Beast (6 page)

I had brought no food because I didn’t have any food I only had water now and anyway I still wasn’t hungry. Food seemed like a form of pollution. I drank water and this was fine. Perhaps I sat there for a couple of hours. I knew I would see nothing and I was happy about it. Nothing was fine. Nothing was good. This was how it was meant to be.

And then it changed suddenly just as it had changed the day before. I took a swig of water from my bottle and I closed its cap and put it down on the ground before me. When I looked up again I saw nothing that I had not seen before and yet none of it looked the same. This time I wasn’t frightened. Instead I felt despair settling slowly and gently down upon me. There was no panic and no urgency. There was nothing to run from. I accepted what I felt almost immediately. But there it was: a gentle, strong, loving despair enveloping me. I felt like the nature of things was laid quietly out before me like the wares on a market stall. For a moment the world cracked open and I saw myself as the wild creature I was as one caged wild creature among billions as atoms as meat as animal as prey. As another small victim the world would not mourn because the world
did not mourn it just went on. The wheel of blood and sperm and death and life kept turning and none of it needed me none of it knew me for there was no me and never had been. I saw the abyss open up and I knew I would be swallowed by it and I knew that everything in my world everything I was and everything I thought and felt and cared about and refused to care about had been carefully constructed only to help me survive any glimpses I might have of this.

What was all this? Everything was so silent and still and sad. There was nobody here but me no creature no noise and it seemed clear to me in this moment that it was driving me insane. How could it not drive me insane? The silent hot white place and everything I had been drifting away on the stream so far that I could no longer see it. I accepted it all. It was fine. I had no desire to change it but at the same time I was clear what was going on. It was horrible. I was so alone. I was so alone and that was all there was and would ever be and there was nothing to be done about that now.

I got up and I turned and walked to the churchyard gate. I walked down the path and I pushed open the church’s wooden door which was ajar. The building was cool and close and immediately I felt different. The despair seemed to be hanging in the air outside like
mist. Inside the building it dissipated. I sat on the very last pew at the back of the church and I held my cold water bottle in my hand like a relic like something that connected me to a world I felt I was floating away from. The whiteness came through the stained glass window at me. To make a window like that. To make this altar and these carvings and these windows to make a spire that points to heaven and to put one in every settlement in the land. What did you have to believe to do that and would it dissolve what was hanging in the air? Did beauty dissolve what was hanging in the air could beauty dissolve anything or was that a lie? Did people make windows like that anymore or did art die with God in the twentieth century? If a tower doesn’t point to heaven why build a tower? If your hands are not folded in prayer what are your hands folded around? As the white light walked through the many colours did it bring the despair with it and would it settle on me again? What did this window tell me as the light came through and this unknown saint rose in red and gold and pointed his staff at me? That there is art and there is god and everything else is a waste product.

I sat in the pew and I breathed and it was fine. It was all fine. Everything was as it should have been. How could I ever have thought otherwise? I liked churches.
Eventually I rose and went back to the door which was still ajar and closed it behind me. Outside the despair was still drifting gently around in the air. This was a waste of time. It was obviously a waste of time to sit here waiting for something which would never come. I didn’t mind that I had wasted my time. I didn’t feel that I had anything better to do. But I didn’t feel like wasting any more of it so I put my pack on my back and headed up again onto the moor.

On arriving back at the farm the first thing I felt was a strong urge for a drink. But not water. I wanted beer or whisky or wine but of course I had none of these. I filled up the lone mug on the table from the jerry can and drank more water instead. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d wanted a drink. Now I wanted to be drunk. I wanted to be pissed for days. I wanted to fall onto the floor and have visions and wake up sick. I wanted to pick up a dirty woman in a bar and fuck her upside down in a car down some filthy lane. I wanted to smoke weed and fly and curse and sing I wanted to run screaming through neon streets I wanted to sit in dark corners in underground clubs I wanted to puke everywhere and bounce off the walls and go to sleep forever. All of this whiteness all of this silence.

I drank two more glasses of water and took a number
of very deep breaths. It became clear to me what I needed to do. I needed to create a system. A system would lock out the fear and the silence and the despair and the whiteness. I needed a curriculum to follow. This sitting this aimless sitting day by day it was getting me nowhere and there is madness in nowhere. That is where real madness is to be found in the middle of nowhere sitting in the whiteness unthinking that is where it all breaks open. Nobody can survive that. You need to run from that when you see it coming over the hill.

I would make a plan. I was going to find the creature and I was going to be systematic about it. There was no point in just hanging around where I had once seen it. If there was something if there was some big creature and if it was living around the moor it would be moving about. It would probably have a big range. It must be living somewhere. There would be somewhere it went at night a cave or a barn or a tree or a hole. It probably had a circuit on which it hunted. There were probably places it liked to go at different times of day. It would have habits. I would learn the habits and I would use them to track it down. I would see it and then I would know.

There were two maps of the moor on the table with the books. I took them from the tabletop and laid them
out on the floor so that they fitted together like a jigsaw. On one of the maps I found the church and the lane and I circled them in pencil. Then I started drawing. I sat on the warm stone floor cross-legged with my mug which I filled up at intervals from the jerry can and I measured and drew. Time seemed to sink into the moment as it does when you’re not thinking about it. Time didn’t pass it just coalesced around me like jelly. I had no notion of how long I sat there. It didn’t get darker outside but I hadn’t seen darkness for days. It was light when I went to sleep and light when I woke up and because I had no watch I didn’t know how long I slept for and because I didn’t know I didn’t care. I sat there in the even light with my mug and my pencil and my two maps and I drew.

When I had finished I had what looked like an uneven pencilled spiderweb connecting the maps. In the centre of the web where the spider would sit were the lane and the church. Around them I had marked a grid comprised of eight mile-square sections. Within each of these squares I had drawn a series of lines which divided them further into smaller areas. Around these eight squares I had marked a further sixteen which I had also crosshatched internally with the same regular lines.

It was a simple geometrical system and the plan that went alongside it was simple as well. The square in the centre of the map covered the place I had been for the last three days. I had already walked most of this area in going to the lane and coming back again and exploring the fields around. I had satisfied myself that there was nothing there. I didn’t know if the thing I had seen would ever come back there but it was the only place I’d seen it. So I would treat it as the centre of the area to be explored and I would systematically explore the land around it. Each day I would select one of my marked squares and I would walk along the crosshatched lines within it until I had systematically walked the entire area of the square. I would walk slowly and quietly and I would look for any signs of the creature. The next day I would do the next square in the same way.

In eight days I would have covered an area of nine square miles centred upon the lane. If I had still not seen it again or come across any sign of it by this point I would proceed to the outer circle and explore the next sixteen squares. That would take me just over two weeks. If I’d still not turned up anything I would start again in the centre of the grid where the lane was. This way I would cover an area of twenty-five square miles
in slightly less than a month. I would repeat this cycle until I found it.

This was a good system. This would work. I stood up stumbling slightly and steadied myself on the edge of the table. My left leg was numb again as it so often was when I sat still for too long. My lower back ached. I took another sip of water and looked down at my map. I had no desire for alcohol anymore. The despair had gone. It seemed like a strange mirage now and I couldn’t imagine where it had come from. This would work. I was pleased with this. It was a net that would close around whatever I had seen. It would bring it to the surface so that I could examine it. I would see it again and then I would know. I would start tomorrow.

The next morning I was in a city. It was boundless it seemed to stretch to all parts of the horizon. It looked like a Third World city it was full of slums all of the buildings were strung together with corrugated iron and plywood and bits of old crate and cardboard and barefoot little black children ran around in the streets laughing and kicking deflated footballs and open sewers ran down the edges of the roads and none of the roads were paved. There were women washing clothes in the river talking together as they worked there were men trudging home over the hill in flip-flops and shorts
walking back from some pain they had been paid for. There were skinny dogs with their ribs showing lurking in doorways. The sunlight was blazing down. There was hunger and there was poverty but the place was full of life people knew what they were hemmed in by and nobody was lying to themselves about what they could be and nobody had come to tell them what they weren’t and so they just lived.

I was walking through this but nobody saw me. I was an alien here. I came down to a lake and the lake was clear and some boys were jumping naked from a rickety pier into the water screaming with laughter and pulling themselves up again onto the wooden struts their naked black bodies shining in the sun. One of them saw me and pointed and laughed and another one of them hid behind his bigger friends and I walked down to them on the pier and I saw that I was tall and white and angular and covered in cloth and a stranger to my own awkward body and to these children who were at ease in themselves. My pockets were full of money and I wanted to go across the lake but nobody would take payment. Can you help me across the lake I said to the boys and one of them said to me I will teach you to swim sir but you must take those clothes off. And so I took all of my clothes off and I stood there
tall and white and pale and hairy amongst these small sleek black boys and the boy I was speaking to said you must jump in there sir and he pointed to the water.

And I didn’t hesitate I just jumped in and my head went under and it was freezing and the water was all over me and I surfaced and looked at the boys and they were all lined up along the edge of the pier looking at me. And I said I can’t swim and they said you can swim sir if you choose to but there is nothing else we can do for you now. We are glad that you came back. And I could see the other shore of the lake and there were rushes growing and a small boat was hidden in them a small wooden boat and I could swim and I started across the lake and things tugged at my ankles as I moved there were things under the water. I kept swimming.

The morning routine was the same every day now and I had come to enjoy it. Wake up clothes on two mugs of water pack bag boots on pick up stick open door step out into the white heat. It was as white as quiet as empty as ever. As before I headed across the stream and up the shoulder of the moor and over it towards the church and the town. But this time I stopped before I went through the gate that led down off the moor and into the lane. I took out my map and I walked until I was exactly in the corner of the first
marked grid. The lines that crossed it back and forth on my map were not related to any footpaths or trackways on the ground. They were just lines on the map and in my mind and I would follow them as best I could. I would move slowly and steadily. There was no hurry. I had all day.

I decided that the challenge was to follow the lines precisely. I would walk the straight lines I had drawn on the map no matter what obstacles I came across on the ground. This would keep me going. It might be fun. Who knew what I would find. I would watch the ground on which I walked and I would keep my eyes on the horizon and anything that happened I would see immediately. Nothing else moved there was no other life there was only the hot and the white and so anything that came to me I would see.

On the map this was an empty grid. Some of the others had features in: ponds streams woods cairns paths. But this was an expanse of heather. The only landmark in this square mile was a giant’s grave. I turned the words over in my mouth as I began to walk. Giant’s grave. Giant’s grave. To be in a land with giants’ graves in it. Some great old menhirs fallen in on each other and what was beneath? To just walk past these things without a second glance and everything they once were.
I would love to dig down and expose the skeleton of a ten foot tall man with a bronze shield at his feet. Yes there were giants in the Earth it was all real all of it. All of the stories they told you when you were a child they were all true. Imagine that. Imagine if adulthood is the fairy tale and childhood is the reality. Imagine giants’ graves all over the land and the motorways roaring past them and it is the motorways which are the romantic lies. Beyond the places you can walk to there is a field of buttercup and clover which rolls down to a river and that is where the life is that is the reality and here you are walking through a grey dream.