Brenda Vickers sleeps soundly until daybreak. This is a long time if you choose to measure it in hours, which she does not. The chill has crept into her arms and hands, and slows her movements as she retrieves her water bottle from her sleeping bag, lights the stove and makes tea. Speech would be difficult — her face is very cold — but is not necessary.
Boots are retrieved from the sleeping bag, crampons fitted, balaclava comes off, gloves go on, rucksack hoisted, ice axe gripped, and she steps out onto the slope of bullet-hard frozen snow. The sunrise picks out a thousand details of striation and patina whose beauty registers only peripherally as she monitors any implications for her own body’s safe, steady passage, sideways across the great invisible arrow of gravity. Her mouth has warmed up now, and she begins to sing, quietly.
The slope softens at last into a frozen corrie, which in turn drops into a narrow glen where the snow peters out. The glen broadens and leads to a bay in a loch — a loch charged with the mystery and motion of the tide, somewhere joined to the unseen open sea. She half-walks, half-jogs along the shoreline path for five miles. The loch narrows and then terminates in a bleak, rocky beach. Behind the beach is the end, or the beginning, of a chaotic little road that leads to the rest of the world. Brenda’s small green van stands meekly at the trailhead, the faded imprint of its effaced Forestry Commission insignia showing faintly under the frost. The windows are double-glazed with ice.
After teasing for a few seconds, it starts. She revs the engine hard, and then swaps her boots for a pair of grubby plimsolls. On the dashboard: gloves and socks frozen into odd shapes, malt loaf wrappers, empty box of Inderal (we are permitted to know that this is sometimes prescribed for anxiety and panic attacks). She opens the back of the van and tosses rucksack and boots in beside the chainsaw, petrol can, sun-lounger cushion used as a sleeping mat, multipacks of budget tinned spaghetti and other detritus. The door has to be slammed hard, and its report might have been heard for a mile or two up the glen, had there been anyone to hear.
The van tips and weaves playfully along the tiny rollercoaster road. Brenda hums the Postman Pat theme. Her mountain shock therapy has worked its usual magic: she’s out of the woods.
‘Oh, you have got to be joking.’
Dan is struck by a little wavelet of joy at seeing his wife her old self, and stoops to kiss her. A fringe of bruised skin extends beyond the dressing on her temple. He can hear her shallow breaths. ‘Good morning, my love. How are you feeling?’
She smiles and whispers, ‘Better, thank you, but seriously—’ she raises a hand to his own dressing ‘—what the fuck?’
It is nearly ten o’clock, and the village is audibly going about its morning business. James F. Saunders, newly awakened from his eventual deep sleep, thinks of Under Milk Wood. This is an unoriginal opening salvo in the ridiculous cannonade of associations that habitually pounds away at his consciousness, but he isn’t concerned. Not yet. This, no matter what, is the day he will begin.
He yanks back the flimsy curtain to reveal the sea view that supposedly makes up for his lodgings’ lack of practical facilities. Fifty yards of sand, seaweed and slimy bedrock now lie exposed between the cobbled ramp and the breakers. A dozen gulls peck about. ‘Attention,’ declares a tinny voice somewhere up the too-narrow-to-turn-round street. ‘This vehicle is reversing.’
James will today break out of his own creative cul-de-sac by a decisive forward plunge into perilous waters. He pulls on his clothes, fills a glass at the sink and clears his desk of everything except laptop, glass and a tattered paperback copy of the Essays of Montaigne, who is to be his maharishi. He has a notion that he will write better hungry. He closes his eyes and takes a slow breath, cold fingers poised over the keys.
Mediocrity in poets is not allowed by gods or men.
3. Crowded room
‘…when they are grown men we find them to excel in nothing.’
Rewind eight days. A man stands unsteady and unwashed in a carriage on the London Underground, staring in fascinated horror at his reflection in the curved window. He and his inverted Siamese twin are joined at the head. As he steps back, the heads are swallowed into the bodies, and then the bodies into the legs, until he is just two grotesque unconnected legs with feet at both ends. Becks’ oft-repeated prediction has come true at last: he has literally disappeared up his own arse.
He sinks to the floor and slumps back against a seat, door, whatever. With his eyes closed, the speeding train sounds like the end of the world. There is a rumbling of thunder or guns or bombs, the rising howl of some tortured phantom, a sudden juddering scream. After hours, days, it all stops. For a single second there is perfect silence. He thinks he might have died. Then the door slides open, and he falls backwards into space.
‘This station is Holborn,’ says a female robot. He’s alive. There is a dazzling light, and a jostling. He has fallen into the surprised arms of a man with pasty white skin and floppy hair.
‘Well, hello,’ the stooping man says, calmly checking that nothing unpleasant is getting on his suit. ‘Are you hopping off or staying on?’
‘Change here for the Piccadilly line,’ suggests the robot.
‘I don’t care,’ mumbles our fallen hero.
‘Alrighty, on we jump!’ The man hoists him up and propels him into a seat. Sits next to him, unnecessarily as the carriage is sparsely peopled. Sound of doors flinging themselves together. A lurch into motion.
‘Had a bad day, sir?’ asks the man, cheerily. ‘Me too, but it’s about to get better. Walley.’
The man is proffering a white, long-fingered hand.
‘Walley’s the name,’ he repeats. ‘You?’
‘James F. Saunders.’
‘James. F. Saunders,’ repeats Walley slowly, smirkingly. ‘What does the F stand for?’
A whisper: ‘Failure.’
Walley smirks again. What a wanker, thinks James, to laugh at a thing like that. Has never failed, I suppose. Goody two-shoes fucking banker or lawyer. Or an accountant. Never set a foot wrong or had an original thought. Thinks his floppy fucking hair is a mark of character. Tosser.
‘Tell me, James F. Saunders — would you like to have an adventure?’ He still has that smirk on his face.
‘Leave me alone.’
‘You’ll be just the ticket. Vickers will adore you. Free drinks.’ He leans and whispers: ‘Free everything.’
James surrenders sullenly to this wanker’s whim. Maybe he came to London in the hope that the city might do something to him, might abuse him in some way, and now it’s doing it. Merryman’s Bay is ineffectuaclass="underline" the only abuse he gets there is from the weather.
‘Walley! Thank God. But who’s this?’
A man of about James’ age has opened the imposing door — five-nine, coiffed ginger hair, cocked ginger eyebrow, dinner jacket. Sort of carrot-top 007. Another goody two-shoes banker type. Or maybe worse — a salesman.
‘Monseigneur le comte de Vickers,’ pronounces Walley, bowing low with a flamboyant flopping of hair. ‘May I present my undying felicitations.’ He actually kisses the salesman’s hand. ‘This—’ indicating James with a flourish ‘—is your big present. A deliciously authentic wastrel. Its name is James F. Saunders. Ask it what the F stands for.’ As he crosses the threshold he taps his pocket and whispers, ‘Don’t worry — I brought you a little present, too.’
The host, Vickers, frowns. Or rather, he conjures a complex and masterful facial expression that simultaneously communicates puzzlement, amusement, tolerant disapproval toward his friend and cheery welcome to the newcomer. Definitely a salesman, and he’s good.