The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Sixth Annual Collection

ANIMA M. John Harrison

A week ago last Tuesday I dreamed all night of trying to find out what had happened to the woman I loved. She was a pianist and a writer. We had met in New York when she played a concert of American and British music. She had reminded me how I had once been able to dance. Now, some time later, she had come to Britain to find me. But she could no longer speak, only weep. How had she traveled here? Where did she live? What was she trying to say? It was a dream heavy with sadness and urgency. All avenues of inquiry were blocked. There were people who might know about her, but always some reason why they could not be asked, or would not tell. I walked up and down the streets, examining the goods on the market stalls, my only clue the reissue date of a once-banned medicine.

I never dreamed anything like this until I met Choe Ashton—

Ten past ten on a Saturday night in December, the weekend Bush talked to Gorbachev on the Maxim Gorki in half a gale in Valetta Harbour. In the east, governments were going over like tired middleweights—saggy, puzzled, almost apologetic. I sat in the upper rooms of a media drinking club in central London. The occasion was the birthday of a corporate executive called Dawes who sometimes commissioned work from me. Shortly they would be giving him a cake shaped like half a football on which had been iced the words: OVER THE MOON BUT NOT OVER THE HILL!

Meanwhile they were eating pasta.

"Now that’s two thousand calories. How much more do you want?”

"So far I’ve had cheese but not much else, which is interesting—”

"Are we going to get that fettucini we’ve paid for?”

The women were in TV: the last of the power dressers. The men were in advertising, balding to a pony tail. Men or women, they all had a Range Rover in the car park at Poland Street. They were already thinking of exchanging it for one of the new Mazdas. I moved away from them and went to stare out of the window. The sky over towards Trafalgar Square looked like a thundery summer afternoon. The buildings, side-lit by street lamps, stood out against it, and against one another, like buildings cut from cardboard. I followed an obscure line of neon. A string of fairy lights slanting away along the edge of a roof. Then cars going to and fro down at the junction by St. Martin-in-the-Field, appearing very much smaller than they were. I had been there about a minute when someone came up behind me and said:

"Guess what? I was just in the bog. I switched the hand-drier on and it talked to me. No, come on, it’s true! I put my hands under it and it said, ‘Choe, I really like drying your hands.’ ”

I knew his name, and I had seen him around: no more. He was in his forties, short and wiry, full of energy, with the flat-top haircut and earring of a much younger man. His 501s were ripped at the knees. With them he wore a softly tailored French Connection blouson which made his face, reddened as if by some kind of outdoor work, look incongruous and hard.

"Has anything like that ever happened to you? I’m not kidding you, you know. It talked to me!”

I shrugged.

"OK. Give us a fag then, if you don’t believe me. Eh?”

He was delighted by my embarrassment.

“I don’t smoke,” I said.

“Come on,” he wheedled. “Every fucker smokes. Dawsie only knows people who smoke. Give us a fag.”

I had spent all day feeling as if my eyes were focusing at different lengths. Every so often, things—especially print—swam in a way which suggested that though for one eye the ideal distance was eighteen inches, the other felt happier at twelve. Choe Ashton turned out to be the perfect object for this augmented kind of vision, slipping naturally in and out of view, one part of his personality clear and sharp, the rest vague and impressionistic. What did he do? Whose friend was he? Any attempt to bring the whole of him into view produced a constant sense of strain, as your brain fought to equalize the different focal lengths.

“I’m sick of this,” he said. “Let’s fuck off to Lisle Street and have a Chinese. Eh?”

He gave me a sly, beautiful smile. An aging boy in a French Connection jacket.

"Come on, you know you want to.”

I did. I was bored. As we were leaving, they brought the birthday cake in. People always seem very human on occasions like this. Dawes made several efforts to blow the candles out, to diminishing applause; and ended up pouring wine over them. Then an odd thing happened. The candles, which—blackened, but fizzing and bubbling grossly, dripping thick colored wax down the sides of the football—had seemed to be completely extinguished, began to burn again. Blinking happily around, Dawes had taken the incident as a powerful metaphor for his own vitality, and was already pouring more wine on them.

“Did you see that?” I asked Choe Ashton.

But he was halfway out of the door.

At first we walked rapidly, not talking. Head down, hands rammed into the pockets of his coat. Ashton paused only to glance at the enormous neon currency symbols above the Bureau de Change on Charing Cross Road. “Ah, money!” But as soon as he recognized Ed’s Easy Diner, he seemed content to slow down and take his time. It was a warm night for December. Soho was full of the most carefully dressed people. Ashton pulled me towards a group standing outside the Groucho, so that he could admire their louche haircuts and beautifully crumpled chinos. “Can’t you feel the light coming off them?” he asked me in a voice loud enough for them to hear. “I just want to bask in it.”

For a moment after he had said this, there did seem to be a light round them— like the soft light in a 70s movie, or the kind of watery nimbus you sometimes see when you are peering through a window in the rain. I pulled him away, but he kept yearning back along the pavement towards them, laughing. “I love you!” he called to them despairingly. “I love you!” They moved uncomfortably under his approval, like cattle the other side of a fence.

“The middle classes are always on watch,” he complained.

We dodged briefly into a pick-up bar and tried to talk. The only free table was on a kind of mezzanine floor on the way to the ladies’ lavatory. Up there you were on a level with the sound system. Drunken girls pushed past, or fell heavily into the table. “I love them all!” shouted Ashton.

“Pardon?”

“I love them!”

“What, these too?”

“Everything they do is wonderful!”

Actually they just sat under the ads for Jello-shots, Schlitz and Molson’s Canadian and drank Lowenbrau: boys in soft three-button shirts and Timberline boots, girls with tailored jackets over white silk trousers. I couldn’t see how they had arrived there from Manor House or Finsbury Park, all those dull, broken, littered places on the Piccadilly line; or why. Eventually we got sick of bawling at one another over the music and let it drive us back out into Cambridge Circus.

“I was here this afternoon,” he said. “I thought I heard my name called out.” “Someone you knew.”

“I couldn’t see anyone.”

We ended up in one of those Lisle Street restaurants which specialize in degree-zero decor, cheap crockery and grudging service. There were seven tables crammed into an area smaller than a newsagent’s shop. The lavatory—with its broken door handle and empty paper roll—was downstairs in the kitchens. Outside it on a hard chair sat a waitress, who stared angrily at you as you went past. They had a payphone: but if you wanted to use it, or even collect your coat from the coat rack, you had to lean over someone else’s dinner. Choe Ashton, delighted, went straight to the crepe paper shrine mounted in the alcove to show me a vase of plastic flowers, a red-and-gold tin censer from which the stubs of old incense sticks protruded like burnt-out fireworks, two boxes of safety matches.

"See this? Make a wish!”

With considerable gentleness he put fresh incense in the censer and struck a match.

“I love these places—” he said.

He sat down and rubbed his hands.

“—but I’m bored with Hot and Sour.”

He stared away from the menu and up at the industrial ceiling, which had been lowered with yellow-painted slats. Through them you could still see wires, bitumen, ventilator boxes. A few faded strings ejected from some exhausted Christmas party-popper still hung up there, as if someone had flung noodles about in a claustrophobic fit or paddy.

“Let’s have some Bitter and Unfulfilled here!” he called to the waitress. “No. Wait a minute. I want Imitation Pine Board Soup, with a Loon Fung calendar.

“But it has to have copulating pandas on it.”

After that we began to drink Tsing Tao beer. Its packaging, he said, the pale grey ground and green, red and gold label, reminded him of something. He arranged several empty cans across the table between us and stared at them thoughtfully for some time, but nothing came of it. I don’t remember eating, though we ordered a lot of food. Later he transferred his obsession from the Tsing Tao label to the reflections of the street neon in the mirror behind the bar. SOHO. PEEP SHOW. They were red, greenish-yellow, a cold blue. A strobe flickered inside the door of the peep show. Six people had been in there in two minutes. Two of them had come out again almost immediately. “Fucking hell, sex, eh? Why do we bother?” Ashton looked at me. “I fucking hate it,” he said. Suddenly he stood up and addressed the people at the nearer tables. “Anyone who hates sex, stand up!” he tried to persuade them. “Fucking sex.” He laughed. “Fucking fucking,” he said. “Get it?” The waitresses began to move towards us.

But they had only come to bring the bill and offer him another beer. He smiled at them, moved his hands apart, palms forward, fingers spread.

“No thanks,” he said shyly.

“The bill’s in Chinese!” he shouted. He brandished it delightedly at the rest of the diners. “Hey!”

I agreed to drive him home. For the first few minutes he showed some interest in my car. At that time I had an Escort RS Turbo. But I didn’t drive it fast enough for him, and he was silent again until we were passing The Flying Dutchman in Camberwell. There, he asked in an irritable voice: “Another thing. Why is this pub always in the same place?” He lived on the other side of Peckham, where it nudges up against Dulwich. It took him some time to find the right street. “I’ve only just moved in.” I got him upstairs then consulted my watch. “I think I’d better sleep on your floor,” I said. But he had passed out. It seemed like a nice flat, although he hadn’t bought much furniture.

I woke late the next morning. Ten o’clock. Sleet was falling. A minicab driver had parked his Renault under the front window, switched its engine off, and turned up Capital Radio so that I could hear clearly a preview of a new track by the Psychedelic Furs. Every thirty seconds he leaned on his horn. At that, the woman who had called him leant out of a fourth floor window in one of the point blocks on the other side of the road and shrieked:

“Cammin dahn!”

Beep.

“Cammin dahn!”

Beep.

“Cammin dahn!”

Beep. Beep. Beep.

“Cammin dahn! Cammin dahn!”

At the back the flat overlooked a row of gardens. They were long and narrow and generally untended; so choked, some of them, with bramble, elder and buddleia stalks, that they reminded you of overgrown lanes between walls of sagging, sugary old brick. In the bleaker ones, you knew, a dog would trot restlessly all day between piles of household or builders’ rubbish, under a complex array of washing lines. Choe Ashton’s garden had once been kept in better order. There was a patio of black and white flagstones like a chess board, a few roses pruned savagely back to bare earth. The little pond was full of leaves. Suddenly I saw that there was a fox sniffing round the board fence at the bottom of the garden.

At first I thought it was some breed of cat I had never seen before: long-backed, reddish, brindling towards its hindquarters and long tail. It was moving a bit like a cat, sinuously and close to the ground. After a minute or two it found the pond and drank at length, looking up every so often, but too wet and tired, perhaps too ill, to be wary or nervous.

I watched with my heart in my mouth, afraid to move even behind the window in case it saw me and ran off. Choe Ashton came into the room.“Fucking hell,” he said. “Are you still here?”

“Sssh. There’s a fox in your garden.”

He stood beside me. As he watched, the fox moved into the middle of the overgrown lawn, pawing and sniffing at the earth. It yawned. I couldn’t see anything there it might eat. I wondered if it might have smelt another fox. It sat down suddenly and stared vaguely into the sleet.

“I can’t see anything.”

I stared at him.

“Choe, you must be blind—”

He gripped my arm very hard, just above the elbow.

“That hurts,” I said.

“I can’t fucking see any fucking fox,” he said quietly.

We stood like that for thirty or forty seconds. In that time the fox went all round the lawn, not moving very fast, then crossed the low brick wall into the next garden, where it vanished among some elders, leafless laburnum bushes and apple trees. “OK, Choe.”

People like Choe are like moths in a restaurant on a summer evening just as it gets dark. They bang from lamp to lamp then streak across the room in long flat wounded trajectories. We make a lot of their confusion but less of their rage. They dash themselves to pieces out of sheer need to be more than they are. It would have been better to leave him alone to do it, but I was already fascinated.

I phoned everyone who had been at the Dawes party. No one knew the whole story. But they all agreed Choe was older than he appeared and, career-wise at least, a bit of a wimp. He was from the north of England. He had taken one of the first really good media degrees—from East Sussex—but never followed it up. He did the odd design job for one of the smaller agencies that operate out of top rooms above Wardour Street. In addition, he had some film work, some advertising work. But who didn’t? The interesting thing was how he had filled his time until he appeared in Soho. After East Sussex he had moved back north and taken a job as a scaffolder; then joined a Manchester steeple jacking firm. He had worked in the massive stone quarries around Buxton, and out in the North Sea on the rigs. Returning to London obsessed with motorcycles, he had opened one of the first courier operations of the Thatcher boom. He never kept any job for long. Boredom came too easily to him. Anything hard and dangerous attracted him, and the stories I heard about him, true or not, would have filled a book. He told me some of them himself, later:

Stripping old render near the top of a thirty-story council high-rise in Glasgow, he found himself working from scaffolding fifty feet above a brick-net. These devices— essentially a few square feet of strong plastic netting stretched on a metal frame— are designed to catch dropped tools or bits of falling masonry. With a brick-net, you don’t need safety bunting or a spotter on the ground to protect unwary pedestrians. Ashton quickly became obsessed. He thought about the brick-net in his digs at night. (Everyone else was watching Prisoner in Cell Block H.) During the day everything that fell seemed to go down into it in slow motion. Things were slow in his life too. One cold windy Monday ten minutes before lunch, he took a sly look sideways at the other jacks working on the scaffolding. Then he screamed and jumped off, turning over twice in the air and landing flat on his back. The breath went out of him—boof! Everything in the net flew up into the air and fell down again on top of him—old mastic tubes, bits of window frame, half bricks.

“I’d forgotten that stuff,” he said with a grin.

“Were you injured?”

“I walked a bit stiff that week. ”

“Was it worth it?”

“It was a fucking trip.”

Later, induced by money to take a long-running steelworks job, he decided to commute to Rotherham from London on a Kawasaki 750 racer. Each working week began in the early hours of Monday morning, when, still wobbly from the excesses of the weekend, he pushed this overpowered bright green monster up the motorway at a hundred and fifty miles an hour in the dark. He was never caught, but quite soon he grew bored. So he taught himself to lie along the Kawa with his feet on the back pegs, wedge the throttle open with a broken matchstick so that he could take both hands off the handlebars, and roll a joint in the tiny pocket of still air behind the fairing. At the right speed, he claimed, Kawasaki engineering was good enough to hold the machine on track.

“The idea,” he said, “is not to slow down.”

I wasn’t sure boredom was entirely the issue. Some form of exploration was taking place, as if Choe Ashton wanted to know the real limits of the world, not in the abstract but by experience. I grew used to identifying the common ground of these stories—the point at which they intersected—because there, I believed, I had found Choe’s myth of himself, and it was this myth that energized him. I was quite wrong. He was not going to let himself be seen so easily. But that didn’t become plain until later. Meanwhile, when I heard him say, “We’re sitting on the roof one dinner time, and suddenly I’ve poured lighter fuel on my overalls and set myself on fire,” I would nod sagely and think of Aleister Crowley’s friend Russell, discharged from the US Navy after he had shot up forty grains of medical-grade cocaine and tried to set fire to a piece of glass by willpower alone.

“I just did it to see what people would do,” Choe said. “They had to beat me out with their hands.”

In a broad fake Northern accent he added:

“I’m scared of nowt, me.” Then in a more normal voice: “Do you believe that?”

“I think I do,” I said, watching with some interest the moth on its flat, savage, wounded trajectory.

He gave me a look of contempt.

This didn’t prevent him from flirting all winter, slipping away—but never too far— between the sets of a comically complex personality: always waiting for me to catch up, or catch my breath.

Drunk in bars, he would suggest going to the first night of a photographic exhibition, a new production of Ionesco, ballet at the Royal Opera House: arrive on the night in some immaculate designer two-piece with baggy trousers and immense shoulder pads: and then say—

“I’ve got the Kawa parked round the corner.”

“I’m sure you have, Choe.”

“You don’t believe I came on it, do you?” And again, appealing to a foyer full of people who had arrived in BMWs:

“This fucker doesn’t believe I came on me bike!”

To see how far he would go, I took him to a dance version of Beauty and the Beast. He sat there quietly, entranced by the color and movement, quite unconcerned by the awful costumes and Persil white sentimentality, until the interval. Then he said loudly: “It’s like the fucking fish tank at the dentist’s in here. Look at them!” He meant the audience, which, gorgeously dressed and vaguely smiling, had begun to come and go in the depopulated front stalls like moonlight gourami or neon tetras nosing among the silver bubbles of the oxygenator. Quiet, aimless, decorative, they had come, just like the dancers, to be seen.

“They’re a bit more self-conscious than fish, Choe,”

“Are they?”

He stood up.

“Let’s go and get some fucking beer. I’m bored with this.”

Two or three weeks later, having heard I liked Turgenev, he sent me an expensive old edition of Sketches from a Hunters Notebook, on the front endpapers of which he had written in his careful designer hand:

“Turgenev records how women posted flowers—pressed marguerites and immortelles—to the child-murderer Tropmann in the days before his execution. It was as if Tropmann were going to be 'sent on before.’ Each small bouquet or floret was a confused memory of the pre-Christian plea 'Intercede for us’ which accompanied the sacrifice of the king or his substitute. But more, it was a special plea: 'Intercede for me.’ These notes, with their careful, complex folds, arrived from the suicide provinces—bare, empty coastal towns, agricultural plains, the suburbs of industrial cities. They had been loaded carefully into their envelopes by white hands whose patience was running out between their own fingers like water. ”

I phoned him up.

“Choe, what a weird quote. Where did you find it?”

“I’m not stupid, you know,” he said, and put the phone down. He had written it himself. For two weeks he refused to speak to me, and in the end I won him round only by promising him I would go to the Tate and spend a whole afternoon with the Turners. He shivered his way down to the Embankment from Pimlico tube station to meet me. The sleeves of the French Connection jacket were pushed up to his elbows, to show off slim but powerful forearms tattooed with brilliantly colored peacock feathers which fanned down the muscle to gently clasp his thin wrists.

“Like them? They’re new.”

“Like what, Choe?”

He laughed. I was learning. Inside the gallery, the Turners deliquesced into light: Procession of Boats with Distant Smoke, circa 1845; The Sun of Venice Going Down to Sea, 1843. He stood reverentially in front of them for a moment or two. Then the tattooed arms flashed, and he dragged me over to Pilate Washing his Hands.

“This fucker though! It can’t have been painted by the same man!”

He looked at me almost plaintively.

“Can it?”

Formless, decaying faces. Light somehow dripping itself apart to reveal its own opposite.

“It looks like an Ensor. ”

“It looks like a fucking Emil Nolde. Let’s go to the zoo.”

“What?”

He consulted his watch. “There’s still plenty of daylight left,” he said. “Let’s go to the zoo.” On the way out he pulled me over to John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. “Isn’t that fucking brilliant?” And, as I turned my head up to the painting, “No, not that, you fucking dickhead, the title. Isn’t that the most brilliant title in the world? I always come here to read it. ”

Regents Park. Winter. Trees like fan coral. Squirrel monkeys with fur a distinct shade of green scatter and run for their houses, squeaking with one high pitched voice. A strange, far-off, ululating call—lyrical but animalistic—goes out from the zoo as if something is signaling. Choe took me straight to its source: lar gibbons. “My favourite fucking animal.” These sad, creamy-colored little things, with their dark eyes and curved arthritic hands, live in a long tall cage shaped like a sailing vessel. Inside, concrete blocks and hutches give the effect of deck and bridge fittings. The tallest of these is at the prow, where you can often see one gibbon on its own, crouched staring into the distance past the rhino house.

“Just look at them!” Choe said.

He showed me how they fold up when not in use, the curve of their hands and arms fitting exactly into the curve of their thigh. Knees under their chins they sit hunched in the last bit of winter sun, picking over a pile of lettuce leaves; or swing through the rigging of their vessel with a kind of absent-minded agility. They send out their call, aching and musical. It is raw speech, the speech of desires that can never be fulfilled, only suffered.

“Aren’t they perfect?”

We watched them companionably for a few minutes.

“See the way they move?” Choe said suddenly. Then:

“When someone loves you, you feel this whole marvelous confidence in yourself. In your body, I mean.”

I said nothing. I couldn’t think how the two ideas were linked. He had turned his back on the cage and was staring angrily away into the park, where in the distance some children were running and shouting happily. He was inviting me to laugh at him. When I didn’t, he relaxed.

“You feel good in it,” he said. “For once it isn’t just some bag of shit that carries you around. I—”

“Is that why you’re trying to kill yourself, Choe?”

He stared at me.

“For fuck’s sake,” he said wearily.

Behind us the lar gibbons steered their long strange ship into the wind with an enormous effort of will. A small plaque mounted on the wire netting of the cage explained: “the very loud call is used to tell other gibbons the limit of its territory, especially in the mornings.” I thought that was a pity.

In the spring he gave up his job with the agency and went offshore.

“I need some money,” he said. “The rigs are the place for that. Besides, I like the helicopter ditching course.”

He wanted to take the Kawa round Europe that summer.

“You need dosh to pay the speeding tickets.” He thought for a moment. “I like Europe.”

And then, as if trying to sum up an entire continent:

“I once jumped over a dog in Switzerland. It was just lying in the middle of the road asleep. I was doing a hundred and ten. Bloke behind me saw it too late and ran it over.”

He was away for two or three months, but he hadn’t forgotten anything. Whatever it was he wanted me for remained as important to him as it had been when he singled me out at the Dawes party. He came back at the height of summer and knocked at my door in Camden, wearing Levi 620s, brand new 16-hole DMs, a black sleeveless T-shirt which had faded to a perfect fusty green, and a single gold earring. We walked up between the market stalls to Camden Lock, where he sat in the sunshine blinking at the old curved bridge which lifts the towpath over the canal. His arms had been baked brown in Provence and Chamonix, but the peacock feathers still rioted down them, purple, green and electric blue, a surf of eyes; and on his upper left arm one tiny perfect rose had appeared, flushed and pink.

“How was Europe?” I asked him.

“Fucking brilliant,” he said absently. “It was great.”

“Get many tickets?”

“Too fucking right.”

“I like the new tattoo.”

“It’s good.”

We were silent for a bit. Then he said:

“I want to show you something. ”

“What?”

“It would mean driving up north.”

Determined not to make a mistake this time, I said:

“Would two days’ time do?”

“Are you sure you want to know this?”

I wasn’t sure. But I said yes anyway. In fact it was four or five days before he was free to leave. He wheedled me into letting him drive. A blip in the weather brought strong south-west winds which butted and banged at the RS as he stroked it up the motorway at a steady hundred and twenty. Plumes of spray drifted across the carriageways, so that even the heaviest vehicle, glimpsed briefly through a streaming windscreen, seemed to be moving sideways as well as forwards, caught in some long dreamlike fatal skid. Beyond Nottingham, though, where the road petered out into roadworks, blocked exits and confusing temporary signboards, the cloud thinned suddenly.

“Blue sky!” said Choe, braking heavily to avoid the back of a fleet Cavalier, then dipping briefly into the middle lane to overtake it. Hunched forward over the steering wheel until his face was pressed against the windscreen, he squinted upwards. “I can see sunshine!”

“Will you watch where you’re fucking going?”

He abandoned the motorway and urged the RS into the curving back roads of the White Peak, redlining the rev counter between gear changes, braking only when the bend filled the windscreen with black and white chevrons, pirouetting out along some undrawn line between will and physics. I should have been frightened, but it was full summer, and the rain had brought the flowers out, and all I could see were horses up to their knees in moon-daisies. The verges were fat with clover and cow parsley. The foxgloves were like girls. Thick clusters of creamy flowers weighed down the elders, and wherever I looked there were wild roses the most tremulous pink and white. Every field’s edge was banked with red poppies. That would have been enough—fields of red poppies!—but among them, perhaps one to five hundred, one to a thousand, there were sports or hybrids of a completely different color, a dull waxy purple, rather somber but fine.

“How odd! Did you see that, Choe?”

“Don’t talk.”

After about twenty minutes he stopped the car and switched the engine off. “This is near enough for now.”

We were in a long bleak lay-by somewhere on the A6. The road fell away from us in a gentle curve until it reached the flatter country west and north. Down there I could see a town—houses for quarry workers, a junction with traffic lights, a tall steel chimney designed to pump hot gases up through the chronic inversion layers of Spring and Autumn.

“When I was a kid,” Choe said, “I lived a few miles outside that place.” He undid his seatbelt and turned to face me. “What you’ve got to understand is that it’s a fucking dump. It’s got that fucking big chimney, and a Sainsburys and a Woolworths, and a fucking bus station.” He adjusted the driving mirror so that he could see his own face in it. “I hated that fucking bus station. You know why? Because it was the only way in and out. I went in and out on one of those fucking buses every day for ten years, to take exams, look for jobs, go round the record shop on a wet Saturday afternoon.” He pushed the mirror back into its proper place. “Ever spend any time in bus stations?”

“Never. ”

“I didn’t think you had. Let me tell you they’re death on a stick. Only people who are socially dead use a bus station.”

Everything warm, he said, went on at a distance from people like that. Their lives were at an ebb. At a loss. They had to watch the clean, the happy, the successfully employed, stepping out of new cars and into the lobbies of warm hotels. If the dead had ever been able to do that, they would never be able to do it again. They would never be able to dress out of choice or eat what they would like.

“They’re old, or they’re bankrupt, or they’ve just come out of a long-stay mental ward. They’re fucked.”

All over the north of England they stood around at ten in the evening waiting for the last bus to places called Chinley Cross, or Farfield or Penistone. By day it was worse.

“Because you can see every fucking back-end village you’re going through. The bus is fucked, and it never gets up any speed.” He appealed to me: “It stinks of diesel and old woollen coats. And the fuckers who get on are carrying sandwich boxes. ”

I laughed.

“There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a sandwich box,” I said.

“Do you want to hear this or not?”

“Sorry, Choe.”

“I hated those fucking buses except for one thing—”

He was seventeen or eighteen years old. It was his last summer in the town. By September he would be at East Sussex. He would be free. This only seemed to make him more impatient. Women were everywhere, walking ahead of him on every pavement, packed into the vegetarian coffee-shop at lunchtime, laughing all afternoon on the benches in the new shopping plaza. Plump brown arms, the napes of necks: he could feel their limbs moving beneath the white summer dresses. He didn’t want them. At night he fell out with his parents and then went upstairs to masturbate savagely over images of red-haired pre-Raphaelite women he had cut from a book of prints. He hardly understood himself. One afternoon a girl of his own age got on the bus at Stand 18. She was perfectly plain—a bit short and fat, wearing a cardigan of a color he described as “a sort of Huddersfield pink”—until she turned round and he saw that she had the most extraordinary green eyes. “Every different green was in them.” They were the green of grass, of laurel leaves, the pale green of a bird’s egg. They were the deep blue-green of every sea-cliche he had ever read. “And all at the same time. Not in different lights or on different days. All at the same time.” Eyes intelligent, reflective of the light, not human: the eyes of a bird or an animal. They seemed independent of her, as if they saw things on behalf of someone else: as if whatever intelligence inhabited them was quite different from her own. They examined him briefly. In that glance, he believed, “she’d seen everything about me. There was nothing left to know.” He was transfixed. If you had ridden that bus as an adult, he said, and seen those eyes, you might have thought that angels travel route X38 to Sheffield in disguise.

“But they don’t. They fucking don’t. ”

After that first afternoon she often traveled from Stand 18. He was so astonished by her that when she got off the bus one day at a place called Jumble Wood, he got off too and followed her. A nice middle-class road wound up between bungalows in the sunshine. Above them, on the lip of a short steep gritstone scarp, hung the trees: green and tangled, rather impenetrable. She walked past the houses and he lost sight of her: so he went up to the wood itself. Inside, it was smaller than he had expected, full of a kind of hot stillness. He sat down for a minute or two, tranquilized by the greenish gold light filtering down into the gloom between the oaks; then walked on, to find himself suddenly on the edge of a dry limestone valley. There was a white cliff, fringed with yew and whitebeam. There were grassy banks scattered with ferns and sycamore saplings. At his feet purple vetches twined their tendrils like nylon monofilament round the stems of the moon daisies. He was astonished by the wood avens, pure art nouveau with their complaisantly bowed yellow-brown flowerheads and strange spiky seed cases. He had never seen them before: or the heath spotted orchids, tiny delicate patterns like intaglio on each pale violet petal.

When he looked up again, sunshine was pouring into the narrow valley from its southwestern end, spilling through the translucent leaves of young ash trees, transfiguring the stones and illuminating the grassy slopes as if from inside—as if the whole landscape might suddenly split open and pour its own mysterious devouring light back into the world.

“So what did happen, Choe?”

Instead of answering he stared away from me through the windscreen, started the car up, and let it roll gently down the hill, until, on the right, I saw the turning and the sign:

“You decide,” he said. “We’ll walk up.”

I don’t know what he wanted me to see, except what he had seen all those years ago. All I found is what he had already described—the wood, smaller than you would expect, full of dust motes suspended in sunshine—and beyond that, on the knife-edge of the geological interface, the curious little limestone valley with its presiding crag like a white church.

“You’re going to have to give me a bit more help,” I said.

He knelt down.

“See this? Wood avens. I had to look it up in a book.”

He picked one and offered it to me.

“It’s pretty. Choe, what happened here?”

‘Would you believe me if I told you the world really did split open?”

He gazed miserably away from me.

“What?” I said.

Somehow the light peeled itself open and showed me what was inside. It was her. She walked out of it, with those eyes every green in the world.” He laughed. “Would you believe me if I said she was naked, and she stank of sex, and she let me push her down there and then and fuck her in the sunshine? And then somehow she went back into the world and it sealed itself up behind her and I never saw her again?”

“Choe—”

“I was eighteen years old,” he said. “It was my first fuck.”

He turned away suddenly.

“It was my only fuck,” he said. “I've never done it since. Whatever lives here loves us. I know it does. But it only loves us once.”

He drove back to London in silence, parked the Escort in Camden and walked off to the tube. I telephoned him daily for two weeks, and then weekly for two months. All I got was his answering machine. In the end I gave up. Someone told me he had moved to Chiswick; someone else that he had left Britain altogether. Then one day in December I got a call from him. He was living in Gravesend.

“All that Jumble Wood stuff,” he said. “I made it up. I only told you that to get you going, you know.”

I said I would still like to talk.

“Can you get down here?”

I said I could, and we arranged a meeting. He rang to cancel three or four times. Each time it was back on within an hour or two. First I was to meet him at the bar of a pub called the Harbour Lights. Then, if I was bringing a car, at his flat. Finally he agreed to be in the main car park at one o’clock.

I drove down there along the coast road, past the rows of empty caravans, exhausted amusement parks and chemical factories which occupied the low ground between the road and the sea. Wet sleet had fallen on them all that month without once turning into snow. You could hear the women in the supermarkets congratulating themselves on being born on a warm coast, though in fact it was quite raw in the town that afternoon. I found Choe sitting on the wall of the car-park, kicking his feet, his jeans rolled up to show off a pair of paint-splattered workboots. He had shaved his hair off, then let it grow out two or three millimeters so that the bony plates of his skull showed through, aggressive and vulnerable at the same time. He seemed bored and lonely, as if he had been sitting there all morning, his nose running, his face and arms reddening in the wind from the sea.

He jumped off the wall.

“You’ll love the Harbour Lights!” he promised, and we began to walk down through the town towards the sea. Quite soon, everything was exciting him again: a girl getting out of a new car; brilliantly colored skateboard components displayed in the window of the Surf Shack; an advertisement for a film he hadn’t seen. “See that? Wow!” He waved his arm. “And look at those fucking gannets up there!”

Thinking perhaps that he had thrown them something, the circling birds—they were actually herring gulls—dipped and veered abruptly in their flight.

“They could wait forever!”

“They’re big strong birds,” I agreed.

He stared at me.

“I’m fucking scared of them,” he said.

“I thought you were scared of nowt. ”

He laughed.

We had come out on to the sea-front, and there was the Harbour Lights, facing out across the bay where a handful of wind-surfers bobbed around on a low swell, their bright sails signaling in acid greens and pinks from a lost summer. “You should see the pies in here,” Choe said delightedly. “There’s a kind of black residue in them. It’s the meat.”

We went in and sat down.

“Tell me about what you do,” he said.

I opened my mouth but he interrupted immediately.

“Look at this place!”

It seemed no different from any other pub on a flat coast, but perhaps that was what he meant. The brewery had put in an imitation ship’s bell; a jukebox played ’60s surfer classics. At one end of the long cavernous bar were a few empty seafood trays under chipped glass, while at the other the barman was saying to a woman in a torn fur coat, “You’ve picked a bad day.” He hurried off down to the other end, where he seemed to fall into a dream. She smiled vaguely after him, then took off one shoe to examine the heel. A small tan and white dog, driven to hysteria by this act, rushed barking at her bare foot. The locals laughed and winked at one another.

Choe stared at them with dislike.

“You went along with all this so you’d have something to write,” he accused me.

I got my notebook out and put it on the table between us.

“It’s a living, Choe.”

I went to the bar to get the drinks. “Write something about me then,” he said when I came back. He grinned. “Go on! Now! I bet you can!”

“I don’t do portraits, Choe.”

The lies liberated from this statement skittered off into infinity like images between two mirrors. He must have sensed them go, because instead of answering he stood up and turned his back on me and pretended to look out of the window at the aimless evolutions of the windsurfers—

They would tack hesitantly towards one another until they had gathered in a slow drift like a lot of ducks on a pond: then one of them, his sail like neon in the sleety afternoon light, would shoot out of the mass and fly for quarter of a mile across the bay in a fast, delirious curve, spray shuddering up around him as he leapt from wave to wave. During this drive he seemed to have broken free not just from the other surfers but from Gravesend, winter, everything. Every line of his body tautened against the pull of the sail—braced feet, bent legs, yellow flotation jacket—was like an advert for another climate.

Sooner or later, though, the board would swerve, slow down suddenly, subside. Abandoned by the wind, the bright sail, after hunting about for a second or two in surprise, sagged and fell into the water like a butterfly into a bath, clinging to a moment of self-awareness too confused to be of any use. This made Choe Ashton shiver and stare round the bar.

These fuckers have all committed suicide,” he said. His face was so pale I thought he was going to be sick.

“Be fair, Choe,” I said cruelly. “You like the pies.”

“I won't let you write anything about me. ”

“How can you stop that, Choe?”

He shrugged.

“I could beat the fuck out of you,” he said.

Outside, the tide was coming in resolutely; the light was fading. I went out to the lavatory. Among the stickers on the bar door was one saying, “Prevent Hangovers—Stay Drunk. ” When I got back the woman at the bar was doing up her coat. “I’d put far too much cayenne in,” she told the barman, “but we had to eat it anyway!” The tan and white dog was begging from table to table, and Choe Ashton had gone. I found him outside. Twenty or thirty herring gulls had gathered shrieking above him in the darkening air, and he was throwing stones at them with singleminded ferocity. It was some time before he noticed me. He was panting.

“These fuckers,” he said. “They can wait forever.” He rubbed the inside of his elbow. “I've hurt my arm.”

“They only live a year or two, Choe.”

He picked up another stone. The gulls shrieked.

“I only told you that stuff to get you going,” he said. “None of it was true. I never even lived there.”

I have no idea what happened to Choe Ashton in Jumble Wood. Whatever he says now though, I believe he returns there year after year, probably on the day he took me, the anniversary of his first and perhaps single sexual experience. It is as much an attempt to reassure himself of his own existence as that of the girl he believes came out of the inside of the world. I imagine he stands there all afternoon watching the golden light angle moment to moment across the valley. Seen in the promise of this light, the shadows of the sycamore saplings are full of significance; the little crag resembles a white church. Behind him, on the gritstone side of the geological divide, the wood is hot and tranquil and full of insects. His hand resting on the rough bark of an oak he appeals time and again to whatever lives in that place— “Bring her back. Bring her back to me.”—only to be hurt time and again by its lack of response.

I understand that. I understand why he might want to obscure it. From me. From himself. What I don’t understand is my own dream.

I’ve lost no one. My life is perfectly whole. I never dreamed anything like this until I met Choe Ashton. It’s since then that I can no longer accept a universe empty of meaning, even if I must put it there myself.