Tales and Imaginings (14 page)

First I construct a windy darkness out of shreds of memory. With the wind I swing open the church-hall door and clatter a
quadrilateral
of light down across the asphalt forecourt. I borrow the smile of a passerby to witness the child backing out of the hall wielding a pingpong bat as if it were a rapier. The invisible attacker forcing him to yield the golden ground is his smaller brother, delayed within the door by adult hands buttoning his coat, but fencing
vigorously
. ‘Come on, pest!’ cries the one outside, flickering in and out of the light-path. I release the little one: he charges out, head down, set, grim, pingpong blade at rigid arm’s length. The door slams.

I let the exhilaration of the night work on them until they are wildly orbiting the forecourt with owl-hoots and wolf-howls. Then I allow a narrower strip of light to fall from the door, and as the adult, the curate or scoutmaster, within I call to them, ‘You two! Run along home, it’s late!’

And it is
late. Suddenly quietened, they climb over the low wall separating the forecourt from the cobbled lane that runs back along the side of the church hall; from its tall windows behind dirty wire mesh I let dim slopes of light cross their way, to be extinguished as soon as they have passed. They walk quickly, pingpong bats under their arms, hands in pockets, collars turned up; the wind at their backs sometimes pushes them into a few running steps. On either
hand are high stone walls with little wooden gates into backyards at regular intervals, mostly in darkness; but here and there I leave a kitchen light on to accentuate the perspective. And now I touch the sky, clear a patch, a black space among the clouds pressing by overhead, just enough to frame a single star that is
briefly revealed and then eclipsed. The children have their heads down, they didn’t notice. I let the gap flow further away ahead of them until it shows another star for a few moments just as the elder boy looks up. He sees it. The wide vague movement of the clouds makes the point of light appear to be travelling in the opposite direction. Before it has disappeared the child has understood the illusion. (They think he will be a scientist; they are wrong.) I send another space over their heads and down the sky in front of them, and two stars show apparently climbing the sky, with a third close behind and then a fourth nearer the horizon. The sailing constellation vanishes, but as the clouds begin to break up others appear. The elder child is about to nudge the younger to attention, but stops himself. I let an idea form in him, and a temptation. He glances measuringly at his brother. Then he suddenly shouts and points: ‘Look!
Shooting-stars
!’ The little one stops and looks up with his mouth open. ‘Gosh, I never saw shooting-stars before. They’re always gone by the time you tell me. Look, three in a row! Where are they going to?’

‘Oh, they go on and on, for ever. And once in every million years they fly past the earth.’

‘Shall we run home and tell them?’

‘They’ll all be passed by that time. We are the only ones to see them.’

‘Well, isn’t it lucky we were out late tonight!’ The young one stands with his head thrown back, round-eyed. His brother points out other arrays of stars, great and small, serenely trekking onwards through vast depths of space, disappearing, being replaced by
identical
arrays. I let him feel the joy of constructing a universe out of light, building a wonder in the mind of his brother. But further over on their right the clouds are parting now and the moon will soon be revealed. The elder child sees its glimmer through the thinning films; creator and destroyer, he keeps his eye on it, timing his effects, learning his craft. Half the sky is filled with the sublime procession now and the younger child is leaping up and down as if he were trying to join it, when the elder cries, ‘The moon! It’s going with them!’ The young one turns and sees the clouds’ edge fleeing across the moon. He stops jumping, puzzled. ‘Silly idiot!’ yells his brother, and starts to run.

In the mind of the young one I feel the cosmos shudder to a stop. The stars are still, dimmed by moonlight. The wind falls away. Then: ‘Pig!’ he shrieks, and hurls his bat after his brother; ‘You pig! Pig! Pig!’ The bat clatters in the gutter.

I lock up the church hall and throw away the key. I turn out the kitchen lights along the alley. I see the children turn in at the gate of their home, and I shoulder another continent of cloud over the scene.

Finally, thirty years later, I use the pen of the elder brother to apologize to the younger.

A breeze touched the blonde curls of the girl on the doorstep. ‘Hello,’ she said, ‘sorry to wake you at this hour of the morning, but we found a man lying in the road out there. Do you think you could phone for an ambulance?’ I peered past her, dazzled
by the summer morning. Outside the gate another girl was kneeling at the roadside. A tress of red-gold hair hid her face and that of the long blackish bundle she was bending over. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘I won’t be a moment,’ and I turned and ran back up to my flat.

When I came down again the girls were poised on slim legs at the gate. ‘We must run or we’ll miss the bus,’ the blonde one called. ‘We moved him into your garden.’ She brushed something off the hip of her rose-pink pullover. ‘There’s your bus now,’ I said, hearing its familiar roar at the corner. The other girl was already
scampering
to meet it before I had had a chance to see her properly, leaving an impression of multicoloured stripes and patches. The first girl hovered in the gateway a moment longer. ‘Maybe he doesn’t really need an ambulance, maybe he just needs food,’ she said with a smile. ‘Have no fear; I will do whatever is best for him,’ I replied, and my rather solemn phraseology made her blue eyes widen for an instant, before she turned and fled after her friend. The glimpses I caught of her bright hair as she appeared and disappeared between the lilacs along the garden wall were like the flicking on and off of a
light, I cried ‘Goodbye, and thank you!’ after her. They certainly could both run like deer, and they did catch their bus, for when it swept past the gate a minute later they were on its platform,
gasping
, laughing, clinging to each other and waving to me. Might they be models, I wondered, going off to be photographed for a
magazine
of fashion? Were they not too brightly dressed to be, say, receptionists in an exclusive hotel? Would Personal Assistants be travelling so early, with the dew still shining on the ground?

The man was lying on his back by the dustbin. I went and squatted beside him. ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I thought it might be you.’ His eyes were closed. His mouth was quite lost among the matted and streaky hair of his beard, as if he had had no use for it in recent weeks. There was dirt in the furrows of his scalp. ‘You don’t know me,’ I told him, ‘but I know you. I see you every day, several times a day usually, walking past. But you are preoccupied, you never look up. You never stop except to put down your plastic bag of things for a moment while you shift that bundle of old greatcoats over from one arm to another. I see that those two kind, iridescent
creatures
have spread them out for you to lie on. Where’s the plastic bag, though?’ I got up and went to the gate. The bag was in the
gutter
; I brought it in and placed it within reach of his hand, which soon began to stir, stretch and grope, as I had expected, until it knotted itself into the handles of the bag and fell inert again. ‘That’s better! I said encouragingly. ‘You feel better holding onto your bag. What’s in it, I wonder? May I look? Old shoes, of course! I should have guessed. Not so old as the pair you’re wearing, though; I suppose by your standards the ones in the bag are new shoes. Walking is all you do, isn’t it. It is all you have to do. Listen, open your eyes, will you? You have to get moving. I phoned the ambulance; it didn’t occur to me it was you, one of you walking people, until I was coming downstairs again. Naturally I hadn’t associated girls like that, so sweet-smelling, with your sort. I
understand 
the problem though; I do understand. You can’t wash while you’re walking, and walking is all that matters, the moving on from place to place, even if the places recur again and again on your
little
round. You always cross the road at the bus-stop, don’t you, and put your bag down and change over your armload of coats when you reach the other kerb. You go round the corner then, out of sight from my window. Where do you go next? I’ve passed you up at the tube-station often enough. Do you turn down that long back-street, I forget its name, from there to the High Road? How many times do you change arms going down that street? It really is the most boring street in London, isn’t it, with the endless wall of the
railway
sidings, and whatever is on the other side, terrace houses I
suppose
, I really can’t call it to mind, and a scrap-merchant’s lot fenced off with corrugated sheet. Come on now, wake up! Don’t you want to walk the length of that street again? Don’t you want to turn down the High Street and step into the doorway of the Bank as you always do, so that you can put down your plastic bag and heave your heavy old coats over onto the other arm without being jostled when the street is
crowded? Though I did notice you doing just that, in that doorway, once when I was coming home from a
late-night
film-show and there was nobody about at all. So that little step aside and pause and out again
is
part of your routine. You have to do it again, quite a few times today, and tonight if you carry on all night, which it seems you do, for I have seen you approaching that particular spot very early in the morning, once when I was
hurrying
to catch the first train to Scotland. Yes, come on, that’s right, open your eyes. Keep them open! Let me help you sit up. You’re only allowed a couple of minutes more, until we hear the bell of the ambulance. You can hide round the back of the house; I’ll send them off in the wrong direction and then you can come straight back through the gate and onto your old route again. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want that and only that. You wish you could
want something else, but you can’t; that’s the catch, isn’t it. Sit up properly now. You fell, I know. Did a car brush against you? Never mind, you’ve fallen before, I’m sure, many times – many more than three times, for instance! You will fall again, of course, though that isn’t a specified part of your penance; it’s just a side-effect of being human. But – listen to me carefully now! – this does not go on for ever. Do you hear? It does not go on for ever! It goes on for a very long time, longer than you can imagine; you will cross this road and stop and put down your bag and change over the coats onto the other arm, the less-tired arm, and pick up the bag again, more times than anyone has ever counted up to – but not an infinite number of times. Do you understand the difference between a finite
number
, however huge, however multiplied by millions and billions, and infinity? It’s not fair really, they should explain the difference before you set out. There is a difference, as you will discover. I know, because I am an agent – that’s why I’m getting you moving again. I didn’t believe in the objective existence of Purgatory until I became one of its agents, but I do understand and I always did; that’s why those two angels brought you in to me. Now, I hear the bell. Get up, come on, be quick! There you are, on your feet again. Lean on the wall as you go along the side of the house. Wait round the back until I call you.’

I gathered up his three coats and shook the dew off them.
Keeping
his face turned from me he held out his arm stiffly for me to hang the coats over it. When he made an uncertain step in the
direction
of the road I spun him round and send him shuffling off along the side of the house. The bell was clamouring at the gate.

I am too near the edge, they tell me; I look too deep. Even here, lying down close to the shopfronts, the wind is tearing at me. The pavement trembles as the lorries pass, and then comes the shock of a wave against the base of the cliff It amazes me that the
passers-by
register neither of these disturbances. So I keep my head down and they hardly notice me.

There is a crack here between two paving slabs, a fissure in the rock with a bramble deep down in it. It runs between my hands, a groove full of blackish grains and a glint of broken glass, and
disappears
under my chest. The bramble stem, dull purple, with pale hooks, leafless, is tensed against the sides of the ragged gap. The wind makes my raincoat flap against my legs. The joint of the paving runs straight to the kerbstone. I taste salt on my lips; spray is drifting up over the rim of the land. Just ahead of me is the base of a lamppost; I worm myself forward, get one arm round it, clasp my hands together, and peer over the edge.

The traffic is stopping. A big wheel moves slowly across in front of me. There is a
cigarette packet stuck to it. When it stops, the corner of the packet, green and white, shows under the bulge of the tyre. People stepping over my legs angled wide across the
pavement
look down at me anxiously. Can they not see that years of footsteps have rotted the stone? The rock is fissured, rain has
worked deep into the faults. I do not tell them the clifftop could break up under us into heavy box-shapes at any moment. If it
happens
– when it happens! – they would surely see me clutch at the sliding masses, my feet dragging across the pavement; they would hear the wind screaming in my ears as I turn, legs astride in the air, twisting myself free of the cloud of sand and stones falling with me, curving my back like a salmon as the wave leaps up towards me, foam biting at my face, arms twisted around my head …

But my arm is around the base of the lamppost, my hands grasp each other firmly even though they are aching with cold. I am steady, my interwoven worlds separating out into two clarities. The joint of the pavement is actually a few inches to the right of the rock-fissure, the edge of the cliff is just beyond the line of
kerbstones
. I dig my toe in where the corner of a manhole cover is
broken
off, get my foot secure where a loose stone has been kicked out of the turf. Smoke spurts by my head, the lights have changed, the big tyre hunches slightly and moves off. A motorbike follows, red mudguards and a leather foot. For a few moments, for as long as I can hold my worlds apart, I can see far ahead, to reflections in plateglass opposite, naked gesturing figurines, and beyond all that a band of ivory sky between the heavy cloud-base and the dark sea horizon. Distant rainshowers hang across the long rim of light.

Look, that pale bird sliding through the air on knifeblade wings! Watch it glide away across the wind roaring up the cliff. But you don’t want to see it. There are people stepping off the pavement onto the black and white rectangles without a glance at the leaping shapeless blacks and whites far below.

Now a wave is gathering itself out of the confusion, raising itself up in a long dark fold. As it moves in towards the bottom of the cliff another sea-bird, a heavy black thing, takes off from the
upcurving
face of water, lifts itself over the dancing white teeth of the blade, glides along the wave’s smooth back with its long neck
stretched out, leaves the wave as it runs in under the cliff, and rolls its flight along the hollowed front of the next wave, turns, checks, rides the water for a moment, and plunges into the throat of the wave. You could see all this if you wanted to, if you would stop for a moment. The bird is swimming in the transparent wave; it is a pale green shadow of itself.

The traffic is stationary again, murmuring, waiting for the lights. Choking fumes roll along the gutter. The wind drives blinding dots of foam into my face. Look down, look down, all of you! Directly below us the belly of the cliff hides the cavern at sea-level, but it is there, I can tell you. I have seen it from the bus: a long slit between the strata where the water crouches to go in under the smooth dark lip of stone. You must have heard it sometimes: the shriek of air forced out, the satiating plunge of liquid into solid. When a wave is torn open by the rocks and thrown back against the next one that comes surging into the shore, the white blood of the sea streams out, coiling and foaming. The two waves drive together and send up writhing towers of shattered water. The new wave mounts the first, rushes over it, arches its smooth-muscled back and empties itself into the cave. Watch what happens! Stand and watch! The waters spread themselves, folds of froth are smeared out, the linked arcs of bubbles widen, sleek black patches well up; a space is prepared, a field, a bed, that is what it is, for the coming-together of the wave now being flung back from below the weight of stone and the next already forming from the chaos of peaks and troughs further out. And this is
a huge one, bulging up out of the dazzling crinkled surface-film, stretching it smooth. This is the one I warned you of, the one that will surely bring down the cliff, shaking out thousands of tons of rock poised over crumbling foundations, leaving the department stores behind us hanging over the surf with seagulls riding up through their floors on the rounded back of the wind. It leans and piles itself against the cliff, it heaves and bursts into the cavern, it
forces itself along clefts running deep into the rock below us, behind us, prising apart the stone. Inertia, the immovable clenched
darkness
, resists, repels. No, this isn’t the one. This wave is
lost, beating against its own echo. I feel the shock throughout my body, people pause as they reach out towards the swinging shopdoors, the piles of metal baskets rattle by the tills, but the force is spent in
unfulfillable
labyrinths, the earth holds, the sea falls back once more.

No, not this time, not today, and maybe not this year. But another winter is coming. Storms hundreds of miles away in the ocean will prepare the great rollers that travel for days one behind another, moaning in banks of fog, whispering through nights of full moon and icy stars, gathering strength from deep after deep. Not this winter perhaps, and not the next, and perhaps not in winter but on some unsuspecting day of spring, a Sunday afternoon with the shops closed and a few children running to a park through the drowsy scent of sea-pink blossoms nodding on the clifftop. At some such moment the ultimate touch will be given, the
undermining
of the base completed. Suddenly, a whipcrack, a whisper that becomes a roar, a crevasse rips open along the pavement, the level turf sinks into hollows and comes apart, we see through it to the glistening calm sea below. And then the gigantic foundering, the utter disappearance into roaring muddy foam of a place we knew, a place where families picnicked only days ago.

So, even though you notice nothing, the double geography will have changed. The line of the cliffs will run further back, behind the big stores, along little streets that are quiet in the sunshine, with locked-up workshops, shuttered restaurants, empty stalls whose loose canvas tops flap in the breeze, where trodden cabbage leaves and the blue wrappers of oranges lie in the gutter and a cat sleeps among broken wooden crates.

I know all this; I have seen such changes several times in the course of my life.