His skin felt fragile, and nervously unstable; he burned, but his heat often seemed to break, flooding him with the chill of the night.
There was something even less pleasant. As he crawled, the leaning darkness - or part of it -
seemed to move beside him. It was as though someone were pacing him, perhaps on all fours, outside the tunnel. When he halted, so did the pacing. It would reach the end of the tunnel just as he did.
Nothing but imagination, helped by the closely looming tree trunks beyond the shrubs. Apart from the creaking of wood and the rattling sway of leaves, there was no sound beyond the tunnel -
certainly none of pacing. He crawled. The cumbersome moist sounds that accompanied the pacing were those of his own progress. But he crawled more slowly, and the darkness imitated him. Wasn't the thorny tunnel dwindling ahead? It would trap him. Suddenly panicking, he began to scramble backward.
The thorns hardly hindered his retreat. He must have broken them down. He emerged gasping, glad of the tiny gain in light. Around him shrubs pressed close as ever. He stamped his way back along what he'd thought was his original path. When he reached the hindrance he smashed his way between the shrubs, struggling and snarling, savage with panic, determined not to yield. His hands were torn; he heard cloth rip. Well, the thorns could have that.
When at last he reached an open space his panic sighed loudly out of him. He began to walk as rapidly as seemed safe, towards where he remembered the road to be. Overhead black nets of branches turned, momentarily catching stars. Once, amid the enormous threshing of the woods, he thought he heard a heavy body shoving through the nearby bushes. Good luck to whoever it was.
Ahead, in the barred dark, hung little lighted windows. He had found the trailer park, but only by losing his way.
He was home. He hurried into the light, smiling. In the metal alleys pegged shirts hung neck down, dripping; they flapped desperately on the wind. The trailer was dark. In the main room, lying on the couch like someone's abandoned reading, was a note: BACK LATER. His mother had added MIGHT BE LATE.
He'd been looking forward to companionship. Now the trailer seemed too brightly lit, and false: a furnished tin can. He made himself coffee, leafed desultorily through his floppy paperbacks, opened and closed a pocket chess set. He poked through his box of souvenirs: shells, smooth stones; a minute Bible; a globe of synthetic snow within which a huge vague figure, presumably meant to be a snowman, loomed outside a house; a dead flashlight fitted with a set of clip-on Halloween faces; a dull grey ring whose metal swelled into a bulge over which colours crawled slowly, changing. The cardboard box was full of memories: the Severn valley, the Welsh hills, the garishly glittering mile of Blackpool; he couldn't remember where the ring had come from. But the memories were dim tonight, uninvolving.
He wandered into his parents' room. It looked to him like a secondhand store for clothes and toiletries. He found his father's large metal box, but it was locked as usual. Well, Michael didn't want to read his old books anyway. He searched for contraceptives, but as he'd expected, there were none. If he wasn't mistaken, his parents had no need for them. Poor buggers. He'd never been able to imagine how, out of proportion as they seemed to be, they had begot him.
Eventually he went out. The incessant rocking of the trailer, its hollow booming in the wind, had begun to infuriate him. He hurried along the road between the pines; wind sifted through needles.
On the main road buses ran to Liverpool. But he'd already been there several times. He caught a bus to the opposite terminus.
The bus was almost empty. A few passengers rattled in their lighted pod over the bumpy country roads. Darkness streamed by, sometimes becoming dim hedges. The scoop of the headlamps set light to moths, and once to a squirrel. Ahead the sky glowed, as if with a localized dawn. Lights began to emerge from behind silhouetted houses; streets opened, brightening.
The bus halted in a square, beside a village cross. The passengers hurried away, snuggling into their collars. Almost at once the street was deserted, the bus extinguished. Folded awnings clattered, tugged by the wind. Perhaps after all he should have gone into the city. He was stranded here for -
he read the timetable: God, two hours until the last bus.
He wandered among the grey stone houses. Streetlamps glared silver; the light coated shop windows, behind whose flowering of frost he could see faint ghosts of merchandise. Curtains shone warmly, chimneys smoked. His heels clanked mechanically on the cobbles. Streets, streets, empty streets. Then the streets became crowded, with gleaming parked cars. Ahead, on the wall of a building, was a plaque of coloured light: FOUR IN THE MORNING. A club.
He hesitated, then he descended the steps. Maybe he wouldn't fit in with the brand-new sports car set, but anything was better than wandering the icy streets. At the bottom of the stone flight, a desk stood beside a door to coloured dimness. A broken-nosed man wearing evening dress sat behind the desk. 'Are you a member, sir?' he said in an accent that was almost as convincing as his suit.
Inside was worse than Michael had feared. On a dance floor couples turned lethargically, glittering and changing colour like toy dancers. Clumps of people stood shouting at each other in county accents, swaying and laughing; some stared at him as they laughed. He heard their talk: motorboats, bloody bolshies, someone's third abortion. He didn't mind meeting new people - he'd had to learn not to mind - but he could tell these people preferred, now they'd stared, to ignore him.
His three pounds' membership fee included a free drink. I should think so too, he thought. He ordered a beer, to the barman's faint contempt. As he carried the tankard to one of the low bare tables he was conscious of his boots, tramping the floorboards. There was nothing wrong with them, he'd wiped them. He sipped, making the drink last, and gazed into the beer's dim glow.
When someone else sat at the table he didn't look at her. He had to glance up at last, because she was staring. What was the matter with her, was he on show? Often in groups he felt alien, but he'd never felt more of a freak than here. His large-boned arms huddled protectively around him, his gawky legs drew up.
But she was smiling. Her stare was wide-eyed, innocent, if somehow odd. 'I haven't seen you before,' she said. 'What's your name?'
'Michael.' It sounded like phlegm; he cleared his throat. 'Michael. What's yours?'
'June.' She made a face as though it tasted like medicine.
'Nothing wrong with that.' Her hint of dissatisfaction with herself had emboldened him.
'You haven't moved here, have you? Are you visiting?'
There was something strange about her: about her eyes, about the way she seemed to search for questions. 'My parents have a caravan,' he said. 'We're in the Pine Dunes Caravanserai. We docked just last week.'
'Yeah.' She drew the word out like a sigh. 'Like a ship. That must be fantastic. I wish I had that.
Just to be able to see new things all the time, new places. The only way you can see new things here is taking acid. I'm tripping now.'
His eyebrows lifted slightly; his faint smile shrugged.
'That's what I mean,' she said, smiling. 'These people here would be really shocked. They're so provincial. You aren't.'
In fact he hadn't been sure how to react. The pupils of her eyes were expanding and contracting rapidly, independently of each other. But her small face was attractive, her small body had large firm breasts.
'I saw the moon dancing before,' she said. 'I'm beginning to come down now. I thought I'd like to look at people. You wouldn't know I was tripping, would you? I can control it when I want to.'
She wasn't really talking to him, he thought; she just wanted an audience to trip to. He'd heard things about LSD. 'Aren't you afraid of starting to trip when you don't mean to?'