Weeks passed.He drifted.
In the month before he left things had been like this. He had felt the same way. Detached. Floating. But those days had not been entirely aimless. They had a fixed termination; he had known then what he was moving towards. Now he did not.
And he himself had been different, not simply younger. With a different sense of where he might look for enlightenment. Intrigued still by the spectacle of his own existence, and open to every clue he might pick up — a look here, a passing comment there — of what he might be. Still making himself up out of what others saw in him. Or wanting to. Because it was easier than looking too clearly into himself.
He had tried that too, but it was confusing. What he had found there was contradictory, or the evidence was in a code he could not crack.
Was he wiser now?
Not much, he thought.
What he had learned in the heat of action was useful only in moments of extremity, of violent confrontation. The pressures now were soft, the dangers more insidious because not deadly. Or not immediately so.
His aunt went easy on him, was not demanding. She had become sociable and went out a good deal, leaving his meals on a plate in the fridge with a note telling him how they should be heated. The notes were jaunty, an easier and more playful form of communication than talk, and became more so as the weeks rolled on.
He ate alone in the kitchen with the radio playing, for the comfort of some other voice in his head than his own, which wearied him, or in the new lounge in front of the news.
He ate slowly, trying not to let the images that flashed from the TV connect with his own low-level anger; which was more like a taste in his mouth that no other could quite displace than an emotion, a subtle disturbance of his vision that bled the world of vividness and gave everything he looked at a yellow tinge.
He watched a group of young men in battledress run hunched and stumbling towards a medevac chopper that swayed and tilted. Its blades churned the fetid air, whipped up a tornado of smashed grass stalks and twigs. He felt a damp heat on his skin. Found he was sweating.
He watched a bunch of young men, much the same age as in the previous clip, but in T-shirts and jeans and with young women among them — and some older women too, not unlike his aunt, grey-haired, in glasses — push hard against a line of uniformed police. Banners hung askew above their heads, like thought bubbles in a cartoon. All capitals, all pointing in the same direction. The young men, animal spirits fiercely mobilised in a violent forward movement, were engaged in their own version of war. And the enemy?
He ate. Chewing slowly. Swallowing it down.
“You know,” his aunt remarked one morning at breakfast, "there's some money. You haven't asked, but it's yours, you know, whenever you want it.”
“I don't need it yet,” he told her.
“Well,” she said, not pressing, "it's there. Just ask when you do.”
On another occasion: "Have you thought of getting in touch with your mother?”
This surprised him. He looked up, but could not tell from her eyes— she glanced quickly away — what she was thinking. Did she want him to or not?
“No,” he said. “I can barely remember what she looks like.”
This wasn't quite true.
“She thinks you're angry with her.”
“I'm not,” he said. “Not anymore. There are too many other things. Anyway, I try not to be angry at all. It does no good.”
“You're right,” she said, but seemed unconvinced.
“Do you keep in touch then?”
“Not regularly. But there is a tie. Your father—”
She foundered, unwilling to go further, and he was glad — he did not want her to. He wanted, just for a moment, to think of himself as a free agent, no ties — or at least to tell himself he had none. The ties, such as they were, he could pick up later. When he was ready. When.
“She's moved to Aberdeen,” his aunt told him.
“Aberdeen!”
The word fell into the room out of nowhere. He knew where Aberdeen was, he could see it on the map, but had never expected to have any connection to it. Hadn't thought of his connections as being so worldwide. He gave a little laugh, more a snigger perhaps, and his aunt looked alarmed.
“I can't imagine her,” he said, "in Aberdeen,” and laughed again.
It denied, of course, what he had already claimed. That he had no clear picture of her at all. And what did he know of Aberdeen?
He walked.From one end of town to the other. Walking was another form of thinking — or maybe unthinking — in which the body took over, went its own way and the mind went with it; the ground he covered, there and back, measurable only by the level of quietude he had arrived at, and the change, when he came out of himself, in the atmosphere and light.
One of the places he liked to go when the weather was fine was to a river park at the far end of town. Willow-fringed along the brown, rather sluggish stream, it was featureless save for an elaborate rotunda of timber and decorative wrought iron that was unusual in that it offered more in the way of fantasy than you got in other parts of town, and a children's playground where, in the afternoon, mothers brought their kids to climb, swing, and roll about in a sandpit. He liked to sit high up in the bandstand, where he had a good view over the expanse of park and an oval beyond, and lose himself in a book.
Towards the end of January it rained for three days. He stopped his walks and stuck to the pub.
Finally the rain gave up, though the air remained saturated. There were still heavy clouds about and the ground was soggy underfoot. He took his usual walk out towards the river. And the park when he came to it was a place transformed. Great sheets of water broke the green of its surface, and hundreds of seagulls had flocked in, bringing with them the light of ocean beaches and of the ocean itself. They were crowding the shores of the newly formed ponds: huge white creatures that had made their way a hundred miles from the coast to translate what had been one kind of landscape into something entirely other. The children had deserted the swings and ladders of the playground and were chasing about among the big birds, delighted by the novelty they presented, the news they had brought — not just of another world, but of a world inside the one at their feet that they had scarcely dreamed of.
He too felt the miracle of it. It was as if a breath of fantasy, that had existed as no more than an unlikely possibility in the lightness and whiteness of the bandstand, had re-created itself as fact in these hundreds of actual bodies, independent organisms and lives, that were shifting about over the green or making brief flights across the expanse of silvery, sky-lit water.
What he felt in himself was an equal lightness, that reflected, he thought, the persistence out there in the world, of the unexpected — an assurance that nothing was final, or beyond surprise or change. The dry little park had transformed itself into a new shore, but the force he felt in touch with was in himself. It was as if he had looked up from a book he was lost in and found that what his eyes had conceived of on the page was shining all round him.
Half a dozen children were chasing along the banks, delighted that by rushing at them they could drive the big birds skyward, half expecting perhaps to find in themselves the power to join them and go heavily circling and gliding. One small boy, unready to challenge the birds as the others were doing, stood stranded on the sidelines. He was maybe five years old. Skinny with pale reddish hair. Doubtful but tempted.
Charlie stood looking at him, and the boy, aware of it, turned to meet Charlie's gaze, drawing his underlip in, which only made his moist eyes rounder.