'How can you ask that?' she said. I waited, deliberately manipulating with silence. 'Nothing's changed, Peter. I tried to kill myself because I loved you, because you didn't take any notice of me, because it was impossible being with you. I don't want to die, but when I get upset I can't control myself. I'm scared of what you might do to me.' She took a deep breath, but it was uneven, and I knew she was suppressing tears. 'There's something deep inside you I can't touch. I feel it most when you retreat, when you were talking about your bloody manuscript. You're going to make me insane!'
'I came home because I have come out of myself,' I said.
'No . . . no, it's not true. You're deceiving yourself, and you're trying to deceive me as well. Don't ever do that, not again. I can't cope!'
She broke down then, and I released her arm. I tried to pull her against me, to hold her and be comforting, but she dragged herself away, weeping. She rushed through the front door, slamming it behind her.
I stood in the hall, listening to the imagined echoes of the slam.
I returned to the bedroom and sat for a long while on the edge of the bed, staring at the carpet, the wall, the curtains. After midnight I bestirred myself and tidied up the flat. I emptied the ashtrays and washed them up with the supper dishes and the coffee mugs, leaving them all to drain on the side.
Then I found my old leather holdall, and packed it with as many of my clothes as I could get in. I packed the manuscript last, cramming it down on top. I checked that all the electricity switches were off, that no taps were dripping. As I left, I turned off all the lights.
I walked down to Kentish Town Road, where late traffic went past. I was too tired to want to sleep rough again, and thought I would find a cheap hotel for the night. I remembered a street near Paddington where there were several, but I wanted to get out of London. I stood undecided.
I was numbed by Gracia's rejection of me. I had returned to her with no idea of what I intemided to say, on of what might happen, but had felt my new internal strength would solve all that was wrong. Instead, she was stronger than me.
The zip fastener of my holdall was open, and I could see the manuscript inside. I took it out and turned the pages in the light of a street lamp. The story lay there for me to see, but the words had gone. Some of the pages had typewriting on them, but it was always scribbled over. I saw names flip past: Kalia, Muriseay, Seri, Ia, Mulligayn. Gracia's blood splashes remained. The only coherent words, undeleted, were on the last page. These were the words of the sentence I had never completed.
I stuffed the pages back in the bag, and squatted down in the recessed doorway of a shop. If the pages had become unworded, if the story was now untold, then it meant I could start again.
It was now more than a year since I had been in Edwin's cottage, and much had happemied in my life that was not described in the manuscript. My stay at the cottage itself, my weeks at Felicity's house, my return to London, my discovery of the islands.
Above all, the manuscript did not contain a description of its own writing, and the discoveries I had made.
Sitting there in the draughty shop doorway, my holdall clutched between my knees, I knew that I had returned prematurely to Gracia. My definition of myself was incomplete. Seri had been right: I needed to immerse myself totally in the islands of the mind.
Excitement coursed through me as I thought of the challenge ahead. I left the shop doorway and walked quickly in the direction of central London.
Tomonnow I should make plans, find somewhere to live, perhaps take a job. I would write when I could, construct my inner world and descend into it. There I could find myself, there I could live, there I could find rapture. Gracia would not reject me again.
I felt as if I were alone in the city, with the vacant illuminated shop windows, the darkened homes, the deserted pavements, the glowing advertisements. I felt a ripple of my awareness spreading outwards, encompassing the whole of London, centred on myself. I strode past the rows of parked cars, the uncollected refuse bags, the discarded plastic cartons and drink cans. I hurried through intersections where traffic lights changed for absent cars, past walls defaced with spray-can graffiti, past shuttered offices and gated Underground stations. The buildings stood high and dim around me.
Ahead was the prospect of islands.
23
I was imagining Seri was on the ship with me. After leaving Hetta, my temporary refuge from the clinic, we had called first at Collago, and I knew it was possible she had boarded there. I stood amidships while we were in the harbour, covertly watching the passengers embark, and I had not seen her among them; even so, I could have missed seeing her.
For the whole of the voyage, from Hetta to Jethra, via Muriseay, I was glimpsing her. Sometimes it was a sight of her at the other end of the ship: a blonde head held in a certain way, a combination of clothes' colours, a distinctive walk. Once it was a particular scent I associated with her, detected almost subliminally in the crowded saloon. A name kept coming distractingly to mind: Mathilde, whom once I had mistaken for Seri. I searched my manuscript for some reference to her.
I prowled the ship obsessively at such times, looking for Seri, although not necessarily wanting to find her. I needed to resolve the uncentainty, because in a contradictory way I both willed her to be on board the ship with me, and not. I was lonely and confused, and she had created me after the treatment; at the same time, I had to reject her worldview to he able to find myself.
This delusion of Seri was part of a larger duality.
I was perceiving with two minds. I was what Seri and Lareen had made me, and I was what I had discovered of myself in the unaltered manuscript.
I accepted the uncomfortable reality of the overcrowded ship, the circuitous passage across the Midway Sea, the islands we called at, the confusion of cultures and dialects, the strange food, the heat and the stunning scenery. All this was solid and tangible around me, yet internally I knew none of it could be real.
It scared me to know there was this dichotomy in the perceived world, as if to stop believing it could cause the ship to vanish from beneath me.
I felt prominent on the ship because I was central to its continued existence. This was my dilemma. I knew I did not belong in the islands. Inside me I recognized a deep and consistemit truth about my identity: I had
