Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 (15 page)

The episode sets him thinking about the current debate over rationing in the NHS. He doesn't see why someone so abusive should expect to be treated. But then, if he is denied help, who next? Fat people? Smokers, like himself?

It reminds him of his desire for a cigarette. He is sure he could cadge one at the front door, where there is a constant rotation of smokers, but he's afraid that if he does he'll miss the person who comes looking for him.

He's right, and he congratulates himself. The same nurse returns and bends down with the same sweet manner. She watches him as he walks, and he wishes there was some outward evidence of the symptoms he has described. There isn't. He could walk a white line if he was required to do it. But inside his mind he is still falling. He follows her to a small examination room, where a doctor is washing her hands. But there is another delay, because a different nurse pops her head around the door and takes the doctor away.

He is left alone again. The room is full of steel and plastic and white paper packages. The walls are the kind of green that is only seen in nature when nature is sick. It is the green of deadly algal blooms in polluted lakes. There is a trolley with a folded sheet and a clean white pillow. There is a chair, but only one. He hasn't been invited to sit down, so he doesn't.

This waiting is infinitely worse than the last. It ought not to be because help is so close, but it is. The falling has accelerated, and the pull of gravity is stronger. A horse is in the act of wheeling away from him. A white horse.

‘A grey horse,' his father says. ‘You never call them white.'

But it is a white horse, a particular white horse, and it never set foot in his father's yard. He is on the point of recognising it when the doctor returns. She picks up the notes the nurse has left.

‘Sit on the chair, please,' she says. ‘How are you feeling?'

He sits. ‘Not too bad.'

The doctor stands behind him. ‘You got hit by a bottle?' Skilled fingers palpate the bump. ‘I think you were lucky. It looks quite superficial.'

‘I feel as if I'm falling,' he says.

‘Falling?' The doctor looks into his eyes. Are you nauseous? Is it like seasickness?'

‘No,' he says. ‘Just falling.'

‘You feel as if you can't keep your balance?'

‘No. My balance is fine. I can't really explain it.'

The doctor shines a torch into his eyes. ‘Do you know what day of the week it is?'

This was never easy for him, since he doesn't have a regular job. ‘Thursday I think,' he says. ‘Or Friday morning.'

‘Name of the prime minister?'

‘Oh, Little Lloyd George Brown Jug.' The doctor looks slightly alarmed. ‘And Tony Blair before that. John Who. Maggie Thatcher. My mind is working all right. My memory is fine.'

The doctor picks up the notes again. ‘You are probably suffering a little bit from shock,' she tells him. ‘These things are more difficult as we get older. We don't bounce back quite so quickly. You are what, sixty-four?'

‘Sixty-five,' he says.

The doctor continues to speak but he doesn't hear her. Because he has hit the ground at last, and he is reeling from the impact. The white horse is galloping away and he will never catch it again. He has landed on the solid ground of home.

He hears the sound of his name and he looks up. ‘What?'

‘I said, we'll play on the safe side. Send you for an X-ray and a scan. We'll just put a couple of stitches in first.'

He hauls his attention to the matter at hand. ‘Are stitches necessary? Can't you use those little butterfly things?'

‘If you can be sure to keep your head dry. If it opens you could end up with an ugly scar.'

‘I don't care about that,' he says. ‘Give the pigeons something to aim at.'

The doctor tilts her head sideways in that attractive gesture of assent which is missing from European body language. With deft fingers she cleans the cut and closes it with butterfly clips, then puts a large dressing out of one of the white packets on the top. It's all over before he knows it, and is hardly painful at all.

But the effects of his abrupt landing are still excruciating. He walks along the broad empty corridors to the X-ray department and hands his notes through the small window there. He follows directions, finds himself in another waiting room with four or five other people. This time he doesn't read the posters. He considers where he has been and where he has landed now. He regards his hands, which still have traces of dried blood around the nails. He runs them over the smoothness of his scalp and feels the dressing there. He puts his tongue into the gap left by the broken crown. He has come to the end of his journey and found the answer he was looking for. The shock her grey hair gave him is not caused by her deception. His concerns about how she will appear on his arm are a side issue, or a small aspect of the primary one. The severity of his reaction has, in fact, almost nothing to do with her at all. It isn't her who is growing old. It is him.

Like Oisín, he didn't know that the world he followed her into was Tír na n'Óg. He didn't know that it was so profoundly different from his own world. He didn't see through the glamour to the truth about the land of eternal youth.

He sees it now. The fine living, the parties, the high life. All that flattery and congratulation, the closed and guarded, self-referential circle of the media clique. He has seen its effects on young authors, the chosen few whom the publishers have connived with the media to promote. He has watched them lose touch with reality as they buy into the hype; come to believe that the things said about them are true: that they are demigods, with the gift of bringing insight to humankind. He has seen writers ruined by it, their skills destroyed because they have lost contact with the real, flesh-and-blood world. He never dreamed that it could happen to him, but it has. And while he moved in this fictional world of fame and ease and wealth and beauty, his own world has continued to grow older, and his body along with it.

A name is called and he looks up. A teenaged boy in a wheelchair goes out, pushed by an older man. There are still three people ahead of him. The air is stale, as though it has been breathed too many times already. He doesn't want to be there. He doesn't need to be there. He has no symptoms now that give cause for concern. The falling is over. But he supposes that the good doctor is probably right, and that he should have those tests, to be on the safe side.

He contemplates the truth he has been hiding from. He remembers turning fifty just after he met her. They went out to dinner to celebrate. He remembers fifty-five and refusing to go out or do anything. From then on he developed a number of techniques to avoid noticing his birthdays. On his sixtieth he was away at a conference and no one knew. She did, of course – she never forgot – but he was so determined not to mark his birthdays that she learned to disregard them. And so did he. It's not that he doesn't know how old he is, but that he has chosen not to think about it.

Now he has to. He chose to go looking for home. The decision was his, every step of the way. He knew it was dangerous to go into the park, but he went. He chose to ride the white horse in search of his own land and, like Oisín, he has paid the price.

He stands up and leaves the waiting room. He walks past the reception window and back along the broad corridors, following the signs to the exit. No one tries to stop him.

The night air is sweet and cool in his lungs. He sees a taxi parked in a drop-off bay with its light on, and he is on the point of opening the door when he remembers that he hasn't any money. He stops to think. She is at home. He can get money from her when he gets there. It won't be a problem, but still he hesitates. There is something about the air. There is something about the sounds of London, the distant sirens, the low, animal snore of cars and taxis and night buses. The city feels wide awake and so does he. He has fallen from the horse, but unlike Oisín he has not turned to dust. He is still alive.

He begins to walk. How long does he have? His father's heart gave out when he was sixty-seven, but these are different times. People live longer now. He has plenty of life left in him.

As he walks he finds that his senses have come alive. When did they desert him? He didn't even notice it hap- pening. But suddenly the air is full of smells and tastes and textures. There are changing zones of temperature and tone between one street and the next. There are stories and struggles, upheavals and resolutions happening all around him, in and beyond the silent houses. The city is undulating with human energy. And beneath his feet there is another world. The ground feels solid but it is not. Under London is a network of tunnels and conduits and cables and drains and sewers, the arteries and bowels and neural pathways of a prodigious city. He is a small thing, a drone in a heaving hive, but he is where he belongs.

His poetry is with him again, and he knows there will be no more
Turf Shed
s and
Salamander
s. This is the real thing. Images arise that defy description, but which he will describe. Words and lines bubble up, arrange and rearrange themselves. A raw excitement courses through his marrow. He is so intent upon these marvellous new beginnings that he barely sees the streets through which he is walking. But he is not lost. For the first time in years, he knows exactly where he is.

{3
3
}

She has found a place of unprecedented calm within her- self. She knows that there are busy times ahead, but she knows there will be silences as well. It's time she took her analyst's advice and stopped running from herself. She is ready for it, now that she is white-haired, now that she has gills. As for him, absent or present he will cause disturbances, the way squalls and storms stir up the sea. But they will only affect the surface waters of her life. In the deeps, where it really matters, she is secure.

Her watch is still showing the time in New York. She sets it to London time and turns off the computer. She is halfway up the stairs when she hears his footsteps outside the front door and then a pause, and then a knock. Why would he knock?

Because he is drunk again, that's why. But when she looks at him through the spy-hole she's not so sure. He calls through the door. She opens it.

‘A ghost!' he says, when he sees her. ‘And wearing my pyjamas!'

He turns to put the bolt across and she sees the white dressing on his head.

‘What happened?' she says. ‘What have you done?'

‘It's nothing. I was wrestling with my demons and they won. Kind of.'

His face is pale, but there is a familiar light in his eyes, the return of an energy that she hasn't seen in him for years. And for the first time in as many years, she finds she is intrigued by him, and she leans against the wall as he hangs up his coat.

‘No, really,' she says. ‘What happened? Where have you been?'

He puts his arms around her and breathes into her soft, white hair. She gets a faint whiff of alcohol from him, but it's only the surgical kind, she is sure. The last of her resistance fades. She returns his embrace.

‘I'm sorry,' he says. ‘I got lost, but it doesn't matter now. I've found my way home, at last.'

She is asleep within minutes but he lies awake for what is left of the night, his mind reaching and stretching, his soul crossing mountainous terrain, up and down, passing through hope, despair, enthusiasm, fear. But it is where it belongs, and he is already wringing words and lines and stanzas out of it all, and it is only an unwillingness to disturb her that keeps him from getting up and searching for a notebook.

When the first light leaks between the curtains it reveals form, but no detail and no colour. Her hair might as easily be blonde as white. She might be forty still, or sixty, or twenty-five. It makes no difference. What matters is that she is herself, entirely and uniquely. And so, thanks to the gods and the heroes which somehow still move between the heavens and the earth, is he.

AFTERWORD

{Based on the story of Oisín and Tír na n'Óg
}

I don't remember ever feeling pressurised for time when I was a child. When my children were born time seemed to accelerate, and the hours, days and years began to speed past. It took me by surprise, and I became intrigued by the phenomenon. But it wasn't until I began going to schools as a visiting author that I realised how pervasive the lack of time was becoming. When I asked classes of eleven- and twelve-year-olds whether they felt they had enough time, large numbers of them informed me that they didn't, that they were already having trouble fitting their busy schedules into the available time.

I thought about this for a couple of years, and gradually an idea for a book began to form. This book was
The New Policeman
, which is set in the west of Ireland where I live, and concerns a scarcity of time in the human world and an unwanted excess of it in the parallel fairy world of Tír na n'Óg [
Teer-nah-nohg
].

I had read various tellings of the Irish fairy mythology, just for my own pleasure, but now I revisited them for research purposes. I was amazed and delighted to discover how well my invented hypothesis – that Tír na n'Óg is a land without time – worked with the stories. The story of Oisín [
U-sheen
], in particular, appears to confirm it.

For those who aren't familiar with it, the story is about Oisín, one of the Fianna [
Fee-anna
], who falls in love with a fairy woman and goes to live with her in her land. It is wonderful there and he is very content, but he misses his friends and family and expresses his intention to return home for a visit. The fairy people try to dissuade him, but when they can't they give him a white horse and tell him that on no account should he get off the horse when he is back in his own land.

When he gets there, he discovers that three hundred years have passed. All his friends and family are dead. He passes through the changed land, appalled by what he sees. As long as he is on the horse he remains immune to the passage of time, even though his own lifespan in this world has long since been used up. His undoing comes about when he encounters a group of men trying to move an enormous rock in a field. They ask him for his help, and as he leans from the horse to push the rock, he loses his balance, falls, and turns to dust.

I love the story, and have used it as the basis for the third part of the New Policeman trilogy, entitled
The White Horse Trick.
I have also examined there, as here, the concept of
glamour
, which comes into a lot of fairy stories, from Ireland and elsewhere.

The fairy folk have the ability to alter the form of things, to make that which is plain, ugly or dangerous look beautiful, in order to entice and deceive. I see this idea as having great relevance to our consumption-driven societies, and most of us are victims of it to a greater or lesser extent. It isn't the fairies who are responsible for it now, of course, but business, media and fashion interests. The result is largely the same, though. We have become dazzled by celebrity and possessions. We pursue these modern versions of glamour, often losing our unique identities in the process. And most of those who achieve the dreams of celebrity status or great wealth soon discover that they have been fooled, and that the expected satisfaction and fulfilment promised by glamour do not exist.

My story is about two people going in opposite directions – one moving away from the glitzy celebrity world and the other who has, largely unwittingly, entered into it. When one of them finally makes a gesture which casts it off, the other is thrown into crisis and forced to recognise the difference between what glamour has made of him, and what he really is.

Some terms may be unfamiliar:
bladdered
 – drunk;
Amé
 – high-class carbonated fruit-drink;
dry-lined
 – old walls covered with studs and plasterboard;
naggin
 – small bottle of spirits;
chuggers
 – charity workers collecting on the street;
púca
[
poo-ka
] – Irish goat-god;
Fionn
 – Fionn Mac Cumhaill [
Finn Mac Coo-well
], mythical Celtic hunter-warrior, father of Oisín;
sidhe
[
shee
] – the fairy folk.

Lastly, a brief note about the length. I'm aware that this story is a lot longer than the others in the collection, and I'd like to explain. Isobelle's original idea was to have a series of novellas, published in separate volumes. When she mentioned this to me, it immediately resonated with an idea I had been mulling over, so I set to work straight away and came up with something in or around 25 000 words. When the concept of the collection changed, I submitted the story anyway, with the promise that I would shorten it later if it was accepted. However, despite my best efforts, and those of editor Nan, it has proved impossible to get it any shorter than this. My apologies – I did not set out to take up more than my fair share of space!