Thin Air (23 page)

Her feet were uncertain upon the
uneven surface of the road. She ached all over. Flat fields swept
away to either side, punctuated by lone oaks, their branches bare
and tangled. In the distance, to her left, Jay could see a hill
rising from a skirt of mist, its summit crowned by a monument that
looked like a finger of stone. She was drawn towards it.

She locked the car and carrying
only her shoulder bag, climbed over a gate into the first of the
fields. She couldn’t see any houses because of the mist and the
rising sun was a pure red disk within it. She felt strange,
detached, but on the brink of enlightenment. She would surrender to
it. Her fall, her isolation, her journey through the night and the
accident which could have killed her had been a rite of passage.
Around her, the world seemed different, reinvented. She had no
sense of other human beings around. The landscape was the rolling
infinity of the otherworld, where dreams would be made flesh and
speak, where the impossible might happen. Perhaps she had gone back
in time. Perhaps she was dreaming.

She began to walk, and as she
did so, the present drifted away from her like smoke. She entered a
new reality in her mind; a vision of what might have been, or
should have been, or maybe what was ultimately true.

The field was
endless. Hay field. It swayed hypnotically, the rubbing grasses
whispering together. She did not feel tired, hungry or thirsty,
even though she had walked for a long time. She remembered that the
previous night she had slept in a barn; corrugated iron, the smell
of oil, old machinery, rust. In the night, she had heard an owl,
and became enveloped by its feathery whiteness. In her mind. The
cry of the owl was a mantle. Perhaps there was no owl at all.

But no, hadn’t she slept in her
car last night? Her memory was indistinct, conflicting
recollections overlapped.

She thought she must be dead,
killed in the road accident without realising it, although she
could not be sure. If she was alive her stomach would be craving
food; her body, fluid. Her limbs would ache. She felt nothing. What
would it be like to be dead? No-one knew. Perhaps this was how it
was; confusion, unsureness. Eternity. This might be it.

She waded through the field and
the grasses surged around her. A solitary tree, leafless, reared
against a bruised sky, but the land was seared and yellow beneath
it. The air was hot and perfumed with dust and freshly-cut hay.
Should it be summertime? There was an inconsistency about the
landscape, something dreamlike. The colours were pure and clean,
yet somehow watery, like a hazy memory of an idyllic season. She
found herself thinking of tropical storms, of rainbows, but there
was nothing around her other than a susurrating emptiness.

Ahead of her, some distance
away, an enormous statue crowned a wooded hill, where all the trees
were in full leaf. The monument reared above the trees, its arms
held wide, gesturing. Summoning. She walked towards it like an
infant taking first steps: stiff-limbed, her arms held away from
her sides.

Grass dust had invaded her
throat, her eyes. She was drying out. In more ways than one. She
remembered the bottle of bourbon she had consumed in that last
hotel. The memory, like the landscape, was oddly inconsistent. It
had happened to her, yet it hadn’t. She could recall the soulless
neatness of the room, how she had wondered at the fact that so many
people had stayed here without leaving any trace of themselves
behind. People must have wept themselves to sleep in the bed, raged
at lovers, thrown things at the wall. The heights of ecstasy must
have permeated the furnishings; a woman’s soft sigh, a man’s groan.
Nothing had been left behind, as nothing of herself would remain
there once she had left. So she had drunk heavily to cushion her
despair. Why bourbon? She had never liked it. And where had the
hotel fitted in between leaving her car in the muddy lay-by and
walking this field? How had she come to lose this time? But the
memory of the car journey through the night, and the decision to
walk seemed illusory now, like a story someone else had told her.
The memory of the hotel seemed more real. Bourbon in her throat.
Despair. She had thought that the world expected people like her to
drink bourbon, to steep themselves in it, until it dribbled from
their mouths and noses, leaked from their pores in toxic steam. She
remembered that, before the hotel incident, she had been drunk for
several weeks and the decision to call a halt to her life, as it
was, had been lubricated by delirium. She was sober now, but she
didn’t want to go back. It must be forgotten, all of it, so that
she could be dead and perhaps reborn. A muted tremor of fear
thrilled through her body.
These are not my thoughts. This is
not my past. It is him. He is with me.

She came to the end of the
field, and the hunched shade of an ancient hedge-row. It was on a
raised bank; she had to climb up to it and even then could not see
beyond the tangle. An archetypal gnarled, wooden fence was
partially hidden among the spiny branches. She found a gap where
she might break through. But into what? She was tired now and
needed to sleep, but felt she had to reach some kind of completion
before she dared close her eyes, otherwise there might be no
awakening.

For several yards, she crawled
along the hedge-row, surrounded by a cacophony of tiny sounds: the
click of beetles, the munch of chitinous jaws, the thin shrieks of
pain, the rustle and sigh of creatures that had no shape. She came
upon a rose bush that dominated the hedge: dog roses. A mass of
small blooms hung heavily out in a shady arc that hummed with bees.
Their song was Morpheus’ call, the summons to endless sleep or
death. Looking up through the shivering pattern of leaves, she saw
the sky, pregnant with storms, was the purple of Morpheus’ cloak. A
heron cut across this royal stain, bearing some unknown omen, its
wings a pale slice against the dark. She peered through a tunnel of
leaves that seemed to have opened up near her face, like a pathway
through the briars that might lead to an enchanted world. She saw a
picture at the end of the leaves: a church; grey, and mottled with
yellow lichen.

She rolled onto her back and lay
in the prickly grass at the edge of meadow. Thistles beneath her,
thorns above, and the flowers; scent mingled with the stable aroma
of cattle dung. This was a moment, a moment of England captured in
time. The sky, the air, the music of summer. It was a ghost around
her.

I will stay here forever
,
she thought.
The skies will change above me, brindle me with
patterns of light.
In her brain, a tune shivered like a skein
of smoke from a distant cigarette. Faces crowded upon her inner
eye, their mouths working ceaselessly. Demands, lies, flattery.
Give me one honest tongue and I will save this Sodom from
destruction
. A short but distinct peal of unrestrained laughter
came out of her, and she rolled onto her stomach. Beneath her
cheek, the warm earth pulsed with life. She could hear the
heart-beat of the world.

‘We are nothing to you, are we,’
she said aloud. ‘We are your children, but you just spawn and spawn
without regard for quality. Vomit us out, sickly progeny. Our
peevish wails fill your ears, the trees. What’s left of them.’ Her
mind was beginning to work again now; she could think in pictures.
It had not been so for some time. But it was not her mind. It was
his.

She rolled over onto her back
once more. Years were sloughing away from her into the soil. She
had lived too many lives, her energy had been scattered, sucked up
by social vampires. She wanted to be nothing, because then they
wouldn’t want her, and she would prove them to be what she’d always
known they were.
There is nothing worth keeping in this world
but me
, she thought. But then, everyone must think that.

Her memories were fading. Hard
to recall now the people who belonged to the faces, the speaking
heads. She had felt mad recently, but now knew she was purely sane.
It was necessary only to walk away from the madness for its
infection to leave the system.

In the far distance, a growl
sounded in the sky and almost simultaneously, the hay stalks became
agitated; their hissing rose to a rattle as the wind started
up.

I can’t stay here. I’m being
moved on.

She clambered to hands and
knees, reached through the gap in the hedge with blind fingers, her
eyes closed. It was as if a hole opened up and sucked her through,
scoring her body with thorns.

The field beyond was cut
roughly, like an over-sized lawn. Its prickly length led to the
half fallen wall of a graveyard, which encompassed the old grey
church. It was a plain building, devoid of gargoyles, yet ivy had
been allowed to swarm over its walls. The graveyard was full of
high ancient trees in full leaf. The green of the foliage was so
intense, it burned her eyes. The barks of the trees were soft with
moss and a mass of flowers sequinned the lawn between them. Behind
the church, a careful gout of lightning scribbled across the sky.
The air was full of the smell of ozone and the echo of long dead
choristers. All was the present moment. No past. Nothing moved at
all. It was like a gold-tinted photograph.

She staggered towards the church
like a drowned thing cast up by a storm. Religion had never
interested her, yet she had once been afraid of the idea of God.
Now, the walls of the church seemed comfortingly solid. She craved
permanence.

Inside, the church was dark, yet
some freak break in the storm clouds outside allowed a few
diminished beams of light to filter through the high stained glass.
She felt she must be like a stooped revenant at the doorway, gazing
into the house of God. It was a bare, functional place, smugly
pious in its simplicity. She saw a figure by the altar; a young
girl, arranging white flowers in a tall brass vase. The girl’s legs
were bare; her dusty fair hair hung lankly over narrow shoulders.
As Jay watched, the girl became aware of her presence, her
scrutiny. The girl’s thin body stiffened; gradually, she
straightened up. When she turned her head, it was sudden; a
flickering movement. Lightning lit up the nave, rendering her
child’s face horrible. It was like a scene from a film; a director
could not have composed it more concisely. Jay staggered down the
aisle, leaning on polished pew backs for support, expelling belches
of perhaps blasphemous laughter. The girl watched her warily,
flowers in her hands. Her skin looked green, lightning washed. Jay
knew the girl was afraid, but felt too weak to reassure her. She
must only see a cackling form lumbering towards her, like something
from a bad movie. Inside, Jay wanted to stop herself, but her limbs
worked independently, their strength draining, even as they
propelled her forwards.

Before she reached the altar,
she fell to her knees, unable to feel her legs, never mind move
them. Laughter turned to sobs. A cool inner self observed these
excesses of behaviour with disdain. The girl took a step away
fastidiously. One of her flowers dropped onto the cold flagstones
between them, bleached of colour like a funeral bloom. She appeared
to be one of those intense, humourless children; her face pinched
into a maturity beyond her years. She would bolt away now, Jay was
sure of it.

But no. The girl seemed to
summon her courage and approached. She held out one paw-like hand
over Jay’s head, her face solemn. Then she nodded and hunkered
down, peering intently into Jay’s face. Jay could not speak,
although clichés fought in her throat to express themselves. ‘Help
me.’ ‘Where am I?’

The girl reached out and touched
Jay’s tears lightly, then grabbed one of her arms with both her
hands. ‘Come on. Get up.’

Jay scrabbled around like a
crippled dog in the girl’s hold, as if her spine was broken.

‘Get up!’ the girl repeated.
‘You must come home with me.’

Somehow Jay found the strength,
but maybe it had been there all along.

Outside, it had begun to rain,
hard, the water coming down in rods; it seemed to bruise her skin.
The earth had released an ecstasy of smells; damp soil, hay, animal
musk, ripped petals. A horse galloped across the field beside the
church, its rider erect upon its back.

The girl came up beside her
after carefully closing the church door. She wiped her hands on the
front of her thin, cotton dress, then eased her fingers through
Jay’s right elbow. ‘Not far,’ she said. ‘One step after another.
Not far.’

Jay woke up to
a sound like whale-song that ebbed from her conscious mind even
before she opened her eyes. A white flare of light bleached the
world, just for a second. It cleared and she found herself lying in
bed in a strange room. The next thing she noticed was the ticking
of a clock. Everything resolved itself as ordinary. The furniture
looked old, and reminded her of childhood weekends spent at her
grandmother’s while her parents had lived their social lives of
minimal debauchery. There was a smell associated with old women;
lavender powder, a kind of damp, soapy undertone. She did not like
the room. It was cramped and dark, and when she moved, the bed
creaked beneath her. She was lying under a wad of blankets, her
arms lying by her sides outside the covers, resting on a cold
eiderdown. She had had sunstroke once, while staying at her
grandmother’s. She had been confined, like this, to bed in the
afternoon, feeling light-headed and unreal. From the quality of the
light, she could tell that outside it was still raining. The summer
trees would be vibrant and refreshed by the water; a chaotic
palette of greens. The leaves would be precise against the bruised
sky, fluttering. Somewhere, a rainbow arced. But where had the rest
of winter gone, the spring that followed? When she’d left her car
behind, the world had been cold and bare. What had she been
doing?