The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

Sunflower Junction ^{Simon Avery}

That winter I started buying old vinyl records from the junkie who lived downstairs from me. He was selling all of his possessions in order to keep the lights burning, some food in his belly and his habit alive. His name was Colin. I couldn’t tell you how old he was but he must have been pushing sixty at least. He looked like he’d been drawn by Robert Crumb. Slow moving, heavy limbed, lugubrious. Long hair the color of cigarette ash, Brylcreemed into an unlikely, gravity-defying wave that washed away from his forehead. It put me in mind of a painting that I had to Google to place: The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Seriously. Every time I set eyes on him—that painting. His eyes were quick but utterly unfocused, as if he were charting the movement of an invisible cartoon mouse around the room. But they were a strange piercing blue, those eyes. Paul Newman blue.

We never talked about the smack. I didn’t partake in the hard stuff. But that November his vinyl collection was my gateway drug of choice. It took me away from myself. I bought a high-end turntable, an amplifier and speakers that sat on an IKEA table in a room that was otherwise empty. I traveled light. But we didn’t talk about that either.

It started with a mint Mono copy of Pink Floyd’s Saucerful of Secrets. Colin offered it me while we sat outside on the garden wall one morning, watching the sea crash over the promenade across the street.

“How much?” I asked, inspecting the sleeve and then the vinyl itself, cigarette gripped between my teeth. It seemed like a question hardly worth asking.

“Forty,” he said after some hemming and hawing.

“Quid?”

“Forty quid and it’s yours. Take it or leave it.”

I studied him for a moment, looking for treachery in his eyes, but he was in many ways, utterly guileless. For a junkie. I opened my wallet and then counted the cash into his hand. He gave me the record and said, “Don’t play it too loud, I’m planning on an afternoon nap.” Then he stood, saluted me and went back inside, leaving me with a record worth ten times what I’d paid.

After that I wasted my days in his front room, talking and playing records. I raided the remnants of my savings instead of looking for work, instead of starting again. I suppose I’d intended this to be a new life in a new town. But it was the same old life. We lived in a Victorian townhouse on the seafront in Hastings, a seaside town in Sussex on the south coast. The building had probably been quite grand in its heyday, but now it was just an assortment of elegantly high-ceilinged, yet shabby rooms with temperamental plumbing and electrics, its facade weathered and beaten by the sea air and the harsh winters. I hadn’t intended to stay long, but I’d already been here for eight months by that November. It was cheap and I didn’t need much. I knew how to survive at this pragmatic level. I’d stopped considering tomorrow. Or the next week, or month. It wasn’t living. I realize that now. It was just existing. But it was fine.

One day Colin showed me a strip of four black and white photos that had been taken in one of those old passport photo booths. In the pictures was a young man with a beautiful girl, who was sat on his lap. They were laughing, happy, kissing. I was so dazzled by the girl that it took me a moment to clock that the young man was Colin. It was the impossible hair and those eyes.

“We were only together for four weeks,” Colin said. He took the strip of photos back and stared at them. “I was sixteen. Just left school and I got job bricklaying. Good hard work but it was a bastard during the winter. She walked past me one day on the street, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was all rolling hips and heels. Then I saw her again that night in a pub, about a mile away from here. She must have clocked me staring. She came over and told me she liked my quiff. I could barely look her in the eye. I was so fucking terrified. No experience. But then we went back to her place and sat up and played records and talked all night. We didn’t sleep together until the third date.” Colin sighed, looked away out of the window, his eyes glassy. I didn’t know what to say, so I waited.

“Her name was Sally,” he said finally. “It was the best month of my life.”

“What happened?”

He shrugged. “What always happens, I suppose. I got paranoid. It happens when they’re that pretty. They get all the attention. I started following her on the nights we didn’t see each other. I got jealous, kept asking questions about where she’d been. You know how it is. The first of a lifetime of mistakes.” Colin shrugged. “I never really bothered again. My heart wasn’t in it.”

It took me a moment to grasp what he meant by this. “What, you mean she was the only one?”

“The only one who mattered, yes. There were others but I quickly realized that there was no point trying after that. I mean, look at her,” he said, showing me the photos again. “That wasn’t going to happen to me twice, was it?”

I pondered what he’d said that night and tried to imagine such blind infatuation. I could all too easily understand that feeling of being overwhelmed by something precious, but to go almost fifty years without really attempting to make it work with someone else seemed not just sad, but foolish. He’d kept the memory of her in these pictures, preserved in aspic for all of these years. Sally would be drawing a pension by now. She’d probably married, had kids, grandkids, worked, retired… A whole lifetime. She’d probably never thought of Colin once.

In the meantime Colin had at some point turned to writing. Aside from the prodigious amount of records and books and newspapers, there were stacks of manuscripts on either side of a battered old Remington typewriter. Every night, if he wasn’t high, Colin would knuckle down to imagining those four weeks of his early adulthood in increasingly beatific terms. He had never intended for them to be published. They were just a way for him to access that beautiful part of his life again and again. A doorway into summer, grasping at that elusive feeling; like trying to wrap your arms around a ghost.

Then one day a CD in Colin’s collection caught my eye. The cover was amateurish, just a photocopy of a blurry image of a pattern I found vaguely familiar. It was called Sunflower Junction.

“Who’s this?” I asked. “Hugo Lawrence.”

Colin studied the CD for a moment, turning it over in his hands until his fragmented senses placed it. “He was a local chap, I think. Only produced the one record so far as I know. This one’s about a year old. I think I must have got it at one of the gigs he did.” He shrugged, passed it back to me. “Take it,” he said. “It’s on the house. You’ll probably enjoy that shit more than me.”

That was the shit I’d become partial to. I listened to Sunflower Junction later, after we’d parted ways. Colin had a late-night rendezvous with a dealer at Bottle Alley, the half-mile long double deck promenade on Hastings’ Seafront, and I had my own assignation with Ingrid, who lived on the third floor.

Ingrid was an alcoholic. She was a few years older than me. A lifetime of abuse had damaged her (I assumed) beyond repair. I thought she looked like one of those Hollywood starlets from the thirties or forties, but ten years on, after she’d been told she was too old for the screen. A faded glamour. Every now and then you caught it in the right light, or bad light. She often talked about suicide in a lazy, delirious way; the poetry of the hot bath, the pills and the bottle of Scotch, the razorblades drawn vertically down the wrists. Sometimes in bed she made me choke her until I could see she was about to lose consciousness, her eyes swimming with a febrile contentment and certainty that this, above all else would lift her away from the baseless fabric of the life she’d made for herself.

Afterwards we had nothing to say to each other. In fact unless we were fucking, we had no reason to spend any time in each other’s company. We’d keep trying, but neither of us wanted to open that lid on our pasts, to share those wounds we clearly carried around like those guys with sandwich boards, proclaiming THE EARTH IS DOOMED. What was there to say about those people who’d carried us out onto the sea, only to leave us marooned on our own lonely islands somewhere? Nothing new. We weren’t looking to be healed or coddled, or sympathised with. Not then, at least.

So we talked about anything but the past. And then we fucked and we turned over and went to sleep. Or I left the bed and came home, sat with all the lights on, daring exhaustion to claim me.

So it was after midnight when I finally put Sunflower Junction on, but I was instantly engulfed by it. The warm currents of languid guitar, the tight, jazzy upright bass and drums, the speckled sunlight of the Fender Rhodes piano and vibes, and then the punctuation of the restless trumpet or clarinet. It sounded like late period Doors, or Tim Buckley or early Van Morrison, like Bitches Brew-era Mils Davis. A stoned, summery, somnambulant trip. Every song had something to say to me. A midnight crawl through an empty Los Angeles on Baby Blue Eyes; a pastoral rumination in an English meadow at the height of Spring on “Forget Me Not”; a tight jazzy tour through a sweaty Parisian club and its backrooms on “Johnny Jump Up”; and then there was the centerpiece of the album: the long, almost improvisational jam of “Sunflower Junction,” the words conjuring bizarre images, the music spiraling and turning into a mantra, an enchantment, a summoning; circling and retreating, repeating and shifting like a mathematical equation, each time changing one number, one word, one note in order to find its way into something even more heightened, more ecstatic…

I slept and dreamed of Emily. I tried to turn away from her but my subconscious had been denied her for another day. It wanted me to feel something again. And every time I turned away, she was there, as perfect as she’d ever been. Another woman preserved in aspic, but for different reasons.

The dream was on my pillow when I woke. It was a broken, ugly thing, like the head of a dead sunflower, the yellow petals blackened at the tips, curled in over the center. I picked at the sticky petals and caught fractured glimpses of the dream I’d had; quick flashes of memory, tugs of loss and longing that I’d trained myself not to feel. But curiosity got the better of me and I pressed my fingers deep into the puckered flesh of its folds, and felt her there, felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time because it was the past, and the past was an empty room to me now.

I withdrew finally, and watched the grey light of day creep across it. Finally I found an old jam jar in the cupboard, gathered up the dream and placed it inside. I put it on a shelf a closet where I couldn’t see it.

There wasn’t much to discover about Hugo Lawrence on the internet, which surprised me. Most people make music not just to be heard but to be seen, to make money, to get laid, to be adored. I knew the drill. I used to be a music journalist a long time ago. But Hugo had no Facebook profile, no Twitter account, no social media presence anywhere. Even minor local musicians knew the internet was a tool to reach the audience they craved.

I finally located a blurry shot of Hugo on stage in a poky little club in Brighton, all hair and fire and sweat, and a review of the show that was enthusiastic despite the lukewarm reception of the audience of hardcore Folkies. Some of the extended jams lost them after ten minutes of stoned, uncommunicated reverie. They retired to the bar, but Hugo didn’t seem to care. He played the rest of the gig with his back to the dwindling audience.

I played the CD again to be certain of its strange allure. A late night can sometimes romanticize music, people, moments. It’s easy to get lost in yourself after the lights have gone off. But everything that had moved me or stirred me then did so again. I went back to Colin and asked about Hugo, but he didn’t know much.

“What about the gig you saw him play?” I asked. “What did you make of him?”

Colin puffed out his cheeks. He seemed muted that morning. He hadn’t opened the curtains yet, and the room had that familiar bittersweet, burnt vinegar smell of heroin. The air was thick and fetid with it. It left me feeling heavy limbed, eager to leave. Colin was generally pretty diligent in keeping that aspect of his life suppressed from anyone who visited him. I should have asked him how he felt. I know that now. I should have cared more.

“He wasn’t really my cup of tea, to be honest,” he said finally. “He played a lot of dive bars and clubs as far as I know. And he wasn’t much of a performer. That much I recall.”

“Is he still around?” I asked. I wanted to see him for myself. Whatever it was that everyone else couldn’t see would be clear to me, I’d decided. Something of the journalist in me was aroused by the music, my curiosity about the man piqued.

Colin wrote an address down on a piece of paper. “Go and see Allan,” he said. “He was with me that night, and he was the designated driver, so I assume he was relatively sober. He’ll probably be able to help you more than I can.”

His friend owned an old record shop down a narrow side street in the old part of Hastings. It was a Sunday. To be honest, like the song, everyday really is like Sunday in Hastings. No one around, broken down arcades with ancient games, dusty windows stuffed with yellowed newspaper, sudden moments of ancient architecture leaning out from the tacky tourist shops and chip shops and pubs. The sound of the sea had diminished by the time I reached the store. All that remained were the lonely cries of seagulls, drifting high above me on the uncertain air currents.

Allan’s Record Xchange was closed today, but Colin had arranged for me to meet its proprietor there. I knocked on a window that was almost entirely coated with ancient posters for local bands until he opened the door and peered out to inspect me. Allan was an old dandy. Despite the decrepitude of his business, he still fussed about the racks in a stiff white shirt, a paisley cravat, a waistcoat and scuffed wingtips. His hair was fine and grey and long, pulled into a limp ponytail that danced around his head as he moved and talked. The shop was dark and dusty and crowded from floor to ceiling with records. Over the years his stock had overflowed into crates and boxes and across ancient shelves that bowed beneath the weight of all that old vinyl.

“This record, Sunflower Junction, is good,” I said after we’d made small talk for a while. “It’s not just me, is it? There’s a sense of history to it, knowledge of what’s gone before, and then he’s taken it somewhere else.” I wasn’t sure what it was I was trying to convey but I was all too aware that this was as motivated as I’d felt for months. “There’s an intelligence to it. It’s raw but there’s something happening beneath it all.”

Allan paused from rifling through a pile of music papers behind the counter. “Well, yes, I suppose so,” he said. “But it also could be seen as wildly derivative of all kinds of those jazz-folkies from the late sixties, early seventies. And it’s awfully self-indulgent at times, but yes, it certainly had potential. He had potential.”

There was something else, something fragile and elusive in the music that I couldn’t decide how to articulate, an element that people seemed to have missed, but I let that go for the moment. “How was he that night?” I asked instead.

“Well there was no performance, you see,” Allan said. “No attempt to connect with his audience. And it was a good turnout. A lot of people had presumably heard the same thing you have in the record and came out on the strength of it. I suppose it’s something you can’t put your finger on.

“But what worked on disc just didn’t work live. Some people said he’d changed after the record was done. For most of the night he barely acknowledged the audience, and if that hadn’t alienated them enough, he decided to turn the show into an extended jam session that lasted almost half an hour. The same song, over and over.”

“Sunflower Junction,” I said.

“Yes. It was as if he was trapped inside the song.” Allan paused for a moment. “I thought he looked lost that night, utterly lost.”

“Do you know anything about him?” I asked. “I looked online, but he’s like a ghost.”

“Indeed,” Allan said. “I have friends who know him. Or knew him. I can hook you up with one of them. He hasn’t really resurfaced since those gigs. Someone told me he was working on a new record but whether that’s true or not, I honestly can’t say. I heard he’d ended up homeless, crashing on friends’ couches or even rough down on Bottle Alley. I don’t know where he is now. Ah, here we are…”

Allan produced a yellowed music paper from one of the piles he’d been ferreting around in. He leafed through it and placed it on the counter when he’d located the appropriate page. “There it is,” he said. “The one and only interview with Hugo Lawrence. Take it,” he said. “It’s on the house.”

I dreamed of Hugo later that night, even though all my subconscious had to go on was a blurry photo, the music and some hearsay. It was enough. I was following Emily through the silent backstreets of Hastings, but she was always just a little too far ahead of me to reach. She disappeared behind the door of Allan’s Record Xchange. The old music posters were crumbling from the windows. There was a light inside that seemed too bright to be contained. I pushed open the door and stumbled into a field of sunflowers. The stems were dry and stiff, towering around me. The air was heavy with pollen, weighted down with immanence. The sun was passing overhead in some sort of time lapse, and the sunflower heads followed its path like passively curious aliens. There was a sound like static, and I kept catching the ghost of Emily’s voice as it rose out of the folds of white noise. I chased it through the sunflowers. They dwarfed me. Their big dry heads seemed to slyly monitor my progress. Me and the sun. Hugo was there, twisting from stalk to stalk, a poorly printed black and white facsimile of a man with a guitar. When I reached the hospital bed, I stopped. The sun had gone. The bed was bare. The old sheets removed. Emily was no longer there. Hugo was on the bed. Then he was crawling off it like a demented spider, and then he lifted his head and opened his mouth. The sun was in there, and it spilled out its brilliance, all across me.

There were petals scattered across the bed, and the static remained, fizzing and angry. It was a sudden confusion of the senses. I couldn’t decide if the dream had really ended. There were fragments of it everywhere. Ingrid wasn’t in bed beside me. When I rose, there were sunflower petals fluttering in the air, and a carpet of them beneath my feet. They were parted to suggest a path to the bathroom.

The radio was tuned to a dead station at maximum volume. A vacant sound. Ingrid had opened up her wrists. Blood had sprayed across the bathroom tiles, had turned the water a shade of red so beautiful it was hypnotic. There were pills under my bare feet on the bathroom floor beside an empty bottle of cheap supermarket Scotch.

“Christ, Ingrid,” I heard myself saying in a high pitched voice. “Christ.”

I vacillated between finding my phone and then attempting to rouse her and staunch the bleeding from her wrists with towels. She hadn’t cut them properly. I was waiting for the remains of the dream to detach itself from me. Waiting to understand the world again. I must have called an ambulance, put on some clothes. I held her and stared emptily at the tiles until the paramedics arrived.

I went with Ingrid in the ambulance and then sat in the waiting room with a coffee that tasted like cigarette ash while they pumped her stomach, stitched up her wrists, arranged for a psychological assessment. I assumed they’d detain her this time under the Mental Health Act, and she’d be transferred to a secure psychiatric unit. At this point, it probably wouldn’t make much difference. Some wounds are too deep. The razorblades were just her way of exerting control over a situation that had defeated her years ago. The burden of trying to live a life you no longer understood.

I sat with her in the ward later on. She woke after an hour and stared at me absently, and then unexpectedly she reached out for my hand. “Hey,” I began and leaned forward, trying to smile, trying to be something reassuring for her, but then her face creased into tears, and she folded in on herself. I relinquished her hand and sat back while she wept silently.

It was almost light when I got home. I went upstairs and let myself into Ingrid’s flat. I spent an hour cleaning the bathroom of blood and pills and sunflower seeds. The petals that had showered down from my dream had come to rest on every surface. I made the bed and found the dream I’d had. It was just the husk of a sunflower head, or a heart made of fractured triangles, I couldn’t decide. When I pushed aside the soft folds with my fingertips I caught glimpses of the field of sunflowers, the hospital bed, the musician with his mouth filled with sun. I teased open the folds, touched the warm, inviting flesh. It invited me to tumble back inside it. Instead I found a jar in Ingrid’s cupboard. I washed it out and placed the dream inside, along with as many of the petals as I could gather. I took it downstairs and placed it on the shelf in the closet and closed the door on it.

Toby King met me outside a pub across the street from Flamingo Park. It was raining. There were no tourists, no children, no calliope music. The rides were covered over, dripping wet. Seagulls wheeled above us. The sea crashed against the promenade, restless, violent, surging.

We sat beneath the pub’s awning, nursing beers it was too early in the day to drink. Toby was in his fifties. He had a hard face and arms that looked like they were made from granite. He wore a pork pie hat without apology. He tapped the table with his calloused fingers, then the chair, his knees, anything. Allan had given me his number. He had footage on his iPhone of one of the shows he’d played when he was in Hugo Lawrence’s band.

“I suppose I should get one of my kids to upload it to YouTube one of these days,” he said.

It was a typically shaky hand-held video, but I honestly didn’t care. At this point, it was like being granted the sight of the Flying Dutchman overhead. The band was mid-way through a delirious rendition of Sunflower Junction. Hugo’s head was down, his hair falling over his face, swaying, his guitar clasped like a talisman, utterly abandoned to the moment. The band was building to something ragged and ecstatic. Finally, reaching some kind of euphoric high, Hugo raised his face. His eyes were wild; sweat was beading at the tips his hair. Just as it seemed there was nowhere else for the music to go, at his indication, the band circled back around and began to build again, like waves crashing repeatedly at the shore. As Hugo turned his back to the crowd, the video ended.

“Christ,” I said.

“Intense, right?” King lit a cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke as if he were post-coital. “It was like that every night. Every fucking night. Shit for the audience, but an absolute fucking trip for us.”

“What was it?” I asked. “What was he trying to achieve with that song?” I think I already knew at that point, or I sensed it, like something settling into my bones. It felt like my life was infected with it already.

King shrugged. He took off his hat and rubbed at his bald head. “Fucked if I know, mate. I just turn up and play my instrument.”

“Did you work on the album?”

“Yeah, yeah, man.”

“Were you there that night you all came up with Sunflower Junction?”

King grinned. “Yeah, I was there. We were booked into the studio down the road for the evening, so Hugo brought some magic mushrooms and some weed and we started jamming while we waited for the ’shrooms to kick in. Hugo would start something, some idea he had and we’d join in, work at it until we hit a groove. By the time we were peaking on the mushrooms, we’d fallen into something good. We could feel it. None of us were thinking consciously about what we were playing, you know? Just instinct. And we were all in sync with each other. It was fucking heavy. I’ve never experienced anything like that night. None of us have.”

“What about Hugo?”

King sniffed, looked at me from the corner of his eyes, sizing me up finally. He shook his head. “It fucked him, that night, you know? It was, I don’t know, transcendent for him, for all of us, but it broke him too. He was ecstatic about it that night, and then the next day when we realized that it sounded good and we’d got it down on tape, you know? This fucking incredible piece of music that seemed to take you somewhere if you wanted to go.”

He sighed. “But Hugo couldn’t get back there. He told me he’d caught a glimpse of something, and I said ‘Yeah, man, me too. The walls were fucking melting.’ But he said ‘No, none of that mushroom shit. Something else.’ ”

“Did he say what it was?

King laughed. “Sunflowers? It’s all in the lyrics, ain’t it? This glimpse of something he’s been seeing since he was a little kid. Somewhere better than here, than this shit.

“Either way, man, it fucked him up. But gradually, you know? We finished the record and then we toured it, and for a while he was the same old Hugo. Still intense, but you could drink with him, talk about women and shit. But it was that song. We played about twenty gigs and each night he’d get to that song and he’d want to us to get to that place again, just like that first night. But it was lightning in a bottle, man. You can’t replicate that sort of shit, night after night.

“So we’d play that song and we’d go round and around, like it was some sort of mathematical problem.”

“That pattern on the album cover,” I said, realizing it then. “It’s a Fibonacci spiral.”

“If you say so, man. He sort of explained it to us once in the van on the way to a gig, but you know, I’m a bass player. It doesn’t mean shit to me. I just try to keep time and not fall off the stage.”

“So what happened after the gigs were over?”

King shrugged. “We stopped hearing from him. By the end of the tour, he wasn’t really talking to any of us anyway. We took our cut of the door and went our separate ways.”

“And, what, that’s it?” I said. “You never heard from him again?”

King had finished his beer. I ordered him another. He said, “People come and go in this game, mate. Look, I heard from Jez, our drummer that Hugo had sold all of his gear. Couldn’t afford the rent and got kicked out on his arse. He was sleeping rough for a while. Still got his guitars and some recording gear in storage. Heard he was trying to write some new material but the drugs were getting in the way. No cash flow so he was borrowing and not paying it back. Last I heard he was in a squat with Jez and a couple of girls. Still playing. Still not talking. Still trying to get from here to there. You know?”

“Do you have an address?” I asked. “For the squat.”

“What are you anyway,” he said, “the fuzz or something?”

I didn’t know at that point why I wanted to find Hugo Lawrence. But I’d caught a glimpse of that uncertain geography, and I could see how it could flood your life, for better or worse. King made a couple of calls, and then, somewhat reluctantly, gave me the address.

I don’t know what I expected to find. The squat was in a row of boarded up terraces, narrow little homes in a warren of backstreets. A shithole of an estate. Feral kids roaming in packs, dogs straining at leads like unexploded bombs, young men and women with permanently listless scowls on their faces.

I assumed it was where Hugo Lawrence had come to die or else to find a way out or in. To break on through to the other side. I clambered over a fence and found a smashed back window that I could crawl through.

The smell assaulted me as soon as I dropped through the window. The scent of honeysuckle and jasmine, phlox and tuberose. A dizzying and suffocating mass of flowers. But it was not just that. Nothing is ever just one thing. There was something broken and corrupted too. It was the kind of smell you wouldn’t assume you could identify, but there it was: not just shit and piss and the fug of heroin, but the putrefaction of bodies, the slow, ugly decay of flesh. I stumbled through the kitchen, taking a breath and holding it, my mind gone blank, narrowing to a point of light.

There were three of them in what remained of the room, long dead on the floor, their bodies beginning to liquefy into the carpet. The smell of spoiled eggs and shit. But that was not the most significant part of the room. It really wasn’t a room anymore. The floor was flooded with clover and cow parsley and tangled grass; there were bluebells growing between the corpses’ fingers, in the places where their bodies had decomposed the most. Claiming them for the earth. Gypsophilia flooded from between one of the women’s legs, across the room and up one of the remaining walls. It was scrawled with a set of numbers and mathematical symbols that I had neither the time nor the inclination to inspect. The geography of the house had been corrupted from within. It wasn’t evident from the outside. The transformation was beautiful, rich beyond words. The heavy, blossom-laden branches of a hawthorn tree. A sea of weeping willows hanging over grassy banks, meadows and copses at the limit of my vision, all seemingly illuminated from within. A drowsy hum to the earth; a heavy stillness that fizzed in the blood. A guitar had been abandoned on a granite outcrop and claimed by lichen. A stream sprang from the rocks, singing quietly and rolling gently around the body of a young man. His long hair was crawling with lice and beetles. The leaves of a Rowan tree, tremulous with dew. Heather and foxgloves, little collapsed stone walls. Everything was flooded with small details, expanded beyond all comprehension. What remained of the room simply resembled old ruins in an ecstatically rendered landscape.

Hugo Lawrence wasn’t among the bodies, so I went in pursuit of him. I fled through a field of poppies toward the promise of summer, or the remains of it. For a while I felt like part of something. I walked for an hour or more. My feet were soaked and my mind was tranquilized. There was immanence to the place. Something I could only call magic, because I had no other words for it.

What else can I tell you? I didn’t find Hugo’s Sunflower Junction. There was a place here for someone, but not for me. This was the ghost of someone else’s imaginings. I lay for a while in the gorse on the side of a valley, breathless and weeping. I don’t really know why. A vague sense of exile perhaps, or of the evanescence of things. I found another guitar on a rock, along with a small digital recorder. I waited for a while, but Hugo was long gone. I took the recorder and made my way back. I glanced behind me now and then, thinking I’d caught a glimpse of a sea of sunflowers somewhere, just beyond a rise, through the trees, across a river. But I was mistaken. It wasn’t mine to find.

A week after Emily died I packed a bag with just the essentials. Toiletries, a few changes of clothes, my wallet, cards, phone, laptop. I didn’t even take any pictures of her with me. There were some on the phone anyway. I paid the last of the rent, talked to the insurance people and solicitors, put the furniture and our belongings in storage. There was no one I needed to say goodbye to. No family and no more than a handful of friends whose lives had taken them away from me as we’d hit our forties. I stayed for the funeral, and then I left.

We’d married young. Emily was seventeen and I was twenty-two. Those relationships tend not to last, but ours did. A few bumps in the road but what we had was clearly too important to walk away from. So many things that seem important when you’re young fall away from you as you get older. And all that remains is love. The short list of things that you wouldn’t do for each other. I think so, anyway. Time has clouded my judgement.

Emily was three months pregnant when she was diagnosed with leukemia. The doctors told us that the baby would have to be aborted in order for Emily to begin chemotherapy. We made the decision for her to have the abortion after days of gentle and quietly dismayed discussion. But it made no difference. A complication occurred. Something to do with white blood cells; a doctor speaking to us in quiet, uninflected tones on a bright day in June. My memories of that time are scrambled, purposely left vague to stop me coming to harm. Emily spent three months in a hospital bed, gradually diminishing, day by day, getting further and further away from me, until she finally succumbed.

I remember the bed, stripped of its sheets afterwards. I remember it quite clearly. The awful absence of life.

I left the squat and made an anonymous call to the police from a heavily vandalized phone two streets away. When I got home, the house was almost unnaturally still. Usually I could hear Ingrid on the floor above me, laughing at some nonsense on the TV, or running a bath, or crying in her sleep. But she had been sectioned at a clinic ten miles away along the coast. I didn’t know when she’d return. After an hour of circling Hugo’s digital recorder which I’d left on the coffee table, I picked it up and took it downstairs to tell Colin what I’d found.

But Colin was dead. I found him on his threadbare sofa, his head slumped forward. The needle and the tourniquet had slid between the cushions. I checked for a pulse, hoping perhaps he was just wasted. But there was nothing. He was clutching the strip of photos of his sixteen-year-old self and a girl called Sally, the making and the ruination of his life.

I stood up and paced the room, a breathless emptiness clutching at me. Like the anticipation of just plunging off the edge of a precipice. Rage and sorrow, all at once. That all too familiar wound.

There were fresh pages in the typewriter on his desk. Another waltz into the past. Those four perfect weeks. I wondered if he’d pulled off Hugo’s final magic trick, and part of him now belonged to a time when his life was right and good. An escape from a life that he considered inconsequential. These pages were his access point.

But this was no escape. This was the corpse of an old man who’d simply stopped living his life.

I called the police. They arrived and asked their questions, and then the body was removed. I realized that I couldn’t stay here in Colin’s rooms without him. That part of my life had been a gentle anesthetic but it was over now. Exhausted, I went back to my flat and fell asleep in my clothes. I dreamed but I couldn’t recall it when I woke. It was there on my pillow anyway, but I didn’t try to peer between its folds. It began to crumble in my hands when I put it in a jar with the others.

I never played whatever was on Hugo’s digital recorder. It wasn’t for me. It belonged to someone else’s great escape. I ended up putting it into the jar that contained the final dream. I put lids on them and walked down to the promenade. The sea was rushing in. There was no one else around. I flung them as far as I could and let the waves take them. Then I walked away. They were just dreams. They had no weight, but I felt lighter for giving them away.

I packed my bags that afternoon. There wasn’t much. Just that hold-all I’d used to escape almost a year ago. I left the turntable and Colin’s records behind. I didn’t really need them. No one did. It was just stuff.

I stopped to see Ingrid on the way out of town. I found her alone at a table in one of the common rooms of the hospital. She looked bereft in her dressing gown and slippers. Her ashtray was overflowing. She was staring out of the window. It had begun to snow - huge flakes, falling in slow motion in a lonely garden. I sat down beside her and we talked. I told her about Colin. I said I was leaving. I looked at the chipped paint on her bitten fingernails, at the bandages on her wrists. She’d tied her hair back; the nape of her neck looked bare and impossibly vulnerable. I saw flecks of grey in her eyes. All of these things, these little details; they discovered something in me then, coaxed light into places I’d left in shadow for what I assumed was my own good. She studied me. At first her eyes were vague with the medication but gradually her consideration hardened. Was I the man I seemed to be, or the man she hoped I could be? At some point I said Emily’s name, and I told her this story. All of it. It took an hour, maybe more. At some point I realized that her hand was in mine.

And then we kept on talking.