He looked away, turned back smiling, cheerful, ‘I’m here to change your mind. And I think you want it changing.’
Patter
I remember, I pulled the collar up on my coat and ploughed into the frigid air. Daniel going fast at my side to keep up, a bit of the look of a narrow-faced dog. The late stub-end of the night – first there were the city’s elegant stone tenements, their staircase railings glowing black with condensation under the orange lights, then shopfronts and desolate empty buildings, then the hedges of the gardens of bigger houses set back on lawns a distance from the street and from the network of back lanes we were going along, like servants rushing so as not to be seen. A stray growth – tendril or bulge – in one of those hedges or a binbag, guts got at by a seagull is as needed and helpless as a small scream of passion or despair I thought, ‘We are lashed down, we cannot spare ourselves.’ Bloody tired I was from so many emotions – really, an excess of them – or the fever of them – which had in the long hours worked itself through, I thought, with that little scene or hallucination over the coffee marking the worst of it. I did not on the whole journey need to think myself into old, happier times to get by. I was beyond that. My trusty body was just intent on getting me home.
Some time along one of the back lanes, Daniel stopped.
‘It’s starting to sleet,’ he said. Stupidly I looked up, and a gritty piece of hail booted into my eye. Daniel grabbed my sleeve as I covered the eye and swore. We looked around for somewhere to shelter, ‘Here,’ he said, and shouldered open a door in a wall.
In the garden we stood under a tree as the sleet turned to hard pips of ice. The tree was wide enough that we could both stand comfortably beside each other against the trunk – we stood beside the tree anyway.
‘It’s really coming down,’ I said. Daniel leaned his head back and I blinked, and could just about make out his eyes under a diamond of shadow. Between him and me were all our heavy clothes. His neck looked good. I didn’t know why I thought of that, just then. There came the kind of sound they make recordings of to help you send yourself to sleep – a sound that becomes music with drumming tickering rhythms of its own, belonging to no one.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, and stiffened in embarrassment. I think – now, when I must be fucking honest – stiffening in self-containment and stiffening in another way are not so far removed. I could see him clearer, his head and neck the only things exposed, the long lines of his throat, his hair overlong on his ears. I don’t think he thinks of himself, I thought. I think he forgets himself in his work. I felt close to tears, but with one eye shut it must have looked like I was winking all the time.
‘Do you think it’ll break the windscreens of the cars?’ I asked.
‘I think it could,’ said Daniel. ‘Wouldn’t that be amazing?’
And I smiled, just a little.
‘You know, I think that I get you a bit more,’ I said.
‘In the light of this; I’ve a violent, subversive edge?’ said Daniel.
‘That’s right,’
‘It shouldn’t be cold enough for this,’ he said, barely in a whisper, and the din of the falling hail nearly muffled it.
‘Yes,’ I said.
It had happened; I had let myself look at him. The hail pattered, lost its rhythm and stopped. I stood a little removed and very upright, wiping my hurt eye. With nothing else to do I scooped up some of the hail and shoved the pellets in my mouth.
Say, ‘How does it taste?’ I thought. ‘Say something like that to me.’ But Daniel said nothing, and we went on our way.
Corpse Road
I said that I was born on a corpse road. That’s not an exaggeration, I really was. Remember I told you part of the fantasy cycle was bringing my parents back from the dead – I’d start with the half-hour before I was born. I’d start with calm images gathered from the photos – there were many photos, once. My father in his Ford Cortina, griping the wheel smiling not at the camera but at his young wife, humped with foetal me. Both of them fair haired – that type always die tragically, don’t they, either that or they’re Nazis. Anyway some neighbour on the street had taken it at their request when they were bringing the car home from purchase. He looks like me if I had an (also blond) beard and serial killer glasses. The side-on image makes the whole – the windscreen unshattered, his body fresh, lolling arm on the driver door. It was a summer’s day, when I was born. I was meant for summer days, all of us alive – my mother in the back seat, I decided, chosen for ease of entry with her giant belly, and her need to shout fullthroated curses and groans as I tried to fire out of her from a thornier exit. My mother, she had looked happy and shy; she had been nineteen, my father twenty-two.
The road that was not exactly the straightest to the hospital but the prettiest – goes through a long ride of trees, over the hill from the dappled wood – of picnic fame – and through pastureland with a river and its oxbow lakes. The road has been widened since its first use, but on one side you can still – if you pay attention – see the things that look like stiles that are for resting the coffins on. A small
