, anyway – I should be at home trying to save my family.
He was silent, didn’t approach. He withdrew, left me horribly, horribly alone, desolate, freezing, shivering. Then he came softly, with a large cardigan, hand dyed, hand spun, hand knitted, a Celia cardigan full of the smells of wool and dye and incense and patchouli, that he laid around my shoulders.
But Celia was gone. I was alone. I didn’t care. I held together my splitting heart, squeezed it to the size and hardness of a nut, still and cold. It was safe in my hands. I felt cool, placid, self-contained, very comfortable.
A hand invaded. I tried to push it away, couldn’t, a strong hand flat on my chest and suddenly a shock, like a punch, like fifty thousand volts, that made me gasp and stagger. Another, and another. I wanted to shout, protest, pull away, it hurt, but I couldn’t move away, it stuck to me, shocked me again and again, I felt my knees buckling. But I didn’t fall. His hand, hot, radiating heat, held me, the shock of it, through my ribs, into my heart.
And then I felt it, coming to life, pumping, the heart-shaped muscle as if cradled in my hands, firm, soft, powerful, pumping blood, red and rich, in endless enriching, life-giving circulation, my heart rhythmic, powerful, radiant. I felt bliss and fear, my heart changed, a grown-up heart, on the edge of something, a new life.
I opened my eyes, to smile at him. His face was pale and drained. He was shaking. I reached for him but he waved me away, rubbed his hands together and placed them over his heart, breathing deeply. I did the same over mine, felt warmth, not heat, but my warmth. ‘Say this,’ he said, ‘ “the heart is the seat of the soul”’. I said it, at first aloud, then silently, in my heart. He closed his eyes, his lips silently shaping words. From being shrunken he grew again into himself, opened his eyes and said, ‘come on, we have work to do. And take off that cardigan – you’re bright red.’

Chapter 4

I was looking at the yin yang brooch Johannes had given me (saying, ‘this is the ta ki, the circle of dynamic unity containing the perfect balance of masculine and feminine. Two forces held together in tension; but without antagonism; mutually interdependent partners. One in essence, two in manifestation’. I remembered the words as if they were carved in stone, examining them from time to time, as if if I was running my fingers over them, their physicality, without really understanding.) Tracing with my fingers the silver setting and the tadpole shapes of opal and jet. I was sitting at the kitchen table. The sun streamed in. The smell of baking bread filled the kitchen. The table was laid for two: gazpatcho soup, a salad mum’d carefully selected and mixed fresh from the garden, her own mayonnaise, a summer pudding, cream, fresh bread she would take from the oven, calling ‘dinner’s ready!’ Seven cooked meals in the freezer. Heavy duty guilt – she was going away for a week – but we got to eat well. She clattered back and forth in high heels, hurrying to be ready. Wreaths of perfume followed her, wrapped around my head. She’d start conversations, trying to sound normal, nervous. I’d just grunt. At last she stopped at my shoulder. ‘What’s that you’re looking at? Oh, it’s lovely.’
‘Masculine and feminine held together in tension, but without antagonism,’ I said, as meaningfully as I could.
‘See,’ she said, a red fingernail touching the brooch, ‘yin in the centre of yang, yang in the centre of yin. The seed of each in the heart of the other.
‘We used to do tai chi in the morning, in the courtyard.’ Her voice, from being brisk, as if outrunning her, had slowed, had allowed her to catch up. Unformed, she swirled around her voice, steadied, it settled into her.
‘When you were in the commune?’
‘How…?’ She checked herself, remembering that now there were conversations closed to her. ‘Community, really, rather than a commune. And we – your dad was there, and you. You were tiny. I’d sit you in a teacup to watch while we did the practise.’
‘Don’t be silly. Did you do it like they do in the parks in China?’
‘Yes. But somehow it was, it became, ours. We’d stand in a circle first, holding hands, then separate to do the practise – you do it together, but sometimes you sink into yourself, centred on your own being, just dimly acknowledging those around you; and sometimes you’re very aware, feel carried along, part of something bigger, more complex and meaningful. Rooted and suspended, filling and emptying, in-gathering and expressing, receiving and giving – each opposition connects because at the extreme one becomes the other; life as change, energy in transformation, everything flows.’
‘Show me.’
I felt the cloud-like presence at my shoulder stiffen, prepare to say ‘I haven’t time, I have to be ready,’ then relax ( I’d played the guilt card ), softly collect herself, touch my shoulder lightly, say in a quiet voice, ‘yes, I will.’
She took off her shoes and stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, barred by the sun through the window. She closed her eyes. She wore blue eye-shadow, and her make up showed in the evening sun. She breathed in and out several times; on each out breath she seemed both to soften and become more defined, the definition coming now from inside. Then she opened her eyes and began to move, slowly, her steps light and yet firm, her movements slow and yet definite. It all came from inside. At every moment she could stop, as in “statues”; but the movement never stopped, was a continuous flow. It was strong and graceful, and I liked it.

The previous winter mum had taken up dancing, jiving, going to classes with her friend Wendy. She’d make up and dress carefully, in toned-down fifties style, cinching a wide, shiny belt round her waist with a ‘there’, her face bright. She’d practice steps,turns, twirls on the sitting room carpet to compilation tapes of fifties and sixties records. ‘I always wanted to jive,’ she’d say, breathless, ‘like my brother and his friends did. But before I got chance to learn, the twist came in, and after that it was “do your own thing, man” time. Come on, you should do this, instead of that rave stuff.’ I’d never been to a rave, but almost quoted Goff at her (Goff was into E’s and raves and sleeping through Monday morning classes with a big grin on his face and eyes painted on his eyelids, like Tom) that raves represented the triumph of a new form of relationship, individual and interest group, over outmoded coupledom; of polyvalent molecules of affection replacing locked binaries (which, because of his metaphor, was the first bit of chemistry that made sense). But I wanted to dance with her. I let her teach me the basic steps and then, with Chuck Berry motorvatin’ over the hill, I repeated the steps methodically, mechanically, turning minimally on the spot as she twirled and whirled (I felt her hand, her waist, enter and swiftly leave my grasp), her feet hardly touching the floor, all angles and snap, sparks flying off her, a flying horse, spinning almost out of orbit then curling safely back. I liked it, my mother the dancer.

And now, another sort of dance. Instead of a whirlwind, a gentle breeze. She moved with a soft, clear flow. Her feet joined with and separated absolutely from the floor with each slow step. Her weight moved as if there was liquid in her, flowed. As her arms moved, I imagined a baby cradled, realised she had held me so, remembered it. But, too, her movements, the kicks and punches, though slow, were firm and precise, full of exact power. She stopped. Enclosed fist in hand. All movement ceased. She smiled at me, said ‘there.’ I could feel her attention stray to the clock, but I pressed on.
‘In the commune, the community, was there much about Kohoutek?’
‘Oh, that was the big thing,’ she said, stepping into her shoes and sitting down. I watched her make the conscious decision to set aside the clock, to focus on me. I was sad that she always had to think before she decided something; but I was glad that sometime she chose to do things like this.

‘There was a big ‘healing the moon’ ceremony to coincide with Kohoutek’s closest point to the sun. Women only – women were beginning to take control of their lives. There was a strong feeling – among men as well as women – that somehow the technological invasion of the moon landings had been a blasphemy; that now the landings had finished, a purification had to take place. And that it was women’s work. It was very powerful – as powerful as some of the times at Greenham. I still have close friends from that ceremony. It was the last great event.
‘Soon after, things started falling apart.’ Her face, from being mistily radiant, had emptied. Then her eyes snapped into focus, she smiled brightly, said ‘the bread’ll be ready. I must be off.’ She whisked the fragrant loaves from the oven – quick blast of heat – shouted ‘dinner’s ready!’, pecked me on the cheek, and headed for the door. ‘Look after your dad,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘That’s your job,’ I shouted to her back as she picked up her bag and opened the front door. She stopped, then continued, pulled the door shut, was gone.
I suddenly thought – I do hope it was Wendy she went dancing with, not blokey man. Then I thought – it must have been Wendy, because she’d asked dad to go with her, bright and enthusiastic; he’d refused grumpily, she’d gone tight and determined and never mentioned it again.

Chapter 5

‘I’ve been exploring the Circle for information on comets – Kohotek in particular, but comets in general, too,’ Woody said.
‘It’s fascinating stuff. For example, it seems almost certain that the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the consequent success of mammals was caused by a comet hitting Yucatan. And it was Edmund Halley’s visit to Newton which stimulated him to write his ‘Principia’, the foundation work of modern science. (Though who knows what brilliant alternative path science might have taken if he’d been left to complete his alchemical studies?!) The swastika, an image of good luck which suddenly appeared in cultures across the world around 2000BC, was probably a four-jet spinning comet – it’s included in a Chinese atlas of comets. The moon was almost certainly split from the earth by a comet’s impact. The scientific establishment’s scandalous attempt to suppress Velikovsky’s work in the Fifties – he proposed that Venus was once a comet that had caused the parting of the Red Sea, among other things – showed clearly the lengths they’d go to to suppress unorthodox views that didn’t fit their mind-set, and alerted many people to the spuriousness of the notion of science as ‘objective’. Both the decline of the Bronze Age city civilisations around 2000BC, and the fall of the Roman Empire and onset of the Dark Ages in the Fifth century are most plausibly explained as being precipitated by meteorite showers from comet debris. Montezuma handed over power to Cortes because he saw two comets which he believed were premonitions of white-bearded Quetzacoatl. There were two highly visible comets over London, in 1664 before the Plague, and in 1665 before the Great Fire. Meteorites (which are comet remnants) were man’s first source of iron. It seems likely that both carbon and water – the necessities of life – came to earth from comets. Comets may contain life, sealed into the water they contain, kept alive by the warmth of radioactive decay – they may be carrying life around the universe! One explanation for the 26million year cycle of catastrophes on earth is the sun having a dark twin, called ‘Nemesis’, which pulls showers of comets out of the Oort layer that affect the earth. The US military has developed Meteor Burst Communications which use the trail of ions left by falling meteors as a reflective surface for communication in war after the satellites have been knocked out. Comets have been so  influential,’ he ended excitedly.
‘So?’
‘I thought you’d be interested,’ he said, hurt.
‘‘I am – but what’s this got to do with Kohoutek?’

‘Okay, let me pull it together. The effects of comets are threefold. First, the global catastrophe of a direct impact. Second, the culture-wide effect of comet fragments. Third, the effect on people’s thinking of seeing a comet, the idea of it being a cosmic messenger. “A comet is like a broom: it signals the sweeping away of evil,’”Yen Tsu wrote. Comets “wipe out the old and establish the new”, said Li Chu Fung. They’re signals of change. Kohoutek was unusually bright a long way from the sun, so it was thought it would be even brighter close to the sun. It was predicted to be one of the brightest comets ever; in fact, it almost disappeared, it could hardly be seen. The reason was that the early visibility came from the vaporisation of exotic ices, such as nitrogen and methane; near the sun, the visibility’s due to vaporising water ice. But it was still the comet, still the time. The moment of its perihelion round the sun, Christmas 1973, was the time for something to happen. Immense efforts were invested. Something did  happen. I don’t yet know what. And it had its effect. Not big and showy. Many people lost heart.
‘But for some, the message was clear – what was to have been the comet of the century, became a secret comet; after the flamboyant but insubstantial changes of the Sixties, this change was to be secret, esoteric, underground, fundamental.
‘The time hadn’t yet come for outward change, but the work entered a new phase. Listen to this: “as Kohoutek passed behind the sun on Christmas Day, I was contacted by a translated Human who I believe to be Melchizedek. He told me that the spiritual energy field embracing the earth was to be rapidly shifted to higher Immortal frequencies through the activation of major earth chakras and Great Dragon ley-lines. My first assignment was to assist in work at Mount Shasta…” There are plenty more like that. And all the work that’s been done since then, through the Harmonic Convergence two years ago, is about to inaugurate a new phase. And we’re involved in it, here – if we can only discover how, what it is we must do!’ He was panting with excitement, eyes bright, full of the sense of a destiny being worked out, just like Celia. It touched me to see it – I remembered how often her apparently hopeless enthusiasms had resulted in wonderful happenings. I didn’t have to believe it; but I could go along with it.

Chapter 6

When Woody talked like that, full of enthusiasm but everything abstract, nothing to hold onto, soon I’d feel uncomfortable, want something to touch, do, change.
So for a couple of days, while he was trying to talk to Johannes, or to make sense of the stuff in the house, I worked quietly on my own, in my own world.
I realised it was something I’d always done when things were going wrong at home; as the arguments or stifled silences raged, I’d slip away, slip beneath it as it were, and sort my Lego, or reorganise my books according to my current system – alphabetical, or sequence of acquisition, or grouped “Christmas books”, “Birthday books”, “Books I bought” – any system as long as it was a system.
On this occasion I cleared out Johannes’ tool shed, emptying it, sweeping it out, cleaning and oiling and hanging all the tools, sorting screws and nails. I was fixing jam-jar lids to the underside of a shelf, for screw-in nail jars, when Woody came panting to the door, ‘he’s talking,’ he said, and sped off. I looked around the four-square space, a place of shape and slanting light, reluctantly stepped out into the dazzling sunlight that exploded through my eyes, in my head, and walked over to where Johannes stood, talking quietly, head down, scratching in the dust with a stick.

Chapter 7

‘In the beginning, men were travellers. As the seasons changed, herds moved, plants fruited, fish swam in, they followed a migrant path, a weaving and cyclical journey through a habitat which gave man all he required – for he required only what nature gave him. He developed tremendous skills – we see the remnants of those skills in the Polynesians who can navigate across the trackless seas without compasses, by the look of the water, the feel of the wind; in the Bushmen who can find water-bearing gourds deep under featureless desert. Their senses were so developed and attuned that they lived in an indescribably rich sensory environment.
‘And with the whispers to the senses came the whispers to the spirit. Even an insensitive person today recognises the effect of different places on mood – the stimulation of soaring crags, the restfulness of woodland glades. Imagine, then, a sensitised people, unencumbered by possessions, uninsulated by clothes (and remember Montaigne’s famous question – did man first dress because he felt cold; or does he now feel cold because he dresses?) Every broad vista, every narrow cleft. every dark wood, every bubbling spring, must have spoken with a different voice. As the tidal moon spoke to his oceanic blood, the sun and planets to his astral body, the magnetic and telluric currents of the earth to his electrically-driven nervous system. 

‘Man was part of nature, as the animals and plants were. He was of their physical world, and their spiritual world. They spoke to him, he spoke to them. He made gifts to thank them, left tribute to placate them. As he walked his migratory path, he talked the landscape – as the Australian native peoples still do in their song lines. Time passed, but it wasn’t linear, it was cyclical, measured by the changing seasons, the annual journey, the return; men could adapt to the slow changes of climate, the precession of the equinoxes, the movements of the earth’s magnetic currents. And man, the great story-teller, the great personifier, told stories – at the campfire, on the journey, with each activity; stories about the creatures who inhabited the world around him, about the origin of landscape features, of the history of the group and from the time before the group, reinforcing the group and its association with the prehuman inhabitants, the spirit world that parallels the physical. For the migration of the group wasn’t random, but followed an annual path – following certain herds, arriving at the coast to catch certain migrations, reaching particular places as fruit ripened. Repetition developed ritual.’

As he spoke, he was scratching on the dry earth with a stick, making features, a route.
‘A child’s birth would be associated with the particular location, the time of year, a memorable event; his rite of passage into adulthood marked by a test during which would be revealed his totem creature.
‘And the movements of the people and their ceremonies strengthened the natural forces, reinforced the earth’s richness. Man lived in intimate relationship with his environment, never taking more than he needed, wasting nothing, asking permission before killing an animal, never “storing up treasures on earth, where moth and rust corrupt” as Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s all there, in the Sermon on the Mount. The earth was his mother, the sky his father. Life was lived, death was not feared, because it was part of life – and in death, wasn’t he reunited with the mother? “Death came to them as sleep”, Hesiod says, “and all good things were theirs”. It was …’
‘The Golden Age,’ Woody whispered.
‘Yes. And man lived in…’
‘The Garden of Eden.’
‘The time before time. Cronus’ time. The same Cronus who devoured his children. How they frighten us by characterising him thus! How grateful we are for mother Rhea for replacing infant Zeus with a stone! But really it’s an image of timelessness, of cyclical not serial time, of repetition not succession. (And don’t Hindus characterise the individual as repetition until emancipation into Moksa is attained? And isn’t it, too, an image of the wisdom that knowledge should sometimes be swallowed rather than brought to birth? That, as Jesus says, sometimes “do not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing”? A wisdom that this rationalist, scientific age refuses to acknowledge?)

So, what happened? What ended the Golden Age? If only we knew – maybe then we’d be able to order our lives better. There was something in man himself, in his brain. Maybe it was an accident, like a glitch in a computer system that’s so complex, unforeseen connections are made. (Just such a glitch almost crashed the first Apollo landing.) Maybe a random mutation. Maybe it was the inevitable outcome of the evolution of an organism so  complex. It was built into the structure of the brain. Maybe it was God’s hubris – he allowed to evolve a creature complex enough to recognise Him, and worship Him; and that would inevitably depose him. The mother (matter) saved the child; the child (man) killed the father (God). Maybe it was matter’s revenge on spirit – the change from a world ruled by spirit to one ruled by matter, a result of the progressive cooling of the universe from the moment of the Big Bang. Maybe it was the outcome of there being three irreconcilable forces: timelessness; entropy; evolution. Whatever, the Bible is clear – it was the serpent. And what did the serpent bring? The knowledge of good and evil. The loss of innocence. The loss of oneness. The notion of dividing one into two – the this and the that – was as significant intellectually as sexual reproduction was biologically. It changed the whole basis of life. For with two – the self and the other – came self-consciousness, the most fundamental of alienations. 

‘So, man had fallen, to live for the rest of his existence in a post-lapsarian condition. It’s the condition we have to live with, what this is all about.

‘But first, let me tell you what happened to the Golden race: “And then this race was hidden in the ground. But still they live as spirits of the earth, holy and good, guardians who keep off harm, givers of wealth: this kingly right is theirs”. So writes Hesiod. While we must live in a time when, as Rilke says: “Each torpid turn of the world has such disinherited ones, to whom neither the past belongs, nor yet what has nearly arrived. For even the nearest moment is far from mankind”.

We who live like that must remember those of the Golden Age, the Golden race, who are not gone – but hidden.’

 He stopped, emptied, staring down at the marks he’d been making automatically in the dust as he’d been speaking, then leaned forward, looking intently, as if he could almost see something there. Then he shook his head, drew back the stick as if to swish it all away, then turned abruptly and walked back to the house, thrashing the air, grumbling. Woody ran indoors and came out with pencil and paper and made rapid sketches of the patterns he had scratched, as the wind smeared it, tumbled it all away. It looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t think what it reminded me of.

Chapter 8

‘I have a date,’ Woody said.
‘Congratulations – who with? Has she got a friend?’ He looked at me blankly, then bleakly. Not a good day for facetiousness.
‘A date for the activation, for doing – what it is we’re supposed to do, here. September 19th.’

‘Good. We have a date. The Circle has spoken. Shame we don’t know what it is we’re supposed to do, isn’t it?’
I was bored, fed up, pissed off. It was almost the end of the holiday. What had started with high hopes was fizzling out, like it had all been a waste of time. The feeling of superiority – that I was engaged in some important mission while my friends were just messing about, passing the time, hanging out – had been replaced by a sense that it’d been me who’d been missing out, wasting his time with a dropout and a loser, while they were getting their lives together. I was Woody Allen choosing the wrong train. For at the centre of the garden, in which we’d done such good work, was a house of chaos and confusion which we’d made no progress in making sense of, a mystery we were no nearer solving. And whether the house was the key to unlocking Johannes, or vice versa, they were intimately involved – and we were getting nowhere with either.

‘Come on,’ Woody said, ‘let’s have another look inside the house.’ I plodded after him.

‘I thought at first,’ his hand sweeping  around the strangely-shaped room, ‘that this might be an actual built representation of Fludd’s “Memory Theatre” – there was a vogue in the Renaissance for inventing memory systems based on places and images, “mnemotechnics” it’s called. Fludd may have based his on the Globe theatre. This strange shape – it reminds me of a shape developed in the 60’s by a Danish mathematician that most nearly combined the circle and the square. You’ve heard the phrase “squaring the circle”, meaning attempting the impossible? It also means reconciling the spiritual circle with the material square. I thought they might, here, have been combining ars rotunda with ars quadranta – the memory systems using magical and concrete images respectively, but…’

‘Jesus, Woody – why couldn’t you have misspent your youth in snooker halls and low dives? I haven’t understood a word of what you’ve said!’
‘It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter – even if it was a system once, it’s long since collapsed into chaos. Where’s the clue, where’s the clue?’

There were tiers of books, shelves of papers, the walls were plastered with pictures and quotations. If I tried to make sense of it, I became confused and anxious. But if I let myself just look, float around, treat it as a cabinet of curiosities, I found it strangely satisfying. “Whole Earth Catalogs”, and “Survival Scrapbooks”, “Ecologistics”, alchemical texts and philosophical works, a model of a perpetual motion machine, a drawing of a water pump, with beside it the text: “When I was in Rome, one Gruterus, a Swiss by birth and my master in this art, made this machine for Cardinal Sextus Giorgio whom he served as engineer. It caused the water from a tiny spring, bubbling up at the foot of a mound in his garden, to ascend to the top. I cannot praise enough his artifice and ingenuity, which from so mean a spring raised water to a height with such ease”. Robt. Fludd UCH p460. In red ink – “ingenious but impractical – find a way”. Beside it copies of Escher’s “Belvedere” and “Waterfall”. A mathematical paper on logarithmic spirals. A geometric study, “The Cosmology of Stone Circles”, an essay “Blake’s Milton Diagram Explained”. “The Rational Almanac 1903-4” by Moses B Cotworth. A beautifully engraved and gorgeously coloured plate of “The Grand Rosicrucian Alchemical Formula”. “The Magical, Quabalistical and Theosophical Writings of Georgius von Welling, on the Subject of Salt, Sulphur and Mercury”. “The Glastonbury Zodiac”. This;
“gently was I charmed
Into a waking dream, a reverie
That, with believing eyes, where’er I turned,
Beheld long-bearded teachers, with white wands
Uplifted, pointing to the starry sky,
Alternately, and plain below, while breath
Of music swayed their emotions, and the waste
Rejoiced with them and me in those sweet sounds”.
Wordsworth  “The Prelude”.
A note in red “Oh yes! Oh yes!”

And: “Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men”. Borges. With the note: “and Shaston too!”Annotated prints of Poussin’s “Les Bergers d’Arcadie”, Botticelli’s “Primavera” , and Holbein’s “The Ambassadors”. This:
“they lived
Brief, anguished lives, from foolishness, for they
Could not control themselves, but recklessly
Injured each other and forsook the gods,
They did not sacrifice, as all tribes must, but left
The holy altars bare. And, angry, Zeus
The son of Cronus, hid this race away
For they dishonoured the Olympian gods”. Hesiod.
Annotated: “we had it made, we blew it, my silver brothers”. A picture “Ramon Lull with Ladder of his Art, 14th C”, with, next to it: “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it)”. Wittgenstein. The note: “the Ziggurat of Wisdom. The Tor Maze. Jacob”.

And more and more. This room was the inside of Johannes’ head. He was lost inside his own maze. He’d built a library and was now lost in it. And we, how were we, two kids, supposed – it would all have been wonderful once (would be wonderful), all this, the books and paper smell and beautiful pictures and fabulous words and mysterious worlds, all around, layer beyond layer, depth beneath depth, height above height, interlocking, interacting, interwoven. If we hadn’t needed to be trying – to make sense of it? I felt the same anger and impatience I felt with my parents, that I was being involved in adult stuff, that it wasn’t our job; I said, ‘I’m out of here’ and headed for the door, grabbing (why?) a folder on my way.
Outside, out of the clotted, curdled atmosphere, the paralysis of damp stagnation, something inside me leaped with relief as I felt the sun hot on me, the buzzy activity in the air, the greenness and sappy richness of the garden (I twanged a branch, felt its wonderful elasticity) stir me up. I looked down at the pamphlet: “Wind- and Water-Power in Wessex – A Plan 1974”. A map of Wessex. I stared at the map. Then down at the ground, at Johannes’ scratchings, almost gone now, except there – that familiar lozenge, on the map, too. Of course – ‘Woody! It’s a map! He drew a map!’

Chapter 9

Orientating on the familiar lozenge of the Isle of Wight, we soon made out, on the sketch Woody had made, the Dorset coast, the Somerset coast, the Mendips, a cross for Shaftesbury.
‘But what’s this?’ An irregular shape, covering much of the area from Shaftesbury to the South Coast. A forest? A tribal territory? We had no way of knowing. Johannes came wandering round the corner, saw us and advanced slowly towards us, talking. Another appearance of Old Hamlet’s ghost. Horatio’s philosophy flattened underfoot. More from our enigmatic oracle:
‘There was the physical landscape, that the tribe passed through, was part of – the deep, still forest, the sunny windblown Downs, the soft-flowing rivers. And, too, there was the energy landscape, unseen but felt – the surface of the earth washed by a flow of energy, the earth’s magnetism, the lines of earth energy, that animals and birds feel, and only dowsers now locate. The tribe followed its annual path over the earth. They observed and took into their beings the physiognomy of the landscape, the patterns of the heavens, felt the flow of energy currents, the benevolent and malefic places. They painted rocks, and held ceremonies at auspicious sites. There were places where several tribes met at certain seasons, for exchange of goods and brides, and for shared ceremony.

And then, man began to settle. And settlement requires agriculture. Or maybe – man began agriculture, and that required settlement? Why did it happen? Not for health or ease – the settled worked harder, were less healthy than their nomadic ancestors. That glitch? That devil? Because it had been thought, it had to be done?
‘Once unity becomes duality, there’s no limit – and maybe there’s no stopping it – duality, this and that, the tick and tock of time advancing. Duality suits agriculture – active male and passive female, growing summer and dormant winter, fructifying heavens and fertile earth.
‘But before that there is the first duality – sacred and profane. For the nomad, all is sacred; profanity is the absence of respect for that sacredness.
‘And agriculture itself is profane, a profanation: as the Native American Smohalla put it, “you ask me to plough the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s breast?” A great taboo, against desecrating the earth, is broken, day after day, every day. Smohalla again, “shall I dig under the earth’s skin for her bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again”. Guilt comes into existence. And the cultivator, who cannot move, is dependent on what the weather brings to his small patch. Instead of company to be enjoyed, earth mother and heaven father become powers to be feared and propitiated.
‘Ceremony must be intensified. With a sedentary life there is loss of varied experience – that experience must be encapsulated, created, in story and image. Agriculture takes up more time – Smohalla says, “my young men shall never work. Men who work cannot dream, and wisdom comes to us in dreams”. Cultivators cease to tell stories, to dream; they pay specialists to dream for them, to tell stories to them, create images for them, bring forth wisdom for them, intercede with the gods o their behalf. Priests, singers, philosophers, artists.
‘Man, having crossed the first line of altering the landscape with cultivation and habitation, goes further; he builds earthworks, stone circles, pyramids, barrows, alignments of standing stones. To reproduce the landscape and skyscape and cosmology of the nomadic tribe, reproducing on a small scale what they once experienced on a large scale. In memory of the lost migration, in penance for the first desecration, in propitiation of the powers of nature, in celebration of his own new-found and ever-developing powers, to strengthen and focus energies that supply his ever-growing needs, ceremonies increase in number and elaborateness. There are walked circuits to remember the tribal path. We see the remnants today in beating of the bounds, May Day celebrations, well dressings, water ceremonies. Oh yes, water ceremonies.’ He stopped. Old clockwork Johannes had run down again. Woody guided him towards the door then returned.

‘We’re getting nowhere. All that talk about duality – he’s still in the Geminian age, 8000 years ago. We’ve been through Taurus and Aries and we’re about to leave the Piscean.’
‘Pisces? Water ceremonies?’ I said hopefully. Woody stared down, kicking the ground moodily. ‘The ruling planet of Gemini is Mercury. And that’s what it feels like – like looking into a bowl of quicksilver; as soon as I think I see a shape, something that makes sense, I reach for it – and it breaks up into rolling balls of mutual infinite reflection batting around in some bizarre pinball machine. I’ll go and settle him down. See you.’

Chapter 10

 I looked at “Wind- and Water-Power in Wessex: A Plan”.
It showed how “within twenty years” (five years to go, folks) twenty percent of energy in the region could be supplied by “the renewable resources of wind and water”. I looked up Shaftesbury in the index. There was reference to wind generators on Melbury Beacon, and the possibility of reactivating, as electricity generators, the Melbury, French and Cann water mills.
But there was also a note on “the symbolic use of wind and water power”. And it referred to Johannes’ place.
And tucked into the back of the pamphlet was a map of the garden, this garden, showing “spring” and “water pump”, with a shape like the one Johannes had drawn on the ground.
I hurried to the place marked. It was in an obscure corner, an area we’d never worked in. There was a marshy area, and a small cliff (an old quarry face?) about three metres high. A rusting pipe, almost lost in vegetation, leaned against the cliff, and at the top was a heap of timber and a weird object made from an oil drum. There was no sign of anything that looked like the shape on the map.

I went back to the house and looked again at the engraving of the water pump. “I cannot praise enough his artifice and ingenuity, which from so mean a spring raised water to a height with such ease”. “Ingenious but impractical. Find a way”. Perhaps he had found a way. I felt a tingle on my scalp, an intuition that this was important.
I searched the room, and at last found a folder marked “Robt Fludd, UCH 1, b p460. (The Great Fludd revisited)” (well at least someone  had a sense of humour). In it were clear drawings of the place I’d found, with odd machinery, one marked “Archimedes Screw”, one “Savonius Rotor”. That evening I showed the papers to dad.

Chapter 11

Dad was in his “Wild One to Easy Rider ”phase – Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels on the floor, posters, creased where they’d been carefully rolled up then forgetfully flattened in the loft, of Brando and Hopper. “On the Move”, written out poster size on the wall; concluding:

The self-defined, astride the created will
They burst away; the towns they travel through
Are home for neither bird nor holiness,
For birds and saints complete their purposes.
At worst, one is in motion; and at best,
Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,
One is always nearer by not keeping still.
California”

The smell of grease and paraffin. He was sat cross-legged on the floor, cleaning carefully, with a fine paint brush, some part of a motor cycle engine, as smoothly shining and complex-looking as a mechanical heart. The tape played – no, not “Born to Run”, but Bonnie Raitt, “Longing in Their Hearts”. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt; if he smoked he’d’ve had the packet tucked up a short sleeve. He looked up expectantly, but when I quietly sat down, he smiled at me and carried on cleaning. I like to watch him work on his bike – he always looked at home, in himself
He was good with his hands. Once, at Christmas they bought me, just as a stocking filler, an Orrery. When I put it together and attached the rubber band, instead of turning the miniature sun and earth and moon in slow and graceful motion, it spun them madly for a couple of seconds, then stopped. He took it away and brought it back a week later re-engineered, with new parts, so that it moved with elegant precision. He even connected it to my Lego motor, and I’d watch it turn, this model of the watchmaker’s universe, from my bed, an image of certainty.
He held the heart up in one hand, examining it minutely, stroking away with the brush a last thin smear of grease in a thread; dried it in a soft cloth, then turned it slowly, the light catching successive surfaces, until satisfied and, with a grunt, put it down on the spread newspaper, in its correct place among the engine parts laid out like an exploded diagram. “Storm warning – feels like a heavy rain, winds on the coast tonight, we may be tossed tonight”. Gently melodic.
He wiped his hands, then looked up at me. ‘When I was eighteen, I got an unexpectedly well-paid summer job on a building site. When I finished, I bought a motor scooter – a naff little Raleigh Roma, but it went. It was magic, I had wings. My orbit increased ten-fold. I was free. Then it broke. From being Pegasus, that gripping it I felt part of, it of me, suddenly it was out there, separate, two hundredweight of junk, horrible in its useless is-ness. I opened it up, poked about, broke it some more. I was furious with it. I was Basil Fawlty. I was furious because I was impotent – I couldn’t repair it, neither could I cope with the interactions involved in having it repaired – the kids I’d risen above, up to the grammar school, into my head; while they’d stayed in their bodies, in touch with their hands, learned to do things, fix things, make things – homo faber – hands. For “hands” is what they were, told what to do, how to do it, by the “heads”. Secondary modern – see? Grammar school – see? Especially cruel for me because my brother had “failed” the 11+. For then, from being close, we were separated, different schools, different attitudes – even our parents joined in, mocking what he said, laughing at what I made. What’s praised gets better, what’s criticized atrophies. But you’re only half a person, trapped on one side of the divide. So your uncle fills his house with Book Club books, is immensely knowledgeable, but somehow the knowledge doesn’t fit into his life. And when I next bought a bike, I learned everything there was to know, so I could service, diagnose, repair. I think I’m pretty good – until I’m with a real mechanic. With me, everything goes through the head. A real mechanic – thinks with his hands.
‘I didn’t want that separation.
‘In London, then in the community, I wanted to break down that barrier between “heads” and “hands”. I thought the way to do it was from first principles, everyone doing everything. Hopelessly naive of course – all you get is shoddy ineptitude. But I learned – tools, machines, work, how to solve problems with what you’ve got, not what you’d like to have. Bricolage, I suppose. When the community folded I had to find a job – I really wish I’d had the nerve to stay on the “hand” side, become a mechanic. But – I had paper qualifications that were worth money, white-collar jobs seemed more secure… And I’ve got the bike.
So – what have you been up to? What’ve you got there?’

As he read the manuscript, his short-nailed, dirt-ingrained fingers sliding down the paper, stabbing to emphasise a point, making quick notes and sketches on a pad, his body wriggling and settling into the posture of one absorbed, I imagined him, helmeted and leather-clad, on his bike, a directed will, an arrowed desire. And then I remembered how, more than once, I’d seen him stride around the limit of this hill-top town, an inch inside an invisible fence, a caged and pacing tiger; or walk with deliberate unchecked pace to the edge, the very edge of Park Walk or Castle Walk, and stop, hands gripping the rail, staring out at some imagined yonder – up to the birds, down to the drop, as if tensing himself to leap … then sigh, turn, drift slowly back to be re-absorbed.

‘This is weird – but wonderful,’ he said. ‘Look – exact technical drawings, but done with such artistry. Like modern day Leonardo’s. Where did you get it?’ I gave him my “I don’t want you to know” look. He stiffened, then smiled ruefully, and let me keep it. 

‘Okay. It’s a water circulation system, powered by a wind pump. There’s a basin at the bottom, from which the water’s lifted to the top. Via an Archimedes Screw – that’s the tube. They use them on farms to shift grain from harvester to silo, so I imagine this is one of those. Inside the tube is a helical spindle – as the spindle rotates, it lifts the water. What makes the spindle rotate is the thing on the tower – it’s called a Savonius rotor. They were big in the early 70’s AT world because you could make them out of an oil drum cut in half. Instead of the sophisticated aerofoil shapes needed on conventional rotor blades. You just have two halves of a cylinder, slightly offset. When the wind spins it, there’s a fall in air pressure on the downwind side, called the Magnus effect, which makes it act as if it had four times the surface area. So – the wind blows, the rotor turns, which, connected to the Screw turns the spindle, which raises the water – which, apparently from these diagrams, then runs back down into the lower pool. So, unless this is the most heavy-duty garden fountain I’ve seen, I’ve no idea what it’s for. Any ideas?’
‘No. But how do I get it working?’
‘What, you have all this stuff?’
‘As far as I can tell. It’s all a bit of a mess. None of it works. What do I do?’Dad puffed out his cheeks and exhaled. ‘Okay. One, disassemble all moving parts, clean, grease, reassemble. Two, clean out the upper and lower basins, making sure especially that the spring in the lower basin and the outlet in the upper basin are clear. Then, connect it up as in the diagrams, wait for the wind to blow, and watch the water go round.’
‘Can I use your tools?’
‘Sure. But remember – only the second-best set outside the workshop. Use the workshop if you need to. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.’
‘Thanks.’ He knew there wouldn’t be. He smiled wistfully then, as I left the room, he picked up another metal body part to overhaul. 

I didn’t care what this thing was for, whether it was just some weird self-contained, self-referential circulating system; I just wanted to do something, achieve something, leave some sort of monument to this crazy summer.

Chapter 12

I wanted something that was mine, my own, something about which I could say – ‘I did that.’
The first work I’d done with the old man. Then what Woody and I had done – the raid had been magic, and us getting back together, and the work in the garden, the way we’d worked and inhabited it – had been good, had crescendoed through the summer, to high summer. Had given me a life, while that other life, family life, was falling apart. But now the summer felt overblown and beginning to fall towards autumn. Too much lost in that labyrinth of confusion and fifteen-year decay that was the house.
It was different for Woody – he was part of all that, whatever it was. Whereas I’d just wandered in, could wander out. (No, I’d broken in. And had to admit I was now part of something here, that had to reach some resolution.
But not in there, in the house That was Woody’s realm. It had to be out here, in the garden. I kept remembering the words on the wall, referring to the apparatus I was intending to rebuild, “I cannot praise enough his artifice and ingenuity, which from so mean a spring raised water to a height with such ease”. I wanted to do that. I wanted to say – ‘I made that’.

I set up a camp by the spring. I had tent and sleeping bag and cooking stove. Hidden by the curtain of uncut vegetation, I worked alone. From time to time Woody’s head would appear through the hanging leaves and he’d report on progress with Johannes. But both of us acknowledged that we were now following different paths – maybe parallel, hopefully convergent, but different.
I arrived early, left late, and worked the whole day. I rarely stayed overnight – after a day alone I liked the reassurance of  the house, the sensory blather of television, contact with other lives. But not much of me went home. Or rather, my head stayed filled with images from the day. If at first I worried that I could get to like the hermit’s life, soon I was working so obsessively, with a focus so narrow, that nothing else mattered.

I renovated the machinery first. I dismantled, cleaned and lubricated the Archimedes Screw. It was a smoothly-machined factory product: the helix span sweetly in its sealed bearings, and shone with a machined look when I’d cleaned its curved surface; I’d spin it and watch the shape of it move along, although the metal, of course, was fixed; only when I put my finger on its surface and turned the spindle with my other hand and watched my finger being carried along by the screw did I have some sense of how it moved water; but even so, when I slid the screw back into its dark and close-fitting tube and fastened it in, I felt at the centre of the whole apparatus was a mystery that approached the magical.

The Savonius rotor was cruder, hand-made from an oil drum cut in half, the halves bolted offset onto wooden discs, the whole running on bearings from a washing machine; but it was simple, and it worked.

I rebuilt the tower – it wasn’t high, about my height, just enough to lift the rotor, which stood vertically and span horizontally, into clearer air – using old timber and rusty nails from Johannes’ workshop. I secured it to the three restraining wires I’d found in the undergrowth, still fixed to rings embedded in concrete. 

I cleaned out the top basin, and the outfall pipe, which seemed to lead into a made gully, but soon disappeared into the undergrowth.

The next job was to clear out the lower basin, at the foot of the cliff. There was live vegetation growing across it, dead vegetation matted underneath. And below that, heaven knows how many tens of centimetres of gluey mud. I cleared the brambles and nettles and woven vegetation. I stared down, into it, exhausted and full of loathing.
Suddenly I was sick of all this. I’d worked alone, worked myself to a standstill – and still, depths of black ooze, still this to do. I’d been slashed by sharp metal, bruised by hammer and falling timber, torn by brambles and whipped by branches; my hands were red and blistered; my arms ached, my legs ached, my back ached. And I was weary, weary, weary. And, below me, a ton of stinking mud to dig out. I stared down at it.
Pick-axe and spade in hand, wearing only boots and shorts, I stood on the edge – and with a cry of despair and defiance I leaped in and fell to work, with crazed energy, driving the pick down, shovelling like a stoker, my arms screaming pain, my face swelling like a balloon ready to burst, cursing with each blow, a rhythmic chant of expletives, almost crying, on the edge of… I don’t know what. But suddenly – I was a spluttering engine, out of fuel. And then it fired into life as the reserve tank was switched on, a fuel of such purity and high octane that the motor was suddenly running faster and cleaner and smoother than it had ever run. My body filled with a pure, luminous energy. My brain was as precise and clear as if pure oxygen was pumping through it and liquid nitrogen cooling it. I grew. Time slowed. The pick-axe rose and fell with deft, unstoppable accuracy, water droplets spraying slowly; the spade cut and sank and lifted cubes of root and earth and hurled them with effortless precision up onto the neatly rising pyramid; the shape of the basin came clear. Sweat ran down me. In my loose shorts, my prick stiffened. A soft woman unbuttoned herself slowly in front of me. I …

‘Well, J Arthur Rank!’ Poised with pick-axe above my head, I looked up to see Fiona Fotheringham smiling down at me. ‘Bang that gong,’ she said. There was satire in her voice – her eyes flicked from my face to my groin and quickly back again – but friendliness too. And I, in spite of this sudden irruption into my enclosed world, I still had time to choose, to choose not to respond with an adrenalin-rush trapped snarl but; to lower the pick, lean on it (covering, as if casually, my groin), take in her lop-sided grin, her warm dark eyes, almost black, the short black hair haloing her round face, tilted head, the shirt tied across her small breasts, her bare, flat midriff, belly button a smile, she standing above me, hands incongruously, endearingly clasped behind her back, semi-silhouetted against the trees and sky, with the birds singing and the breeze playing, and say:
‘Just the galley-slave drum – it keeps me working.
‘There’s plenty to do, if you want a holiday job?’ She cupped her chin, furrowed her brow, in mock ponder, ‘thanks, enticing as that mud looks, I’ll pass.’ Then: ‘we’re going to the sea, to Durdle Door. Thought you might like to come.’ Her prepared speech.
‘We?’
‘Megan’s just passed her test. Her mum’s car. Ben. A few of us.’
‘How did you know I was here?’
‘Oh – you know,’ hands fluttering then landing on her lips, as if this explained everything. Then: ‘eet is my beezness to know zees zings.’ Fiona mugging. A car horn.
‘Well, I’m a bit – occupied.’ My turn to mug and mime.
‘So I see. Up to the proverbial in it. Just a thought. Maybe another time.’ Added, ‘It looks – interesting. Weird, but – interesting.’
‘Yeh. It’s – both the above.’
‘Yes, I can see that. God. Look, sorry to…’
‘No, please, it was nice of you to think …’
‘Yes, well, I did. See you.’
‘Yes. See you.’ A smile, a finger wave, and she was gone. A space where she’d been. A car starting, stalling, restarting, crunching gears, ironic cheers, acceleration, gone. I listened to them driving away, out of my life.

Then the adrenalin kicked in. My hear pounded, I shook, I feverishly replayed the conversation in my head, desperate to hear how stupid I’d been, what I’d said, whether I had been stupid. It felt okay. Not brilliant, but okay. I mumbled fervent thanks.

Her entry and exit had left a tear in my self-sufficient world. It leaked, my attention futilely chasing, shouting – I’ve changed my mind, come back, I want to go with you! – imagined watching them disappear, then sun-kissed beach and pounding waves. Ben, Huh. I sank the pick, hit a stone, jarred my arms. I concentrated, got back into the work, found the rhythm again. The tear repaired. The woman reappeared, warm and welcoming; but with Fiona a presence, a cool pebble in my hot mouth.

Chapter 13

Late that day, after a long day, I had finished.
It was all there: the place, the parts. I’d worked myself to the edge. I looked at it, the place I’d excavated from vegetation, the pieces I’d restored from decay – for a moment I saw it all together. And then my legs went to jelly and I staggered and sat. I sat for a long time, unable to move. I’d never been so tired in my life. At last I dragged myself up, tottered home, slept through a bath, and crawled into bed.

But I couldn’t sleep. Though my body was emptied, my brain was in overdrive; it felt like some ancient overheating computer, all glowing, switching valves and spooling tape and spraying punch cards, locked in a room run by a maniac. Scenes, images, ideas, faces flashed at subliminal speed. Every time I approached sleep, I’d be sliding off the edge into a black gulf, and wake with a jump. I so wanted to slip into bed with someone, cuddle up, no questions. But parents were behind, lovers (would that ever be?) ahead. I imagined Fiona curled up in her bed, asleep in sleep’s arms. Only I was alone.

At two I gave up and went out. It was a warm, dark night, clouds sliding then clearing. I was warm enough just in shorts. There was a wind from the south, a restless hot wind. I walked along empty lit streets, past silent houses, the only one not spellbound. I walked to the edge of town and climbed stiffly over the stile and dropped knee deep into grass in the big field. The wind was hissing in the trees, almost conversational in its modulation, sibilant in the dry grass. It was a big wind, boisterous, trying to lift me, a hot and dry wind from Africa. I stood facing it and felt it flow over me and caress me and define me with its warm hands, and riffle through my shorts. I walked to the middle of the field. A pinprick of light in the Vale below; a silent headlight sweeping across the silhouetted Down in front of me; and beyond, the faint glow of distant city lights. But here, in the town at my back, everyone was asleep, was under a spell; visions came to them, spirits visited them, messages were left for when they awoke – only I was awake, alone in the world.
I started at a movement; a badger lumbered past me, bear-like, striped, head down, oblivious. Then a straight-tailed fox dabbed light-footedly across the corner of the field, stopped once to look straight at me with impassive eyes, went on. Beneath me a thousand palpitating rabbits slept. I’d believed there was a space ship inside the hill, and I’d seen strange creatures in trees. Just for a short time, when we first came here.
Had those perceptions, the clear eyes and innocent mind of a child, been true, soon overwhelmed by stifling orthodoxy? Or had they been the delusions the mind invents so we can survive in a baffling situation
I took off my shoes. The ground was warm. The huge convex hill was now the shaggy back of an immense, breathing creature. The sky, suddenly cleared of cloud, peppered with stars, was close enough to touch.
I lay on my back, arms by my side. The earth was warm, the grass, beneath me and folding over me, was soft. The wind slid over me in successions of silk. If I just reached up, I could pull the starry sky duvet down onto me. I listened to the wind’s rise and fall, like breathing. For a moment, just a moment, the earth embraced me, took me to itself, the sky draped and protected me. And for a moment, just a moment, my mind emptied and became perfectly clear. Almost immediately consciousness intruded and thoughts filled it up and tasks clamoured for attention; the ground became hard, the grass irritated my face, the noise of the trees rose to a howl, the sky became implacably remote, its light coming from long-dead stars. But for a moment … I shivered and got up quickly and walked home fast, almost running, and felt the walls four-square around me, and plunged into my cosy bed under my safe posters and slept.

Chapter 14

It took a long time, a lot of ingenuity, of make it up as you go along, of frustration, to fit it all together. The Archimedes screw leaned at forty-five degrees, from the spring outlet (which had hardly wet the bottom of the basin) to the top of the cliff. There, because of the one hundred and thirty five degree angle at which they were connected, there was a complication of cogs to transmit the power from the Savonius rotor to the spindle of the screw.
At last it was finished, and I stepped back and looked at it. There it was. Not doing anything. There was a riffle of breeze, the rotor shook, creaked, didn’t turn. And anyway, there was no water. What had I done? I’d built a folly, an absurdity. And I’d turned down Fiona Ferringham, for – this. I’d wasted my summer on – this. Over there, in the collapsing house of joker cards, were a senile lunatic and a sociopathic weirdo.
All this. I’d got myself into all this, just so I could say to my couldn’t-care-less parents – I’ll show you that I don’t need you. I despised them, I despised Woody, I wished I’d never set foot in this garden, I didn’t want to be in this tight, dark, inturned, isolated town that festered like a pimple on the hill. I got on my bike and rode.

Swooping down the hill in daredevil arabesques (finger to the blaring cars); riding straight over ridge after ridge, aiming for the final blue ridge that merged with the sky.
By the time I came to, I was on the broad, open Downs, the sky-filled, air-filled Downs, where the rape shone in yellow geometries, the ripe barley rippled in the wind like silk, the hayfields were shaved cut-outs. A red tractor crawled slantwise, tiny and slow as a bug, across the Down’s smooth flank. Plastic-covered rolls of straw lay like giant roller bearings.

After I’d sat for a while, looking north, away from the town, out to the wide world, I became aware of a change in the weather. There was movement through the thick air, sudden freshnesses, like fresh water in salt. When I turned, I saw, instead of the usual hazy blue, dark clouds, bruise-coloured, dense, low, massed, moving, advancing slowly but unstoppably, darkening the earth. I could already see, in the distance, the curtains of falling rain. There were stabs of lightning, rumbles of thunder. The rising wind whipped miniature tornadoes of dust at the field edges. I set off for home, fast. We were both, the storm and me, heading for the same place. The first fat drops were splatting onto the concrete around me as I skidded my bike into the garage and ran into the house.

Chapter 15

The storm arrived, wrapped itself round the hill, and battered the town with gales of wind, lashings of rain, the slash of lightning, the shake of thunder. In my mind’s eye I saw it engulfing my assemblage, the slanting sweeps of rain film-lit, jags of lightning illuminating its silhouetted form. I saw different things happening, as in sequences of film. Film one: the wind shook the tower, rocked it so braces tore away, nails popped out (close-ups of nails working free); a flying branch tore off the rotor clean as a sabre stroke; the restraining cables snapped, one, two, the tower twisted – three – and flew apart, disappearing in cartwheels out of shot; when the storm subsided, there was nothing there, no evidence of it ever having been there, erased. Film two: the wind heaved at the rotor; it creaked, moved, stopped; more creaking, and then it began to turn, slowly at first (close-up on the cogs, tooth pushing tooth, the spindle turning, everything moving, all of it coming to life, like a Frankenstein creation); the whole assemblage (lit by lightning flashes) spinning smoothly, working with machine perfection. But, to what purpose? What is moving, what is slowly, being revealed …?

I imagined, but I didn’t want to know. I’d done all I could. Now I wanted to leave it to fate. If I was standing at the edge of the future, it had shown me nothing, not a single stepping stone into the blackness. I didn’t want to be there, waiting. I wanted to be here, at home, tonight. The future could wait.

The storm raged. I sat in my room, by the window, in the dark, door ajar to the lit house. Mum was downstairs, being domestic; cooking dinner, phoning family and friends, as if knitting together the unravelling family, checking the large pan of jam bubbling on the stove. Her voice cheery, almost hearty, on the phone (a nervous cheeriness – she flinched at lightning, and thunder made her clasp her chest). The smell of raspberries and sugar boiling. I could picture her washing jars, fretting over setting points (brushing her finger across a dab of jam on a saucer, rippling the skin , sucking it reflectively), turning up the record player as the storm intensified (Mozart Horn Concertos, she pom pomming loudly along), flinching as the rain hit the glass like flung pebbles, and the wind bulged in the closed door.

Dad was in the workshop at the bottom of the garden, separated from the house by the lawn that was turning into a lake. The door was open, the rain swept past. He sat in the light of his anglepoise lamp, surrounded by darkness, chiaroscuro, intent and still, except for his deft fingers as they worked on the intricate bike part fixed in the vice. Suddenly he’d lean out of the light, disappear, as he reached for a tool, then his face would reappear, like a bird flying into light, and he’d settle to his work. Every so often he’d lean back, stretch, rub his eyes beneath his glasses, and stare out through the open door. He looked surprised that the storm was still raging. He seemed to look beyond it, out into the darkness, maybe past the darkness, or just deep into it.

And I sat in my room, witnessing. Years later I saw a painting by Rembrandt called Scholar in a Room with a Winding Staircase. It brought back that evening. On the left there’s the scholar, strongly sidelit from outside the frame, staring down, as if in contemplation, but looking into the picture. On the right there’s a woman working energetically at the fire, looking at the fire but beyond it, out of the picture. Between them there corkscrews upward a spiral staircase. Halfway up the stair, a figure standing, third vertex of an equilateral triangle, almost lost in shadow, uncertain, as if caught at a moment of decision; to descend into the room and become the moving focus of their attention? To turn decisively and climb out of the picture? I stood there for a long time, in the Louvre, contemplating the shadowy figure, considering his possible actions. And then – how strange I hadn’t seen it – I saw the low arched doorway, the wooden door, in the back wall of the room. I felt the inward pressure against it. I said – it was through there that change came; the figure on the stair could have changed nothing. I returned my attention to the figure on the stair, and allowed him simply to be there, not as actor, but as witness. I released him from responsibility. And at that moment I began, retrospectively, to release myself, too, from any role, that night, other than that of silent witness.

Chapter 16

The next morning, as I picked my way uncertainly through the dripping wreckage of vegetation, I didn’t know what I would find. I pushed aside the branches. It was all still standing; but nothing moved. I climbed to the upper basin, stood by the tower. It had worked; the bottom basin was almost empty, the upper brimful. At that, as if in demonstration, a gust of wind turned the rotor and a couple of gouts of water slopped out of the screw. It had worked. But, to what purpose? One step up from a Cargo Cult aeroplane but as (more) futile if I didn’t know how to make use of it. Then I heard my name being called, someone crashing through the vegetation, and Woody appeared, yelling: ‘We’ve done it! We’ve cracked it! you’re a genius! I’m a genius! WE’RE THE GENIUS BROTHERS!’

He arranged himself in the crook of a tree and I pulled out the ground sheet and lay on it, full length, chin in my hands – he was in story-telling mode, and this would take time – as drops dappled onto us and slanting sunrays dried us and lifted wreaths of water vapour in our sudden-jungle.

He began, ‘I was spending all the time I could with Johannes, walking with him, asking him questions, showing him books and pictures, trying to find the escapement from randomness to sequence. A number of times I saw a glimmer of understanding on his face, a deep connection to what he knew – followed each time by fear, a scramble back into unconnected facts. It was understandable – once he acknowledged sequence, he’d have to accept consequence, what’s happened to his life; he would be locked into it, back on the treadmill of his life. Sometimes I was ready just to leave him be, to try and find another way. It seemed too cruel to drag him back. But each time, as well as the fear on his face, there was a look that battled with it. An apology that he couldn’t do it. And with it an appeal, to keep trying, that he wanted to, had to do it. As if he was saying – I know I’m hiding in here, but I’m trapped, too, help me get out.

‘The storm was gathering – after the oppressive stillness, the first flurries of wind. We were in the main room, candles lit. Johannes was getting twitchy. Restless. He’d start to speak then stop, search impatiently through books then stand, fists clenched, in frustration. He’d pace, stop, listen, like a caged animal hearing the sounds of the wild. The wind rose, the rain started, the lightning and thunder approached, arrived, lit the room like a flash bulb popping, vibrated it like a gong. I nearly jumped out of my skin. But he stood there, head on one side, as if listening to a voice only he could hear. Then he went deliberately to a book, opened it on “Examples of Hermae”. His finger followed the words under it, then he closed the book and began to speak. He spoke slowly, carefully, each sentence on, as it were, a separate line.
‘The standing stone, in the pentagram of crosses, was a herma, dedicated to Hermes.
‘Messenger of the gods, patron of travellers.
‘Hermes pushed the caduceus – axis mundi -’ he walked quickly to Botticelli’s “Primavera” and traced it with a finger, ‘up through the cloud of ignorance, seeking direct apprehension.
‘He was a lightning rod.
“Hermes’ fire – corposants – dance prophetically on the masts of ships at sea.
‘As earth light, will o’ the wisp, god of deception, he leads astray the unprepared, loses them in swamps and deserts.’ He shuddered, fear filled his face – but he clenched his fists, stood his ground. The next flash of lightning illuminated his face – it looked like carved granite, craggy and set. He opened a folder, “The Saint-Simonian Utopian Community, Menilmontant, 1832”, read from a poem, “Le Temple”, by Michel Chevalier:
‘ La flêche s’elevait comme une paratonnere;
‘Elle allait, dans les nuages,
‘Chercher la force electrique”.’

‘He seized his staff and said, ‘je vais chercher la force electrique!’ And went outside.
‘Inside was like being in a drum, roof the skin, windows the snares under the flung rain, wind buffeting, wrapping round, pressing in – under pressure, but strangely still. Outside, it was shrieking wild. A terror of elemental forces. The wind blew through the trees with a constant hiss that made my hair stand on end, then rose to a banshee wail that froze my blood – then stopped suddenly, as if a throat had been cut.
‘The trees shook like sinister rattles, thrashed branches like reaching tentacles, unleashed arrows. Impenetrable black split by blinding light. The wind tore the breath from my throat so I felt I was drowning. Debris slid past our feet, threatening to take us away. We were soaked in seconds and the rain beat on us like stones. The earth had turned to ooze, was sucking me down where I stood. Thunder cuffed my head, lightning split it open. And Johannes was walking, imperturbable, oblivious, head into the rain, swinging his staff, walking away from the safe lit doorway, into – it felt like into – the jaws of hell.

‘He walked through the garden to its edge, then through the fence and out into the middle of the open field. And there he stood, arms spread, staff raised. Like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. He was yelling at the storm – not defying the lightning to strike, but demanding it. He’s yelling like King sodding Lear – and I’m gibbering and shivering like the poor bloody Fool, tugging pitifully at his sleeve, terrified of the lightning, not wanting to die. He’s standing there, staring up, rain flowing down his face, dripping off his face, hair hanging in rat’s tails, all attention, senses straining; while I’m pulling at his arm, on the edge of hysteria, pleading,  ‘come on, we must go in, it’s not safe, we must go back, please, let’s go back.’ He closed his eyes. Then he looked down at me, with the softest, most benevolent look I’ve ever received. It was like a shower of Disney stardust. But real. He put his hand, a big hand, on my shoulder, and his warm touch enfolded me. He smiled at me, a look that said – you’re safe with me. And I believed him. Because it was true. I was no longer afraid. 

‘A bolt of lightning struck the tree in the middle of the field. It split it like a giant axe blow – I looked at it this morning. There’s a spiral scar down to the ground. The electricity ran across the field, tingling my feet. He went stiff. He swayed. For a terrible moment I thought he was going to topple, like the struck bull in Apocalypse Now. Instead he softened, became wonderfully mobile, squeezed my shoulder, said ‘got it.’

‘There was no rush as we walked back. The storm raged, but I was in a bubble, protected, an acolyte. He walked straight here, saw all this wonderful stuff you’d done, without surprise, working, as if it’d always been here. Then, from the top basin he began walking, tracing a serpentine path – sometimes moving quickly, with certainty, sometimes stopping, as if awaiting a message, then advancing carefully. He held his staff loosely, as if it was a divining rod. I followed, marking his path down as best I could – scratching with a stone on tree trunks, tying knots in branches, making little piles of stones, sure he wouldn’t recall it again – that wasn’t his job – terrified it’d all be washed away, because he could trace it only once. At last our intricate path brought us to the lower basin.
He said, ‘there’, with a sense of arrival, then headed for the house. 

‘The rain had stopped, the clouds were blowing away, the moon shone on all the wetness, covering everything with silver. At the door he said, ‘go and sleep now. I have work to do.’ As the door was closing, I hurled myself at it, desperate not to be shut out. He let me in, made a bed in the corner of the big room, brought me cocoa. He looked around the room, shook his head, carefully cleared a space at the big table, and started work. His clothes dried on him. I watched him from my snug corner. It was wonderful, not to feel responsible. He would stare into space, refer to books and pictures, check maps, write methodically. Once I woke, suddenly anxious, but he was there, working steadily, with quiet absorption. I was in the presence of a master working. I fell asleep again, safe inside the strange, curved, knowledge-filled room.

‘He was still at the desk when I woke this morning. The air was clear and the birds were singing. I made breakfast, and we ate in silence, me with the energy of one just woken, he like a wound-down clock. Each time I tried to speak, he waved me to silence. At last he pointed to the desk, and went wearily to bed. He’d written it all out neatly, with notes, plans, references. It was all there. It’s all there.’

Chapter 17

I’d expected Johannes to collapse back, as he’d done before, his energy the flare of a burning sheet of paper. That we would, again, have to carry it forward.
But when we entered the big room later that day, He was working calmly, methodically. Already he had cleared part of the room, files and books sorted and placed. Already there was, instead of a surrendered dissolving into chaos, a sense now of incipient meaning, a rising order. Instead of stagnation, there was energy flowing. And Johannes, examining each book and paper carefully, sometimes with a grin and shake of his head, as if recalling the first time he’d seen it, as if locating it in the scheme of things in his mind’s eye – an old scheme he was recovering? A new scheme that was only now coming into being, whose time had come, was now …? – was calmly focused in a way I’d never seen before. Gone the sudden brilliances. Gone the relapses into inertness. Now he burned with a steady flame, as if he had tapped into a fuel source. Instantly I felt myself relaxing, the weight taken from our shoulders, being carried, now, by him. He turned, hearing us enter, his face lit up and he came quickly over, arms outstretched, saying, ‘my helpers, my guides who led me while I was blind. And now, although still dimly, I see our way towards the consummation.’ This is what he told us.

The tribe, having ceased to follow the natural flow of energy and life in the landscape by settling, and having thus expelled themselves from the Garden, attempts to reconstruct a facsimile of the Garden, a model paradise. Having ceased to journey, but having been conditioned by journeying, the settled tribe must create a cosmology in one place that recalls their journey. And now that movement (of the tribe) is replaced by change (visited upon the tribe), it needs a contract of foundation with the gods in which the group is allowed the conditional use of the land, in return for duties and observances. Now more than ever at the mercy of the elements, the settled group seeks to improve its security by increasing its control of the elements.

‘Now, let me relate all this to the spiritual history of Shaftesbury, and the work we are doing here.’ He sat before us, hunched, concentrated, his grey hair pushed behind his ears, the dome of his forehead shining, his face deeply lined, his lips fleshy, his eyes, behind old-fashioned glasses, alternately fading out of focus as if he was looking into, studying, some imagined place, and becoming sharp as diamonds as he looked at us, raising his eyebrows and nodding us into agreement. I felt in the presence of an energy and certainty that bowled me along. Years later I saw a Renaissance fountain in a garden in Rome, with a satyr, maybe Silenus himself, gushing water – a twisting braid, a rushing certainty, glittering in the sun with rainbow drops; it reminded me of Johannes that day, with the sun shining diagonally down from the high window. 

‘The standing stone, the herma, at the top of the hill, would fix the earth spirit, to keep it from its natural wandering, that the tribe would once have followed but can no longer. The image in the tradition is of the serpent’s head being pinned – it’s come down to us most obviously as St George and the dragon. The stone focusses the earth energy, draws it up to the surface, connects it to the solar energy. It also links it to the wider pattern of earth energy manipulation – Shaftesbury is on the Bridport to Stonehenge ley line. And perhaps the five Market crosses of the town, recorded in the Middle Ages, were successors of a pentacle of surrounding stones which would further amplify the power. For the pentacle by tradition has the significance and perfection of the circle, and the power to bind evil powers and bring good fortune. Interestingly, there is today a five-sided house near the top of Gold Hill, perhaps an echo of that pentagon of power. Thus would the new solar religion, of the Age of Taurus, the age of megaliths, seek to control and manipulate the earth spirit of Hermes, or Mercurius.

‘However, the earth spirit has not one, but two aspects. In Chinese feng shui they’re called the Green Dragon and the White Tiger. And dowsing on the St Michael line – the Great Ley line that crosses England from St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall to near Lowestoft – has shown there to be not one but two currents of energy, of opposite polarities, spiralling around the line; they’ve been named the Michael and Mary currents. The image, of two intertwining energy currents, is caught perfectly in Hermes’ herald’s wand, the caduceus, in which the wand represents the axis mundi, the intertwined snakes the masculine and feminine powers. A form echoed in the double helix of DNA. So, if the stone marks the line of the Green Dragon energy – where is the White Tiger energy line? It’s what we’ve been searching for, can now begin to work with.

‘It came to the surface here, at the spring in this garden. It would have been a place sacred to the tribe’s ruling deity, for springs are sacred places, and would have been watched over by a hermit – the Hermes connection again – a locale in the reconstructed Garden, the point of origin on the ceremonial path that would have been walked each year to echo the tribe’s migratory path, as commemoration of its wandering days. The hermit – a guide for lost travellers, both physically and spiritually – would have lived in a round hut on a square base; for squaring the circle symbolises the union of heaven and earth. He would have passed his time in study and contemplation, living on gifts from the community. Acolytes would have come to him for teaching, initiations would have taken place here. There may well have been a subterranean place in which, through sensory deprivation, the aspirant sloughs off the contingent, comes face to face with his essence. There are reported to be tunnels under the hill, here.’ Woody, rapt, nodded. 

‘Each year, on the tribe’s most sacred day, the day on which the spirit of this place was most active, water from the spring, the water of life, would be carried along the complex generative path that echoed on a small scale, within the confines of the settlement, the tribes’s former migratory route across the region – it was that route that I was trying to draw in the dust that day – up the hill, as a libation for the standing stone. What an vision!  – the water of life brought to the hill’s dry summit. Imagine the dancing, the singing, the celebration! Thus would the sinuous yin White Tiger energy intertwine and balance and amplify the yang Green Dragon energy located by the great standing stone, both fixer of the earth energy and connector to the sky energy. Incidentally, “feng shui” means “wind water” – and up there the lowland spring was united with the windswept Downs.

‘Each era has its own way of performing practices that link with tradition, with origin, with soul buried in the deep past. So, in Christian times, there was a monk’s cell here. Probably a monk would come here on retreat as he prepared himself for the next stage of enlightenment – water, in the Christian tradition, is associated with purification, renewal and baptism. And of course there was a famous Abbey at Shaftesbury.’

‘But the Abbey here was a nunnery,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘but there were several monasteries nearby. Possibly, even, the monk came from Glastonbury – Shaftesbury and Glastonbury are linked in an ancient saying: “if the Abbot of Glaston marries the Abbess of Shaston, their Children shall have more abundant wealth than the King of England”. Maybe that expressed a spiritual as well as a material truth; the monk was the spot of yang in the centre of the yin in the ta ki symbol. Whatever, the Abbey here was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and there’s a traditional association of Hermes, as Mercurius, with the Virgin. Fountains or living springs represent St Mary, who is also water as the womb of creation. In Catholic countries springs are often decorated and celebrations held on the day of the Assumption. Perhaps on that day [15 Aug] the monk, caretaker of the spring for the rest of the year, absented himself and the nuns, after prayers at the spring, carried water up to the Abbey – a procession more decorous but no less fervent than in pagan days. In Christian theology it could represent the climb up Mount Purgatory to the earthly Paradise; glimpsing at last through the forest of pillars of their soaring Abbey in the light streaming in through the gorgeous stained glass. The possibility of Paradise itself, as the water was poured, not as libation on a standing stone, but into the stone font. Need I add that “font” comes from the Latin word for “spring”?’ He smiled. His eyes were clear and blue; he was seeing all this as he spoke of it; and he was enjoying this clear vision.

‘And then came the influence from the East.  From contact made during the Crusades. Maybe by Templars, who were active locally. There’s a stone found near, possibly from the Abbey, that has carved on it a pattern found only in the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. And then, of course, there’s the Byzant. The priest cell rebuilt, possibly as a Templar house, certainly its shape and function influenced by alchemical thought. One of our number had a vision of Ramon Lull, the Spanish mystic; and one of our aims was to reconstruct Lull’s Ars magna here, in this place, as a physical memory system,’ His hand swept around the room, Woody’s eyes bugged out and swivelled, straining to see. ‘And later, the big house was built as a larger scale expression of neoplatonist Renaissance ideas. Dee and Fludd worked there. It was respectable in Tudor times – Queen Elizabeth chose her coronation day because Dee found it astrologically auspicious. There was a time, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when such ideas were a serious rival to the Baconian scientific view of the world. It was driven underground by Cartesian rationalism, the second Fall, the fall of the fallen, the division of mind from matter, reductionist abstraction that’s driving our society to destruction. Unless that thin deep stream, driven underground, watched over with such care by the few, can once more restore spirit to the material world.’ He paused, staring at a vision, before recalling himself,

‘But what happened above ground? The Byzant ceremony, an expression of that first need to walk the journey, to celebrate the spirit energy, to bring the water of life to the centre of the community. The forms change with each age – what’s important is to be aware of the essence, the eternal. What can you tell me about the Byzant?’

‘It’s that weird looking thing, like a giant gold mace, in the museum. It used to be carried in a procession,’ I said.

‘Right. First of all, it’s a relic of a water ceremony. An ancient water ceremony – in 1518 it was already described as having taken place “time out of remembrance and mynde” – in other words, for longer than anyone could remember. Through time, as the population on the hill had grown, and maybe with a falling water-table – as a result of agricultural practice and climate change – the water supply in the town became a problem. There were springs all around the foot of the hill, and there grew up a regular trade in water-carrying.
‘But the springs in Enmore Green were in the demesne of Gillingham, a royal possession. In order to give thanks for the use of that water, and as symbolic payment for it, on a date in May the residents of Shaftesbury,  shall,’ he read from a piece of paper, ‘“shall come down into Enmore Green, at one of the clocke at afternoon, with their mynstralls and myrth of game; and from one of the clock to two, there shall they dance: and the mayor of Shaston shall see the Queen’s bayliffe have a penny loaf, a gallon of ale. and a calf’s head, with a pair of gloves, to see the order of the dance that day; and if the dance fail that day, and the queen’s bayliffe have not his duty, then the said bayliffe and his men shall stop the water of the wells of Enmore from the borough of Shaston”. Why such a ceremony? Why such emphasis on dancing, on the symbolic gifts of food and drink, on the importance of the ceremony being performed each year? Clearly, it’s a fertility ceremony. And one that, I’m sure, goes back to the earliest days of settlement – it was an echo of the annual renewal of the original covenant between the tribe and the gods; it was that age’s version of it. The dancing raised the White Tiger energy; the procession followed the White Tiger line, connecting the spring with the centre of the settlement, where the herm once stood. One path up is still called Tout Hill – a name that derives from Thoth, the Egyptian Hermes. Another was Gold Hill. Which brings us back to the Byzant itself.

‘Byzant has these meanings: it is a gold coin from Byzantium; it is the gold token that someone has been on pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and it is the King’s gold offering at the Sacrament or a Festival. Note the Eastern connection, the gold connection, the royal connection. It is the town’s totem, the symbol of its power: it is gold, the Byzant itself, decorated with peacock feathers, a solar symbol, and was decorated, each Byzant day,  with borrowed gold plate to the value, even in the seventeenth century, of £2000; it has at the top a pine cone, symbol of fecundity and good fortune. In shape it is reminiscent of Hermes’ caduceus – especially when you bear in mind that originally the intertwining snakes on the caduceus were ribbons, as on the Byzant. And the journey of the Byzant connected the king’s domain in Enmore with the king’s gift on the hill – for it was King Alfred who founded the Abbey, for his daughter as Abbess. And it echoed the people’s original nomadic journey, and it commemorated the covenant of the people with the place, and it annually energised the male and female energy lines, and their union.’ He paused. It was a lot to take in. Then continued,
‘So – where is the Byzant today?’
‘In the museum.’
‘And does the Byzant ceremony take place?’
‘No.’
‘The Byzant is insulated in a glass case in the museum, its power unrenewed each year, the energising ceremony long discontinued. Do you know when that happened?’
‘No.’
‘In 1820, the Grosvenors, wealthy London property owners, bought Shaftesbury, as a pocket borough, to control the town’s two seats in Parliament. They also bought land to the north, and thus became Lords of the manor including Enmore.
‘In 1825 they built the Town Hall. They built it in the market square, at the energy centre of the town, where the herm once stood. The energy was no longer pinned – now it was blocked. And in 1830, the Byzant ceremony was discontinued – with “the consent of the Lord of the Manor” – ie, Lord Grosvenor. The reason given was “to save money on feasting and drinking”. Whether a deliberate act to repress the old ways, the old powers, or merely the rational actions of the coming men of business; in the space of a few years, the livingness of the two great energy lines of the town were disempowered.
‘It was our role in the 70’s – and will be yours and my role now – to begin the re-empowering of the dragon and tiger lines.’

He stopped. He pushed up his glasses, squeezed his eyes, remained for a minute with eyes closed, as if calling up reserves of energy. Then he smiled at us, and resumed:
‘Man’s vision is limitless. But in order to make sense of, function in the world, it must be limited, filtered, structured. The filter, the structure, is determined by the culture. Culture decides what we see and don’t see, sense and don’t sense, by the simple technique of the Emperor’s new clothes.
‘The first great change, the first strong filter, was self-consciousness, the sense of the self as separate from the environment. It enabled man to begin to control his environment through direct action.
‘The second great change, the second strong filter, was the separation of spirit and matter. It enabled man to create his own environment through the application of objective science to technology. That filter made the spirit world optional. Men could say  “god is dead”.
‘In the 1960’s came rapidly accelerating movements, diverse streams, that sought to re-integrate the spirit, the universal life force, into the material world – a manifestation of the changing consciousness among the sensitive as the Pisces – Aquarius transition approached. That’s at the root of the “Aquarian Conspiracy”.
‘So the acupuncturist relates the body’s meridians to the earth’s dragon lines; the yoga teacher can equate the spine and ida and pinyala energy channels with the wand and twined serpents of the caduceus; the dowser uses his skill to trace energy lines; the Gaia theorists and the organic growers begin to understand the subtle energies that activate life on earth.
‘Workers in various fields dedicated themselves to strengthening both the spirit energy and our awareness of it. Through tai chi, yoga, meditation, by organic cultivation, by walking the lines, by prayers and dedications at sacred sites, by working to unblock energy flows. That last was our work here.
‘Efforts to restart the Byzant ceremony have always petered out because, without the ceremony, the energy levels were low. What we needed was to raise the energy level. We needed an energiser, a starter motor, a battery, to accumulate energy, to get it circulating, so it could touch people, influence their actions, give them the strength to work to re-establish the energy flow through the life, the very fabric of Shaftesbury.
We came up with the idea of a self-sustaining circulation of water, at the sacred source, a small scale simulacrum of the white tiger path. We started it. But I … fell ill. The others gradually left.
‘All these years it might have been working, building a reserve of energy…

‘But now you’ve repaired the pump, I’ve rediscovered its path through the garden. Now we can open that channel, complete the circuit, recommence the flow. The water must be flowing by September 15th. We must do it.’

Chapter 18

It spun in my head, set it spinning, this explanation, this unfolding of an alternative history – a what might have been, maybe a what should have been, instead of the inevitability of history as we’d learned it. And it thrilled me that I was part of it. I was fired up, hot, ready to forget school, do whatever he said we had to do. I was in Blues Brothers territory – I was on a Mission from Johannes.
School started the next day, the first day of the Sixth Form. And it started without me. I led a secret, alternative life. Each morning I left the house at the usual time, returned as normal, grunted my usual monosyllabic responses to eager parental questions. But in between… sped heart singing down to Johannes’, delighting in the separation of appearance and reality, the doling back to them of my parents’ hypocrisy, their choice of having multiple lives, of changing the rules. Pulling off my school uniform as I cycled, Superman on a bike. 

Woody had managed to mark roughly the line of the water channel connecting the upper and lower basins that stormy night. But we still needed Johannes to locate it precisely for us.
We hacked, we cut, we dug; we were the navvies on the mystical canal. Johannes our surveyor. Sometimes he was as calmly scientific, with his pendulum and Chinese compass, as Telford. Sometimes, with his sudden trances, as intuitive as Blind Metcalf. He walked the line as if it was a slender thread over a bottomless drop. Which we realised, for him, it was. it was all or nothing. When he’d marked a section, he’d disappear into the shed, and soon we’d hear tapping, and we’d set to, clearing and digging.

With the autumn, the new term – dad always said that from long habit of education, he always associated autumn with new beginnings – dad became even more restless, active, rattled.
He walked the rampart, pressing ever harder against the invisible Zardoz barrier. He’d stop and stare out – sometimes as if nerving himself to break out, sometimes as if surveying the horizon – For attackers? For rescuers?
In his room he seemed to be going through his life, experience by experience. As if seeking a pattern. As if searching back for a connection from which he could once more move forward. Black and white photographs of women appeared briefly, successively on his wall. A laughing girl holding a snowball, arm back, ready to throw. Half a booth photo, bouffant hair and pale lips, looking anxious and determined. Long hair and a big-eyed look through a fringe. Then a bleached out, arty photo of an amazing looking woman – halo of curls, face flat white, big, black-lined eyes you fell into. I Imagined each of them as my mother, testing each. (Never thinking of me not being, or being different, just having a different mother.) A row of diaries appeared, dated from 1963 to 1973, then “June 1989 to            ”.

With mum, it was if the further she went away, the more she needed to return, however briefly. As if there was some touchstone she needed to return to, something she still hadn’t found, or resolved; or maybe, like a stone on a string being whirled, gaining momentum, until the moment came to let herself go. 

But I was guessing. Both their lives were mysteries, had become unreal, and I was disconnected from them.
I came home each evening, beat, to an unreal world. I slept in a stranger’s bed. School was a place in a dream. (I’d forged a letter from dad to the school, and written to Mark, saying I’d had to go away to recuperate from glandular fever. Astonishingly, in the ten days before the fifteenth, I met no-one I knew. As if I’d stepped through into another dimension.
I had my own reality. A real family. People I could trust.
And a world that had narrowed and concentrated to the thin line I was inching along with such effort, discovering, creating, making apparent, my attention focussed centimetres in front of my feet, working to my limit, nothing extraneous, no perspective, a life of necessity.
A life in which, I realised later, when it was past, I felt in an absolute way, that I never did before. And never have since (quite). I was doing what I had to do, I was acting without choice, I was living a life of necessity. I which I was strangely free.
Things happen when you’re young, that you take for granted. You’ve no measure of how special they are. You think anything can be repeated, other things will happen even better, the really interesting stuff’s all in the future etc. But when they’re gone, those special times, you remember them, some of them with an ache that never goes away. A moment. A person. Or, in my case, a period of time. Measured in days but immeasurable. When I was making that narrow, shallow channel, when I was walking that line, there was no distraction, no deviation. The work (and, yes, I can call it The Work) filled my world, my life, I was the work. Mediaeval monks, before the invention of perspective, spoke of “dwelling in the face of God”. I dwelt in the face of the work.

I remember feelings, moods. Facing each day, stiff and cold, the meaningless and the impenetrable, heart heavy at the impossibility of finding a way through, looking  back at the work we’d done, the channel we’d cleared, with longing for its clarity, and not wanting to go on, wanting only to go back, wishing each day for a voice to say – it’s okay, you can go back – every day. Brambles like barbed wire all day, and fantasies of torture. A boggy place oozing and stinking and sucking me down, closing over my head, my last unheard cry followed by a final in-breath of choking mud. Johannes’ tapping, like a galley drum. But then sudden lightnesses, weightlessnesses, euphorias that had me singing at the top of my face, ecstatic. Working quite alone, in an alien world without meaning, my limbs tools that I controlled but didn’t feel, my eyes cameras, feeling nothing, lost and alone. My limbs and my heart and my lungs, the tools I used, the vegetation I cut through,the earth I dug out, part of one common endeavour, cooperating in single purpose, aspects of the same thought, the same breathing, I was every flickering butterfly, fleeting bird, moving cloud, the path opening before me like arms in sweet embrace. Working, just working, doing a job, knowing what I was doing, handling the tools, practical. Impossible to describe. We cut the channel neatly, lined it with stone as we went. When we reached the lower pool, on 14th Sept, having wished each day for it to end, I didn’t want it to end. And in fact it didn’t.

Chapter 19

I expected Johannes to open the sluice at the upper pool, connect the Savonius rotor, set it all going. Instead, without a thank you, a word of praise or celebration, he walked up to the top pool, along the winding channel, round to the bottom pool, up to the top pool… Seven times, we must walk it, he said. Seven times seven. He led, chanting.
Woody was behind me, muttering. I was in between them, stumbling along, tired – not tired, exhausted. Beyond exhaustion, wiped out, not knowing what I was doing, unable to go on, not able to stop, link in a chain between certain energy and anxious energy, parenthesised, loving one and hating the other, hating one and loving the other, hating both with spitting rage, loving them both with dissolving tears. And then entirely indifferent. Watching a back, feeling a hand, following my alien feet, and within me a cloudy emptiness, pearly and ungraspable. Buddha: I learned nothing from perfect being; that was why it was perfect being. I’m not saying I was there, but I was near enough to know what he was talking about.
When at last Johannes stopped, I blundered into him, my legs unwilling to stop. I was still, but everything was going round, circling me, me the still centre. I watched it all go round, with the exaggerated concentration of a stage drunk, at the centre of a fairground roundabout, my hand on the shoulder of the man whose hand is on the lever. That’s how close I was.
The channel was lined with white stones. I tried to imagine what shape it took, that sinuous white line (as, years later, stood in the middle of the Uffington white horse, I tried to imagine its shape). I began to see things.

It was evening. The sky was blue and the sun was red. Everything was very still. Johannes climbed up to the top pool.
He said: ‘we dedicate this work to the wandering spirit of Hermes; may he see it and feel it and be drawn to it, so that his energy may return.’
The light of the setting sun flowed across the sky, like dye in water, illuminating rose pink the high ice clouds.
He opened the sluice.
I listened to the water begin to trickle, run, followed in my mind its serpentine flow, turned to see it appear, twisting in infinite braids, flowing over the white stones. The sky was red and everything turned red and the water became a flow of glittering rubies. It entered the lower pool, pouring red. There was a puff of wind. He engaged the rotor which cranked slowly round, the screw turning, the water being drawn up from the spring and pulsing from the pipes’s mouth, water into water. The circuit was made.
As the tribe had once travelled, and the celebrants had once walked, now the water flowed. The sun set. I felt a hand laid, oh so gently, on my shoulder. I leaned into him.

It is said that the heart chakra has twelve golden glowing petals and is the place of higher consciousness and unconditional love. I looked down to find my bruised, work-worn, newly-strong hands pressed to my heart.

Chapter 20

I could have stood there forever, within the sheltering hand, as night gathered and the stars came out, the wind pump creaked and the water flowed. But I found myself guided towards the house.
At the door the hand lifted. He was gone. I felt, like cold water poured from a jug, solitude pour over me, touch every surface of me, define me, at once exhilarating and terrifying.
Johannes went in, And Woody. The door closed in my face.

Oak and nails and heavy wrought fittings. I stared at the pitted iron of the knocker. An uprush of familiar feelings – failure, exclusion, rejection, not having been chosen.
(Always waiting, hoping, expecting, to be picked out, to be chosen: the quiet, unassuming one – they must see my special radiance; the limousine stops, the voice from the cigar smoke, “that’s him, there’s our new sensation”; the searching monks arrive late at night, there’s low conversation at the door that I can’t, quite, hear, I’m quietly led out; walking alone on holiday, alone on a rock, all my being saying, ‘now – choose me, NOW’).
Part of me wanted to walk away, reject the rejection, return to the old, find something new.
But a lot had happened this summer: more of me wanted to stay, to go through with what we’d begun, to go forward. I stood, nose an inch from the wood. I would stand until I got my way. I would stand until everything had dissolved except my irreducible will. It was my right. I stood. And stood.
Then I had an idea. I reached out my hand, pushed – the door swung open.
I stepped out of something, left something outside, and entered.

Chapter 21

Dark corridor, and at the end of it, framed by an arched doorway, as I walked towards it, dazzling light, white, creamy, flickering, dense, opaque. And yet weightless, empty, to dive into, to swim through, as I approached. Shimmering alien light, and a fuzzy alien form beckoning me.

I entered the cave-like room, filled now with the tremendous illumination of dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of dancing, flickering, blooming candles. With a spiral of music perpetually rising. The air dizzy-making with the smoke and the candle heat and the oxygen depletion and the smells of melted wax and incense. The walls newly lined with a pattern of books and images on the edge of making some tremendous sense ..
I had no time to study it as Johannes led me, light-headed, to my place. At one centre of a ta ki, Woody at the other, between the two centres a complex, involuted familiar labyrinthine path. Johannes in front of us.

I stood and waited.
You may have read Woody’s account of that evening. It is one of the most popular of his writings. A very different account to mine. This is what I experienced.
The Shepherd’s tone spiralled up, other music wrapped around it, choral, modal, each voice separate, the sounds combining inside me, Johannes chanting, toning, all rising in crescendos then falling away but each time higher, more intense, brighter.
Drowsy in the candle heat, losing myself in the density of their light – then seeing each individual candle flame, ascending, aspiring, lifting, taking upward the weight of the candle so the whole mass was floating, weightless and brilliant, a cloud of light.
I’m riding on the music, sliding into the light, spinning directionless, tumbling helplessly … I see a triangle, a delta. I fix on it. I’m focussed. The triangle is a flying eagle. The triangle is an arrowhead. The triangle is a bow.
I’m standing on the open expanse of Castle Hill, the green landscape below me stretching to the horizon, the sky clear blue, the breeze rippling around me, sounding in trees and grass, the sun directly overhead. The eagle is flying towards me on powerful wings. I nock the arrow, draw the bow to its limit, aim straight up, at the sun.
If I miss, the arrow will rise to its highest point, tip over, plummet straight down, impale me to the ground. Success or death.
As the eagle crosses the sun, I’m blinded, I can suddenly see, I release.
I travel in the arrow head. It travels only with the original intention; the eagle can choose.
It receives the arrow head. They are one.
I am in the eagle, seeing the ground through eagle’s eyes, transformed.
I am on the ground, staring up, paralysed as the eagle stoops down at me, eyes venomous yellow, cruel beak open, tongue hissing, talons aimed at my heart, wings at first swept back for speed then spreading to block everything out the moment before it strikes.
It hits me like a punch in the chest and I fall to the ground.
Simultaneously Woody staggers back, covering his eyes. And Johannes throws wide his arms, cries out, and crumples to the floor.

Silence, apart from the crackling of the candles.
Stillness, except for the flickering of their flames.
I lay there, checking myself over. There were red marks on my chest that faded quickly. I felt okay, climbed slowly to my feet. Woody was standing, swaying, like a boxer who’s been punched to unconsciousness, won’t go down, shaking his senses back into place. We looked at each other, something different in our eyes that soon faded, inwards, but touched, we touched.
Johannes lay crumpled where he’d fallen. We waited for him to get up, put his arms around us, tell us what to do next. But he didn’t move. Woody crouched by him, put his cheek to his mouth, felt for his pulse, turned to me and said, ‘he’s dead.’

Chapter 22

I had seen one dead person before. My grandfather, my father’s father. He’d died when I was twelve, and there’d been much discussion between mum and dad as to whether I should go and view the body. As usual when they couldn’t decide, they discussed it endlessly between themselves, excluding me, and then left it to me, entirely uninformed, to make the decision. I said ‘yes’, because I’d never seen a dead person.

The first shock – seeing him in the “Chapel of Rest” (a place like a lock-up garage cheaply done up with a few synthetic drapes and electric candles and artificial flowers and funereal muzak, a place of artificial piety that made it hard to think or feel deeply), lightly made-up, the shape of his face changed, (I suppose by inexpert attempts to impose serenity on a face twisted by painful death, and to make up for the teeth in the glass by the bed) so he looked like a Tussaud’s waxwork, correct in detail but shockingly unlike him overall – was that I couldn’t convince myself he was dead. I kept expecting him to grab me suddenly, in that daft, frightening way old men have with little kids and laugh heartily; or touch me slyly on the wrist and wink conspiratorially. (As we drove home afterwards, I could see him in my imagination climbing out of the coffin, brushing himself down and saying, ‘how did I do?’)
The second shock was that he looked like someone else. It wasn’t the effect of the cosmetic work – I looked long enough to see past that, to see him. Gone was the crabbed, bleared, mean, disillusioned old man; here was a noble face, lined and tired, but steadfast and achieved. My grandfather had lived and died a disappointed man; this was the face of a life well lived. Was it the face of the life he’d dreamed of living, a parallel life that he imagined living at the same time as he was living his actual life, that could somehow now reveal itself? Or was it the face of the life he might have lived, if he’d had the chance, if he’d given himself the chance? Whatever, it affected me deeply; sat in the back of the car on the way home, behind my parents’ ageing heads, I vowed there and then that I would only live one life, my real one.

You see? even now, all these years later, I can’t go straight on, I have to go for a walk, come accompanied to confront again that moment. With my grandfather, it was all sorted, I could stand aside and comment. With this, we had nothing. We had to face the unknown, act without reference. With my grandfather, I’d seen something new. With Johannes, there was only absence. He’d gone. There was nothing there, just a corpse, and emptiness. A cracking asunder.
The moment before there’d been the three of us, together, not just in the past and the present, but in the future too.
Now – his body slumped, on his face a mixed expression, of joy, surprise, realisation, shock; as if control of his face had left him just at the moment before he could compose it – from what he was seeing now: the candle-lit room, his acolytes, the work done – to what he suddenly saw coming at him: as the edge of the light-filled world rushed towards him, passed under him, and he fell off, into the black void. He was gone. 

Any calm lasted only for seconds. Then terror and panic took over:
‘What do we do? What do we DO!’
‘How do we explain this?’
‘Who to?’
‘They’ll put me away.’
‘What will I tell my parents?’

At first we reverted to being terrified kids,waiting for the grown-ups to come back, dreading it, wishing for it, wanting authority to take over, wanting its certainty because it took responsibility, which would allow us to slip out from under that responsibility.
But the eagle was in me. Johannes would have wanted us to keep in control. Not to do so would be a betrayal. What we’d been doing with him hadn’t suddenly ended. This was part of it. We couldn’t stop now. We had to go on, conclude, complete.

‘We must bury him,’ I said.
‘Are you crazy? If they find out…’ Woody was panicking. I’d never realised how much his contempt for authority stemmed from a fear of it, how strong was his desire, his need, for invisibility. Also, once they started investigating his life, his place, heaven knows what illegalities they’d uncover. And the total power they’d have over him. It was easy for squeaky-clean me; but he was an outlaw who couldn’t risk being taken. And behind that, unknown to me, was the process he was part of, that was unfolding, that mustn’t be impeded.
’We must,’ I said definitely. ‘He needs – time.’ I didn’t know why I said that, or even what it meant, but I felt it. That he needed peace and quiet and stillness, in the garden.

We got the tools. We found a place within the circling waters.
It was a still night, cool now, with a gibbous moon that looked like a teardrop.
Every sound we made seemed to be amplified by the stillness. Having acted oblivious to the outside world for so long, we now felt as if it was pressing all around us, peering in, listening, noting, deciding when to move in on us.

‘I’ll dig. You – ’ He gestured to the house. Before I could speak he sank the pickaxe in, landing each blow with focussed ferocity.

I went back to where we’d layed Johannes out on the bathroom floor. I’d read they used to wash a body with vinegar. I did what I could. I’d also read that they scrubbed a body, but I couldn’t do that – his loose skin felt so fragile and paper thin I feared a brush would tear it from his bones.
As I worked on the bathroom floor, turning his inert, bag-of-bones body, his arms flailing and striking iron pipes, his head snapping back, I winced and apologised, I got angry with his stupid out-of-control body, with him for having run out on us, abandoned his body, told him I knew it wasn’t so, that I could only do what I could do.
I remembered him in the bathroom that first time, his bony knees sticking up out of the suds as he scrubbed his back with the long-handled brush and sang Blake songs.
Now there was silence and the slap of helpless flesh and my tears splashing down on him as I worked, and me swearing at him for leaving us now, after we’d done so much, when we’d done everything he asked, and often before he knew, and now he was gone and we didn’t know what to do, and apologising and despairing and wishing for it, please, to end soon.
And yet, those minutes alone together, that intimacy, they’re precious to me.

Lying there, on a linen sheet I found, with a smaller piece of linen round his loins, hair combed and beard straightened, I thought – he looks like Jesus. And cried some more.
At last the tears ended. I sat looking at him. I scanned his face for meaning. Was it calm, wise, stoic, tragic? It had settled into inscrutability. There was no final message.

Chapter 23

We struggled him out to the grave. I was shocked at how unwieldy and heavy a corpse was, as if its one desire was to embrace gravity, the centre of the earth.
Woody suggested we use the wheelbarrow, and I began laughing, at first suppressed then openly, shrilly, falling to my knees in helplessness, kept going ‘woo, woo!’ waving my hands through clouds of smoke, as I remembered The Ladykillers. Hysteria, I suppose. When I stopped, I felt calmer, and sadder.

We laid him in the grave. His body settled as if sinking back into the earth from which it had come. We stood awkwardly, holding flickering candles. The rotor had stopped, and it was very still. The only sound was the last trickling of water.
We crossed his hands across his heart and strewed what flowers we could find over him. I wanted to kiss his lips, but didn’t dare. I still feel the absence of that kiss.
Woody had found a volume of The Upanishads and read this, his voice at first quiet and hesitant, then growing stronger, as if sure of the truth of the words. Halfway through, a silent white owl flew past.

“He is becoming one, he does not see, they say; 
he is becoming one, he does not smell, they say; 
he is becoming one, he does not hear, they say; 
he is becoming one, he does not touch, they say; 
he is becoming one, he does not know, they say. 

‘The point of his heart becomes lighted up and by that light the self departs either through the eye or through the head or through other apertures of the body
 
And when he thus departs, life departs after him. 

And when life thus departs, all the vital breaths depart after him.
He becomes one with intelligence.
What has intelligence departs with him.
His knowledge and his work take hold of him as also his past experience.

‘Truly, when a person departs from this world, he goes to the air.
It opens there for him like the hole of a chariot wheel.
Through that he goes upwards.
He goes to the sun.
It opens there for him like the hole of a lambara . 

Through that he goes upwards.
He reaches the moon.
It opens out there for him like the hole of a drum. 
Through that he goes upwards.
He goes to the world free from grief, free from snow.
There he dwells eternal years.”

We stood for a moment, holding hands. Then, with great reluctance, for we didn’t know what we’d do without him, we wrapped the sheet across him, and filled in the grave. We took the tools back, cleaned them, and hung them up.

In the room, as I was blowing out the candles that were still burning, I saw a shape at the back, a figure carved from the same stone as the beautiful girl I’d fallen in love with at the beginning of the summer, and the satyr and woman-figures that we, the old man and I, had broken. It was a strange figure, neither male nor female.
‘It’s the androgyne,’ Woody said. ‘It represents the union of the male and female forces, the passing beyond this and that, the attainment of wholeness, oneness. It is the purpose and end of our endeavour. I have to go.’

We embraced, and fled in opposite directions. 

I returned to the strange familiarity and comfort of home. In my sick bed, I imagined Woody striding the bare Downs, heading I knew not where, dogged in his determination, set in his defiance. And then I fell into a troubled, dream-dense sleep.

Chapter 24

For two days I was feverish, almost delirious, bursting with dreams – of lights, UFOs, endless staircases, sudden passions, perfect beach days, being adrift in space, endlessly turning. On the third day I awoke feeling empty and flat, as if everything had been rollered out of me.

I ached with a sense of loss. But also a sense of having found something. The feelings, separate but running across each other, were new and raw, with no object to fix on, but suffusing my being. I lay there, enervated and sore, until the evening. Then I told my parents I was going for a walk, alone. They prepared to protest, then saw the look on my face and nodded and stepped aside.

It took me a long time to reach Johannes’ place, I walked like an old man. There was noise, lights, voices. I crept towards them.

White vans and cars, orange lamps and blue lamps ticking round, throwing their lurid light, a generator humming, the grave spot lit as if for a film, men in black digging. I was glad he’d had those days, of peace and quiet and, hopefully, of transition, lying quiet in his linen wrap. I missed him dreadfully. I hoped he was in “a world free from grief, free from snow”. And that he would dwell there “eternal years”. And I hoped that transition had happened before the heavy hands, the squawking radios, the too-loud voices, the vinyl body-bag, the refrigerated mortuary, the pathologist’s clinical examination and seen-it-all monotone into the microphone – “white male, age approximately sixty-five years, emaciation consonant with prolonged self-neglect, no external signs of violence. I am now opening the body cavity…” sound like a zip.

I stayed there until they had lifted him out and put him in the ambulance and driven away with him, a silent, unseen witness. Then I went home.

I waited for the call, for the murmuring voices downstairs and the concerned parent face round the door – ‘there’s a policeman here to see you …’ I prepared a story that told the truth while excluding Woody entirely. But no-one came. At first I waited. Then I stopped waiting. I lay in bed, dozing, reading old comics, old books – Bagpuss, the Moomins, Thomas the Tank Engine. I spent a lot of time just staring round my room, at all the posters I’d stuck up, the objects I’d collected. It was all here, my life to date.
But not to date. To a few months ago. But now seeming unreal and weirdly remote. While my life in the here and now was stark and raw. And the future was an enormous storm cloud. I did jigsaw puzzles. I had a candle burning all the time – I would wake in the dark and be grateful for its persistence and admire its soft flame.

Mum and dad took turns nursing me, bringing me ice cream, magazines, fruit salad, rice pudding, library books, tomato soup, being with me when I wanted, making themselves available. They asked no questions (once I’d convinced them I hadn’t been abducted and sexually abused) and were very kind and it was nice to see them.
But mostly it was easier to be on my own, listening to household activities below me, the street outside – the milkman and postman calling, the early cars, the kids going to and coming from school, the day opening and closing like an enormous eye. From overheard phone calls I knew they now knew I hadn’t been at school, but said nothing.

Lying there, hour after hour, listening to the rain falling and autumn winds, the world going on outside my room, I experienced the summer as enclosed in a bubble, very bright and hallucinatingly clear, but receding. I’d no idea whether it had left anything.

Suddenly it was time to get on with my life; whatever that was. One Friday I announced that I’d be going to school on the Monday. They said, ‘are you sure you’re ready?’ When I said a definite ‘yes,’ they looked relieved.

Chapter 25

On Saturday morning I went to the house. There was a new chain and lock on the gates, but nobody about. I squeezed through the hedge and went to the house. It was empty. It had been cleared entirely.

Walking around, peering in through dusty windows, there was no evidence that anything had happened there. But Johannes’ swing still hung from the tree, and in the garden there were the magic square, and the circling water.

I walked slowly back up the hill and sat on a bench on Park Walk.
I looked at the flat mass of Melbury Down, the small hedged fields of the Vale. It was a grey misty day, with hardly any blue in the sky or green in the fields, colour absorbed by the mist, the humps in the fields rising like grey islands out of a thin white sea. Only the birds were sharp – black crows, flying purposefully (practical, having mastered all the necessary skills with none of the superfluity or eclat of more refined and extreme and loved birds, and, on days like this, taking over the world), and swifts, thin and sharp as cut tin, hoovering up the last insects, building up body weight, gathering until they reached the critical mass that would trigger their flight south.

The summer was gone.
Woody, who at the beginning of the summer was a friend I’d missed a lot, had come back into my life and then, apparently definitively, gone out of it.
Johannes, who in my more fanciful moments I’d seen as Merlin waking up, was dead.
My parents were splitting up: my mother, always on the move, capricious, there when she wanted to be; my father, there because there was nowhere else for him to be, self-absorbed, an emotional black hole.
They’d all gone. All the work had gone for nothing. There was nothing to show for it.

Less than nothing, because I’d lost what I’d had, I’d missed what I might have had, and what I’d gained was gone. I’d experienced something that had taken me there, but not brought me back. I felt like the man in a Ray Bradbury story I’d read, alone on Mars wondering what’s happening back on earth, looking at it through a telescope, but knowing he can’t go back, has to invent a life for himself where he is.
I felt empty. I felt I was a thin shell between the emptiness inside and the world outside, a world that might be illusory but that I found myself admiring, feeling affection for – the small plane taking off from the airfield on top of the Down, the smoke curling slowly up from a chimney and a garden bonfire, the sounds travelling up to me. Children played energetically on the swings below me, people walked into the pub.

She sat down on the bench beside me, close but leaving just the right space.
She moved her hand; she didn’t touch me, but moved it over me, close, parallel, my arms, my shoulders, my back, my head, my chest, making the shape of me.
I suddenly felt how much I’d grown over the summer.
Her hand settled on the back of the bench behind me; I felt its warmth.

‘Hello, Fiona Fotheringham,’ I said, still looking straight ahead.
‘Hello, you. We’ve missed you. I’ve missed you. We wondered when you’d be coming back – if you’d be coming back. Been somewhere special?’
‘Mars?’
‘Ergs, a “wow” situation, what?’
The movement of her hand had softened my skin, warmed it, I could feel my face, I felt myself break into a smile, my face creasing like old leather, shaking my head. I said,
‘Did you mean – coming back to school?’
‘Well, I guess you have to get get back from Mars first, maybe? Tell me, do they still have triangular doors and golden eyes?’
‘Sure – but the earth stuff’s not Fifties stuff anymore – now it’s Eighties’.’
‘Oh, that’s a shame – I liked the Fifties stuff.
‘Ecoute, mon ami – there’s a Rave tonight, and a party, equinoctial, Luke’s seventeenth, I finished an essay – so many things to celebrate. Can I count on your presence? Will the shuttle dock in time?’
‘Is this a general invitation?’
‘Mais non, mon brave, a thousand times, no! This is strickly poysonal. You will be ticketed, tocketed, dicketed, docketed, ear-tagged probably – “I’m with La Fotheringham”. How about it?’

While she was talking, I’d been imagining her into being – the mouth shaping the words, the round cheeks, the sparky, serious eyes, the framing curls – making a connection across, into the summer, the last time I’d seen her. Now I could turn and look.
I jumped at how real she was, the image I’d created so pale and insubstantial, how alive and full of life and deliciously animated – expressions cycling across her quizzical, tilted face as she waited. I wanted to hug her. Ugh, uncool. Settled for a small bow, a slight inclination, and, ‘I’d love to.’
‘Good on ya, mate.’ Briskly. ‘My place at eight. Don’t be late.’
‘It’ll be great. I can’t wait.’
‘Tsk, tsk,’ eyes to heaven then a smile.
She passed her hand over mine without touching, stood up quickly, threw her bag over her shoulder, clapped her beret on her head, salaamed, turned and walked off along the length of Park Walk.
Minnie Mouse clatter, Monroe chassée, Salt’n’Peppa shake, Dorothy red shoe skip, catwalk hip swing, Carnival rhumba, getting smaller, then, just as she was disappearing down Stoney Path, flinging her beret high, arm held high, beret falling onto her head just as she sank from view, and a last wave. A class act.