I walked out the house and headed for my car. I needed rolling fields, oak trees and little rush-lined ponds. I needed acreages of black and white cows and honey-coloured stone. I needed peace and truth and order. All of this was a little hard to get in this far part of the north and in this season of dying. I drove out anyway, heading in the direction of Ayrshire, though I’d never been – I dimly knew there were milk cows there, close enough – sixty on the country roads, nothing coming in the opposite lane, a roundabout by a woodside development, and blinking, there were fields, laid out stripped to stubble as they were. Somewhere about an hour south of Edinburgh I spotted a small river with trees along it and feeling tired decided it would be fine. I parked up at the side of the road.
He would come, I was sure. Any part where there were fewer people, in a landscape he felt comfortable in. I called him only ‘him’ in my mind. So far he had been James, but he was also Daniel, or Daniel-like, or ghost, or a singular hallucination from sleep deprivation, somehow shared with Minto, or indulged in by him – he had known the figure was there before I had, hadn’t he? I thought – he made me think of him, the bastard. And now I was stuck with him. But I didn’t have to be. You just have to face these things. I had the diary in my hand and I was walking in a field down to the river, just as I had the day before – or was it longer – walked down to the river. Where that first river had been shallow and broad, dark under a deep infinite dark, and biting cold, this river was grey-green, deep and narrow, fringed with leaves and grasses, those tall plants that have an umbrella of white flowers in summer had left their skeletons to wave in the damp breeze. I saw a brown shelf of mushroom on the skinny stump of a tree. I saw crows walking in the fields beyond the river. Out of a patchy blue sky sparks of snow were falling.
I got to the riverbank and I stood close to the edge. It was too wet for sitting. I waited and thought I should look at my phone, but then, that looking at my phone might make me seem distracted and uninterested. I wondered what rituals were needed to summon a person perhaps caused by – causing – a breakdown in the normal order of my life. I thought about how to punch him; I had the feeling if I tried he would stop being incorporeal. I pictured giving a black eye to a ghost. I’m not ashamed to say it now. I’m hungry – wait.
Okay.
I opened the book. Some flap on the edge of it was loose and I worried it with my fingernails. Stopped because it was an old book, and didn’t need my help getting more worn. Then – I heard it—
James, came the whisper, so quiet – I had dreamed it. I had mistaken the wind for it. I did not move; the wind in channels ran around me.
There was a bang, a metallic dunt, and I dropped the book.
Someone had hit my car. I could see them out of theirs, looking around. I ducked. The book – the diary – it was in the water, sinking. I grabbed it, nearly falling. My arm covered in slimy water, my fingers feeling of nothing, my heart contracting to a blip. But I had it – I pulled it out.
The book was not totally soaked. I looked around one last time, and there was nothing, no second car, not even crows near me. Nothing wanted me except to torment me.
Nothing made sense. I was feeling faint with the cold and the shock. I was sweating and swearing – I clambered back to the car, slipping on the wet grass, and my car had a smack in the rear bumper, but no terrible damage – lights all present – I shuddered and got back in, and drove home, slowly, with the sense that the world was full of figures watching me from the countryside, disinterested, leaning on farming equipment or staring out from the windows of the old cottage rows. I don’t know if I saw them or if Minto saw them through me or if I had fallen asleep at the wheel and dreamed my way through them, the overlap of dreams and actual progress home. I was fierce though, and my body digested the shock. By the time I came home and washed my hands and dried the book in the oven and sat with it again at the kitchen table, no one could have told whether I’d moved all day or not, or even guessed that I’d almost lost it – the diary – not so many hours ago.
Katabasis
I could hear the city around me as Órla dragged me through it, though what I or she said to one another I couldn’t say. The sky was this grimy pale gold, while, I kept thinking, the night is like two hands about to snap – closed to crush us between them – any minute now. I had trouble swallowing, I had a pressure behind my eyes and it felt like I had a sinus infection. Now, thinking, I suppose I was panicking, a little. I had the diary in the pocket closest to my heart, like a Romantic. I kept raising my hand to touch my pocket unthinkingly until I made myself stop. Just because I had almost lost the book didn’t mean I would again.
‘It’s sunset,’ I was saying, but Órla wasn’t listening. We were on the long
