Gerry laughed. ‘That’s a fair point, actually.’
Why was he always so unwilling to take things at their face value? Why did he always feel the need to step back from whatever was going on and see it from a different angle to everyone else? Judy had seen him as mocking, but the truth was that he admired and envied the ability of others to engage with the everyday world on its own terms, and he often berated himself for not being more like them. Judy herself was a paediatrician – she was Dr Judy Fotherington at work – and when she talked about what she did, he was amazed by the scale of the problems she had to resolve every working day, weighing up possibilities, dealing with distraught people, and, hour after hour, choosing courses of action that might change whole lives for better or for worse. He knew her job would terrify him. He knew that, unable to face the responsibility, his mind would keep skittering away. And then something would go wrong, and it would be his fault.
They talked about other things now, a sister of Judy’s who’d not been well, Gerry’s son who’d been having problems at school, and it wasn’t until later, when they turned to walk back again, that he returned to her point.
‘I really don’t experience myself as drilling down in search of meaninglessness, Judy. Quite the opposite, in fact. I feel myself to be seeking meaning.’
When they were back alongside the starting gate again, with its rubber tyres, they stopped to watch another race begin. Gerry recognised some of the riders and liveries from before. That red-headed guy, for instance, in the purple and green diamonds. It was the same riders, over and over, on a different set of horses.
There was meaning in the everyday world, but it was made of gossamer, that was how Gerry saw it. It could hold you up if you were very very gentle with it, but otherwise you fell right through. People like Judy accepted that fact, and treated the gossamer with respect. People like him had to keep tugging it and wriggling about, in search of something firmer, something they could get a grip on, something which wouldn’t tear if they were clumsy, or restless, or felt like being a little rough. This wasn’t necessarily the best strategy, he acknowledged. In all probability, there was nothing firmer to be found, and you either worked with the gossamer stuff and its limitations, or you were left with nothing at all. You went along with the game – entered into it, as people said, treated it like it mattered – or you stood on the side lines while others played. He was just a bystander. Others dealt with the world as they found it, got on with what could be done, and didn’t waste their time on things that were beyond their power to change.
Judy was in front when they came to the bridge over the dual carriageway, and she walked straight across to the other side, but Gerry stopped in the middle to watch all those tons of metal rushing by beneath him, punching their way through the air as they hurried east or west. He had felt rebuked by Judy for wanting to dismantle everything. Recognising there was more than a little justice in what she said, he had felt cornered, and had promptly responded by dismantling himself. But now he was collecting himself again. He was giving himself some time. He was gathering himself together.
Gerry was good at getting out of corners. All this drilling down that Judy complained about, all this prodding and tugging at the gossamer, was Gerry’s way of making sure that there would always be a way out, for it meant that wherever he happened to be was provisional, and there was the possibility of being somewhere else. If he couldn’t escape the wolf on the ground, well then, he’d just become a swallow in the sky. If an eagle then dived towards him, he’d stop being a bird and become a fish instead. And if a shark opened up its jaws and rushed towards him, he’d banish the whole ocean and run off as a gazelle, leaping away across the plain, while the shark snapped its teeth in the surf.
Judy had stopped to wait for him on the far side.
‘You okay?’ she asked, as he joined her.
‘Yes, of course, I’m fine.’
‘You looked a bit troubled there, I thought, standing looking down at the cars.’
Gerry laughed. ‘Sorry, Judy. The truth is you got me thinking, and it gave me an idea for a story. I was just quickly getting hold of it before it slipped away.’
‘What? A whole story came to you? Just standing there on the bridge?’
With Gerry now walking in front, they climbed back up onto the dyke.
‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘not a whole story at all, but, you know, a setting. A setting and a source of tension. Which is a good start. I was imagining that road as it might be one day, far off in the future, when you and me and the world we live in are as thoroughly forgotten as the people who built this dyke.’
‘I guess people would still know it was a road, wouldn’t they?’
‘They would. And still use it as a road as well, as we still use Roman roads now that are hundreds of years older than this dyke. But the thing that really puzzles those future people about these kinds of road is that they actually consist of two roads running side by side. There’s been some kind of catastrophe in England, you see – nuclear war, runaway global warming: I’ll think of something or other – and there are no cars any more and not nearly so many people. So they look at that road back there and see that each carriageway is more than wide enough to take three big carts side by side, and they just can’t imagine a volume of traffic that would justify two such big roads running together along the exact same route.’
The sky had become a little brighter, he noticed, and some depth and colour had returned to the landscape around them.
‘So they actually only use one carriageway,’ Gerry went on, ‘that’s what I was thinking. They only use the northern one of the two: the eastbound one as we’d call it now, though they travel on it in both directions. Most of the metalled surface has long since gone, but when holes appear they get filled in with gravel and the road is still the best and the busiest for miles around.’
‘What about the other carriageway?’
‘Ah, well that’s going to be the point of the story. The southern carriageway they leave alone. They’ve allowed a thick barrier of trees and shrubs to grow along the edge of it and down the central reservation, so as to isolate it from its surroundings, and they never walk or ride on it at all except when they have to cross over it to take a turning south. Even then, their practice is to pass over it quickly, with eyes cast firmly down, not looking to the left or the right, and children are sternly warned not to peek.’
‘Presumably they have some reason for this?’
‘They certainly do. What they’ve decided, you see, is that the northern carriageway was intended for human travel and the other was meant for spirits. They call the southern carriageway the spirit road.’
‘And the spirits are what? The dead?’
‘Not just the dead. They use the word “spirits” to refer to things that seem to exist in some way but don’t fit in with their understanding of the world. The people on the human carriageway can’t deny the existence of spirits altogether, however much they might like to, because the world is full of mysteries and contradictions, but they’ve very sensibly given those troublesome spirits their own road to travel on, so they can go about their own spirit business to their hearts’ content, and leave the humans undisturbed.’