His eyes were very large and blue and he spoke with an odd accent which was not foreign but which I had never heard before.
“It’s Peace Square,” I said. “It’s Memorial Day.”
He stared at me.
“I’m hungry.”
“Do you want me to get you something to eat?”
He still just stared, as if his brain was incapable of processing the sounds that reached his ears.
A cold breeze rustled the cherry blossom. My father’s gentle voice went on about Aggression Control programmes and the need to construct Positive Masculinities.
“Where do you come from?” I asked the stranger. “How did you get here?”
He stared across my shoulder, looking at my father without really seeing him. Then he rubbed his face with his hands.
“I’m so hungry.”
“Like I said, I’ll get you something to eat. But I think we should get away from here.”
He nodded and followed me through the sunlit streets, gazing around at trees, at houses, at people, at notices and signs. We passed an election poster for the RadFems and he stopped to look at it. It showed a frightened woman cowering in a huge male shadow. “NEVER AGAIN!” the poster declaimed, “REDUCE THE QUOTA NOW!”
“Reduce – the – quota – ” the stranger read very slowly aloud, as if he was a child.
“They don’t want us any more, mate,” I said. “That’s what it boils down to. They don’t want us and they don’t need us much either.”
He looked at me, frowning, then turned away from the poster and carried on walking. I had to hobble my quickest just to keep up.
“No cars,” he said after a while.
“No. Well we hardly have any. Not since…”
But he wasn’t listening. We had come to the Mother-Church and he was absorbed in studying the sign outside with its rose-pink mandala. Petals within petals, softly unfolding, and blossoming, and thriving, free from danger at last…
He looked at me.
“Where do I come from?” he said, repeating the question to himself that I’d asked him some time previously. “I don’t remember. So many… So many places.”
Frowning, he started to feel about in his pockets as if they might hold some clues.
“The trees danced,” he said. “The ground boiled…”
He found a penny coin in his pocket and handed it to me, then he pulled out some dried up bits of leaves and flowers. Little blue flowers, they were: forget-me-nots.
Tears brimmed from his eyes.
“What’s the matter?”
He held out the bits of flower, as if he thought these shrivelled scraps could somehow speak to me and provide some kind of explanation. Tears ran down his cheeks as his whole face screwed up with the effort of remembering and then, quite suddenly, he seemed to relax.
“Jazamine!” he cried. “Jazamine! I was with her by that pool!”
“Who is Jazamine?” I asked him.
“She said she’d wait for me there. In the green wood. But… but I keep falling.”
“Falling? How do you mean?”
He flinched. He’d become agitated again. More agitated than before. His breathing had become quicker, his eyes constantly on the move.
“I don’t know who you are! I’ve never met you before! Why do you keep asking me all these questions?”
He started to run. With my stupid feet and my stick, it was useless for me to try and follow.
“Stop! Come back! I won’t hurt you!” I cried out after him, but he didn’t even look back.
The penny piece had the head of a king on it, like an old coin from before the plague, but it was new coin, an English coin, minted only a year ago. The trouble was we’d had no king in England for over forty years.
I had a strange moment of terror, as if the world had suddenly turned out to be nothing but a painted backdrop and I had glimpsed for one moment what lay behind.
Two women passed by me hand in hand, both laughing.
“…anyway Mandy went round to Gill and Sarah’s,” one of them said, “and there was the most God-awful row. Typical Mandy, Gill said, but she’s hardly the one to talk. Anyway, what Liz said about it was…”
Jazamine in the green wood, who the stranger loved. Who was she? What kind of world did she inhabit?
I stooped to pick up one of the crumpled forget-me-nots that had fallen at my feet.
Later I went over to the Men’s Pub. It was very quiet. At the back some boys were playing Ninja Assassin, the pub’s one surviving video game. At the bar Harry Higgins was conferring with his diminutive sidekick Peter Hemlock and with Rod Stone, the landlord.
They looked up with irritation as I came in. They were MRP activists, all three, and had no doubt been discussing politics. Like most people, they didn’t feel able to talk freely about such things in front of me because of who my parents were.
I belong to neither camp. Neither the men nor the women accept me as their own.
But Harry was an instinctive, compulsive networker. He made it his business to be friendly to everyone, to cultivate every possible connection.
“Jack! Nice to see you mate!” he exclaimed. “Let me buy you a pint. I expect you need it!”
I accepted the drink, but I could see his welcome was ambiguous. His face smiled but not really his eyes and he was anxious to resume his talk with Peter and Rod out of my hearing. So after Rod had pulled my pint for me, I carefully chose a seat some distance away from them and put some music on the antique jukebox so they could plot and scheme in peace.
“I want you / I want you so bad / I want you-ou-ou / I want you so bad it’s driving me mad, it’s driving me mad….”
The jukebox and the music on it, like Ninja Assassin, was old stuff, from the golden age, the days before the Plague.
“…I want you…”
I thought about a girl like Beatrice in a green wood, bathing in a woodland pool, with the green leaf-light on her skin.
Presently Lily Tulip came in, balancing precariously on her high heels. She wore a tight silver dress slashed to the very top of her silk-envaginated thigh. Her eyelashes were heavy with mascara, her ear-lobes hung with fake jewels.
The three men greeted her from the bar. Harry whistled.
“Hi guys,” Lily simpered at them, then glanced across at me, knowingly, like an old fisherman casting out his line. I looked quickly away.
But I watched her all the same, in little furtive glances, as she settled down at her accustomed table, crossing her long legs sheathed in blue silk, and sipping her blue curacao.
“…I want you so bad…”
God help me, Lily wasn’t what I wanted at all, yet I could see myself going to her before the night was out.
Then the door flew open and in burst the stranger.
“The wood,” he blurted out to the room in general, “I’m trying to find my way into that wood…”
“The wood?” asked Rod Stone.
“Over behind here,” he gabbled in that impossible-to-place accent of his. “You can see the green branches over the rooftops. I keep following roads that seem to lead there but they always turn out to be dead-ends.”
He turned to me.
“There was a public baths at the end of the first road,” he told me, without giving any sign that he remembered our earlier meeting. “I went in and it was full of naked old women. It was strange. They didn’t even try and cover themselves. They just laughed. And then at the end of the next road I tried there was a couple arm in arm on a bench in a garden, watching their children play, but both of them were women.”
“That seemed unusual to you, did it?” Harry asked, with a quizzical glance towards Peter and Rod.