But now it felt like his story was on hold again, or even that it had gone back on itself.  He couldn’t help wishing that he could go on telling the story to the woman who had become part of it, could go on filling in the gaps and creating new chapters; chapters bursting with the life that somehow seemed to have slipped away from his.

It was chance that took him in the direction of her ghost.  He was attending a day of seminars at the university where she had once been a student.  Typically he had decided to turn chance into a kind of pilgrimage.  He would rather see the house in which she had once lived than the blue-plaqued or unmarked residence of any of his favourite writers.  Besides, she was his favourite writer, and this city a part of the story of her life.  She told him once the name of the street on which she had lived, but it was at the overgrown fringes of his memory now and he couldn’t pluck it from its hiding place.  He would just have to hope that he bumped into it and underwent a sudden jolt of recognition.

Late arriving, he had to run from the car park to the building in which the seminars were taking place in order to pick up a parking permit, then run back to place it on view.  So he was breathless as he twice crossed the campus, much changed since her time, he guessed.  But there would still be buildings here she had been in, and around them streets which she had walked down.  He wanted to breathe the same air as her for a while, albeit displaced by time.

In the lobby of the building he was visiting he spotted a colleague and knew that for a time he would have to put all thoughts of pilgrimage aside.  The seminar was delivered against the background hum of ventilators.  He fought to let neither the hum nor the dryness of the lecturers’ content send him to sleep; went further by making sufficient salient points to underline his presence, his engagement even.  As the other attendees – the majority of whom were women – voiced their opinions, he gave them the once over, took in their characters.  None even came close to what she was, to having what she had.  None of the people in any of the rooms in which he habitually found himself had it.  As so often he wondered how he had ended up in this world.  He felt miscast, misplaced.  If only he could step from one reality into another, he would do so.  But they had decided not to merge their parallel worlds.  He was stuck in his and she in hers.  Watching rain fall silver in the white light of the sun outside the window, all he could do was take his mind to her.  He imagined himself into the past, into her world.  Imagined the two of them as fresh and new and unburdened.  Imagined their paths crossing, and making a friendship or a love in bars or halls or a seminar room such as this.  She would have set lecture hall, refectory and bar ablaze, he knew it.  They would rarely if ever have seen her like.  But he also knew that if he really had met her then, he may not have had the visible force of personality to have engaged her attention.  Instead he would have admired her from afar, always debating with himself whether to attempt to bridge the space between them.  It was age which gave him the confidence to do what he had done, to make eyes across the celebratory table at which he first saw her.

He emerged from his bubble and looked at his watch.  Not even half way through.  He was longing for lunch and the afternoon session to be over, so that he could for a time follow her traces and walk around what he thought of as her streets.

At last he was free to go.  He wandered out into the air, breathed in its moisture to replace the dryness in his lungs, and set off walking.  Soon he found himself faced with a path across a common and knowing that at some point she would have walked this way, he walked it too.  Now they had a common in common.  The path was signed Lover’s walk.  It might have been for lovers a long, long time ago, but today – and he imagined it was so in her time too – it was creepily enclosed and disconcerting.  He soon diverted off into a grassy space on whose turf he was sure she would once have sat and stretched out.  And drank and kissed, in a life he could never be a part of.  Seeing a pair of magpies, he thought to himself, I’m confused; she and I have attached so many terms and conditions to the sight of one that I don’t know what two means any more.

He headed back into the streets around the university.  Past redbrick houses with gabled fronts and a redbrick hall of residence, past a yellow brick pub in which he felt sure she would have drunk.  Down a hill and back up, passing a church on the corner, looking off to left and right at the name of each street, searching for that stab of recognition, but though some seemed achingly familiar, none came.  As the rain began to fall again, he gave up, turning back into the campus.  Soon he found himself in front of an old, foursquare redbrick building: the Union.  He knew for sure then that if he trod the steps of its entrance he would cross over with her in space if not time.  A student, a woman, was standing in the doorway.  She took in his approach, as anyone does while waiting and on seeing someone coming towards them.  For a moment he allowed himself to imagine that it was her, that this was where they had arranged to meet; that here was his portal to the parallel world he wished to enter.  But if he kept up this pretence he knew he risked unnerving the waiting woman.  In any case it was going to be perturbing if he walked up the steps and turned about in her face.  But he felt impelled by his pilgrimage to do it; he couldn’t not.  So as he came up one side of the steps he comically made as if he had forgotten something, and came back down the other.  She gave him a look, but that was all.  Just some hare-brained, harmless maths lecturer, she might have thought.

Not far from the union building was a little rectangular pool in which a geometric figure had been set.  Blue-green with copper patina, it looked to be by some contemporary of Henry Moore.  Dawdling on summer days, she must have stood here and gazed upon it.  He watched the rain patter on the viscous-seeming surface of the water and on the lily pads which part-covered the pool.  Perhaps if he span a coin into the air, a piece of silver to break the water’s skin, he could make a wish and that would be his portal.  He flipped ten pence skywards and watched it arc and puncture the water.  Through the settling ripples he saw its resting place, and closed his eyes.  He stretched out his right hand and wished.  He felt her hand brush his, but when he opened his eyes she was gone.

It was only when he got home and dug out a map that he spotted and remembered the street name, and realised with one more pang in his heart that he had driven along her road and had parked just off it.  Had crossed and recrossed it on foot.  Had walked in her steps without knowing that he was.

Everything went against him, or so it seemed.  The innocent questions asked which sparked a hailstorm of guilt, the weather itself, the old lover ringing when he did.  Finite time to finish a redecorating job and a sanctimonious neighbour waging a war of attrition being the weights which stretched the main and all the other burdens an ounce, a pound, a stone too far.  Then a television programme about a man living a secret life; its uneasy parallels.  Weights too far.

He sighed.  He knew her reasoning was sound.  But his heart refused to listen to his head, or to the silent screaming in hers.  His alleged grace, her undoubted woe, they had become one.  Intermingled and indivisible.  A transference of substance approximate to the soul or life force or very subtle mind had taken place, an each-way transference.  Together they were something other than what they were apart.  Something both celestial and earthy.  Without her he was neither.  He couldn’t help longing to be stretched out once again upon the rack of their love.

All the old familiar songs began to circle menacingly, their bittersweet threat now intensified beyond his pain barrier – ‘Let me down easy’, ‘Ne me quitte pas’, ‘I want you’, ‘Black cherry’, ‘Love letter’, ‘Take care’, a hundred others, the really desperate ones.  And he knew that whenever he heard them in future, he would be right back in the moments where the angles became pleading and the begging became panic and the thickness in his throat became gasping, tearing sobs.

He was not ready for this.  He didn’t think he would ever be ready for it.  He could only hope that she found that she wasn’t either.  It was the fitful, flickering element of hope which kept him going.  And if that light died, he didn’t know what he would do.  He wished he could replay time from a certain point, make it go differently.  But there were so many things outside his control.  He felt powerless, or at least that his powers were limited.  He couldn’t McCartney a ‘Yesterday’ out of the ether, but there he was still trying to.  And even in the unlikely event that he succeeded, as likely as not it would still do no good.

As much as anything, perhaps more than anything (save for the kisses and the touch of their bodies, save for the words that passed between them then) he would miss the sharing of all the ordinary little everyday things.  But that was exactly the problem – the ordinary little everyday things were hidden inside a bubble of secrecy, and each of the thousands of pieces of knowledge the one held about the other, because they were wrapped in love, might as well have been a splinter threatening to pop it.

When I go to sleep it is with images of you, images of us as we were together.  Naked flames dancing, ashes smouldering, turn and turn the fuel again.  From within the fire I feel you scorch my skin, and watch you flare and burn.

Sometimes too I imagine what we never had the chance to do.  Just one of those things; a summer breeze through a high sash window, your head on my shoulder, mine on yours, our faces upside-down to each other’s as we lie length to length diagonally across the bed listening to Bringing it all back home.  From time to time, lips puzzling with their upside-down conundrum.

To reach sleep I kid myself that there is nothing to worry about, that you’re there.  Sometimes it works.  But when I wake in the night, the first stricken thought I think is that you’re not.  The realisation crushes me and I long to be back under, to be un-conscious.  And when I wake in the morning, you are my first thought then too; you and the not unrelated awareness of my morning glory.  To ease the absence, I take myself in hand, and have you ride me, and say to you the words I know you still long to hear.

Day

The silence is deafening.  It roars and bays and there is no escape from it.  When I put my hands over my ears or try to block out sound through keeping busy, it only shouts all the louder.

I could feel you disappearing again, shrinking from me, from the poison ivy of my words, my company.  The hold we have on each other is strong; it will last till the days we die.  You have had to wrench yourself away, and our flesh is torn where we were joined.  I doubt the wound will ever fully heal.  We will, I think, carry it always.

In the car I ignore the periodic flashing of the engine warning light.  Instead I focus my attention on Blood on the tracks.  Jesus, Bob.  Through the windscreen I see two geese flying high over the harbour, rising with each wing beat as ‘If you see her, say hello’ unfurls.  Stuck in traffic, I watch until they vanish into a pall of cloud, always within kissing distance of each other.  Even as I re-focus on the music, my thoughts wander, in a constant cycle of concentration and drift.  Inevitably I see you both inside the songs, and outside of them, listening along with me.

Somehow I make it through work, alternating immersion in its beige tones with the red raw memory of us.  The day can’t help but die with the drive home, and the requirement to put on another head.

The dissembler pretends to be someone he is not. His role requires constant improvisation, a steady forward progress across shifting sands. Every moment he must remake, re-create, modify the personage he is playing, until at last the moment arrives when reality and appearance, the lie and the truth, are one. At first the pretence is only a fabric of inventions intended to baffle our neighbours, but eventually it becomes a superior – because more artistic – form of reality. Our lies reflect both what we lack and what we desire, both what we are not and what we would like to be.’

‘The Mexican… becomes mere Appearance because of his fear of appearances. He seems to be something other than what he is, and he even prefers to appear dead or nonexistent rather than to change, to open up his privacy.’

– Octavio Paz, The labyrinth of solitude

I remember the night I first wore the mask.  My brother threw a party, between Hallowe’en and Bonfire Night.  He said it was fancy dress.  I assumed that meant Hallowe’en fancy dress.  I turned up as a creature of the underworld; or at least one dressed in black and wearing the mask of a monster.  It was lizard green, with pointed ears, and a wolverine’s muzzle and yellowing teeth set in a blood red maw which resembled the torn flesh of prey.

My brother on the other hand wore a suit, with a thin black tie; until he told me, I didn’t know he was supposed to be James Bond.  You could have come as anything, you doughnut, he said, rolling his eyes.  Thanks for making that clear, 007, I said.  But I was happy as I was, a masked fiend or ghoul; I felt freer, less self-conscious, plus I could see through the eyeholes that I was freaking people out.  I couldn’t keep it on for long, of course – it was airless in there – so periodically I reverted back to human form.

He had emptied out his garden shed, made it into a bar, fairy lit.  It wasn’t apparent where he had put all the stuff that was usually stored inside it.  Midway through the evening I stepped in to top up my glass.  Without the mask on.  Just my brother’s wife and a friend of hers in there.  I was introduced.  From words spoken and looks issued, I could tell the friend was a hunter, a predator even.  Enough had been drunk there in the shed to loosen lips and intimations.  Stone-cold sober, I felt unsettled.  But that wasn’t all I felt.  Confusion; an element of attraction coupled with a greater degree of a feeling it isn’t over-dramatising to describe as repulsion.  I wasn’t used to being deliberately and visibly eaten up like that.  And yet if you’d asked me about my innermost workings and I could have told you in confidence, I would have said that I longed to be eaten up, to be taken in mouth and claw by just such a predator.  But in that pretend-bar, in the presence of my brother’s wife, it seemed misplaced.  There was something odd about it.  I couldn’t put my finger on what.  As soon as I was able, I backed out of the shed.  Put the mask back on, and distance between myself and other people.  Listened to my monstrous breathing rasp through the holes cut in the blood red maw.  When at last I felt sufficiently undead, I took the mask off again.  Craned my neck skyward to watch the fireworks.  Breathed in the cold night air, before exploded gunpowder spread its pall.

It was only much later, remembering back, that I realised the woman standing with my brother’s wife in their fairy-lit garden shed-bar that night was – it transpired – the one with whom 007 had been having an affair.  I was a decoy.  A decoy way too close to the bone.

If only I had reached out my hand and said wait, lie here just a little while longer.  Then she wouldn’t have seen us, then you wouldn’t have turned your face away, then I wouldn’t be feeling this way.  Hollowed out.  Cored.  And then marooned on a motorway.  Following a track I didn’t want to be on.

In an attempt to distract myself from the acid burn of heartache, I played some music, but the sound was dry, deprived of any sweetness, failing to console.  I turned to the radio, to try to enter lives beyond my own, but I couldn’t engage with any of it, with any of them.  So I fell back on listening to the engine, its pitch somewhere between a hum and a roar.  It was all I needed to hear.

On the way up, I had marked the signs, as usual, though on a different route.  A mobile home – let’s call it a caravan – on a flatbed lorry; the gift of all travel, of course.  A pale and fading wash of rainbow.  A Dreamland balloon, though I suppose its shape determines that really I should call it a zeppelin.  A handsome water tower.  The once smart, many windowed chalet-style pub fallen on hard times.  The owners didn’t even think it worth boarding up all those windows.  We could have broken in, you and I, and found a room that would have been ours for however long we needed it.

A final sign, perhaps, once I was with you: the body of a peppered moth, resting its mottled wings in lamp-lit glow on polished wood.  I meant to draw your attention to it, but I did not.  I meant to do and say so many things while I was with you but time and circumstance were against us and we had to keep looking over our shoulders.

On the way back down, I spotted the message you had left.  I couldn’t hear half of it above the engine, above the reflection of its noise from the soundboard of tarmac, but I got the gist.  It was remorse, and it was enough; in any case, I would forgive you anything, just as I believe you would me.  And I already understood how that fear of being found out could trump the fragile state of love.  If I am hollowed out, you are split in two.  There was a break in your recorded voice, a catch in your throat, the whisper of your love.  Tears, I could hear, in your eyes.  Perhaps things would be ok, I thought, perhaps we would get past this latest snake.

My mind was speeding and I was driving fast enough to be pulled over by the police.  I hogged the outside lane, nosed atypically and arrogantly into the back of errant users of my private track until they stood aside.  No-one could compete with me, no-one was foolish enough to try me on the inside.  I was above the law but beneath contempt.  Your no longer quite so secret lover, speeding home, throwing double sixes in his head, climbing ladders, all the way to 100, all the way to a heaven that still he could not give up on.

Those signs – caravan, rainbow, balloon, tower, a place in full view in which to hide from the world – they could signify either way.  All except the moth, which it would be healthier – though possibly not wiser – to see as an insect rather than a sign.  Of course I took them all as for me rather than against me.  For us, not against us.  On the way back, in the dark, the moon occulted, there was nothing to see.  There were no visible signs to determine what the future would bring.

One thing was certain.  It wasn’t the way either of us wanted it to end.

* We go wandering at night and are consumed by fire.

I see you in all of these things, and countless more.
You are the form and function of my mind,
its dynamic and discipline,
acoustics and architecture.
Its supporting structure.
And even when you are no longer there
you will still keep me upright.

He had reached a junction, and there before him were as many roads as he cared to imagine, including the volte-face.  He recognised he had failed to achieve the most personal of his ambitions, and he also saw himself as a failure in the career which was visible to other people.  Pricked by the first intimations of morbidity and mortality, he had finally acknowledged both failures to himself and when he looked around at the rest of his life, he realised more forcefully than ever that his remaining vitality was swirling remorselessly down a plughole.  This was an emergency situation.  What did he most want then, in the limited time left to him?  The answer called to him like the Sirens: he wanted to feel again the headiness of falling in love, the total immersion of being in love, and – looking self-critically at a third failure in his life –  he wanted to try preserving the new love better, to make it last, and last gloriously rather than comfortably.  He wanted love to turn his insides out and simultaneously sting and kiss both his skin and his mind until the very end.  He needed to use the organs with which he had been born to their full; needed to live out loud, even if only one other human being saw and heard him doing so.

He looked back at the book and his eyes came to rest on the last words he had read before his mind wandered – words which were in fact the reason his mind had wandered:

‘If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life.  Even if you can’t get together with that person.’

He tested the truth of this in his mind.  It seemed a little trite, from at least a couple of angles.  It was uttered by someone who did not know or had not taken the trouble to imagine what it was to be a parent; someone who also appeared not to have had the experience of being denied the chance to get together with their lover.  Whereas he knew something about it, for he had found someone he loved like that, with his whole heart.  Loving her was both the easiest thing in the world and at times, the hardest, for three strong reasons that the omniscient narrator would not let his character’s wandering mind detail here.  But he could not stop himself from loving her and together they had mostly risen above those obstacles, though each seemed powerless to remove them.  One would have been relatively unproblematic; two might have been workable; three had them tied in inescapable mental knots.

So now he was both where he wanted to be, and not where he wanted to be.  But his vitality and a reason for living had been returned to him and to his wandering mind that was worth any amount of accompanying pain and heartache.  She had indeed been his salvation.

The omniscient narrator, he knew how this was going to end.  But the character who was currently the focus of his narration, he still had no clue at all, and that crafty all-knowing trickster was not letting on.

He did not need to ask which she meant.  Her eyes were on the ring, the episcopal ring, the one which showed that he was wedded to the church.  How quickly she had turned command of the conversation.  His hand was in hers now.  She lowered her lips to kiss the ring.  He felt them burning hot on his cold fingers at the edge of the gold, and as well as the flames which engulfed him he felt the charge of an electric shock throughout his body, a charge that seemed to explode and rearrange every electron and positron of his being.  The look in her eyes as she raised them to his rearranged them all over again.

He was a bishop while she was an actress whose mixture of ballsiness and diplomatic tact meant that she preferred but didn’t insist on being called ac-tor as opposed to ac-tress.  His position gave him a certain immunity from gossip, while she swam in its waters.  As far as society was concerned he was a worldly clergyman and she was an actor with spiritual leanings preparing for her next role as the wife of a bishop.  When she came to take tea at the Palace that first time, the flow of his answers to her theological questions never faltered even as he found himself gazing across the array of cakes at the near-godly perfection of her face.  She noticed his fiddling from the first; the way he couldn’t help availing himself of the deep pockets in his trousers.  Despite his high office, he was, after all, merely a man, and she was all woman.  She could have had her pick of leading men but they conformed to type and soon left her bored and restless.  This holy man wasn’t afraid of the violence of her emotions, had in fact she thought an understanding of it not solely confined to observation.  And – though at the outset he had found this hard to believe – he came to understand that the attraction was two-way.  Closeted in his study one day after tea taken in the public part of the Palace, she got down on her knees before him.  The look on her face as she unhooked and unzipped his trousers and watched his rising cock split the tails of his purple shirt; the reverence with which she sucked him made him feel that he had not striven for earthly status in vain.  He put his hands into the ringlets of her hair and tried to shut out all thoughts of God and sin.  He found it was not hard to do so, for here surely was a heaven on earth to challenge the most ardent believer’s notion of the paradisiacal nature of the afterlife.

And later when he administered the discipline which she subsequently came to expect of him – evangelically administered it as the shapely arch of her body bent over the episcopal desk – he gained a pastoral satisfaction well beyond the righteous glow acquired through ministering to the poor and the needy of the diocese.

In those moments, in the times she teased him to his theological limits, whenever he subsequently remembered their ecstasies and dwelt on the perfect understanding which had grown up between them, he swore that he would give up his see to tend and be tended so, if only she would let him.  But though they discussed it over and over, in the end she always concluded that it was better he stayed with the people who needed him.  She wasn’t going to disappear.  She would commit some quid pro quo time to his ecclesiastical good causes and under its cover they could continue to see each other regularly, though it might never be quite enough for either of them.  Such a realisation sometimes saddened them but love and sex chased the blues and the purple away and afterwards he would remind her of what she had said the very first time she knelt before him.

– Brings a whole new meaning to the word bishopric, doesn’t it?

A silvery crack in the centre of the screen.  At first I thought it was a strand of tinsel somehow come to be stuck in the wiper.  But it wasn’t fluttering in the wind.  It was still.  I remembered the stone in the dark the night before, the suddensharp bang of flinthead against toughened glass.  A crack then, snaking from the point of impact.

As I drove I swear I could see the crack moving.  By journey’s end there could be no doubt.

On successive days I watched it grow, shaken by the car’s vibration, sensing its movement much as you do the minute hand of a clock, or the movement of a ghost just beyond your angle of sight.

I thought I should get something done about it, but I was inert, passive, a passenger in the driver’s seat.  A liver of a life lived through screens.  Let the crack lengthen, I said to myself, and the screen cave in.  Let me have to smash through shattered glass to see again.

And so over days the crack zig-zagged laboriously across my vision, occasionally emitting an audible snap, like the splintering of the ice which tops a frozen lake.  It was alright to leave it.  I was beginning to like it.

But today as I drove the crack ran, today the crack scared me.  It ran like paper tearing.  It is a tear, a tear in time and space.  A wormhole, a hole for worms.  Or – it’s hard to tell from this side – a black hole.  So now there is the temptation.  To put my hand through in the hope of a hand on the other side grasping mine and pulling me through, pulling me free.  A strong hand pulling me into welcoming arms.

Only I might just as easily disappear.