Sun Dance (5 page)

A week before Dad’s death she’d flown me out from school to see him. I stood beside his hospital cot. Sunlight through the window fell across a crumpled, yellow faced old man, all that remained of the virile father I’d known. I see yet the form of his face; broad, high forehead, a hooked nose, predacious in profile, but most strikingly, the clear blue eyes. That afternoon they shone out of his gaunt features with a peculiar light which penetrated through and beyond me.

We had never been familiar but he caught my hand and the smile which always lurked behind his eyes appeared as he spoke, “All my life has been a search, a quest for that ultimate equation, the key to unlocking a mathematical pattern which is the pure and glorious template of infinity. Understand infinity and you strike the anvil upon which every force and particle of this universe and all other universes, past and future are forged. It’s the music of unending beauty.”

His voice became a cough; he turned aside for some minutes, until, with a spark of the vigour which I remembered from childhood, he said, “I never found that equation. If you ever do, guard it with your life. It’s the key which unlocks the secret haven of eternal consciousness.”

I looked out of his window. Sunlight played on the leaves of the aspen trees. They shivered in a breeze which highlighted their paleness. And in their yellow fluttering, the sun danced.

He stirred a little, “Hector boy, I lie here dying. Tonight, tomorrow? The music is soaring, filling my head, taking away fear. I’m young again. There is no void, only these soaring notes of beauty. I hear them, as though from the heart of all creation. There is no death. Believe in beauty. Its melody is the key to eternity.”

I was twelve. Those were his last words.

The blue eyes remained staring.

He was reaching for that key.

How long had I been in this single ward? Had I been identified? So far I hadn’t been asked to put any details on a form. That struck me as strange. No visitors, but then there was nobody I knew in London. Would my colleagues trace me? Unease continually affected my thinking. Never mind the contents of my briefcase. If the damn thing still existed, maybe I’d shown my contempt for the politicians too openly. So far no police to see me, but I was getting increasingly alarmed. Concern over being detained erupted. God, I must get out of this place.

Weakness kept me chained. The horror of the tunnel burst again and again. Its roaring crash and splinter brought panic attacks clawing my sinews. Escape, escape, it screamed. I’d cast wildly round the bedroom, gripping the frame of the bed and sweating profusely. Only when her eyes looked down at me, blue and intense, would each attack pass away. Shining with inner laughter they smiled, and I would sleep, as though rocking in a warm sea.

The sundial re-appeared each day, a yellow slash on my bedcover. Its spring light drove a reviving spirit. After one fierce bout of the recurrent trauma, never mind limb and lung, I knew a mental recovery to be just as urgent. I needed to deal firmly with my revulsion for city smells whether stale air or recycled water. No more tranquilizers. Confidence, self discipline, I needed to regain control of my thoughts, quell these ridiculous manias. Action was needed now, the action I’d determined upon weeks ago.

Restless beyond endurance, beyond the rational, I threw sheets aside. Damn medication, a breath of the ocean, salt air would cleanse burnt lungs, the power of the sun would give me back strength. I knew it, I knew it. I rose.

Cash, clothes, I needed both. Ask the nurse to help? No, she might be implicated in my disappearance, lose her job. The wardrobe, check the wardrobe. Why? I crossed to it unsteadily. Staring me in the face, clothes on hangers; not the grey suit and smart meeting tie I’d worn, that would be impossible; no, a check shirt, Harris tweed jacket, flannels, socks, heavy brogues. Incredulous, who the mischief? At the bottom of the wardrobe, a leather portmanteau!

No sight of my briefcase. Some person could be privy to its contents, deliberately or otherwise. That wouldn’t stop me. It had gone, with any luck in smithereens. Putting the portmanteau on the bed, I opened it gingerly. Shaving kit, more clothes. I snapped it shut, sat a moment. None of it mine.

Morning round had been and gone, “What the hell,” I was being recklessly driven by the voice hammering in my head, “Get out of here, boy, out, get out!” Pants, shirt, trousers, socks, I fell back on the bed to pull them on, “Boy, boy, am I weak.” Struggling to dress, I grunted with pain as I bent.

“Good God, this lot fits me.” Whose? Hollow cheeks and lantern-jaw watched from a mirror over the sink. I touched the face with a skinny hand, noted the actions, not a man I recognised, surely I was alive? I attempted a grin, it’s me O.K.

Tweed jacket, an amazing fit. Hurriedly, automatically my hand went to the inside pocket. A blood stained wallet.I stared at it in disbelief. “Mine. How in the name of creation did it get into this outfit?” Fumbling through each pouch, cash, bank cards, “of course it’s mine.”

In disbelief I checked the contents again. A small card slipped onto the floor. I picked it up. Just a handwritten phone number. No time to think that one out.

Visitors thronged the passage, chattering, clutching grapes and flowers. None ever opened my door. Joining the stream was easy. Corridors, lifts, more corridors with pictures. Past reception. Front door, don’t look back. I was outside, goodbye hospital, and thank you.

I leant against a taxi rank pillar. A coughing fit overtook me, “You OK, guv?” The cab driver took my elbow, “Yes thanks, I’ll be fine in a moment,” and after a pause, “Euston station, please.” Why in the world should I pick Euston?

The cabbie helped me to a seat in the station.

Amongst the throng of everyday city life I sat thinking.

A small card, hand written phone number, I turned it over.

Blank.

Clack-arty, clack, clack-arty, clack, it hammered through an aching head, a drumbeat pounding from Euston to Glasgow, rolling into bends, roaring through stations, the route of ‘The Royal Scot’ since days of glowing firebox and the hiss of steam. Silver tracks and clattering points, the train swaying in lively tempo. Hurrying north, driven by some wild urge, it might be a ridiculous whim but there was no denying my shiver of expectation. Ten years cooped in a physics lab testing theories, exploring new concepts, here was the same nerve jangling sensation I experienced when my research stood on the edge of fresh insight.

Perhaps I’d venture to some hazardous retreat, elemental and remote which could ignite a spark of imagination, lift my mind beyond mundane thoughts into a torrid zone of inspired dimensions where ideas emerge or equations present themselves. Unravel the enigma of ‘Dark Energy’, prove it the force driving the expansion of the universe. Deduce the nature of ‘Dark Matter’, invisible, yet thought to be the overwhelming mass of this universe. Research which occupied past work haunted my brain, torturing me with ideas just out of reach. I was far from well.

Was this headlong stampede northwards the trick of a fevered mind, the first symptoms of insanity, maybe schizophrenia, had I lost contact with reality? The injury to my head in the explosion might explain the violent swings of a mind in the grip of disjointed thinking which I found impossible to stem. Abruptly a fresh mental turmoil erupted as I began to consider the widespread indifference and gross ignorance that could be driving our species towards extinction when the potential evolution of intelligence might set the waves of imagination on a journey through the orifice of singularity towards a comprehension of infinity?

I heard myself lecturing the carriage, “An age of enlightenment awaits us, knowledge yet untapped. Ninety-six percent of this universe remains virgin to our understanding. All that we are, all the stuff that constitutes everything we touch, all we experience as reality, all we see about us as though it were totality, is a mere four per cent of a supreme mystery. Let me tell you….”

I became aware of standing and shouting. The woman beside me got up in some alarm, snatched her case off the rack and moved down the compartment. In mortifying embarrassment I sank back on my seat. Hands sweating and twitching, I looked out of the carriage window. The need for treatment was becoming obvious. Could a practical life help me recover?

We rattled through mundane countryside. Copse and hedgerow dovetailed into bow fronted homes, red brick and mowed lawns. Their uniformity fed into factory gates surrounded by bumper to bumper car parks. Skylines puffed away. Brickworks’ chimneys, slender and elegant, hour glass energy towers topped with steam carried away in twisting spirals on a blustery day.

Streets followed the contours of forgotten valleys. End on houses formed serrated rows of tiled roofs and castellated chimney pots, each tiny back garden proudly walled from its neighbour. Ariel forests gave viewers access to the disappearing jungles, or maybe the ritual of sexy soaps and violence. Squeezed between graffiti and washing lines I spotted the odd decrepit residence; pillared doorways, shading beech, the remnants of an unassailable feudal divide. As we banked through industrial estates, gigantic multinational signs presided over factory parking lots and used car dumps. Sickly trees waved plastic bags. Pub signs, potting sheds and greenhouses, a conglomeration of human bolt holes, temporary shelters before the onslaught of compulsory identification and draconian measures are brought to control the anarchy which will engulf these same streets as the fallout from a growing wealth gap.

City overspill and rolling countryside, the conurbations of modern housing stretched their tentacles into fields trimmed white with hawthorn blossom. Here and there red tiled farmsteads evoked an era of squire and lady, fox covets and hunting horn, whilst squat farm cottages with perhaps a dry lavatory down the garden caught the mellowness of a rural culture with Morris Dancing beside the duck pond. Spacious undulating countryside, its hollows of leafy lane and thatched roofed village suggested more the stockbroker hideaway rather than any rural deprivation. On a rise of ground a dark oaken glade, pagan in its seclusion, skirted the tower of a Norman church Square and solid the bastion of a cherished age, the hands of its gold faced clock stood at twelve, slow or maybe stopped?

The rail tracks climbed into the Lake District, grassy fells and grey homesteads clinging to primitive hillsides. Stone dykes wound over the skyline, hand built monuments to bygone skill and the hardiness of a people. National Park territory, few cattle, but plenty of bed and breakfast signs, a rural culture providing scenic amenity. Out on a ridge windmills facing a day of heavy showers and a blustering wind turned their energy to offsetting the activities of an expanding species. Ten billion humans set to require the resources of two planets? The sun hid behind clouds of stupidity.

Rain drove across the carriage windows in diagonal streaks. Crewe, Preston, Carlisle had passed my window. Soon we’d be crossing the Solway Firth. Utterly weary as I was, I raised my head and watched intently the last of Jerusalem’s green and pleasant land. Louring cloud brought gloom to the flat expanse of the last miles of England. The steel struts of a bridge carried the train over mud flats and a tidal creek. Showers of angled desolation appeared slate grey and bone cutting. Was this the miserable crossing which divided two cultures?

Its empty dejection became the echo of my mother’s mother, the sadness of her voice. Looking out I remembered. I heard her talking to a child at knee; a soft voice, distant in its telling of the Jacobite’s retreat to the Highlands. I saw stumbling men who came home to death by Redcoat bayonet, the sacrifice of a people to the aspirations of royal vanity. “Well boy, back through Carlisle came the Highlanders, ragged and hungry, cheering and victorious they’d been, just months before, loyal to the fatal Bonnie Prince Charlie.” The old grandmother paused with a sigh of reflection, “Now they wanted only hill and high ground, the sanctuary of wild places with its winter snow and hidden pride. We didn’t ever recover from the slaughter on Drumossie Moor,”