Then things tilted again, and I went back to the car.
That was my first time in these woods. A strange thing happened as we drove away. A sudden wind whipped itself up and the rain got heavier. I was rolling up the window and for – oh I don’t know – maybe three seconds, I saw a boy in one of those big fields that come after the woods. Two fields over. Naked in the pouring rain, thin and white, arms round himself. His face looked towards me but he was too far away to make out any features. The hedge hid him, and then I saw him again for maybe another second or two, from a different angle. There he was, just standing still for no reason in the middle of a field in the middle of the day.
‘Stop the car!’ I said.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I can’t stop here,’ said my dad.
‘Stop the car!’
‘Why?’
I was opening the door.
My father shouted, ‘You bloody fool!’
The car stopped and I jumped out and ran back.
He was still there.
Don’t misunderstand. I haven’t got a clue about anything but I’m not a fool. I’m not talking about fakes and frauds, videos on YouTube, screamers, all that. I’m talking about things that happen in a breath in the middle of an ordinary day. I know the explanations. A hallucination is something physical in your ridiculous clown of a brain, not uncommon, all quite normal, but when it comes, the creature is as real as anything ever was. Not the same real, a different real. Still, it can touch you and stop your breath and look you in the eye, shake your mind out of your head. A hallucination can sometimes swing upon the air as it comes into focus, a shimmering appearance. And sometimes, like the cold boy, it’s solid, sharp as a fox or a hare. Until it isn’t.
Gone while you blinked.
Which is what happened.
My father was furious. My heart beat twice as fast all the way to Hothemby by the Long Wights where they’d booked a holiday cottage. I never said another word, but when we got home a week later my mum took me to the doctor’s because she thought I was depressed and he suggested I start reading the Guardian. ‘That’s a very lively paper!’ he said kindly. ‘It’ll give you a lot to think about. What newspaper do you get?’ He addressed this to my mother, who had insisted on accompanying me into the consulting room and had been sitting looking at me with a mild worried smile while I didn’t know what to say or do.
‘The Daily Express,’ she said.
‘Oh, well, that’s very good too,’ said the doctor.
‘She sometimes says she’s seen something,’ my mother said nervously.
‘Something?’
And I had to tell him about the boy in the field.
‘Mm,’ he said, ‘has anything like this ever happened before, Lorna?’
It had, but not so startlingly, and I’d learned to keep my mouth shut about such things. I shook my head. Then I told him I’d read in a book how there was a poor boy killed and thrown out naked in those woods, and the doctor asked where I’d heard about that.
‘It was in a book,’ I said, ‘in the cottage where we were staying.’
‘Ah!’ he said, looking relieved. ‘You know what’s happened.’
He gave my mum a big smile. ‘You know what’s happened,’ he repeated, ‘her memory’s playing tricks.’ And explained that what had really happened was that I’d actually read the story in the book before I saw the boy, and that because I had such an impressionable mind and such a highly developed imagination I had manufactured a kind of – he paused, looking up and sideways to his left as if a small helper was holding a prompt board over his head – a kind of projected thought-picture. It was actually not all that unusual. He gave me some pills anyway. He was the first of all my doctors, and I’ve forgotten his name. I forget most of their names and some of their faces but a few stand out: old Dr Walse with the bottle-top glasses and elaborate jowls (he used to pull them out to a distance with his fingers and let them slap back, he didn’t know he was doing it) and the one called Muriel whose eyelids rippled. This one was a nice young man, enthusiastic and kind. He talked about the tricks the mind could play, the illusions, the reasons for déjà vu, crackling synapses, short circuits, nothing to worry about unless of course it becomes a problem. It’s just a dream, he said. Only it happens when you’re awake.
‘But we didn’t go back to Andwiston,’ I said.
‘You probably did but you don’t remember.’ He smiled, drawing his prescription pad across the blotter. ‘I’m always getting mixed up myself. I get the days wrong all the time.’
‘Oh, so do I!’ said my mum reassuringly. ‘It’s awful, isn’t it? I forget people’s names, it’s terrible.’
I can’t remember what the pills were called. They worked. I didn’t see anything else for years and I no longer had those disturbing frissons, as if someone came and stood in my space, invisible.
2
Waking Monday morning in his stale bed, Dan thought first of the three ravens that had landed on the lean-to roof last night and jabbed the bathroom window with their sharp beaks. Later, a fallow doe, heavily pregnant, had walked out of the wood behind his walled garden and stood in the deepening dusk watching through the slats of the high gate while he pulled some mint and a few leaves of cabbage. He was a superstitious man and these things bothered him.
He’d dreamed that the cats were all gone, but the
