Time is
Neila sat with Theo and told stories as the river, too wide and broad for their little vessel, bumped gently against the side of the boat. She told stories and once she started, she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t stop speaking the words just fell from her, so many years of silence, so many years it all it being fine and she looked up to the horizon, and the horizon was burning, the country was burning and only on the canal was she safe, only here.
And she said, “My brother had depression, he had depression and we all told him to get over it, we told him to just try and see the good side of things I mean, the good side it was just…”
And in the villages around the canal the lights were dark and the streets ran wild and there was blood between the stones, but not here, not where the ice cracked before the prow of her ship, and terror gripped her heart and she blurted:
“You ask people, when they tell you something terrible, you ask them ‘Are you okay?’ Of course they’re not fucking okay but what else are you meant to say. ‘Oh you must be feeling shit you must be so shit you must be…’”
Theo is going to leave soon, she knows it. She can feel it and now that she’s taken a passenger on board, now that her heart has cracked and she chose human company, chose again to have someone in her life, anyone at all, she is terrified of letting go. She feels as if she is spinning out of control, just turning in the current, unable to find a way to steer in a straight line.
By yellow candlelight she put her head against his shoulder and he put his cheek into her hair and their hands tangled together, warmth in the winter night as the fire burned down and Neila murmured:
“My brother is better now. He is who he is. He knows that now he doesn’t hate himself he isn’t angry any more he doesn’t rage he isn’t…”
And stopped a while, as the snow fell and the fire flickered and the light burned down to the bottom of the bowl.
“In tarot, the Fool begins the journey. With an innocent heart and a soul full of wonder he sets out on his wanderings, looking to explore the universe, delighting in all things, trusting in all things the Fool is a card of exploration, hope. As he journeys, he meets many things. The wise Magician; the Emperor and Empress, the Lovers, the Hermit, the Wheel of Fortune, the Hanged Man. The Hanged Man is the crossroads, is suspension, a choice that holds you back or will send you forward, a moment where all things stand on the edge. Sacrifice, surrender, martyrdom, treachery—in some drawings you can see it, a halo, there is an idea there of giving up something old to make something new, for others, half in sky, half on land, the world tree but you hang from it, Odin searching for knowledge, crucifixion, some see divinity others say they see Judas with a bag of silver in his hand. I don’t see anything noble in it, I used to think there was but now I just think it is the world. It is the truest card that is, the world we travel and we wish and we dream, caught between sky and earth. But we are tiny and the sky is huge and sometimes we cannot be all we think we are. We cannot be… there are some battles we cannot conquer and we push and we push until and still we are here, suspended, we did this to ourselves. We did this.”
They sat together a while, and in the darkness another boat passed them by, the wake tipping the Hector a little from side to side, before washing itself out.
“At the end of the Fool’s journey is the World. The Devil, the Tower, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, Judgement, the World. Once I saw a card, the queen of cups, and I thought… it always seemed to me that I was there, that she spoke to me. Sometimes I catch myself making stories from the things that happened in my life, making stories of who I will be, and in these stories I’m always the hero or the villain because that way I made a choice, I made a choice and I chose to be here and there wasn’t ever anything which I couldn’t control, there wasn’t a part of me that is…”
She stopped.
“Time is…”
Stopped. Didn’t know what the words were that followed.
“Do you regret?” she asked. “Do you look back, do you look at—when you think about the time you’ve had and the things—do you regret? Is that what you feel?”
Theo thought about it.
“I think I would,” he said at last. “If there wasn’t something more important to do.”
Later, Neila stood alone at the back of the Hector, hand freezing on the rudder.
The fucking cormorant didn’t even bother to fly away when she flapped at it now, just sat there on the roof of her fucking boat, minding its own business in the most insufferable way.
And in the days before
Helen sat with Theo on top of a hill as the sun set over the vales. In the town below someone was screaming, screaming, until they were silenced. Queen Bess didn’t hold with that sort of thing, not in her neck of the woods, but on the other side of the valley there were the tearers the ragers the faders the zeroes the
Helen said, “Is it enough? Theo? Is it enough? Have I saved my son?”
And Theo didn’t answer, and things didn’t seem to change that much after all.
The next day they too went to the races.
Chapter 66
Getting into Ascot was easier than Theo had expected, and just as unpleasant.
The first challenge was penetrating the Ascot cordon. None of them had the credit to get past the toll booths, let alone proof of identity for the car park. Public trains had stopped running several years ago, with only a private prebooked service for race days; £76 a ticket and a trolley cart serving champagne and hand-cut roasted vegetable chips from a boutique in Devon.
In the end they crept in under cover of darkness, following the railway track and hiding in the trees until the patrols passed, camping without fire in the bitter, falling snow, huddled together in a chilly bundle as they waited for the sun to rise.
Theo pressed close to Helen, and Bea seemed to share his concern, twining herself around the older woman as if she could will heat into Helen’s shuddering bones. Helen was too cold to refuse, shut her eyes and nodded in gratitude, blue lips curled in on themselves as if she might suck in warmth.
No one slept that night, and every now and then a helicopter passed in the distance, and Corn hissed that they should have brought foil sheets or painted themselves in mud, and Theo wasn’t sure what difference these things would have made, but it seemed important to Corn, so he didn’t argue.
In the morning they shuffled down the shallow hill towards the railway line, light bursting golden white off the clinging frost on the stiff green grass. A few pigeons fluttered in the trees; something larger rustled away into the undergrowth. For a moment the land below them was radiant ivory snow, branch-grey and grassy green where the sun was beginning to drive back the frost. The station was a timber canopy, the perfect place for potted plants and a stationmaster who knew the locals by name; the station café sold sausage rolls, pork pies and clotted cream, and smoke rose from the mansions tucked between the drooping oaks. The memory of a great forest had shaped the land, and still lingered in ancient beech trees and scars of ivy cut through by roads and roundabouts.
They met a white van on the edge of Ascot, parked by a gate to an empty field overgrown with long, spined grass. The man at the back of the van stood arms folded, smoking a tiny brown cigarette, eyeing them up as they approached, nodded just once at Corn as they slowed.
“Yeah,” he muttered and, looking again from top to toe, nodded once more and added, “Yeah. Okay.”
He opened the back door of the van. A smell of mothballs and mildew rolled out in a cloud of fine, floating particles, and as Theo’s eyes adjusted to the gloom he saw clothes, piled on the floor and drooping out of stained cardboard boxes pressed to the side. For ten minutes they shuffled around in the back of the van, breath steaming and fingers blue-white as they fumbled with furs and velvets, Helen muttering, “Of course the code is less stringent for the jump season…”