Amaryllis Night and Day

  Seen from the cliffs at Beachy Head, the sea was grey and dimpled, far, far below us like a leaden porridge slowed by distance, advancing in sluggish small wavelines to the base of the cliffs. The newly risen sun, impartially illuminating a fan of mawkishly mild strato-cumulus clouds, offered nothing but the blank whiteness of its disc. The tiny lighthouse, red-and-white striped, was like something out of a Christmas cracker, not to be taken seriously as a warning to mariners. Look at me, it said. Look how puny I am, how much of a toy. How can I possibly help anybody in the leaden porridge of the sea or on the high chalk cliffs?

  A sign by the phone box said:

  The Samaritans

  ALWAYS THERE

  DAY AND NIGHT

  Phone 735555 or 0345 909090

  Perched on the sign was a meditation of crows. I thought they might sing ‘Hit That Jive, Jack’ but they avoided eye contact, said nothing, and flew away. ‘Not ravens,’ I said to Lenore, ‘crows.’

  In the phone box was a card with its number and location:

  01323 721807

  Nr Beachy Head P. H.

  Eastbourne

  East Sussex BN20 7YA

  On the shelf in the phone box was a stack of paperbacks, all of them Notes from a Friend, A Quick and Simple Guide to Taking Charge of Your Life by Anthony Robbins. Riffling the pages I happened on some word lists for transforming ‘Old Boring Words’ into ‘New Exciting Words’. ‘Interesting’ became ‘amazing’; ‘awake’ became ‘energised’; ‘cool’ became ‘outrageous’. I turned to the beginning. Lesson One was FEELING OVERWHELMED … HOW TO TURN IT AROUND. Lesson Two was THERE ARE NO FAILURES. On the flyleaf Ted Danson, Christauria Welland Akong, and Arnold Schwarzenegger were quoted praising the book highly. A little gift card pasted there bore the holograph message:

  The fact that you’re alive means

  that someone cares about you.

  Merry Christmas

  From

  A Friend

  ‘The fact that I’m alive only means that I’m not dead,’ said Lenore. ‘It doesn’t mean that anyone cares about me.’

  ‘I care about you.’

  ‘OK, but that’s not what’s keeping me alive. And look at all the billions and trillions of us walking around being alive, billions too many of us. Do you really think that someone cares about every one of us?’

  ‘I very much doubt it.’

  A little brown dog frolicked ahead of us in transports of joy; a black Labrador urged caution as we walked through the sodden grass towards the cliff’s edge. This was New Year’s Day 1994. The weather was mild; there’d been some drizzle but it had cleared and the morning now presented that special kind of daylight one sees on New Year’s day after having been up all night: a different country, that daylight.

  Lenore and I had left my house at 06:15. It was cold, it was dark; the night gleamed with blackness in which a white moon, three days past the full, said, This is your life. Lenore’s Citroën 2CV, sporting a several-years-old cerulean-blue paint job, seemed an inadequate vehicle for the imperious spirit of its driver: the heater didn’t work very well, the valves and pistons seemed not entirely able to achieve compression, the clutch had lost its grip, and the whole machine rattled and shook and protested the pathetic fallacy of its lot. Lenore drove as if hacking her way through the jungle with a machete. I was the navigator, I had a little torch, I had an atlas, I was in love; all things seemed possible; I could find anything from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s and I had provided ham-and-cheese sandwiches and a thermos of tea.

  Wandsworth Bridge Road was empty; the street lamps all pointed to the future. The Shell station just before the bridge glowed saffron and scarlet like a temple at the gates of Night. Coming off the bridge we saw the netted sparkle of lights in the blackness looking like Los Angeles in a thriller.

  We got on to the A214 and went through Tooting Bec on the way to Croydon. At 06:25 it had a Marie-Celeste look, abandoned beneath its Christmas decorations. Indoors the townspeople slept or lay awake, made love or vomited up the remains of the evening while we outdoors moved through the night towards a new dawn. Always the street lamps offered perspectives receding to vanishing points. And each point we passed through was a vanishing point for someone up ahead.

  ‘Do you feel yourself always vanishing and reappearing?’ I asked Lenore.

  ‘I’m always vanishing; I’m not sure whether I actually reappear. On New Year’s Eve I can feel the next year coming with some kind of a self to cover my vanishment.’

  ‘A new self?’

  ‘I don’t aim that high. Any kind of self will do; used is OK – two or three careful owners. Whatever.’

  I live in a state of surprise much of the time; things others take for granted suddenly amaze me. Moving towards the ever-receding vanishing point I was struck by the frailty of what humans have put together like something out of a box: houses; shops; roads; street lamps; trains and railway stations; aeroplanes and airports. I imagined a gigantic foot stepping on it. Crunch. Of course film-makers imagine that all the time, and build monsters on to the feet.

  ‘Oi!’ said Lenore. ‘Mr Navigator!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’re going through Tooting Bec. What happens next?’

  ‘Mitcham, then Croydon.’ Like an animated line on a TV map we advanced through Croydon where a silver four-propeller-engine aeroplane was mounted in front of a floodlit deco building: Airport House. BOOKING HALL, said the entrance marquee; WEDDING FUNCTION.

  ‘Do you think the wedding function is happening right now?’ I said.

  ‘It’s a vampire wedding,’ said Lenore. ‘They have to clear out before the sun comes up.’

  The vampire wedding at Croydon remains a vivid memory for me – the happy couple sinking their teeth into each other’s necks, the guests all drinking (?) too much and the child vampires dancing with their elders as the band played ‘The Transylvania Polka’. A lot of the vampire kids would be grown up by now.

  After Purley we got on to the A22 through Kenley, Whyteleafe, and Caterham. I think it was on our way out of Caterham that we hit a stretch of unlit road. ‘Dark roads always seem fateful to me,’ said Lenore.

  ‘In what way?’ I said.

  I don’t know – just the unknown making itself visible.’

  Godstone and East Grinstead came and went as the sky lightened to the most delicate cerulean. General Amnesty, said the sky. All sins forgiven. Clean slate.

  I feel young, said the Citroën 2CV. I can do this, I can make it to Beachy Head.

  ‘I wonder if the vampire couple will still be together a year from now,’ said Lenore.

  ‘I guess they take it one night at a time,’ I said. ‘Look, the morning star.’ We pulled over briefly for a morning-star kiss. ‘Am I making you unhappy?’ I said.

  ‘There’s a period of natural immunity in these things,’ she said. ‘Reality comes later; we haven’t got there yet.’

  I remember inky-black trees against that wonderful paling cerulean sky, very Edmund Dulac. Looking at that sky one could believe in flying carpets, jinn in bottles, even an utterly new year. It’s difficult to force remembered images into chronological sequence. Those crows on the Samaritans sign at Beachy Head, I see them often.

  Coming though Eastbourne there was definitely a classic rosy-fingered dawn lighting up the clouds on our left, while on our right the drifting dark smudges of all the accumulated dawns before this one reluctantly quitted the stage and a few gulls, like aerial extras, completed the scene.

  We were climbing then, with lots of sky all around us and was that – yes, it was – the sea, just a greyness, a flatness, a Here-I-amness. We parked at the Beachy Head Countryside Centre, a brown national-park-looking place, THE FAMILY WELCOME, Full menu served all day, 11:30 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.

  With our sandwiches and thermos of tea we made our way to the view of the white cliffs and the toy lighthouse and the grey and kelpy-looking strand between while the sea, grey and dimpled, moved f
ar, far below us like a leaden porridge slowed by distance, advancing in sluggish small wavelines to the base of the cliffs. The joyful little brown dog frolicked ahead of us while the black Labrador continued to urge caution. Reaching the edge of the grass the little brown dog flung himself over headfirst and we were afraid to look but it was not the end of him because he reappeared laughing so it had not after all been an edge of no return.

  That was six years ago, and when my mind goes back to that dawn it gives me the vampire wedding, the leaden porridge of the sea, and that meditation of crows.

  15

  From Here on out to Where?

  Sitting naked on our bed in the Brass Hotel Amaryllis said, ‘How is it with us now, Peter?’ Her voice was very small. She was such a changeable creature, at one moment a confident enchantress and the next touchingly unsure of herself. In the golden light of the brass bedlamps she sat on the rumpled brass-coloured sheets, hugging herself. Her ribs seemed childlike and pathetic. She had a tattoo on her belly just above her pubic hair, a blue yin-yang symbol.

  ‘How do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘I mean, are you with me? I don’t want to be alone any more.’

  This is a glim, I was thinking. What will she say in real life? Is real life as real as this? ‘You’re not alone any more,’ I said.

  ‘Why? Because you’ve slept with me?’

  ‘We slept together because you tuned in to me and I tuned in to you and now we’re …’ Be careful, I said to myself – don’t leap without looking.

  ‘We’re what, Peter?’

  ‘Together.’

  ‘For how long?’

  So small she looked, so sweet and vulnerable. ‘From here on out,’ I said.

  ‘From here on out to where?’ When she said that I saw a dark road empty under an evening sky, pine woods on either side. Was that a very large ramshackle-looking black cat?

  ‘Wherever,’ I said.

  ‘Do you mean that? Doesn’t it sound crazy to you? You really don’t know me at all.’

  ‘Yes, I mean it. I know it sounds crazy and I don’t know you at all but there it is.’

  ‘Can I believe you? It isn’t easy to be sure.’

  ‘Believe me, you can be sure.’ My mouth kept running ahead of me while I struggled to keep up.

  ‘I don’t know you at all, really. I don’t always get it right when I tune in. Maybe you’re not as alone as I am, maybe you’ve already got somebody.’

  ‘I’ve got nobody but you, Amaryllis.’

  ‘But it happened so fast,’ she said very softly, almost more to herself than to me.

  ‘Well, after all, things move faster in a …’

  ‘Peter, don’t say the wrong word!’

  ‘Dream,’ I said as I woke up. ‘Nobody but you, Amaryllis.’

  16

  Listing

  I looked at my watch: 03:42 and I felt as if I’d been dropped from a tall building. Reality! Very confusing. The glim I’d just woken out of seemed realer than anything else that had happened between Amaryllis and me but then … I keep trying to find the best description of reality for myself – a practical working description is what I want, nothing philosophical or metaphysical. It isn’t, for example, a level plain; it’s full of dips and gullies, with here and there a ha-ha on the private lands. But really it’s different things at different times. Amaryllis – and I closed my eyes to bring her back – had in that glim given me whatever was her reality in those present moments. It didn’t matter that she was full of unknowns, a mystery to me. I had the taste of her in my mouth and in my mind.

  Was she awake too? I wanted to look at her, asleep or awake. I went down to the bedroom and stood at the closed door, hesitating. I imagined her waking up and wanting to be alone with her recall of the glim. I turned away and went up to the studio, sat down at my desk and moved the computer keyboard out of the way. It was time to make a list and I wanted to do it in handwriting so as not to miss any clues my hand might offer. I took a sheet of yellow A4 and a black fibre-tip pen; for a heading I wrote BALSAMIC:

  * GLIM 1 – The queue at the Balsamic bus stop. Amaryllis looks at me, gets on Finsey-Obay bus. I wake up. Who were the others in the queue?

  * FIRST REAL-LIFE MEETING – Science Museum, at the Klein-bottle display. We go for coffee in Exhibition Road. When she leaves I ask how to get in touch with her. She says, ‘At the Balsamic?’

  * QUESTION – Is the Balsamic bus stop there in the glimworld even when nobody’s glimming it?

  * GLIM 2 – The Brass Hotel. The receptionist laughs at me.

  * GLIM 3 – Venice. Commissario Brunetti can’t help me.

  * GLIM 4 – The shack in the pine woods. The old woman posing as a black cat says, ‘There is a bomb in Gilead.’

  * GLIM 5 – On spiral stairs in Finsey-Obay bus. Looking up at her bare bottom. I kick Hastings and others down stairs. Stop at the Brass Hotel. Lovemaking in Room 318. T-shirt says, ‘Unnatural practices yes’ Amaryllis anxious about what’s between us. I say the d-word and wake up. Why did I say the d-word?

  * KLEIN BOTTLES – Metaphorical connection? (I noticed that I had some difficulty in writing Klein; the letters ran together in an ill-formed way.)

  * QUESTION: She said Hastings on the bus was my idea. Maybe he was, but what she said when we talked about it – was that coming from her or from me? Maybe when I’m doing the glim I set up the location and the situation but what develops depends on who and what is in the glim.

  * HASTINGS – Probably he and Amaryllis have been lovers. Do I care? It seems not. I wonder who else was in her life before we. Or still is.

  * QUESTION – Amaryllis is sleeping in my bed. When she wakes up are we going to take up where we left off in the glim or will things be as they were before the glim?

  I went to see if she was still asleep. She wasn’t in my bed. She wasn’t in the studio or on the balcony. She wasn’t in the bathroom or the kitchen. She was nowhere in the house. The night was gone, the day was here; the tube trains were running and the trees on the common were swaying in the cool of a morning that was going to turn hot very soon. Some birds were twittering in a half-hearted way, as if they were working to rule. At that time of day I always have the feeling that if you gave reality a good kick the scenery would shake.

  17

  Late Last Night

  She hadn’t left a note to say where and when she wanted to meet next. She was skittish, after all. Surely that wasn’t asking too much of her, a next-morning word or two?

  Thursday was here again, and the last thing I wanted to do was go in to the college; I was dreading what Hastings might bring in this time. ‘Pull yourself together,’ I said to my face in the mirror. So I did and I went.

  I’d asked them to see what they could do with images from glims but only a few had anything to show me. The others said they didn’t glim – which was nonsense because everybody glims – or they hadn’t been able to recall anything. Hastings didn’t turn up at all. Of the five who brought in work only Cindy Ackerman had something that interested me. She’d covered a large sheet of paper with scribbled notes and diagrams that weren’t actually Klein bottles but suggested them.

  ‘What’ve we got here?’ I asked her.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘The dream was like an animation that kept reiterating the idea of something that passes through itself and that’s about all I can say.’

  I glanced at a few lines of her notes and read:

  Then and there and now and here and she and I and not and was and then and now and here and there and was and was and not and was …

  The words made my stomach churn a little as if I were on a fairground ride. ‘Have you been to the Science Museum lately?’ I said.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘What you’ve got here looks like something you might have seen at one of the exhibits.’

  ‘No, I haven’t been for years. I ought to go, really – it’s probably a good place to pick up ideas.’

  ‘And n
ew friends,’ said Kirsty Whittle, who was sitting close by.

  Ackerman blushed but said nothing. She was a tall young woman, dark-haired, handsome, a militant feminist and Marxist who was a regular protest-goer and placard-carrier. I had the feeling that she could have told me more than she did about her notes and diagrams. Those scribbles seemed to me to be connected in some way to Amaryllis, which may sound a little paranoid, I know. Nobody’s perfect.

  While Ackerman and I were talking Ron Hastings came in on crutches with his left leg in a cast. His face looked as if somebody had stepped on it. ‘What happened to you?’ I said.

  ‘Fell off a ladder.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Late last night.’

  ‘Around three in the morning?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Odd time to be up on a ladder.’

  ‘Came home a little the worse for wear, found myself locked out. Builders had left a ladder in the area. I went up it to my first-floor window, didn’t quite get there. Do you want a note from my mother?’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to bug you.’

  ‘Where were you at three o’clock this morning, Peter?’

  ‘Glimming. Sleeping, rather.’

  Did he look at me in a strange way? I wasn’t sure.

  ‘I hope your dreams were better than mine,’ he said.

  ‘You had bad ones last night?’

  ‘Something muddled and unpleasant – can’t remember.’ He sat down at his table and began to write in his sketchbook and I moved quietly away.

  I made no further requests for glim images; everybody went back to whatever they’d been working on and I had very little to say for the rest of the day.

  18

  Walking Spanish

  It was all I could do to restrain myself from looking for Amaryllis during the lunch break but I managed to hold back until I’d finished at the college. Where might she be – which of the places where we’d been together in our waking lives? And of course her availability was not unlimited: part of her time was taken up by the piano lessons she gave. I was pretty sure that she wanted to see me again but I recognised that she had to do it her way. Although she’d readily admitted being a weirdo there was always method in her madness: by not giving me a time and place to meet she was continually testing how tuned in I was to her.