–A view of a desk in an office;
–A first-person view of driving a car along a narrow lane;
–A view of an old woman chewing something;
–An old man reading the paper;
–Another old woman, but this one has pink streaks in her hair.
I know that if I jump into one of these I could end up anywhere. I have to end up with Saul Burlem, because I just don't know how I'll get back to this point if I get lost first. I look through the images again. The desk has a fluffy toy on it. The hands on the steering wheel of the car are female, with fluorescent pink nail polish. These people aren't male. Now I'm left with three elderly people. Are these all the POVs of grandparents: images of other grandparents or grandparents' acquaintances? Where's Saul Burlem? Where's his POV? I glance over the images again. I can't choose. None of them seems right. Maybe he is dead. But my mind seems to want to rest on the woman with pink hair. In fact, I'm just looking at it and thinking that it's unusual when my mind, clearly translating this into "interesting," starts to jump me into this consciousness, anyway. Oh hell. I'm blurring.... I'm leaving Molly. Just as I go I try to leave a thought in her mind: Forget Hugh. Forget him...
Chapter Twenty
You now have one choice.
You ... I'm coming down the hill in the dark, the lights from the town below sparkling like reflections on water. The dog, Planck, won't go any farther up: It's as if he senses a presence there that I'm not aware of. He doesn't seem to like this space for exactly the reason I do like it. He can't stand the ... The what? The history? The ghosts? Nothing surprises me anymore. So we're walking down. Away from the old, shadowy gateposts; away from the crumbling gray stone wall. When I'm up here I imagine people walking or travelling on horseback in a time when there were no cars; and I sense that there wouldn't have been that buzz you get now: the buzz of electricity being generated and used, and car engines, and pop music. But I'll go where the dog wants to go; it's easier that way. And I'm pleased with myself, pleased that I can give up control like this. But being pleased with myself won't do. I should be nothing with myself. I want the void. Idiot: I can't want the void. I have to let it come to me. I have to let it slowly envelop me when I'm not thinking anything.
Now I know what thoughts look like, thinking is more difficult, anyway.
The dog really does want to get out of here. We're almost running now on the icy, hard mud. Frost. No good for plants; that's what my mother used to say. And Christmas is coming, of course. As we reach the bottom of the hill I see the lights in close-up: hundreds of white, tasteful stars hanging over the road, all within reach. The tree by the roundabout is strung with lights as well. What does Christmas mean now? Not really more or less than it did before. Lura's a vegetarian, but she will force us both to celebrate. She likes rituals. Our tree is up but we haven't decorated it yet. Lura doesn't want stars and tinseclass="underline" She wants to decorate the tree with black holes, wormholes, and quarks. She wants to drape it in the fabric of space-time. I laughed when she told me this. I said I'd see what I could find in the shops. At least I go to the shops now. I go to the shops and I walk the dog. And nothing awful has happened yet. It's better than being locked in the house all the time.
Console?
It comes up. There's only one milky image in the middle of the screen: a blurred view of lots of green leaves. I ask it to close the image down and it does.
Who am I?
I am Saul Burlem.
Thank God. Where am I?
Walking along Fore Street. I'm walking along Fore Street but Planck wants to turn left, past the cheese shop, and then right, towards home. He can't want to go home already. No, he doesn't. He trots right past our front door and onwards, his muzzle like an arrow pointing down towards the space where the walls meet the pavement. Ah, now here's my second-favorite place in town.
Where am I?
I'm standing here while the dog sniffs some weeds growing out of the pavement. Yes, here's the space I like. It really is a space, an absence, enclosed with four walls. Various signs have gone up lately explaining that this is a building site belonging to blah blah, and telling you the various bad things that will happen if you trespass in it. It spoils the effect somewhat. It was better before the signs went up. An empty space, enclosed by walls: a house with no rooms and no roof and a carpet of pinkish Devon earth. I like that. It reminds me of my favorite place in town: the castle. The castle is the same kind of thing—walls enclosing nothingness. I have a postcard of the castle above my desk. It's an aerial view, probably taken from one of the helicopters that are always throbbing in the air on clear days. You look down on it and it's like a gray stone ring left discarded on a hillside, ripped, perhaps, from a giant's finger. And you can go to visit it as welclass="underline" You can pay money to go into a circle of empty space with some walls around it. I love it. You look at this empty space, fenced off, made special, and you think: What am I supposed to be looking at here? Are the walls there to keep the nothingness in, or the town out?
And now, bizarrely, I know exactly how stone is constructed. But I still don't know who made the spaces. Who invented absence? Who chooses to celebrate it here? Of course, people don't know they're celebrating absence (although they should; they really should). They think they're visiting something, something tangible—but it just isn't there anymore. They think that by visiting an empty space enclosed by walls they can travel through time. And I know about that, too.
Why won't Burlem think of the name of the town he's in?
Where am I?
Now I've crossed the road and I'm standing outside the church, the church we go to every evening, just in case. We don't pray, but what we do is perhaps a sort of prayer. We walk in and then out again, just in case. I've never known exactly what sort of church it is, even though I'm inside it every night. I assumed it must be C of E or Catholic, but it doesn't actually have a name: It's not Saint Anything's. But every Thursday evening happy people come here in homemade clothes and do something cheerful inside. Well, they always seem cheerful when they come out. I think they go door to door in the evenings they're not here, selling something invisible like hope or salvation. Lura obtained the keys and no one minds that we go in there every night. Do I believe in what they do in there? Yes. I have to, now. But I wonder if they'd still believe if they knew what I know.
Where do I live?
St. Augustine's Road.
But I know where that is: It's his boarded-up house. Why doesn't he think of his address here?
Where am I now?
Walking up the hill where the road sweeps around like a question mark and you can get run over if you're not careful. There's a sign at the top: Torquay, and an arrow pointing right.
So he's near Torquay; but I don't even know where that is. It's not enough.
What happened to make me leave my house?
Oh. Where to begin this story. Why am I thinking about this now? The dog snuffles onwards, up through the market square, but I'm not seeing that anymore. I'm seeing ... What? How far back does my mind want to go? I see scenes on fast-forward: The first one is, predictably, that paper I gave in Greenwich on the curse of Mr. Y. Lura was there. The Project Starlight men were there, too. Of course I had no idea who any of them were then. The only truly innocent member of the audience was Ariel Manto, and she was the one I kept looking at: the girl with the tight gray jumper and the red hair. I remember Lura walking away afterwards, going back to join the Lahiri group without saying anything. Then I see myself drinking too much with Ariel, fantasizing about making love to her, and then—the horror, the horror—realizing she probably would go to bed with me. I left, of course, before I had the chance to actually go through with it.