After the build-up it was almost absurdly easy in the end. Rafe showed me where he’d stood. We didn’t know what was going to happen, but we knew it was going to be an adventure, our adventure, and we held hands and closed our eyes at 4.05 p.m., on Saturday, 19 September 1994.
22
After a few minutes I saw a light ahead. Not a light as such, but a lightness. Memory was coming to an end, and the membrane was only a few hundred yards in front of me. The path between the trees led straight in front, and as I peered into the distance I thought I saw a flash of darkness, like a black coat on the move.
When we opened our eyes the plain was in front of us and for a minute all we could do was stand and stare at it. I didn’t even think of taking my camera out. It didn’t seem appropriate somehow. I’ve still got that camera somewhere. It still has the same film in it.
And then we whooped, and hollered, and leapt and shouted, and ran down onto the beach. We walked until the bumps seemed to be leading us somewhere and then everything went cold and heavy and we woke up in a dusty square at twilight, in a ghost town in the middle of a desert.
For a few days we just rootled around, walking, sleeping, finding out how the place worked. It didn’t take us long to realise that it worked like dreams did, and we remembered wild ramblings on drunken floors and marvelled at how right we’d been, and from deep in my memory I dredged up the right name for this place. Those few days were the last days of summer, the last times we had when we were really friends, when we were together as one and a half. I could go on for weeks about the things we found, and how it felt, but I’m not going to. I couldn’t make you see it.
It was another world, and it was ours.
It didn’t take us long to discover that this world was not one of pure sweetness and light, either. On the second day, when we were walking towards a castle like the one Alkland and I saw, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye and went to take a closer look.
It was a baby, a little baby girl, and it sat gurgling merrily under a bush, alone on a plain the size of Denmark. It was scary, and it hurt a little, but the babies were less unpleasant then, more manageable. It was only later that they changed. I’ve often wondered if there were babies in Jeamland before we found the way in. I’m not sure there were. I think we changed Jeamland right from the beginning, even before Rafe started to do it on purpose.
Two days later we saw our first Something, and saw it turn into a monster. It was Rafe’s, and it looked very much like his father. I never really got to the bottom of that, but I think I can guess. Rafe’s old man was not a very nice guy. He wasn’t a patch on Ji’s mother, but by normal standards he was certainly a bit of a bastard.
That changed Rafe, I think. After the monster he felt differently about Jeamland, and maybe Jeamland felt differently about him. I don’t believe things between us would have gone the way they did if we hadn’t discovered Jeamland. Jeamland changed us as much as we changed it. Rafe changed it far more than I, and I think that’s why he went insane, and I only became what I am today. I have no idea who got the better deal.
By the evening after the monster I was beginning to think about going back home. I’d told my folks we were only going to be gone a couple of days, and like Alkland on his first trip, I felt I could do with a reality top-up.
Rafe had been acting a little oddly for the last couple of hours, occasionally stopping and cocking his head, and then walking on and saying it was nothing. He finally explained what it was when I mentioned the idea of going home.
Rafe had begun to feel there was something else, some other layer. The feeling that I’d always had in the normal world he felt about Jeamland: there was something else out there, and he wanted to know what it was.
So we concentrated, and opened our minds, and felt around for something else, for something more. We were the original never-satisfieds.
When we opened them again we were in The City. It took us a while to establish it wasn’t just another part of Jeamland, and then it was like discovering a whole other roomful of presents on Christmas Day, and all thoughts of going home slipped my mind. Within hours I knew I was going to be happier there than in Jeamland, that this was the place that I would keep coming back to over the years. It was like having a science fiction film all to yourself, a strange other world where you knew enough of the rules to get by. It was the kind of world I’d always wanted: interesting, but manageable, a place to be a mysterious outsider in.
Rafe got bored after a couple of days, and wanted to go back into Jeamland. I knew that I really had to go home, and so I went with him. Rafe was irritated that I felt I had to show my face back at the suburban homestead, at least to let my folks know I was okay, but he was mollified by the fact that I was determined to come straight back in.
We punched our way back into Jeamland and found somewhere quiet to sit. Then, following the way we’d come in, we closed our eyes and thought, pooled our friendship and our knowledge, remembered home and reached out towards it.
When we opened our eyes, we were still in Jeamland.
We tried again. And again. We walked to somewhere else and tried. We punched back into The City and tried again, but only ended up back in Jeamland. For a day and a half we tried at hourly intervals, until our heads ached and we stared wildly into each other’s bloodshot eyes.
We couldn’t do it. We couldn’t get back.
We told ourselves that it was just a temporary problem, that we were tired, weirded out. I went back to The City to find somewhere fairly sane to rest for a couple of days, leaving Rafe in Jeamland.
It was the first time we’d been separated since coming in, but I’d had enough. I needed something stable for a while. I can remember the look Rafe gave me just before I punched through. He nodded, and it was a nod I’d seen countless times, in school, in the street, in bars. But the eyes were different, the eyes were somewhere else. The eyes were beginning to turn inside.
Over the next couple of weeks we tried again. I told Rafe where he could find me in The City, and every couple of days he’d pop through and fetch me. It didn’t work.
As weeks stretched into months we tried less often. At night I dreamed of my parents, and lost weight with the misery of how worried they would be. I tried to be calm, to relax. After all, there was no logical reason why we shouldn’t be able to go back the way we’d come. So why did each day that passed make it feel less likely? Perhaps because each time I saw Rafe I felt less close to him, realised that he was going away.
I met Zenda completely by chance. I’d just discovered Cat Neighbourhood, and had taken to spending my weekends there. They didn’t seem to mind me hanging around, and I’ve always loved cats.
One weekend I was sitting out on the lawn near Tabby 5, providing some kittens with an exciting new thing to clamber all over, when I saw a tall slim girl walking up the path. For one heart-stopping moment I thought it was Anjali, the girl I’d met in New York, but as she got closer I saw that she was very different. In fact I realised later that the only similarity between her and Anjali was the most important one of all, and that it made her look like Rachel too. I noticed her. She stood out.
She saw me, and hailed me, and we got to talking. Over the next few weeks we went out a couple of times, taking our time. By then it was six months since Rafe and I had come into Jeamland. A Christmas had come and gone, a Christmas I spent alone in my apartment in a tight ball of misery, thinking of my parents at home. I was not yet over Rachel, but I was ready to start trying to be.
Then one day I went to visit Zenda’s home Neighbourhood. I’d heard of Idyll, but hadn’t got round to exploring it yet, and I liked it as soon as I set foot inside the wall. There was something so old about it, so gentle.
I picked Zenda up from her block and we walked a while, taking in the sights, and then she touched my arm and led me down a narrow alleyway. At the end was a huge square, overgrown almost to jungle proportions. This was the oldest square in Idyll, Zenda said proudly,
the least changed. The middle of it was fenced off, and inside the fence lay a huge broken column of stone. We walked along the side, marvelling at it, trying to imagine it when it had been standing.
When we reached the far end I stood and stared at it. I stared and stared until I thought I was going to faint. Fixed to the end of the last piece of column was an acid-eaten statue.
It was Nelson’s Column.
As I got closer to the light, I saw I hadn’t been mistaken. There was someone in a black coat standing down there at the end. I guess if I’d thought about how I’d feel at such a moment, if I’d believed it could ever happen, I would have expected to feel fear, or anger, or hatred. But I quickened my step, and walked towards him.
Zenda led me to a café. She virtually had to carry me.
I told her. I had to. I had to tell someone.
At first she thought I was stark raving mad, of course. And so I took her to Jeamland. I had to find Rafe anyway, to tell him what I’d found. It took me a few weeks to work out how to do it, but I took her there. She didn’t share what Rafe and I did, so I had to work out a way of making her see. I went to the coast, and I found Villig. I worked it out, and I got her in there. She saw.
We walked for an hour through a forest of slender trees, until we came upon a waterfall. It was Zenda’s waterfall. She had dreamed about it as a child, and her delight in seeing it again made me feel so happy, made me feel proud of Jeamland again.
That was a wonderful afternoon, the last really good one. We sat on the grassy bank in the shafts of sunlight and talked, and I knew finally that this was the other half of me, the one I’d always been looking for. She shone in the light like an angel, and I worked up the courage to reach out and take her hand.
That was it. That was the nearest I ever got to telling her how I felt.
Because there was the sound of laughter behind us, and I turned to see Rafe standing at the edge of the trees. It was not a nice laugh, and as I stood up to introduce him I had a strange sideslipping feeling.
For a moment I didn’t know him. I just saw a man, a man who didn’t look as if he liked me very much.
I’ve never understood Jeamland as well as Rafe did, because as time went on, there was more of it in him. Maybe it was an accident he happened to turn up in the place where we were, maybe not.
I told him about Idyll, and about the column of broken stone. He understood what it meant. There were no two ways about it, really.
The City wasn’t another realm after all. It wasn’t a second alternative reality. It was the reality we’d come from in the first place. It was the real world, but later, so much later.
We looked at each other for a long time and I think we understood then that it was all over, that we really couldn’t go back home. It’s kind of difficult to accept something as the future unless you got there the long way round, but that’s what we’d found, and once you’ve gone forward, you can’t go home again. We were cut off for good from our childhood, and the bond between us snapped there and then. The shafts of sunlight faded, and Zenda pulled her coat around her, suddenly cold.
As we stood facing each other as strangers, Rafe sniggered, and jerked his head towards Zenda.
‘Found a new one, eh?’ he said, in a low suggestive tone. I didn’t say anything. ‘Don’t fancy her much,’ he added, and I kept silent. I could sense that he was building up to something. It didn’t surprise me that Zenda didn’t appeal to him. She looked like she might have too many opinions of her own. She didn’t take any shit from anyone, even then. ‘No, you can keep this one,’ he said finally and winked.
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked quietly, feeling very cold. Rafe stared at me, and then turned to include Zenda in the conversation. The movement was jerky, barely under control.
‘You know, he actually told me about her baby? Wanted me to tell him everything was all right?’
Zenda recoiled as if slapped in the face, and he grinned savagely. Then he whipped his face back to mine and screamed at my face. ‘How do you think I fucking felt?’
You know how sometimes you get a glimpse of what someone’s going to say before they’ve said it, an intuitive feeling about what’s coming up next? I had one, but he finished it for me before I realised what it was.
‘That was my baby, Stark. Not yours. Mine.’
Rafe had an affair with Rachel. It lasted six weeks. Four weekends, really. They slept with each other eight times. She told him about the baby first. She wasn’t sure whose it was, but she’d decided she wanted me and so she was going to tell me it was mine. Rafe believed it was his. Maybe he was right. Maybe he cared for her. Maybe she was going to tell me in that last call. Maybe she’d started as I put the phone down. Who knows.
Rafe screamed this at me in front of Zenda. He punched me in the face and stomach and I fell down. I gave no defence. I had none. I had nothing. He kicked me twice, and then he went away.
I took Zenda back to The City. We continued to see each other every now and then, but something had died in me. I thought at least I’d known my world, the one I’d grown up in. But I hadn’t. I hadn’t known it at all. I’d thought that lies had a different sound, that you could tell what the truth was by listening.
I was wrong. More than Jeamland, more than The City, Rachel’s baby proved something to me. You don’t know anything about the world, not the real world, not the one that matters. I couldn’t understand how they’d been able to do it. I don’t even mean emotionally; I mean practically. I couldn’t understand how they’d been able to work it, to find the time without my knowing. You think you see the world as it really is, think the gaps you see, the time you understand, is the way it is. But there are other gaps, ones you don’t know about, and in those gaps the devils are playing. You don’t know anything about the world. You just don’t fucking know.
So I withdrew from it. I didn’t kill myself, though I stood shaking with a broken bottle in my hand more than once. I just closed down for a while, and when I reopened for business I wasn’t the same. I found someone else to be. You met him.
A year passed before I went back into Jeamland, and when I went, it was for a reason. A friend of a friend had starting having very bad nightmares, nightmares which were slowly killing her. In her nightmares she kept seeing a man who sounded very much like Rafe.
That’s how it started. I spent another year trying to patch up what Rafe was doing to Jeamland, but I couldn’t keep up. He was insane by then, stirring up the Somethings and making them stronger, pissing in people’s streams and finally actually killing them. For the hell of it. For something to do.
He was as lost as I was, but he was full of Jeamland and it had killed my friend just as surely as Rachel’s baby had killed his. The Rafe I knew would never have come to specialise in smashing his fist up through people’s skulls from the inside. The more time I spent in Jeamland, trying to fight him, the worse I got, the more I hated him, and when he decided to try to bring the whole thing crashing down, to break down the wall between Jeamland and The City, I got on my steed and rode.
Ji and I found him, and we killed him. The difference between worlds, the conclusion of twenty shared years, the end of it all came down to a filthy room in the future and the sordid hatred of two men who hurt too much to live. Ji pulled the trigger, but that was a technicality. I pulled it really, and I felt a savage rip of joy.
And after years of wandering around The City, rounding up Somethings who were still running wild eight years after Rafe was dead, I’d come down a path in a forest to find that they were not the only ones for whom he’d never died.
The twist of Jeamland that had pushed Alkland, the Something that had killed Bellrip in Rafe’s distinctive way, the shadowy figure that asked questions in Red and shot at me in Royle, the whole nightmare: that was me. I did it.
When I was a few yards away from the figure I stopped for a moment, and then took one more cautious step forward. The coat was exactly as I remembered it, the hair, the
stance, everything. It was Rafe.
Slowly he turned. A lock of dark hair fell over his tanned forehead, and his face looked tired. His eyes looked tired too, tired but alive, just as they always had, and this time I had no way of stopping the tears that pushed up from inside. I ran my sleeve across my eyes, not wanting my vision to be blurred, wanting to be able to see my friend properly. That face.
I tried to smile, and he smiled back, and his smile was the same. It was the smile he’d always had, since we were two small boys on a bench outside a headmaster’s office four hundred years ago. It was exactly as I remembered it.
It was bound to be. Because that was all it was: how I remembered it. In the end I’d dreamed stronger than anyone, strongly enough to bring my monster to life again so I could finally face him.
Still grinning softly Rafe jerked his head towards the wall and I stepped tentatively forward to stand beside him. Side by side we stood, and watched through that clear membrane, looked out at a September day in 1994, at a house in a leafy street. The door opened and we came out together, looking so young but so much more like ourselves. We stood on the path and Mum and Dad stepped out to wave us goodbye, not knowing that they would never see me again.
I could see their faces so clearly as they stood arm in arm on the doorstep, hands waving in time, and as my chest hitched I raised my hand and waved back. Rafe waved to them too, and as we did I whispered to myself all the things I never had the chance to tell them. It wasn’t the same, but it was the best I could do.
They stopped waving, and Dad turned to Mum and said something which made her laugh before they went back inside. And that’s the memory I always have of them now, that picture. It’s a good picture, a glimpse of the last day I had with them, and I’m glad that on that day they were happy.
When the door was shut I turned to Rafe, and we took a long look at each other, seizing a last ever chance.
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