The plastic sheet in the shower stall clung to me as the shower head became lachrymose over my raw feet. Shriven, I put myself into the right-hand bed and shoved a radio I’d found in my rucksack under the clean, thin pillow. There was a cup of tea I couldn’t for the life of me remember making cooling on the bedside table — next to it the unopened Country Crunch. In the night the Archbishop’s wife whispered through striped cotton, ‘I don’t know how he’s feeling, he’s not here.’
Having walked for four centuries I came to the cliff edge only to discover that it wasn’t there; instead a cartographer’s black ink line was ruled across the field strips. Distance was time, while beyond a screen of crack willows a small mere rippled in the morning sunlight. I struck out to the north-east, heading for the villages of Newsham and Sisterkirke. The going was soft between the tilled strips and soon enough my boots were balled in mud. Away to the north-west, above the unseen Wolds, a cloud host flew, wings outspread. There must have been hail as well as rain in the night because here and there the wheat was mashed to the ground in swirls of stalks; stalks that, when I stooped to examine an ear, I saw were rotten. White grubs wriggled obscenely from the spikelets.
The wind got up, and within sight of Newsham church spire I came upon a gaggle of peasants herding their livestock before them — a few white geese, but mostly motos, their thin withers bloody from the willow switches the peasant women wielded. The motos’ baby faces were contorted with the effort of trotting through the waterlogged fields.
‘’S’all gone,’ the lead moto lisped as it rushed past me, and when the peasants drew level they affirmed this simply by their own flight and the tawdry vessels of Christ’s feast they lugged with them: a tarnished brass ewer and bowl, two hefty leatherbound volumes — the Holy Bible and the parish records. Of their priest there was no sign.
I detained an old man by the sleeve of his smock. ‘’E stayed in the church last night,’ he told me while the others hurried by. ‘Praying, asking God to deliver the village from the sea.’ As an afterthought he added: ‘Silly cunt. Come sunup the nave were down on the beach. All our owsez ’n’ all — but God’s got nowt t’do wi’ it.’
‘Really.’ I was keen to interrogate this advanced thinker further. ‘Then what do you imagine he feels about the loss of your village?’
‘I don’t know how he’s feeling,’ Jane Williams whispered, the motion of the news having rolled her back beneath me. ‘He’s not here.’
It was grey dawn and the stiff spear threw me to the partitioned bathroom, where I waited on cold lino until I was able to piss. Back in the winding sheet I lay listening to an owl impersonate a man impersonating the hooting of an owl. Then I rose again, and twitching back the curtains saw a misty back garden lined with trestle tables, each one stabbed by a collapsed sunshade.
I rose once more and returned to the bathroom. There was a small window in the wall above the sink and a man I’d never seen before was looking through it straight at me. He was gaunt and somehow shifty, with lines of incompetence around his eyes — not laughter. We stared at one another in silence for a few minutes, while I took in the saliva, dried white, at the corners of his saturnine mouth. The fellow seemed so confused and drowsy that I felt no fear or exposure. Nonetheless, I quit the bathroom and went into the corridor to have a word with him — but he must have fled at my approach.
Then crept back again, because when I regained the sink he was at the window once more. Tiring of his little game, I undid the catch at the side of the frame and closed the shutter, in the process exposing a curious recess in which three small shelves held individual bars of soap, a tooth mug and a box of pink tissues, its thin cardboard printed with a photograph of a pink rose. So, looking at these items, I shaved myself by touch alone.
After I’d eaten the cornflakes someone had thoughtfully provided, drunk a cup of Nescafé, then taken a miserable shit, I opened the little shutter in the bathroom to see if the man was still there. He was, but appeared fresher-faced, and with a fastscabbing nick in his Adam’s apple that suggested he’d recently shaved. It was the same as before: the two of us enmeshed in a doleful stare; then, unhesitatingly, he reached out his hand towards me, and I, not hesitating either, extended mine to him. On to my open palm rolled a curious little figurine — a child’s toy, presumably, although there was nothing playful about it. The blue Churchillian siren suit with a pig’s head rising from its high collar was redolent of unnatural experiments conducted in secret government laboratories. I had never seen the figurine before, yet sensed that it had talismanic properties, and was a gift the giving of which had to be respected.
The stranger and I nodded curtly to one another, then simultaneously stepped away from the window.
I found myself on the outskirts of a village that was shrouded in dense morning mist with no awareness of how I might have got there. I was dressed appropriately for a walking tour in green Gore-Tex trousers, thick socks, viciously uncomfortable leather boots, a blue wicking T-shirt and a black cagoule. It was chilly and although the trees and hedges had a midsummer density for a while I equivocated: was the cobweb stretched between the bars of a gate jewelled with frost or dew?
I couldn’t remember my name, where I had come from or where I was going. I didn’t know whether I was old or young. I unfastened my trousers and pulled them and my underpants down enough to expose a penis between blanched thighs — so discovered I was a man, and a white one. One memory I also retained: that both doors had to have been locked before I left wherever it was I’d been and the keys then posted back into the building. Had I done this?
A neoprene pouch sagged in the half-masted folds of my nether garments. I unzipped it, discovered a digital camera and prodded it on. Adjusting it so I could access the images already saved on its memory card, I flicked through them. My hunch had been correct: there were pictures of a lock with a hand inserting a key in it, then the same hand poked inside a letterbox. I compared the hand in the photo with the one on the end of my arm — they matched.
Replacing the camera and rearranging my clothing, I discovered a paper napkin on which was scrawled a crude map with arrows, approximate distances and a wavy line for the seaside. No other plan presented itself — I was an enigma to myself, swathed in the silence of this strange place; nevertheless, in choosing to follow the map forward, along the lane between the knapped-flint walls, I knew that I conformed to the paradigm for people like me — white men like me. At a crossroads a simple roundel annulled limits on speed but my pace remained constant as I moved into open country. Whoever had bequeathed me these feet had done me no favours, as with every step they cut into me like knives.
Peacocks roosted on the pantiled roof of a cottage — how did I know these terms? Away in the unvarying stubble a hare searched for a shadow to box, and the sodden umbels of the cow parsley were as still as any living thing could be. I reached a T-junction and obeying the napkin turned to the right. Now, in back of wide verges, bungalows lay behind privet hedges; beside a carport I glimpsed a trampoline festooned in old police crime scene tape. A blackbird fidgeted in a hawthorn, a blackboard was scratch-marked ‘Clematis’, ‘Alpines’, ‘Laxton Fortunes’ — all items priced at 50p.
A stile hopped towards me, crept under me, and I was on a drainage ditch the banks of which were massed with marsh marigolds, yarrow, thistles and nettles — all their flowers monochrome in the mist, all their scent as fresh as air freshener. I went on and in due course a pillbox canted in a cleft came upon me; here the path terminated in a muddy chute that slid me the twenty feet down to the beach.