Reg – my master, my friend, my one true love – is weeping.
Don’t cry, I want to say. But I can’t, because the language we share doesn’t have words, so I try with all my will to find a way of making him hear me, and if there is such a thing as telepathy or the simple power of light in a mammalian eye then I’m using it now; I’m using it to say: Don’t cry, don’t fear, don’t fret and don’t fight. Love, only love.
And as The Howl turns in great circles above me and those beating wings bear down, stealing the light from my eyes, I have time to take one last look at his tear-stained face and think: Don’t ever change, Reg. Don’t you dare ever change.
England
REGINALD
Things grew quieter as we left the city and, after another two hours, we reached Wembley Stadium, where Aisha had been bound. Even as we spotted it from the top of a narrow hill I knew that we would find it abandoned. The city was finally emptying out, self-destructing as those Purples fled and black and yellow flags were raised over the ruins – another glorious new dawn, another power shift. Round and round and round they go. It never stops.
Charlie was dead on her feet and burning up as we stumbled through the doors. I dragged her to an unmade bed in the dormitory and searched for supplies.
Although it was empty, the base was still equipped and I found food, water and a little gas stove in a supplies cupboard. It was not much – a few tins and packets – but I fed Charlie as much as I could and left Aisha with her as I searched for medicine. I found some painkillers and antibiotics in a red box. I had no idea whether they were the right ones, but I had no choice but to try.
That night I moved three mattresses into the storeroom and locked it, just in case. The city boomed and crashed through the night but nobody came. I held Charlie close, slept like a dead man and woke to a quieter, snowless dawn.
We stayed there for three days. Aisha and I took turns staying awake with Charlie, holding cold towels to her forehead, feeding her food, water and pills. One day I awoke to find Aisha looking down at me.
‘Aisha?’
I sat up. The towel was hanging in her hand.
‘Charlie …’ she said, the word as clear as water.
‘What’s wrong?’
She smiled.
‘Charlie’s awake,’ she said and turned. Behind her, Charlie was sitting up on the mattress, drinking water from a metal cup. She smiled when she saw me.
The showers still worked so we washed ourselves for the first time in months. I had never felt so clean. My beard had grown so I searched for a razor but Charlie stopped me. No, she said. It suited me. I had never thought of myself as someone who could carry a beard, but when a woman says she likes something you keep it. That is a fairly good rule to live by.
After our showers we took some clothes and boots that had been left behind, and when Charlie stepped out in her military fatigues I almost mistook her for an intruder. She looked half the woman she had been beneath her mass of jumpers and coats.
‘It feels strange,’ she said.
‘It suits you,’ I replied and she blushed. So that is a rule that works both ways.
We spent one more night in the base. Then there was only one thing left for us to do. In an empty mess hall littered with paper I knelt before Aisha.
‘Do you still have that photograph, young lady?’ I said. She pulled it from her pocket and showed me the back.
Gorndale, Bistlethorpe, Yorks.
Magda. x
Yorkshire.
I found a map, we packed supplies and headed north.
That night we lay on the musty bed of a ghostly M1 Travelodge, with Aisha asleep between us. I asked Charlie if she wanted to find her husband.
‘No,’ she said, looking at Aisha. ‘I really don’t. What about your brother?’
I thought for a moment, stroking Aisha’s hair. ‘Maybe some other time,’ I said. ‘There are more important things right now.’
After a careful pause, Charlie turned to me. ‘Reginald, what happened to your wife?’
So I told her.
On the day that Isla left us, Sandra left me too. In the toilet of the hospital relatives’ room she had found a badly misplaced packet of painkillers, and used them to end her agony before it had truly begun.
I had wanted to blame her – for cowardice, for leaving me alone, for anything – but I found it impossible. Our grief was the same, it just behaved in different ways. Hers was brutal and decisive, whereas mine stretched out in sick tendrils years in length.
The next day I had returned to our home, finding the half-unpacked boxes, toys and clothes with which we had been about to start our new life. I had wandered through that empty flat, with the traffic, heatwave, and all the world’s problems still churning outside, unaware of my own. I had searched through the boxes, feeling a decision being made somewhere deep inside of me: this needed to be buried, quickly. I would wrap these two terrible days in sackcloth, tie it tight and abandon it in the most desolate part of my being.
As I had felt myself closing in, I had come across a box. Inside it was a video tape that Sandra had given to me as a birthday present the year before. Classic Matches: World Cup Italia 1990, semi-final, England v West Germany. I had put it on and watched it, and then I had watched it again.
I told Charlie all of this, and when I was finished she cradled my face and kissed me.
‘I’m sorry, Reginald,’ she said.
Then she lay down beside me and fell asleep, holding my hand. I loved her for not saying anything else.
Grief may be the end of all worlds, but as all worlds end, others begin. I still love my wife and daughter, but now I love Charlie too. Love does not divide, you see; if you let it, it multiplies, and in the end how far it multiplies is down to you. I believe you can call the whole world by its real name, if you only let yourself.
I watched Charlie and Aisha dream in peace, lost in the stillness and the ripple of their eyelids. I thought back to those moments that had flashed before my eyes as I choked beneath the gallows, and I was certain that when death finally did take me, this moment would be added to the reel.
The next day we packed and found water and crackers in the hotel kitchen.
‘We should locate a car,’ I said. ‘I could easily get one working.’
Charlie smiled and stroked my beard. ‘If it’s all the same with you, Reginald, I think I’d rather walk.’
So walk we did, and later that morning we arrived at the remains of the M25 motorway. I paused at the edge and looked down at the cracked lip of road.
‘What’s wrong?’ said Charlie.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I just haven’t …’
I let the words dissolve and looked up. Before me was an unfathomable land full of fields.
I once met a man who told me he mourned for England. He said that the country he belonged to and that belonged to him was gone, and he yearned for it to return. But England is not a place you belong to. No country is. The place you belong to has no name. You cannot speak it, you cannot see it, you cannot touch it. But you can hear it sometimes. You can hear it in rustling hedgerows and distant birdsong. You can hear it in the wind’s wild howl across a moor, a place upon which you have never set foot, but you swear you know by heart.
‘Reginald?’
Charlie looked back at me, frowning, with Aisha by her side. ‘We should get going. We have a long way to go.’
I used to be afraid. Afraid of touch, afraid of water, afraid of my past, afraid of crossing invisible boundaries in case I fell apart. But I am not afraid any more.
‘Come on then, hound,’ I said, smiling down at Lineker. He looked up, his right eye obscured by a bandage. Then we stepped across, and the land opened its arms to greet us as it does anyone who places their feet upon it.
No, England is not a place you belong to. England is just a place you walk through. And if you do happen to walk through it, as we did during those early spring weeks when the cities burned an
d the forests yawned with new life, then I can tell you from experience that the walk is infinitely more enjoyable in the company of a dog.
Epilogue
LINEKER
So.
I should explain.
(This is embarrassing.)
It turns out that repetitive cranial trauma can lead to certain psychological phenomenon like hallucinations, autoscopy and delirium. In other words, getting a few wallops on the old bonce can make you see things, feel things, believe things.
Like you’re dying and a host of golden geese are descending from heaven to carry you away into The Howl. I know, I know, embarrassing, excruciating, like I said.
Thought I was dying, wasn’t, actually very much alive, fine, good, thanks for asking.
I mean, you can hardly blame me. These past few months have been a little – shall we say – trying, after all, and would it be an understatement to say that I have not been my usual self? Probably. But I’m all right now. Back on track. Right as rain. Kushti.
I’ve still got it, though. The Killer. It strains inside like the ringing in my ear. You can never untaste blood.
Strange. It doesn’t really feel like it was me, looking back, although I know it was. The me before, the me between and the me after: three different me’s but somehow all the same. You’re not just one thing all your life, are you? You’re not just one story but lots of little ones, endlessly told. Hard to keep track of them all.
Probably explains why you’re such cunts.
Keep your hair on; I’m not getting all wolfy again and I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing. It’s just the truth. You’re cunts.
You. Are. Cunts.
There’s no getting around it. You, sitting there, reading this right now, are an A-grade See You Next Tuesday. Just like me, Reg and every other thing that walks or swims or slithers or crawls upon this rock. This planet – this pale blue dot – is populated entirely by cunts.
And that’s all right. That’s fine.
You’ve just got to accept it.
Let’s pick someone at random, I don’t know … fucking Gandhi. Mr Mahatma Gandhi to you, leader of the Indian Independence movement, supporter of the underclass, pioneer of passive resistance and all-round top bloke. Now, do you honestly think he got that virtuous without realising that, deep down, he was a bit of a tit?
Do you not think there was a moment when he leaned before the bathroom mirror, took off those glasses of his, shook his head and muttered: What have you done this time, you stupid twat?
Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, Florence Nightingale – all the same. They had to realise what they were before they could change. That’s how it works.
And who probably never had that moment before the mirror? Adolf – I bet he never thought he was a cunt. I bet he thought he was the fucking bomb dot com. Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan – none of them ever took that simple step of accepting they were anything more than a struggling mammal trying and failing to make sense of the world. No, they just thought everyone else was.
Plus they all had moustaches. So that’s something to watch out for too.
Mind you, so did Gandhi. And Dr King.
And Mother Theresa, come to think of it …
Still got this fucking ringing in my ear; it’s like a gnat, I can’t fucking SHAKE IT OFF.
What I’m trying to say is own up. Admit it. Confess. Stand naked on the rooftops and scream it to the sky, shout it loud, shout it proud: I AM A CUNT.
But – and this is important – one with potential. Because you can be nature’s worst nightmares but the best of its dreams too; you only need to watch a child to see that. Take this one here. She’s running up that hill, laughing, eyes streaming with happy little tears. At the top of the hill is some kind of enormous farm, a conglomeration of fascinating buildings, which I bet are absolutely crawling with rats, a babbling brook (I thought they were made up!), a mill and a bunch of people strolling about in the courtyard, sawing planks, building walls, cooking food, playing with their kids. Dogs too. Lots of dogs. I can already smell the shape of the pack I am about to gloriously disrupt.
There’s some old bird standing at the gate and she’s crying too; she can hardly believe what she’s seeing – this brave warrior charging towards her. She knows who she is. She’s special to her. Important.
But halfway up the hill this brave warrior stumbles to a halt. Her chest still pumps, her hands still reach for the gate, her eyes still lock upon it, but something has made her stop. Slowly she turns to look down upon Reg, Charlie and I, waiting at the bottom of the hill. We watch her dazzling in the sun, and with that bright, elusive smile of hers, she calls his name.
‘Reginald!’
Her voice explodes, ringing like the bells of a hundred cathedrals, following her back down the hill and into his arms.
‘You saved me, Reginald,’ she whispers into his ear, and tears squeeze from his eyes; the second time I have ever seen my master cry. He smiles and says: ‘Other way round, I believe, young lady. Other way round.’
I witness something happen to my Reg just then, and I could spend centuries trying to explain it but some things are beyond the reach of words. Even poetry is just a grasp at the truth. All I will say is this: when he knelt to embrace her he was one thing, and when he stood he was another. That’s all you need to know.
He lets her go and I swear I can hear the hills sing as she runs back up to the gate, double speed – this furious heart that burned through a snowstorm, who saved my life, whose glorious scent streams behind her in ribbons and waterfalls. I know what it is now, that smell of hers; those pebbles on cotton, cut grass, glacial water and peanut butter. It’s home. The burning heart has found her home.
I think of our home sometimes – the flat, the window, my endless bird-filled dreams – but it all seems so dim and far away. Now we’re here in this space, with fresh air filled with a thousand ghosts. The wood, the smoke, the rivers, the hills, the honey, the strawberries, the apples, the bracken, the maggots, the shit, the cocks, the cunts and everything in between. It’s all out there waiting for us. Heaven on Earth.
Still go it – killer. It tries to escape sometimes. It overwhelms me and I feel the old fear bubbling, the hatred, the certainty – but I push it back, I lock that fucker down. Because hatred, fear and certainty are the most woeful of things, the very worst stories you can tell.
So I close my eyes, count to ten, and let myself drift up from the long grass like downy spores on a summer breeze. Before I know it Reg is calling my name, and – bosh – my eyes snap open and I’m away.
Free from Hate, free from Time, free from Gravity.
Into the Wind, into the World, into The Howl.
Belief
Beliefs are strange. Things of certainty about things uncertain. Take mine, for example. I believe there are graves in the field next to the house where I live. I stop at the fence every morning and I look at three lashed crosses standing crooked against the sea, and I believe I know who is buried beneath them.
But I can’t be sure. So I believe instead. I suppose I could dig them up, but, as I see it, there are only two ways that little enterprise can end and neither of them is particularly palatable. Besides, if you have to go round digging up graves to prove your own sanity then you’ve probably already lost it.
This house, and the cliff to which it clings, is falling down. I believe that I came here on a road that was drowning in mud, that I climbed stairs from a deserted beach to join that road, that I swam to that beach from a small boat and sat there shivering beneath a gathering storm, watching the boat sail back the way it had come. I believe that I arrived at that boat after following a series of roads through a country that was torn apart, washed away and burned down to its raw rock. I believe that I wasn’t alone.
My memory stretches into the past like this, filament thin, a string of flickering flames, each one connected to the next. Some burn strong and bright, others barely glimmer.
I can still feel the sun of an English summer, smell the warm grass that brushed against my boyhood face, hear my mother’s voice calling beneath the gentle hum of a single-engined aeroplane.
I believe what I believe to make life less terrifying. That’s all beliefs are: stories we tell ourselves to stop being afraid. Beliefs have very little to do with the truth.
I don’t know. Belief, memory, fear – these things hold you back, weigh you down, stop you moving. And I need to get moving. I need to stop thinking about this stuff. That’s what Harvey would say – stop thinking, keep moving. But it’s hard to stop thinking when there’s nobody else but you and a candle and an old house on the crumbling coast of a ruined country. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this down – so I can stop thinking about it and get moving.
So I need a place to start. I may as well start at the end.
The End
I heard my name called. Once, twice, then a third time louder. I jerked awake. I was sitting down; my arms were folded, stiff with inaction. The air was full of noise and movement. Screams, colours flashing by, something tugging at my trouser leg. I tried to focus. A red, urgent face was looking down on me, shouting.
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