‘Who is this guy you were talking about, anyway? A Hungarian?’
‘Not a Hungarian,’ said Blanche. She looked down into her glass, afraid to say ‘English’ in case her Spanish friend laughed. She didn’t wish to spoil the drama of the moment.
A pompous-looking man had accompanied them to the performance. He sat in a cane lounger with a lager on the table by his side, giving every appearance of lassitude. When he could be sure of being heard, he said, in his carefully enunciated tone, ‘What we’re talking about here in a secular age is a hunger for God. God or the Breast. You can have enough sex, Blanche, believe it or believe it not. You can never have enough of God. God’s the giant breast in the sky.’
Only Teresa felt qualified to comment on these remarks. From her vantage point on the balcony, overlooking the square, she said, ‘It’s a divine dissatisfaction.’
The man stretched his legs. ‘I wouldn’t put it like that, dear. More gross, quite honestly, than divine. Do you realize how much of every day is taken up with food, with the belly? The pursuit of food, the eating of food, the recovering from its after-effects? The stomach’s as much a tyrant as the genitals.’
‘Not in my case,’ said Teresa, who was dieting.
Taking a rein on herself, Blanche said in a low desperate voice, ‘I was a friend of his wife’s. I loved him then … Was it just a case of “can’t have”? He looks so lovely. And he thinks I look lovely. And he’s good and pleasant to be with in bed. Isn’t pleasant better than good? The number of men I know who’re good in bed and nothing else. Good – and shits. Roy … Roy’s a decent man, and when I saw him again—’
‘Did that woman really eat her daughter or are you just tipsy and making it all up?’
‘If only he wasn’t so caught up with the past …’ Blanche half rose. She set her glass down unsteadily on the marble top of the table.
‘Christ!’ she said. She sat down again, suddenly sober, suddenly bereft of words. Somewhere, a long way away, an evil thing had befallen her lover.
3
Bishops Linctus
You don’t find it odd to discover gradually that you’re sort of running. Or more a jog-trot. You can see the legs going, and they’re yours. And the scrubby grass below your shoes, resilient, springing up again when you’ve passed. That’s not odd. But something’s odd.
Imagine yourself in an art cinema. The movie begins without titles or proem. The opening shot is of some character walking or jogging across a featureless landscape. Photography: grainy, bleached. Camera: perhaps hand-held in an old-fashioned twentieth-century way.
The sequence immediately holds your interest, although there’s little enough to see. Perhaps some kind of tribal memory comes back, if anyone believes in tribal memory – or anything else – any more. Our ancestors were great walkers, right back to the Ice Age and beyond. If you can walk along a glacier with bare feet, you deserve to succeed.
Now imagine you’re not in a comfortable seat watching the movie. You are that jogging character. Only you’re not in a movie. You’re real, or what we label real for convenience, according to our limited sensory equipment. (Anyone who walks on a glacier with bare feet needs his head looking at …)
Head … Yes, that’s still there …
You’re not surprised even at that.
Your life appears to have begun anew, and you’re progressing across what will turn out to be … a rather unappetizing stretch of England … Salisbury Plain. Salisbury Plain is a) flat, b) plain, c) cold, and d) preparing to receive sweeping gusts of rain. You register these facts one by one.
But walking is no trouble. It’s everything else that’s trouble.
Like how you got where you are. Like what happened. Like who you are. Even minor details like – where do you think you’re going?
Night is closing in. It comes in early, rising out of the ground to meet the lowering cloud.
So what do you do? You go on walking.
There’s a landmark distantly to your right. Half-concealed by a fold in the ground stands a broken circle of stone monoliths. You imagine it’s the ruin of some bizarre Stone Age cathedral which was taken out in the war against the Neanderthals. It stands cobalt and unintelligible against the outlines of the over-praised English countryside.
Cathedrals … Something stirs in the mind.
Now wait … but you continue, limping as you walk, while darkness filters into the saucer of land like a neap tide. You continue, more slowly now, whispering words to yourself under your breath. You feel gradually more in command of yourself. As if in confirmation, a line appears along the featureless wastes ahead. When you reach it, you find a fence, with a road on the far side of it. Darkness now gathers about you like an illness.
When you have climbed the fence, you flounder through a ditch, to stand by the roadside. Almost no traffic passes along the road. You wait.
You? You?
Me. I.
The dissociation of personality closes. A blurry zoom lens shrinks back into focus. He realizes he is one Roy Burnell.
Or used to be. Something is missing.
With these slow realizations comes the first angry drop of rain. He realizes that he needs shelter before anything.
He knows he has a father, but cannot remember his name, or where he lives. As he stands there shivering, he recalls the loss of his mother. And was there someone else?
He tries to thumb a lift from cars as they approach from either direction. Their headlights sweep over him. Past they swish in the increasing downpour, never pausing.
Bastards.
He remembers that word.
A long while later, in hospital, Burnell is to remember the dream of the devil who bit his head off. It really happened. Someone stole part of his memory.
At last, when the rain is dwindling, a car stops. A woman is driving. A man sits beside her in the passenger seat. It is an old car. She puts a big blunt face out of the window and asks him where he wants to go. Burnell says anywhere. They laugh and say that is where they are going. He climbs into the back of the car.
All he can see is that the woman is heavy, middle-aged, and has a head of frizzy hair. The man might be her father. He is old, sharp-nosed, stoop-shouldered, wearing a cap. As the car roars on its way, the man turns stiffly and asks Burnell a few questions in a friendly way.
Burnell wishes to be silent. He is cold and frightened, being reduced to near anonymity. He cannot frame any answers. He remembers he can’t remember a car crash.
The couple fear he is a loony, and kick him out in the nearest village. He is inclined to agree with their judgement. Why can’t he remember how he came to be on Salisbury Plain?
The rain has stopped. He stands where they dropped him, outside a row of cottages showing no signs of life. Prodding himself into action – he is tired now
