Breaking Light

by Karin Altenberg

  Gabriel looked up from the paper. He was vaguely aware of Mother addressing him, but he ignored her like one would a summer breeze. He frowned, unable to fully comprehend what he had just read – or, rather, why such an article would have been written now. It seemed somehow to be directed at him alone. A message delivered aux mains, for his eyes only. He wondered if anybody else would have noticed. Surely it must be a sign? He read on:

  Recently, an increasing number of the performers, who would, by current standards, be classed as disabled, have been removed from Dr Buster’s Sideshow and put into institutionalised care.

  The feature had been written by a professor of medical anthropology in London, who was carrying out a research project on the last freak shows in Europe and the States. A professor. So somebody was actually studying the mystery he had once experienced? It seemed an incredible thought.

  Suddenly he heard Mother’s voice again, this time quite clearly:

  ‘I wonder, Gabriel, if you really know what you want?’

  ‘Look, Mum,’ he groaned, irritated to have been disturbed, ‘did you know what you really wanted at my age?’ He stood up and crossed to the sink to get a drink of water.

  ‘Actually, yes, I did.’

  This surprised him and made him turn to look at her. She was watching him and he detected a look in her eyes that he had not seen before – something that flared once and settled. For a moment, he was confused to be looking down at her – he was so used to looking up.

  ‘What was it that you—’ he began to ask, but she interrupted him.

  ‘What about your university applications? What if you’re accepted – how will I be able to reach you?’

  ‘Don’t worry; I won’t get a place,’ he replied, but not with such certainty this time, as he thought of the professor mentioned in the paper.

  ‘Oh, Gabriel. You’re a clever boy … and you have such imagination.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? I thought you didn’t like my imagination.’

  ‘Let’s not argue,’ she sighed.

  ‘All right,’ he muttered, cheeks aflame.

  ‘I found Gerry’s old sleeping bag and this rucksack.’ She gestured towards something that was hanging from the handle of the kitchen door. ‘I thought they might come in handy for your trip.’

  ‘Oh, thanks, that’s really great.’ He felt the purpose rising in him again and, for a moment, he thought that he could perhaps tell her after all – tell her what it was that he wanted, or, at least, what he hoped to find.

  ‘I do know what I want,’ he tried. ‘I want to find out about things. I can’t explain it very well. I want to know if there’s something else. You know, something I haven’t understood yet, some mystery that needs to be solved, that kind of thing …’ His voice faltered as he heard, for himself, how ridiculous he sounded.

  Mother smiled then, but sadly. He was older, she noticed – his body had hardened and the cuts on his knees had healed – but not old enough.

  ‘Mystery,’ she said, shaking her head slowly. ‘A mystery is just an imitation of something we carry inside us – the urge to explore something we can never discover.’

  ‘But …’ He was shocked and appalled by what she had just said. He had never heard her speak like that before. Perhaps he had misjudged her, thinking her stupid and irrelevant. ‘No, I won’t accept that.’ He winced at the hollow sound of his own voice, which somehow managed to fill the kitchen.

  ‘Ah, well,’ she said then, without much emotion. ‘You’d better start packing.’

  *

  As the train left the platform at Exeter and Gabriel shoved his backpack on to the luggage rack and sat down on the hard seat, it was as if Mortford no longer existed – although part of him realised that things might carry on as normal: Mother would get up in the morning, finding the milk bottle on the doorstep, boys would be taught in dimly lit school rooms, a farmer would be looking with jealousy at somebody’s new tractor and the buzzards would soar over the moor, keeping an eye on what went on down there.

  Oakstone had stood empty for a few years. Michael had been sent to boarding school shortly after Mr Bradley’s funeral and Mrs Bradley had left at about the same time – no one knew where, but some thought she might have crossed back to the continent. A few times, he had sneaked into the gardens and peered through the French windows where there was a gap in the curtains; the furniture and the paintings of glorious ancestors were still there, but there was an empty feeling about the place, as if the house had been stripped of any significance so that all that remained was a set for a film or perhaps a staged tragedy.

  But all that was no longer relevant – all Gabriel’s roads were leading away from there. He put his hand on the seat next to him as if its polished wood might offer some kind of reassurance that this was reality. If Mother had been upset about him leaving, she had not shown it. But she had washed and ironed his shirts carefully and helped him pack the rucksack on the eve of his departure. A few times, as these preparations went on in the small cottage, they had brushed against each other and once, when they met in the doorway to his bedroom, she had held her hand to his cheek for a moment, and he had let her.

  Where was Michael? Gabriel could no longer picture him – would he even recognise him if he saw him? He too might have left school now. The posh school. Had he gone to his mother in France or was he still in England? For a moment, Gabriel closed his eyes and tried to imagine Michael at Oxford or Cambridge, as this was most certainly where he would have been expected to go. But, however much he tried, he could not conjure up an image of him amongst the Gothic limestone and the soaring stained glass. Nor would he let his mind turn off the safe path of memory to face again the Moor Cross Inn, where they had last met.

  But no, he convinced himself, this was no longer relevant; his quest was altogether more personal. He rested his forehead against the cool surface of the train window and looked at the landscape. All through the south-west, the pastures were rinsed and silky after a summer rain that had sailed ahead of the train earlier that afternoon. The skies opened high now into an impossible blue and the waning breeze combed softly through fields of barley. As he travelled into evening, towards the sea, the setting sun warmed his face through the window and he relaxed. Grey towers of ancient churches reassured and time loosened its reins, bringing him further away. The sky – the vanishing sky – seemed to swell and swallow up the horizon and he let his shoulders sink, his hands slacken and relax.

  This is how the journey began. He was travelling away; he was travelling towards. Looking for … Looking for what? What sort of a quest was this, and what did he hope to obtain as he set forth from Mortford?

  Amongst the strangers on the train, he was a stranger to himself. He had no idea who he was and, as he looked into his own eyes reflected in the darkened window as the train raced through a tunnel, he found no clues. He was back again in that corridor of mirrors where this quest had first started.

  Although it was a short journey, a few hours at the most, because it was his first passage of this sort it felt endless. And, through this distance, the deepening countryside outside the window tried to convince him of its possibilities.

  Travelling west, the engines of the train laboured on through the landscape that gradually lost its familiarity. At dusk – one of those numb nightfalls that make the landscape look sluggish – he was relieved to cross a great river. As he watched the dark waters from the bridge, he knew that it was too late to turn back.

  He had few belongings. His backpack held a handful of shirts, socks, underwear, a wool cardigan, an anorak and some books he had taken from Uncle Gerry’s cottage but never looked at. The sleeping bag was tied with straps to the bottom of the rucksack, along with a small primus stove and a water bottle. Mother had packed a stack of sandwiches and given him a five-pound note, which he kept in the otherwise empty wallet in the inside pocket of Uncle Gerry’s tweed jacket.

  *

  As he stepped on to the platform at Penzance,
he knew at once that this was different, that the adventure could begin. A lonely gull laughed overhead as he stood for a moment, taking in the scent of the sea – not the close stink of the shore, but the breath, the sigh of ocean – the salt breeze, the deep, deep water, the oysters in their shells, the metallic, the cold. And there were other smells too, connected with the seaside: deep-frying, rotting fish waste, and something else that he couldn’t quite pin down.

  He shouldered his backpack and walked along the quay into town, having decided to spend the first night in a B & B. The quay was dark but, here and there, tentative light sieved through thick curtains and painted the cobbles in smoky grey. A fine band of pink still rested on the horizon and the sky out there was the same colour as the night skies of the illustrated Bible he had read as a child.

  It took him a while to find a place with a vacancy, and the woman who let him in was brusque rather than friendly as she showed him to a tiny room at the top of a rickety staircase. She was a large woman, almost as tall as he was; her abrasive dark grey hair was tied back in a strained bun and her skin was a strange pale yellow. He smiled, wishing that he had kept the little moustache he had been growing over the scar. She left him alone then, closing the door before descending the stairs. He could hear her steps for a long time, as if the room was in a high tower, rather than in a harbour house.

  It was more a ship’s cabin than a room, he felt, and it suited him just fine. He could feel, rather than distinguish, the sea outside the window, resting in the harbour after a long day of worrying and fretting amongst the hulls of fishing boats. He lay down on the narrow bed without undressing and fell sleep almost immediately.

  *

  He woke early to the smell of bacon fat and realised how hungry he was. After groping around a while in the browning gloom, he found a narrow kitchen at the back of the house. The woman was wearing a calf-length skirt of a coarse material and a fisherman’s jumper that was a few sizes too large. He watched her for a moment as she stooped over an old-fashioned cooker, which was black with soot and grease. Stepping into the kitchen, his boot slipped on something, which melted into the linoleum floor.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs …’ he said gallantly, trying desperately to remember her name.

  ‘Morning,’ she muttered, without turning. ‘You can seat yourself at the table, there.’ She indicated with her head towards a Formica-top picnic table set up in the opposite corner. A single chair had been put in front of the table, which had been laid for one under a naked bulb. He fidgeted for a moment with the cutlery, which was not altogether clean.

  ‘So, you must be very busy in the summer. Do you get many guests?’ he tried.

  The woman muttered something and he wasn’t sure she had heard his question. However, he thought better than to ask it again.

  Instead, he sat politely and, when she placed a huge plate of stringy bacon and eggs in front of him, he finished it all quickly and with good appetite. This seemed to cheer her up somewhat. She chuckled as she poured him another cup of tea. A large dog, its pelt the colour and texture of the woman’s hair, entered the kitchen and pushed itself under the table to settle at his feet. The stink was almost unbearable and he was relieved that he had had time to finish his breakfast before she let the dog in. He could feel the woman studying his face closely and he hoped that his revulsion wasn’t showing. For once, he was grateful for the scar that would divert her attention, he hoped.

  ‘So, what brings you here, then?’ she asked at last.

  This straight question took him aback somewhat and he had to think hard.

  ‘I wanted to meet the sea where the land ends,’ he said at last, and blushed. He wasn’t even sure this was what he wanted to do, but it sounded good. He had come there for no better reason than his foot had stepped on to the train.

  ‘Ah, I see; a quest to the end of the world,’ she said, and he thought he could detect some irony in her voice. ‘Well, it’s not much to look at out there, you know – just rocks and sea. Same as anywhere else.’

  ‘Oh, well …’ He glanced with some horror at the unkempt woman.

  ‘The paths around here are ancient, I’ll tell you. You’re not the first pilgrim to come this way.’ She had a broad, fleshy mouth, which gave her the expression of a large fish that prefers to consume huge amounts of tiny things. She was formidable.

  ‘Pilgrims?’

  ‘Pilgrims, knights-errant: young men trying to set the world right.’

  He hated the way she made him sound common. ‘Oh, but—’ he tried.

  ‘I hope you find whatever it is that you’re looking for,’ she interrupted. Then her lips closed with a damp sound.

  *

  Grateful to get away, he walked in the morning sun to the little harbour and on to a pier, where he sat with his back against the smooth, fortress-like walls of the jetty, the backpack by his side. By now, the sea was as blue as the sky he had been watching the previous afternoon. No, it was bluer, more innocent, and the houses in the town looked like children’s building blocks, stacked against the hillside. Soon, tourists were milling around the quays in the harbour and their constant chattering soothed Gabriel’s mind. He closed his eyes to the sun and listened to the little noises of the world – to the swell, which rustled the pebbles in the shallows, and the sea breeze, which intrigued the masts and tackle. Somewhere, a dinghy pulled at a rope, whining like a spoilt child. The sun turned around the harbour until, in the end, it handed his hot face to the shadows. He fell asleep and dreamt that he was a child again, resting against the rocks of the tor.

  But he did not allow himself to rest for very long. His journey must begin here, at the end of the world.

  *

  Resting his elbows on the weathered stone of the bridge railings, Mr Askew watched the stream below. Transparent, it had only one purpose, which was to flow. It was possessed by this motion, unrestrained, un-helmed, immaterial. It held nothing and wanted only freedom. Freedom from what? The prospect confused him. It was a fluid state, which could only be achieved in opposition to something more solid.

  What freedom had he hoped to find as he set out on that first journey? He had no work, school had finished, and there was no love to hold him. Loveless, he had lost an uncle, a father, a brother, and his mother had at last set him free. ‘You’d better start packing,’ she’d said, as if freedom was a thing with which to rap his knuckles one last time. ‘You’d better find out for yourself.’ And yet she was the one who had always kept knowledge hidden away and chained in dark dungeons.

  Loveless? A vague image flickered in his mind. He remembered a market; he moved with Mother through legs of people and stalls. The crowd heaved around them until all he could hear was the blood pulsing in his ears. He could not penetrate the forest of legs. And then, an opening, a glen and light and air. ‘I thought I had lost you!’ he cried, as he turned and looked up into her face – Mother’s face, smiling.

  ‘I was right behind you,’ she said.

  In a sudden flash, he realised that she had really wanted to be, that she had tried to, at any rate, and that the intention reflected a kind of love.

  No, he realised now, it was not escape that compelled me. He stood back from the railings and continued across the bridge. Not a search for freedom, then, but for the opposite – the eternal hope of belonging.

  *

  He started walking then and, directed by some locals, he found an ancient inland walkway that led across the peninsula to the coast on the north. There were cornfields dotted with the red of poppies, hedges fragrant with insect life, and fields of green grass where lambs still tilted against their mothers. When he looked back the way he had come, he could still see the bay and the cone of a strange island, which he hadn’t noticed before. It sat on the horizon like the mirage of a citadel. For a day and a half, as he walked across that upland, he would turn to see this island shrinking behind him.

  But mostly the landscape around him looked like a reflection of itself: glossy and sti
ll, like a photograph. He wished he could have told somebody about it, but realised also that real beauty is something best enjoyed alone.

  If those summer days above the sea enchanted him, the nights unsettled him. Quite often, he would sleep out in a field, making a lair for himself in the high grass, like some kind of a beast. When he pressed himself against the ground, he could feel, through the wad of the sleeping bag, the earth’s heart beating against his own – thud, thud, thud. He would sometimes look up at the stars, picking them out as they hung alone or in comfortable clusters. His favourite was the two heads and locked hands of the Gemini.

  Dozing, straining not to wake himself, he would fill up with the absence – the loss that was so familiar by now. Trying to be whole, he listened to the unfamiliar noises that filled the darker end of the night. The sea breeze would often rest all night and stir with him in the morning. Then the sun would rise and pick out pearls from the surface of the sea.

  Once, well above the tidal mark at the beach near a small town, on a night of such semi-consciousness, a shadowy couple stumbled across the dunes without seeing him. They passed so close by that he caught the trailing scents of alcohol and powdery perfume. Gabriel held his breath and, after a moment, the woman giggled as the man made urgent noises, fumbling around her body. Soon, Gabriel heard their quickening breath and little animal noises from just a few yards away and pressed his hands against his ears – but it did not help; he could not shut out what was happening; it was as if he was there, too. He might have moaned as, behind his closed eyes, he tried to picture the girls he had fantasised about during his teenage years in Mortford: Suzy Hill, with hair as black as the river at night and long white arms, and Dolly, who worked as a maid at Daunton’s farm and was a bit dim. The boys at school had called her an easy ride, but he had never known quite what that meant. He had associated the hot, overwhelming urge with all that was repulsive and shameful. Touching himself in bed or up on the moor, he had felt only revulsion and eventually release. An image of Mrs Bradley in a tight-fitting dress surfaced briefly in his mind, but he pushed it away with such force that his arm hit the sand and the couple on the dune stilled for a moment, listening into the night – but their moaning soon started again. Gradually, Gabriel’s body relaxed until he was no longer in it, but freed at last, and the shadows seemed to take on individual shapes and stand out like statues of icy marble – even though he himself was burning.