Gavin tells himself he is protecting Amber’s honour but his anger is overwhelming and undirected and his main intention is to wipe out his shame at having allowed this whole sorry situation to happen.
He is a big man and still strong despite having done little exercise for the past three months but his smaller opponent has clearly been in fights before. They grapple briefly, falling together onto a chair which shatters beneath them. Then the man breaks Gavin’s nose with a headbutt. The shock loosens Gavin’s grip, the man gets to his feet, kicks Gavin hard in the small of the back and drags Amber from the house. Gavin does not care what might happen to her. He is not even greatly concerned with the damage to his face. Mostly he is frightened by the fact that he is now alone.
He walks to A&E where he is both relieved and distressed that no one recognises him. He returns five hours later with a bandage over his nose to find that the iPhone and wallet he left on the hall table have been stolen along with the TV, the hi-fi, his MacBook Air and his passport. He rings the bank to cancel the card but the current account has already been emptied of three thousand pounds. He rings a locksmith then has to ring back and cancel the visit when he remembers that he has no way of paying the man. He drinks half a bottle of whisky, lies down on the sofa, loses consciousness and wakes up an hour later, face down in his own vomit.
The following day he goes to the bank to get hold of some cash. He has a vicious hangover, a bandage over his face, no proof of identification and a very short fuse. He leaves before the police are called but returns to find another locksmith has come, employed by the bailiffs who have now repossessed the house. There is an envelope Sellotaped to the door explaining how he can retrieve his possessions. He tries to smash the blue recycling bin through the front window but the individual panes are too small. The glass shatters, the top of the box comes free and bottles fall around his feet, some shattering, some emptying dregs of wine and beer onto his trousers.
He has five and a half thousand pounds in a deposit account he cannot access and six pounds forty-three in his pocket. He wants a strong drink, he is hungry and he needs painkillers. He can afford only one of these things. He buys a packet of Paracodol from Boots then has to return and ask for a glass of water so that he can swallow them because his throat is too dry. He sits in the library for three hours, reading the newspaper and staring into space.
He does not consider contacting any of the people he has called friends over the past few years. It is not what the word “friend” means to him and, indeed, if they had treated him in a similar way he would have seen it as an imposition. His main concern is that other people do not find out about his present state.
When the library closes he heads up to the Star and Garter Gate and into the park. He needs to walk long and hard to burn off a churning anger. He is not homeless, he is simply without a home for the present. He has made mistakes. They can be undone. He walks for five hours and spends the night in the Isabella Plantation, sleeping in short bursts from which he is rapidly woken either by the imaginary stranger or by real animals moving through undergrowth nearby.
The following morning he returns to the bank in a more conciliatory state of mind. The woman at the counter says, “It’s Mr. Cooper, isn’t it?” She is excited for a second or so then goes very quiet. He is ushered into a private room. He explains to a man in a cheap suit that he was burgled. He recites his mother’s maiden name, his pin number and his last three addresses and walks out with an envelope containing two thousand pounds. He takes the bandage off his face and throws it away.
He calls the bailiffs who explain that it will cost seventy pounds to retrieve his possessions. He counts silently to three and puts the phone down.
If he spends the next week in a hotel he will rapidly run out of money and find himself back at square one. He needs to ration his resources and ride out this period of turbulence.
He buys a sleeping bag, a cheap one-person tent and a waterproof coat from Millets in Epsom. He buys two packs of sandwiches from the reduced section in Sainsbury’s and two plastic litre bottles of water which he can refill. People stare at him, either because of his broken nose or because they recognise him. It is impossible to tell which. If they stare for too long he stares back. If they do not look away he tells them to fuck off. He buys more Paracodol. He does not think about going to the Citizens Advice Bureau. He does not think about finding a hostel. He does not think about foodbanks or day centres. He wants nothing to do with homeless people or those who make it their business to care for them.
He sleeps in the park for a second night, camping in the trees at the end of Pen Ponds. He is woken by the police in the small hours. They are very polite. He packs his tent and makes a show of walking towards Robin Hood Gate but veers into a stand of trees when they can no longer see him. They’re less polite when they wake him the following night.
He walks upriver. Eel Pie Island, Ham Lands, Kingston, Hampton Court. He climbs a fence and pitches his tent behind the waterworks on Desborough Island. The following day he stands under Chertsey Bridge and watches heavy summer rain stipple the Thames for two solid hours. Laleham, Staines. He passes under the M25. He has now left London. Above him, one by one, planes rise from Heathrow and are swallowed by the sky. Wraysbury, Windsor.
The days are warm and long, but the path is busy so he must pitch his tent after dark and take it down soon after dawn. He camps in a little copse near the A332. He camps in a wood near Cliveden.
It is August. He does not know the precise date. A year ago he was diving in the Maldives with Emmy, accompanied by manta rays and blacktail barracuda, living a life that seems fictional now, its inhabitants as glossy and shallow as actors in TV adverts.
He is embarrassed by his filthy clothing and his unwashed smell but the dirtier and more ragged he becomes the less he attracts people’s attention and this is some relief. He does very little. He spends most of his day by the river, walking, sitting. He has never taken much notice of the non-human world. He rowed for two terms at Cambridge but the river was little more than background. He sees mink, he sees water voles, he watches iridescent-blue dragonflies hover among the reeds. He sees a shiny, black terrapin with red eyeballs sitting on a wet stone. He likes it best in the early mornings when the water is a mirror and flotillas of geese and ducks sleep in the last of the mist.
August becomes September. The weather turns. The Paracodol which previously kept him asleep till four o’clock are becoming less effective. He is wary of damaging his liver and kidneys by taking more.
He falls into conversation with a man who has already pitched his ramshackle tent in the little wood where Gavin himself was planning to spend the night. Terry has worked as a librarian and a cook and a gardener. He is reading a battered copy of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table.
They talk about the crayfish Terry has caught in the river and will be cooking for his supper. They talk about Cornelius Drebbel who piloted a submarine ten miles from Westminster to Greenwich in 1621 under the eyes of James I. Gavin asks him why he is camping rough and Terry explains that he knows the identity of Prince Harry’s real father and for this reason he is being hunted down by the security services. He weeps a little and apologises for this. “I’ve been running for a long time. It’s hard to keep my spirits up.” Gavin wishes him well and continues walking in order to pitch his tent elsewhere.
There are tiny insects of some kind in his hair. He has a rash up his right arm and over his shoulder which might or might not be scabies. He has what feels like a constant, low-level chest infection.
He discovers that staff at the Co-op in Pangbourne throw food past its sell-by date into a skip at the rear of the shop at the end of the working day.
One morning he sees a boy walking over a bridge. He is certain that it is Thom. He fights his way up a steep bank and through a hedge but when he reaches the road he can see no one. He sees the boy several more times, never his face, only ever the back of his head. He vanishes when Gavin gives
chase.
September becomes October. Goring, Moulsford, North Stoke. He sees a dead dog float past, its legs in the air like a cartoon of a dead dog. He gives up buying food. He saves his remaining money for Paracodol. He doubles his dose then triples it. A security guard finds him going through the bins behind Tesco in Wallingford and attacks him with a fury out of all proportion to the offence, pushing him to the ground, kicking him repeatedly and calling him “you thieving, fucking scum.”
He understands now that taking your own life might not be a weakness. He has travelled a long way. It is a different country out here and everything looks different. To carry on living or to end one’s life in a manner of one’s own choosing? The answer is not obvious. To fill one’s pockets with stones could be a decent bet against poor odds.
October becomes November. If the sun is out he finds that he can lie on his back for hours watching the clouds move and change above him, but the sun is rarely out. Most often the sky is low and grey. For a period of two weeks there is heavy rain every day. He is caught off guard on several occasions and unable to find shelter in time. His clothing is now permanently damp.
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.
He descends very slowly to the ground floor on a staircase of open risers and wooden treads which are warm beneath his unslippered feet. The atrium, he can see now, leads to open-plan dining and kitchen areas of smaller proportions but equally filled with light. The woman is standing at the stove. She spoons porridge from a small black pan into an earthenware bowl. “Have a seat.” The same familiarity, the same unnerving possibility that this is a ritual they have gone through before, because while he would never previously think of eating porridge, as soon as she says the word he knows that it is what he wants. He sits at the table and she places the bowl in front of him. “Coffee?”
He nods. He does not want to speak out loud. There is a game being played, the rules of which he does not understand and whose stakes, he thinks, could be very high indeed.
The kettle whistles as it comes to the boil. She turns the hot plate down and pours the bustling water into a cafetière. A column of steam rises above her head as she fits the plunger into the glass jug and places it on the table. Before taking her own seat across the table she gently folds back the sleeve of his pyjamas with two fingers to examine the rash on his wrist. She nods to herself then dips her hand into her pocket and retrieves a little blue-and-white tube of permethrin cream and hands it to him. “I’ve already put some on. You’ll need to use it a couple more times.”