The World and Other Places (18 page)

We arrived in winter not knowing what to expect. What should you expect, away from home, without information, the telephone lines down and the hotels closed?

There were four of us, two men and two women, none of us married to either, each of us single or divorced. The women were better at it than us; better at the things which seem to mean nothing … seem to mean nothing … but don’t.

We had answered an advertisement in a paper. ‘Adventure of a lifetime,’ it said. ‘Send £5.’

£5. A few Euros. Less than $10. Price of a ride in Mickey Mouse or a bug infested buffet lunch at a boarded up Chinese. The risk was nothing. Why not take it? What you risk reveals what you value.

I should have remembered that the Devil comes to the farmer on his way to market, and says, ‘Take this bag of gold and all I want in return is whatever stands behind your house.’ The farmer knows that all that stands behind his house is a wormy old apple tree dropping Golden Delicious. The Devil can take it. This is a cinch. He hurries home swinging his swag and what should be between tree and he? His only daughter standing behind the house.

And the moral of that story is? Well, what do you think it is? To content yourself with lifting swedes when the Devil dangles his twenty-two gold carrots? Or a little warning that there’s no such thing as a risk-free risk?

I thought marriage was one of those until I read the small print. I was recently divorced and all the grand gestures we made, the ceremony and neon, seem like a funfair in winter; useless, tacky, ignored. The lit-up quality of our life together doesn’t work without a generator. The love has gone. So what was movement and excitement, a bit gimcrack maybe, a bit sentimental, was put into storage for a couple of years and then quietly dismantled. The Decree Absolute came through and I read the details carefully. Everything was there, nothing omitted, except that I am unhappy, which like all important things, goes without saying, I suppose. But why is that?

The important things. Where should I find them? In the detail, like God? In the risk, like the Devil?

Adventure of a lifetime. Here is the envelope. The note inside tells me to go by public transport to a place in Scotland I have never heard of and await further instructions.
Well what did I expect? What should I expect for £5? It used to be a large white note, big as a flying carpet. Think of the journeys compressed into its tissue weight. I could have ridden it like a Sultan, a princess on my pommel. I could have slept under it for a week. Then it shrunk and turned blue, nearly died I think. Then it shrunk some more, and now, almost a coin, there’s nothing to be had out of it but a bag of fish and chips. The adventure of a lifetime shouldn’t begin with salt and vinegar on its tail. Where are you now, my deep-fried princess?

I went to the dry cleaners to collect my clean clothes but they had been sold. I took them in before the divorce and I forgot to collect them again. Now, like most things, they are no longer legally mine. The assistant, voice like a bottle of solvent, drew my attention to the small print, as I am sure God will do on Judgement Day, and I will have to say then as now, that my eyesight is poor and I cannot reach the bottom of the optician’s chart, and this will be deemed NO EXCUSE.

I am inadequate, I know, not to have read the small print, but if it is so important, one of those important things, why do they not put it in LARGE PRINT, like this, so that everyone will see how the details conspire to tell quite a different story to the plot?

So I have nothing to wear except the clothes I have been
wearing for months. In these and by bus I am expected to begin the adventure of a lifetime.

Since I was a child I have been sick on coaches. Don’t you know that the riotous pattern of cloth favoured by coach firms for their seats is a direct response to the gut loads of vomit retched over them? Why else the mucky swirls picked out in carrot-orange? Why else the base-mix of brown and green?

In the stretch string compartment in front of my knees are what they call ‘Courtesy Bags.’ I shall be quietly filling these while everyone else is gorging themselves on prawn cocktail and Diet Coke.

The first hour went well enough until I realised that the woman four seats away was wearing my jumper. I leaned over her, casually, nicely, alarmed at her bosom, and asked her where she had got it from. The jumper not the bosom. She didn’t answer me. She dug deeper with her plastic fork into the plastic flute of her prawn cocktail, the active pink prawns against her active pink chest. I felt faint, the way I do when I check my tiger wormery and see the busy pink mouths feeding on the kitchen waste.

‘It is hot in here isn’t it?’ I said as she fanned herself with a Courtesy Bag. Hot, no wonder, swaddled as she is in a pink V-necked jumper that should be in my suitcase and isn’t.

So now you are thinking that I am the kind of man who buys pink jumpers and what kind of a man is that? I wish I knew.

I slunk back to my seat and tried to write a postcard to my sister. I wanted to tell her what was happening to me but I had nothing in my hands she would recognise. Not even the jumper she had bought me for Christmas.

Risk, detail, the small print and the important things. I wrote carefully, ‘Adventure of a lifetime.’

Second hour: Traffic jam. All drivers the colour of raspberries. Tried to make eyes at a strawberry blonde.

Third hour: Motorway service station. Fifteen minutes only. Tankful of diesel and fifty-six jam donuts.

Fourth hour: England spreading out before me like a
^***
sandwich.

Fifth hour: Courtesy Bags in short supply. Well-preserved gent lends me a jar. He’s taking two hundred of them to the Mother’s Union in Glasgow. They’re going to fill them with home-made you-know-what.

Sixth hour: There’s a smell of boiling fruit coming from the engine.

Seventh hour: Total breakdown mechanical and nervous. Coach plus fifty-six passengers stranded by blackberry hedge.

Eighth hour: Karaoke and diarrhoea.

Ninth hour: Jesus dead. The rest of us to follow.

Almost everyone and my jumper got off at Glasgow. I was left in the sticky coach that rumbled into the potted night, black and thick and shiny, until a blade of daylight scooped me out. I stood on the Tarmac, suitcase beside me, my molecules over-heated and under-slept. I was nothing. I was everything. I was all I had.

When I was a child I lost my parents early. I lost them before I had time to find anything else. Now, whenever I am quite alone, no one near me or likely to be, I feel I am back at my beginning. I feel I know exactly how things stand, the important things, at any rate.

Give away a child and you hurl a message in a bottle. There she is, your DNA, your ancient patternings, a code left for others to decipher, and you won’t be able to read what you have written. You hardly know that you have written what you have written. The plot develops without you. You were the details and the risk but the story belongs to someone else.

I survived, washed up on the far shore of Bohemia, and if I have any parents, they are the kind wind and the warm soil. If I had any parents I would go to a telephone box and ring them and tell them I am scared.

The adventure of a lifetime. This is it. Cost: £5. Await further instructions.

There was a note pinned to a tree. I read it carefully. It said
CARRY ON
.

After a little while of carrying on, I saw a figure ahead of me, walking purposefully with a suitcase that seemed too heavy. I caught up with the figure and tapped it on the shoulder. It looked round.

‘Are you by any chance on the adventure of a lifetime?’ She nodded. She was small and dark with a face like a tax form. I tried to read the small print.

‘Do you know where we are going?’

‘No idea.’

‘Carry on then?’

I started to think about Hansel and Gretel and how they found their way through the forest by leaving a trail of stones. We left nothing behind but the heat from our bodies and that soon chilled.

The moon was full and white and mysterious as a Communion wafer. Would she guide us back? Forward? I no longer knew which way I wanted to go. Pursuit or retreat. In life, ordinary lifetime life, it is so easy to march down the road until your legs finally give way and everyone crowds round the coffin and declares you did your best. You didn’t though did you? The road was marked and you took it. Never mind that it was a ring road circling the heart.

‘What are you hoping for?’ I asked my companion.

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘I don’t want to be disappointed.’

We knocked at the door of the BIDE A WHILE guest house.

No one answered. I tried to use the phone but its cable was loose like a shipwreck and its torn off dial lay in a pool of out-of-currency shillings. No one had been here since decimalisation.

Been where? I have to say I don’t know. There are no signs and we brought no maps. We were awaiting instructions. You understand don’t you?

We heard a noise behind the hotel. I braved myself and went to look. There a man and a woman sheltering under some dripping ivy. They said they had been there for some years and from the moss grown over their faces I believed them. I suggested we travel on together.

‘There’s nowhere to go,’ said the man.

‘There’s nowhere to stay,’ I said.

He looked upset. ‘This is a hotel. There’s a phone box.’

‘Both out of service,’ I said.

‘Are you a tour operator?’ he asked me suspiciously.

‘I’m lost,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

It was night. It was winter. The snow began to fall. On the coach it had been September; warm, beginning-golden, a second flush of roses, apples on the trees. I must have mislaid October as I have mislaid so much of my life. October was gold and copper and brass and then November came and locked away the gold in lead chests. I always forget, when something is here, that it won’t always be here. Take it now or lose it. Risk everything.

The sky was full of torn scraps of paper, all blank. There were no instructions on the snowflakes, or if there were they melted too quickly for us to read.