“I don’t know how high rosemary grows in these parts.” I didn’t. I was far from home.
“We have gentle winters. Rosemary flourishes here.”
“So why exactly did the people burn it all down?”
He paused. “You’ll get a better idea of how things lie when we get to the top of the hill.”
“How do they lie?”
“At the top of the hill.”
The hill was getting steeper and steeper. My left knee had been injured the previous winter, in a fall on the ice, which meant I could no longer run fast, and these days I found hills and steps extremely taxing. With each step my knee would twinge, reminding me, angrily, of its existence.
Many people, on learning that the local oddity they wished to visit had burned down some years before, would simply have gotten back into their cars and driven on toward their final destination. I am not so easily deterred. The finest things I have seen are dead places: a shuttered amusement park I entered by bribing a night watchman with the price of a drink; an abandoned barn in which, the farmer said, half a dozen bigfoots had been living the summer before. He said they howled at night, and that they stank, but that they had moved on almost a year ago. There was a rank animal smell that lingered in that place, but it might have been coyotes.
“When the moon waned, they walked the lunar labyrinth with love,” said my guide. “As it waxed, they walked with desire, not with love. Do I have to explain the difference to you? The sheep and the goats?”
“I don’t think so.”
“The sick came, too, sometimes. The damaged and the disabled came, and some of them needed to be wheeled through the labyrinth, or carried. But even they had to choose the path they traveled, not the people carrying them or wheeling them. Nobody chose their paths but them. When I was a boy people called them cripples. I’m glad we don’t call them cripples any longer. The lovelorn came, too. The alone. The lunatics—they were brought here, sometimes. Got their name from the moon, it was only fair the moon had a chance to fix things.”
We were approaching the top of the hill. It was dusk. The sky was the color of wine, now, and the clouds in the west glowed with the light of the setting sun, although from where we were standing it had already dropped below the horizon.
“You’ll see, when we get up there. It’s perfectly flat, the top of the hill.”
I wanted to contribute something, so I said, “Where I come from, five hundred years ago the local lord was visiting the king. And the king showed off his enormous table, his candles, his beautiful painted ceiling, and as each one was displayed, instead of praising it, the lord simply said, ‘I have a finer, and bigger, and better one.’ The king wanted to call his bluff, so he told him that the following month he would come and eat at this table, bigger and finer than the king’s, lit by candles in candleholders bigger and finer than the king’s, under a ceiling painting bigger and better than the king’s.”
My guide said, “Did he lay out a tablecloth on the flatness of the hill, and have twenty brave men holding candles, and did they dine beneath God’s own stars? They tell a story like that in these parts, too.”
“That’s the story,” I admitted, slightly miffed that my contribution had been so casually dismissed. “And the king acknowledged that the lord was right.”
“Didn’t the boss have him imprisoned, and tortured?” asked my guide. “That’s what happened in the version of the story they tell hereabouts. They say that the man never even made it as far as the Cordon-bleu dessert his chef had whipped up. They found him on the following day with his hands cut off, his severed tongue placed neatly in his breast pocket and a final bullet-hole in his forehead.”
“Here? In the house back there?”
“Good lord, no. They left his body in his nightclub. Over in the city.”
I was surprised how quickly dusk had ended. There was still a glow in the west, but the rest of the sky had become night, plum-purple in its majesty.
“The days before the full of the moon, in the labyrinth,” he said. “They were set aside for the infirm, and those in need. My sister had a women’s condition. They told her it would be fatal if she didn’t have her insides all scraped out, and then it might be fatal anyway. Her stomach had swollen up as if she was carrying a baby, not a tumor, although she must have been pushing fifty. She came up here when the moon was a day from full and she walked the labyrinth. Walked it from the outside in, in the moon’s light, and she walked it from the center back to the outside, with no false steps or mistakes.”
“What happened to her?”
“She lived,” he said, shortly.
We crested the hill, but I could not see what I was looking at. It was too dark.
“They delivered her of the thing inside her. It lived as well, for a while.” He paused. Then he tapped my arm. “Look over there.”
I turned and looked. The size of the moon astonished me. I know it’s an optical illusion, that the moon grows no smaller as it rises, but this moon seemed to take up so much of the horizon as it rose that I found myself thinking of the old Frank Frazetta paperback covers, where men with their swords raised would be silhouetted in front of huge moons, and I remembered paintings of wolves howling on hilltops, black cutouts against the circle of snow-white moon that framed them. The enormous moon that was rising was the creamy yellow of freshly churned butter.
“Is the moon full?” I asked.
“That’s a full moon, all right.” He sounded satisfied. “And there’s the labyrinth.”
We walked towards it. I had expected to see ash on the ground, or nothing. Instead, in the buttery moonlight, I saw a maze, complex and elegant, made of circles and whorls inside a huge square. I could not judge distances properly in that light, but I thought that each side of the square must be two hundred feet or more.
The plants that outlined the maze were low to the ground, though. None of them was more than a foot tall. I bent down, picked a needle-like leaf, black in the moonlight, and crushed it between finger and thumb. I inhaled, and thought of raw lamb, carefully dismembered and prepared, and placed in an oven on a bed of branches and needles that smelled just like this.
“I thought you people burned all this to the ground,” I said.
“We did. They aren’t hedges, not any longer. But things grow again, in their season. There’s no killing some things. Rosemary’s tough.”
“Where’s the entrance?”
“You’re standing in it,” he said. He was an old man, who walked with a stick and talked to strangers. Nobody would ever miss him.
“So what happened up here when the moon was full?”
“Locals didn’t walk the labyrinth then. That was the one night that paid for all.”
I took a step into the maze. There was nothing difficult about it, not with the bushes that marked it no higher than my shins, no higher than a kitchen garden. If I got lost, I could simply step over the bushes, walk back out. But for now I followed the path into the labyrinth. It was easy to make out in the light of the full moon. I could hear my guide, as he continued to talk.
“Some folk thought even that price was too high. That was why we came up here, why we burned the lunar labyrinth. We came up that hill when the moon was dark, and we carried burning torches, like in the old black-and-white movies. We all did. Even me. But you can’t kill everything. It don’t work like that.”
“Why rosemary?” I asked.
“Rosemary’s for remembering,” he told me.
The butter-yellow moon was rising faster than I imagined or expected. Now it was a pale ghost-face in the sky, calm and compassionate, and its color was white, bone-white.
The man said, “There’s always a chance that you could get out safely. Even on the night of the full moon. First you have to get to the center of the labyrinth. There’s a fountain there. You’ll see. You can’t mistake it. Then you have to make it back from the center. No missteps, no dead ends, no mistakes on the way in or on the way out. It’s pr
obably easier now than it was when the bushes were high. It’s a chance. Otherwise, the labyrinth gets to cure you of all that ails you. Of course, you’ll have to run.”
I looked back. I could not see my guide. Not any longer. There was something in front of me, beyond the bush-path pattern, a black shadow padding silently along the perimeter of the square. It was the size of a large dog, but it did not move like a dog.
It threw back its head and howled to the moon with amusement and with merriment. The huge flat table at the top of the hill echoed with joyous howls, and, my left knee aching from the long hill-climb, I stumbled forward.
The maze had a pattern; I could trace it. Above me the moon shone, bright as day. She had always accepted my gifts in the past. She would not play me false at the end.
“Run,” said a voice that was almost a growl.
I ran like a lamb to his laughter.
The Thing About Cassandra
SO THERE’S SCALLIE AND me wearing Starsky-and-Hutch wigs, complete with sideburns, at five o’clock in the morning by the side of a canal in Amsterdam. There had been ten of us that night, including Rob, the groom, last seen handcuffed to a bed in the red-light district with shaving foam covering his nether regions and his future brother-in-law giggling and patting the hooker holding the straight razor on the arse, which was the point I looked at Scallie and he looked at me, and he said, “Maximum deniability?” and I nodded, because there are some questions you don’t want to be able to answer when a bride starts asking pointed questions about the stag weekend, so we slipped off for a drink, leaving eight men in Starsky-and-Hutch wigs (one of whom was mostly naked, attached to a bed by fluffy pink handcuffs, and seemed to be starting to think that this adventure wasn’t such a good idea after all) behind us, in a room that smelled of disinfectant and cheap incense, and we went and sat by a canal and drank cans of Danish lager and talked about the old days.
Scallie—whose real name is Jeremy Porter, and these days people call him Jeremy, but he had been Scallie when we were eleven—and the groom-to-be, Rob Cunningham, had been at school with me. We had drifted out of touch, more or less, had found each other the lazy way you do these days, through Friends Reunited and Facebook and such, and now Scallie and I were together for the first time since we were nineteen. The Starsky-and-Hutch wigs, which had been Scallie’s idea, made us look like we were playing brothers in some made-for-TV movie—Scallie the short, stocky brother with the thick moustache, me, the tall one. Given that I’ve made a significant part of my income since leaving school modeling, I’d add the tall good-looking one, but nobody looks good in a Starsky-and-Hutch wig complete with sideburns.
Also, the wig itched.
We sat by the canal, and when the lager had all gone we kept talking and we watched the sun come up.
Last time I saw Scallie he was nineteen and filled with big plans. He had just joined the RAF as a cadet. He was going to fly planes, and do double duty using the flights to smuggle drugs, and so get incredibly rich while helping his country. It was the kind of mad idea he used to have all the way through school. Usually the whole thing would fall apart. Sometimes he’d get the rest of us into trouble on the way.
Now, twelve years later, his six months in the RAF ended early because of an unspecified problem with his ankle, he was a senior executive in a firm that manufactured double-glazed windows, he told me, with, since the divorce, a smaller house than he felt that he deserved and only a golden retriever for company.
He was sleeping with a woman in the double-glazing firm, but had no expectations of her leaving her boyfriend for him, seemed to find it easier that way. “Of course, I wake up crying sometimes, since the divorce. Well, you do,” he said at one point. I could not imagine him crying, and anyway he said it with a huge, Scallie grin.
I told him about me: still modeling, helping out in a friend’s antique shop to keep busy, more and more painting. I was lucky; people bought my paintings. Every year I would have a small gallery show at the Little Gallery in Chelsea, and while initially the only people to buy anything had been people I knew—photographers, old girlfriends and the like—these days I have actual collectors. We talked about the days that only Scallie seemed to remember, when he and Rob and I had been a team of three, inviolable, unbreakable. We talked about teenage heartbreak, about Caroline Minton (who was now Caroline Keen, and married to a vicar), about the first time we brazened our way into an 18 film, although neither of us could remember what the film actually was.
Then Scallie said, “I heard from Cassandra the other day.”
“Cassandra?”
“Your old girlfriend. Cassandra. Remember?”
“. . . No.”
“The one from Reigate. You had her name written on all your books.” I must have looked particularly dense or drunk or sleepy, because he said, “You met her on a skiing holiday. Oh, for heaven’s sake. Your first shag. Cassandra.”
“Oh,” I said, remembering, remembering everything. “Cassandra.”
And I did remember.
“Yeah,” said Scallie. “She dropped me a line on Facebook. She’s running a community theater in East London. You should talk to her.”
“Really?”
“I think, well, I mean, reading between the lines of her message, she may still have a thing for you. She asked after you.”
I wondered how drunk he was, how drunk I was, staring at the canal in the early light. I said something, I forget what, then I asked whether Scallie remembered where our hotel was, because I had forgotten, and he said he had forgotten too, and that Rob had all the hotel details and really we should go and find him and rescue him from the clutches of the nice hooker with the handcuffs and the shaving kit, which, we realized, would be easier if we knew how to get back to where we’d left him, and looking for some clue to where we had left Rob I found a card with the hotel’s address on it in my back pocket, so we headed back there and the last thing I did before I walked away from the canal and that whole strange evening was to pull the itchy Starsky-and-Hutch wig off my head and throw it into the canal.
It floated.
Scallie said, “There was a deposit on that, you know. If you didn’t want to wear it, I’d’ve carried it.” Then he said, “You should drop Cassandra a line.”
I shook my head. I wondered who he had been talking to online, who he had confused for her, knowing it definitely wasn’t Cassandra.
The thing about Cassandra is this: I’d made her up.
I WAS FIFTEEN, ALMOST sixteen. I was awkward. I had just experienced my teenage growth spurt and was suddenly taller than most of my friends, self-conscious about my height. My mother owned and ran a small riding stables, and I helped out there, but the girls—competent, horsey, sensible types—intimidated me. At home I wrote bad poetry and painted watercolors, mostly of ponies in fields; at school—there were only boys at my school—I played cricket competently, acted a little, hung around with my friends playing records (the CD was newly around, but CD players were expensive and rare, and we had all inherited record players and hi-fis from parents or older siblings). When we didn’t talk about music, or sports, we talked about girls.
Scallie was older than me. So was Rob. They liked having me as part of their gang, but they liked teasing me, too. They acted like I was a kid, and I wasn’t. They had both done it with girls. Actually, that’s not entirely true; they had both done it with the same girl, Caroline Minton, famously free with her favors and always up for it once, as long as the person she was with had a moped.
I did not have a moped. I was not old enough to get one, my mother could not afford one (my father had died when I was small, of an accidental overdose of anesthetic, when he was in hospital to have a minor operation on an infected toe. To this day, I avoid hospitals). I had seen Caroline Minton at parties, but she terrified me and even had I owned a moped, I would not have wanted my first sexual experience to be with her.
Scallie and Rob also had girlfriends. Scallie’s girlfriend was
taller than he was, had huge breasts and was interested in football, which meant Scallie had to feign an interest in football, mostly Crystal Palace, while Rob’s girlfriend thought that Rob and she should have things in common, which meant that Rob stopped listening to the mideighties electropop the rest of us liked and started listening to hippy bands from before we were born, which was bad, and that Rob got to raid her dad’s amazing collection of old TV on video, which was good.
I had no girlfriend.
Even my mother began to comment on it.
There must have been a place where it came from, the name, the idea: I don’t remember though. I just remember writing “Cassandra” on my exercise books. Then, carefully, not saying anything.
“Who’s Cassandra?” asked Scallie, on the bus to school.
“Nobody,” I said.
“She must be somebody. You wrote her name on your maths exercise book.”
“She’s just a girl I met on the skiing holiday.” My mother and I had gone skiing, with my aunt and cousins, the month before, in Austria.
“Are we going to meet her?”
“She’s from Reigate. I expect so. Eventually.”
“Well, I hope so. And you like her?”
I paused, for what I hoped was the right amount of time, and said, “She’s a really good kisser,” then Scallie laughed and Rob wanted to know if this was French kissing, with tongues and everything, and I said, “What do you think,” and by the end of the day, they both believed in her.
My mum was pleased to hear I’d met someone. Her questions—what Cassandra’s parents did, for example—I simply shrugged away.
I went on three “dates” with Cassandra. On each of our dates, I took the train up to London, and took myself to the cinema. It was exciting, in its own way.
I returned from the first trip with more stories of kissing, and of breast-feeling.
Our second date (in reality, spent watching Weird Science on my own in Leicester Square) was, as told to my mum, merely spent holding hands together at what she still called “the pictures,” but as reluctantly revealed to Rob and Scallie (and, over that week, to several other school friends who had heard rumors from sworn-to-secrecy Rob and Scallie, and now needed to find out if any of it was true) it was actually The Day I Lost My Virginity, in Cassandra’s aunt’s flat in London: the aunt was away, Cassandra had a key. I had (for proof) a packet of three condoms missing the one I had thrown away and a strip of four black-and-white photographs I had found on my first trip to London, abandoned in the basket of a photo booth in Victoria Station. The photo strip showed a girl about my age with long straight hair (I could not be certain of the color. Dark blond? Red? Light brown?) and a friendly, freckly, not unpretty, face. I pocketed it. In art class I did a pencil sketch of the third of the pictures, the one I liked the best, her head half-turned as if calling out to an unseen friend beyond the tiny curtain. She looked sweet, and charming. I would have liked her to be my girlfriend.