I felt awful, disconnected.
‘You don’t remember getting here? The men, the wire? What I said? The bike?’
His burka was gone. He wore a black hoodie and black leather jacket and sweatpants.
I didn’t remember anything. We’d done what? Got whooshed down pipes, teleported under the sea from the Sahara?
‘You don’t remember them getting us out? Giving them the stuff in the sack?’
He lay next to me and held me gently while I tried to patch things together, think through my big blank.
‘It’s OK, it’s normal, heavy-duty gas, it can mess your short-term memory. You’ll be fine in a bit. Take deep breaths. Relax.’ He stroked me very gently, kissed my hot slapped face. ‘Norfolk,’ he said. ‘The coast. Where the pipes come in.’ Back in Don’s cammed Britain. A so-called gas terminal, he said, at England’s flat east. Back in the realm, green place in spring: wild garlic, tiny dots of new leaves, reeds, blossom, hardy old nature up to its business. Which spring, my long sleep? My hands and nails looked the same. A bit more stubble on my head.
ONLY PINCH.
‘He’ll know we’re here,’ he whispered. ‘Soon enough. He’ll let us. Just step in when he has to, like before.’ HE DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT A. ‘Just don’t say anything.’
‘Why are you saying things?’
‘I know what not to say.’
We had a pile of leather motorcyclist clothes: gauntleted gloves and boots, padded jackets and trousers to put on over our tracksuits.
‘From where?’
‘Ahmed’s guy. You don’t remember?’
I’d never worn such things, they were heavy.
‘Knife and bulletproof. Modern armour.’ We’d scored a motorbike too, a big, old, unsmart black and chrome one propped up by a tree.
‘From A?’
He nodded. ‘Cleaners, cooks. Glitches in the system. There’s always a way.’
‘Going to Barrow?’
He nodded. ‘How do you feel?’
Bad. Fuddled. Blank. Stupid. Swaying in my warm heavy leathers which fitted so exactly. My brain feeling very small. Hungry—he tore me a hunk of dry bread from a stash in the bike’s panniers and gave me water to drink which made me feel better. Monarch, the silver writing said on the bike’s side. He crowned me with a heavy blue and silver visored helmet, then grabbed me. A sudden noise: something coming our way from behind trees. A woman, hair pulled back, in pink exercise clothes, jogging in nature with white buds in her ears, connected to what she held in her hands: a pink phone she was touching, scrolling through messages, finding music.
A dawn jogger with her phone. We shrank back.
She looked up, saw us facing her in our gear and visors, nodded. We nodded back, she jogged past.
A pal of Ahmed’s? A terminal policewoman patrolling the perimeter?
A dumdum thralled by gussied fetters bought with her own money from Don’s quark merchants. I wanted to run after her.
‘Come on.’
He got onto the bike and I got on behind him and put my arms round him.
He revved the engine. We started down the path.
45
We rode out of woods into flat bare land, away from sea, down empty dawn roads as the sun broke through clouds behind. Fields and hedgerows sparkled green, a just-rained feel. English signposts, a high clear morning, us back in England, land of lost yews. Arms round, visors down. A few early-morning dumdums in cars, decked with coated trinkets, yabbering into Don’s machines, under Don’s spell, the rising sun glinting on their mirrors and windscreens. Clear air, light blue sky, puffy baby clouds, us floating through a perfect young spring day.
He zoomed me down country roads, avoiding towns: must have been told directions when I was conked out, given wooden beads. We passed blossom, willows in bloom, daisies, dandelions, other cammed yellow flowers, jolting over every bump in the road. So much stuff, after the desert. I hugged him. Dainty new leaves speckled trees at the cusp of new life, still-bare trees showed mistletoe. Hares and rabbits raced near pebble, flint and red-brick houses. We floated past a big old pile of red-brick Tudor chimneys, a field of buttercups, gorgeous pink blossom, satellite dishes, church-watchtowers, bluebell woods, yellow fields, a family of mink or large ferrets at play in a hedgerow, ideal cottages, ivy on thick twisted trees.
A stag ran across our path, made us break hard and nearly fall. Further on: a whole dead deer by the side of the road, next to a faded poster for a daredevil air show and big silver silos full of grain or something. Lambs played in fields separated by elegant pines and communication towers, piglets gambolled by steel box sties. We saw pheasants and dead pheasants, swerved hard on corners at scary angles. I gripped him. We rode through a forest and past a power station. Birds flew up high, avoiding turbine blades. Roadside, we saw a dead fox, a dead cat, more dead pheasants. Dead supermarket bouquets marked a crash.
We took a smaller path into a new wood of tall regular evergreens, then swerved off the road proper onto muddy tracks into wilder land, bumping and turning, him knowing the way, splattering mud.
A scheduled stop-off? A time-out? We stopped in a glade by a big tree, got off, kept our helmets on. He pushed me face-down against the bike.
We ate fresh leaves and roots in the clean spring sunshine.
‘So lovely,’ I said, watching the blossom in the sun.
‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Spring’s easy, all the same, everything’s beautiful when its young, no skill in that. The real beauty is autumn, everything dying in its own way, showing how well it lived or not. Blazing out.’
He poked two sticks into mud and marked where their shadows fell. We followed a stream to a pool and took our helmets off to drink.
‘Pure spring water from chalk: sure you can drink it, sure they don’t want you to. Keep you at your laced muck from your dumdum taps.’
The chalk here was the same seam as ended up at Silbury Hill, he said. Alan’s White Road that turned out to run east-west. He dug in mud and showed me black flint, told me it was the best kind, told me this pool was once a holy place, like all springs bubbling up from pockets in chalk. He took off his clothes and waded into the pool, bent down even though it was freezing, messed around in the middle, got a big stick and swirled it round, hooked something, dredged it up.
It was a big, oiled, green canvas bag, military-looking. He carried it out of the pool, shook himself dry, patted himself off with his clothes, put them on. Squatting on the bank he opened the soaked bag and took things in plastic bags out: three square motorbike number plates, two long car number plates, a couple of folding knives, a pen knife, a small metal box containing a roll of money and four British and US passports wrapped tight in plastic. Candles and a tin of flint, fluff and U-shaped pieces of metal. A toolkit containing screws and screwdrivers, spanners, needles and thread. Two sets of keys and a trowel. A pot of pills and a pot of what looked like honey. Small clear baggies of white powder. A large bag of that weird dry stuff which had turned out to be mushrooms, for those headaches he hadn’t had in yonks. A gold ring with a strange light blue stone, some gold chains, two long gold necklaces, four big gold coins, a gold brooch in the shape of a harp which he pinned inside my jacket.
‘In case we get separated and you’re on the run and need cash. Head for pubs, take the helmet off and put it on the floor, keep the hoodie over your face and nod, accept any price in cash, get away fast. Head for service stations, camp out round the back, look for marks on trees, wait.’ For ‘A’s people to find me, for someone to find me. He showed me marks carved into the blossoming trees.
He gathered up most of the stuff, put the rest back in the bag, threw the hoard back into the middle of the pool for its next visitor.
‘Wet cupboards. Lake terma.’
Back at the bike he divided our new trove between his pockets and the bike panniers. We ate bread, honey and the vile mushrooms.
He changed the motorbike number plate with our new tools, threw the old
one into the pool. He crouched and marked with new pebbles how the mud stick shadows had moved and measured the distance with his thumb.
‘Getting our bearings. Don’t you worry my pretty.’
He took a needle, rubbed it through his head stubble, set it on a leaf floating in a puddle, waited for the needle-leaf to settle.
‘Where it faces? North.’ Barrow was north-west, where we were heading. Yes, you can magnetise a needle with electricity from your body to make a compass. Yes, there is flow about which dumdums aren’t told.
Back on the bike feeling better but still inside my high clear cloud. He whooshed us out of the forest north-west through Don’s Britain, away from coastal countryside towards modern churches, motorways, towns, estates, superstores, industrial zones decked with easy blossom like showgirls, dumdums at their phones. We crossed a wide river, the land started getting hilly. We stopped off for petrol at a small service station, paid in cash from the trove roll. After we drove up into hills full of lambs following signs for a model village. We drove in, parked up, took off helmets and gloves, pulled our hoodies low, bought blue cardboard tickets with our cash.
May the sixth, according to the tickets. Six months after he’d come for me in Archway. It felt like six years.
We wandered round. A run-down concern, us the only visitors: ideal olde-worlde slightly-chipped England in miniature form. Tiny people, tiny houses, pubs, cricket and bowling greens, zoos, shops, churches, funerals, a moated castle. Model trains whipping round.
READING IT? I pinched.
He nodded. Codes I wasn’t privy to, from pals I didn’t know. Plans of attack, info and warnings arranged in rugby formations, rhino herds, cricket scores.
On the wall outside the empty gift shop was a large relief map of Britain. He showed me where we were, near Derby, at the start of the rocky north-south central spine of Britain, the White Road on Alan’s map.
‘The border zone. See? Two countries, Britain:’ the dull flat south-east of servant-knaves and lickspittle apple middlemen that we’d just ridden through versus the fortified dragons of Hyperborea where slaves once dug empire juice.
‘At least they had skills and honour: press-ganged here to dig and sniff. Not complicit toads squatting in stately homes that know more than they do. Always two countries, two cultures, Britain. The divided kingdom. Those who think it’s a country, those who know it’s a mine.’
‘I’m scared,’ I said. ‘Of what’s next.’
‘It’s nothing. You were born to it. You’ll surprise yourself. Keep your mind blank.’
‘And after?’
‘We’re in good hands. You’ll see.’
Back on the bike, heading down the hill into Hyperborea proper, land of ooze and apples, sifted by flow masters from way back, ancient hidden centre of the world. We floated past ugly towns and old scars, car parks built on secrets, plump ex-slaves and their swiping toddlers. We did motorways, shrouded in our leathers and helmets, weaving fast under circling birds of prey. The land got wilder again, signs said ‘The Pennines’, we passed hills and forests, heading for the Lakes. Journeys merging—I felt scared and hugged him, saw flashes from our first time. White sheets laid out on the road.
I hadn’t thought about that in ages. I couldn’t think about it. We were avenging them. I did old Scritch exercises: counted trees, counted to twenty-six. I saw us riding up to Jenny 2 on the map that was Britain and a body, saw us as vectors for Don to scry through liquid crystal, saw pixellated Chris who’d sold his soul to them, saw the land breathe as the evergreens flashed by.
We entered land I knew from a different season, from autumn. Then: marvellous unique death, now: green clone shoots. Perfect lambs frolicked in small fields bounded by dry stone walls that were the last traces of megalithic building. Pylons and power stations gorged on crack goo, big mountains loomed in the distance. Japanese tourists enjoyed dead purple slate.
Signs for Coniston. Enbarr and his sign, the post box and Bugg just a right-turn up from here, white drawers, the van, him hacking me in the lake.
I hadn’t believed then, hadn’t understood. Us in the burrow.
A different time and place. I knew better now.
We didn’t take the turning, didn’t need Kraton’s barn this time. We had all the info we needed now, shared fruits of my head.
He knew too now, more than me. That was understood now, between us. Thank fuck. He could solve me now, what others had knitted into me, a puzzle for machineheads. I felt light, riding pillion, still woozy from gas, close to the land, not cut off in a car, riding with him through Don’s dumb Britain, whooshing down its secret veins towards the dragon’s snout.
We turned for Ulverston, back on smaller roads past blossom, abbeys, priories, watchtowers, churches with vanes showing wind direction, the very least of the services they once rendered. We turned left again by a statue of the Virgin Mary, took the coastal road. A supermarket, then the chocolate sea and mud we’d sailed through before under grey clouds in a different season, in a frenzy. The tide was out, the mud puddles full of blue sky.
We floated past bird swarms, salt marshes, horse farms, caravan parks, crumbling sea walls. The shiny nuclear cube on the other side of the bay glared in the bright afternoon sun. Our canoe was out there somewhere, sunk in quicksand.
We parked up and sat on a bench facing the mud, hand in gloved hand, visors up. Tiny brown birds scurried away.
‘Good call, little pals,’ he said to them. ‘Harsh lessons burnt into their DNA.’ We faced the blue afternoon together. ‘Can you feel the history?’ This muddy coast, sailed by Greek and Indonesian adventurers. The Irish Sea, once the black heart of a dragon-shaped empire only he knew about any more. The true Mediterranean, where the myths were set. Wexford, across from us in Ireland, where the gold was. Anglesey, aka Mona, aka Spinning Jenny’s orchard, where nymphs and Gorgons guarded gold apples of immortality and crones and dragons guarded golden fleeces, where Julius Caesar slew female druids. The Gower, further south, its castles and pools.
‘Worm’s Head, at Rhossili, where Perseus turned the sea dragon to stone with Medusa’s head. Where we went.’
‘We didn’t go there,’ I said. Unless I’d forgotten.
‘I went with Don. The ancestral lands.’
He put his leather arm around me. Out direct beyond us in the sinking afternoon: the Isle of Man, aka Niflheim or Ellan Vannin or the spiral or the Isle of Apples or Middle Cinnabar, whatever that was.
‘I used to race my bike there,’ the famous Isle of Man motorbike race. ‘A chariot race once, round the whole island, for the favours of a lady. A queendom, once, like they all were. No wonder they call it Man now.’
We couldn’t see the Isle of Man but we could tell where it was: exactly where the red sun dipped in front of us, at this time of year. He said.
‘Ever seen the flag of Man?’ Three bent armoured legs, arranged in a circle. ‘Code for a cauldron, where you smelt metal, the three legs it stands on. Island of makers, even today. Magicians, they’d have seemed, knowing what they knew about the properties of things. They used to lame smiths, did you know? To stop them running away. You can smelt inside your body, if you know how. Heat your belly, turn it into a furnace, mix and cook materials inside you if you got the control, cure anything inside.’
‘Really?’ This sounded a bit far-fetched, even to woozy me, nodding away.
‘Sure you can. That’s what it all means really. Witches’ cauldrons full of brews. Dunk the old king in, youngify him. Three-legged stone cauldrons outside Chinese temples. The watermill powering the fiery cauldron of Stonehenge on that Chinese map. The Holy Grail: that’s a cauldron, right? A magic vessel. All code for the same thing: bellies,’ touching my belly. ‘Get it hot, brew it up, fire up the whole shebang, direct the flow round your body. Collect and forge your inner minerals, make inner pills and potions to heal you of everything. If you know how. Belly-cauldrons: the grail: the key to eternal life.’
‘No way.’
‘Way. Hard work, they say. Years of study, in those caves. Worth it, though. But don’t tell the dumdums. Can’t have everyone live forever, where you gonna put them all? That’s what this is all about.’
‘Thought it was about the crack.’
‘And the cracks inside.’
Lights dotted on round us, the sun going down on this perfect day. The sky darkened, we held gloved hands, he talked more, about Irish sea dragons and what went on beyond the Isle of Man. Ancient northern sea empires, ‘septentrional Armorica’, Spain, Gaul, Britain, Wales, Ireland, northern Russia, the Faroes of the Pharaohs, Iceland, Greenland, northern Canada, the North Pole. Magnetic northern islands, indrawing seas that sucked iron nails out of ships to scupper the curious. North and South Poles repulsing each other, the north swallowing up flow, the south pumping out new flow, how it affected mood and bodies, how we were all one thing, connected, on the live planet that made us that Don was guising from us. What really went on up in the Orkneys, Shetland, Gotland, Saaremaa.
‘The eye and the dapple,’ I said.
He looked at me blank.
But Saaremaa was the eye, and Gotland was the dapple, of the stag sea dumdums called the Baltic. Or that’s what he’d told me from our porthole in the tramp wreck back in November. Or whenever it had been. Or what someone who looked just like him had told me, someone with the exact same stump and scars but with different eyes.
Clouds went pink. It got cool. He babbled on, about Scotland and its huge mineral wealth under the granite, what really went on at Loch Ness during the shamantic era of the esoteric Wu or some such, the I Ching hexagrams tattooed onto that ice mummy they found in the Alps. About Tibetan monasteries in Scotland, the Tibetan monastery we’d just driven past, housed in an old priory on the coastal path, its pure-gold-roofed new temple. How everything here was ruled direct by Don, every last inch of it, by Don and the Dons from back in the day.
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