Oxford, Eynsham, Bablock Hythe, Newbridge. There are very few people around now. He wishes he were an animal so that he could simply hunt and eat and sleep in a burrow and not have to dwell on the past and worry about the future.
He has no money left. He runs out of Paracodol. He feels constantly frightened. It is impossible to tell how much of this is due to codeine withdrawal and how much is due to his rapidly declining health. It is too cold to sleep at night. He sleeps instead for brief periods during the day. When the dark comes down he finds a wall against which he can sit, hoping that he will not be attacked from behind.
He has a low fever. His head pulses and his joints ache. He no longer has the energy or the wit to find a source of clean water. He drinks from the river. In the middle of the night he has stomach cramps followed by diarrhoea.
He has lost the tent. He has no memory of how this happened. It is possible that it was stolen, though by whom he has no idea. He is now blind in his left eye.
He cannot drown himself. He knows that the creature to which his mind is inextricably bound will fight to stay alive and he will simply come out of the water a couple of hundred metres downstream colder and sicker. So he turns and makes his way back to Oxford where he saw a train passing north on the far side of a flooding meadow some days ago.
He comes off the river at Godstow Nunnery and walks through the village before turning back onto the meadow itself. There are cows and ragged horses. The train track has been separated from the grazing land by a high metal fence he no longer has the energy to climb, so he follows it south until it disappears into an area of high scrub. He wades through the brambles and the long grass until he finds an elderly wooden fence he can climb with ease.
He sits between the small trees on the earthen bank that runs beside the rails. A train passes. Ten minutes later another train passes in the opposite direction. He thinks about his father. He thinks about Thom. He thinks about Emmy. They seem a very long way away. A third train passes.
Walking down the meadow he regretted not having some alcohol or Paracodol to provide him with Dutch courage but it doesn’t seem necessary now. Indeed with each train that passes he feels less and less comfortable sitting here and more strongly drawn to that invisible doorway only ten metres away through which he can pass into a place where there is no pain and there are no problems to solve.
He waits for another three trains to pass. When he sees a seventh some two hundred metres away he gets to his feet and walks down the little slope onto the gravel and steps over the nearest rail. He sets his feet firmly on a single black sleeper and leans forward with his hands on his knees so that the front of the train will strike his head and there will be no chance of his being thrown clear and finding himself alive and badly injured beside the track.
A hundred and fifty metres. The train horn sounds, followed by the grating skreek of metal on metal. A hundred metres. It will be over in seconds.
He sees movement from the corner of his eye, a figure moving among the trees where he was sitting earlier. Is it Thom again? He must not turn his head. He stares hard into the dirty pebbles between his toes. The horn. The skreek. Twenty metres. Ten.
A hand grabs his upper arm and roughly hauls him sideways. He thinks at first that it is the impact of the train. His head is filled with thunder. Metal hammers and flashes. He wonders why he is still thinking. He can feel his hands. He can feel his legs. He cannot be dead. The thunder stops. He opens his eyes and sees the sky. A black retriever licks his face.
“Give me your hand.” A man is staring down at him. “The police will be on their way. We need to leave quickly.”
Gavin is too perturbed to do anything but obey. The man is surprisingly strong. He hoists Gavin to his feet and lets go. He feels dizzy. He steadies himself and starts to walk. After three tentative steps, however, his knees buckle. He pitches forward and cannot even summon the energy to raise his hands to protect himself. He hits the gravel face first and passes out.
The room is warm and clean and uncluttered, a cube of three white walls, a white ceiling and a window which constitutes most of the fourth wall, through which he can see a line of trees and a featureless, off-white sky beyond. He wonders briefly if this is the laboratory to which you are returned after the experiment of your life has been allowed to run its full course. He can smell lavender fabric conditioner and an antiseptic he remembers from his childhood.
He is able to see out of his left eye. It is still foggy but he can discern colours and rough outlines. His hands look like the hands of a much older man. They have been cleaned but there is still dirt under the nails and in the deeper cracks of his skin. A rash of dry red scabs leads up his wrist under the sleeve of green cotton pyjamas. He remembers that he was homeless. He remembers that he tried to take his own life. He feels tearful but cannot tell whether this is relief or disappointment.
He rolls over and swings his feet carefully onto the bare waxed wood of the floor. His body is stiff. He has no clear sense of how long he has been unconscious. It feels like days. He stands slowly and walks to the window. He expects to see the treetops give way to roofs and chimneys and aerials but he finds himself looking instead onto rolling English farmland of the kind he remembers from his childhood, a dense wood of oak and beech to his left, a ploughed field falling away on the far side of a stone wall then rising again like a wave in a Japanese woodcut, a fringe of trees on the brow of the hill, a spire in the distance. The old comfort, the old claustrophobia. A beauty that sings to something deep inside him.
He turns. There is a white door set into the opposite wall. He has no idea what might lie beyond it. He does not want any more complications. He is already exhausted by his journey to the window. He returns to the bed, lies down, closes his eyes and slips back out of the world.
A woman is sitting in a simple chair of blond wood that wasn’t there when he last woke. It is later the same day. Or perhaps it is the following day. She has a chestnut bob. She wear jeans and a cream woollen poncho. Her feet are bare. He recognises her but is equally convinced that they have never met. Panic flutters in his chest. He wonders if he has been in this place for years and this encounter has happened hundreds of times before, only to be forgotten repeatedly.
The woman sits in silence for a long time and seems entirely comfortable with this. He says nothing, wary of popping the fragile bubble and finding himself beside the river once again. Eventually she says, “You should come and have something to eat,” and only then does he recognise the ache in his abdomen as hunger. She stands up. “I’m sure you can find your way.” She leaves the door ajar.
Through the gap he can see more wood, more light, more white paint, a narrow sliver of another big window and, beyond it, more trees. He can smell an open fire. If he leaves this room he will have to deal with things he does not have the strength to deal with. But he is wary, too, of offending his hosts, whoever they might be. He gets to his feet and makes his way to the door, pausing briefly with his hand on the frame in order to get his breath back.
The bedroom is one of seven rooms off a first-floor balcony which runs around three sides of a boxy, light-filled atrium. Below him, over the rail, is the focal point of the house, three low sofas and an open hearth where several logs are burning. In front of him is another wall of glass, two storeys high, divided into big squares so that the view of the long lawn and the small lake and the surrounding trees seems like a video projection. It is, by some distance, the most beautiful house he has ever seen, the kind of house he dreamed of living in as a teenager, the polar opposite of the Rookery, with its low ceilings and thick walls and dark corners, every surface patterned and every cranny occupied by some antique thing.