Breaking Light (24 page)

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 still, 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.

Afterwards, he tried not to think about this episode. The next morning, he stood and glanced over at the place where the couple had lain. The sand was disturbed but there was no other trace of their lovemaking. Later, Gabriel wondered if it had happened at all – or whether it had just been another one of his lewd fantasies.

And yet something had changed in him that night. It was as if his eyes had opened for the first time to the image that had been drawn in dark contrast on the inner wall of his heart on that day by the Giant's Table. As he looked out from the depths of his sleeping bag the next day, the sky looked different, as if something had dirtied the air. In this dull grey light, Gabriel could sense that witnessing the sexual act on the beach had merely put a faint smudge on his heart where that other dark memory had been lurking for so long. But, instead of fear or disgust, he felt a strange surge of euphoria and gratitude and he smiled to himself, wishing that there had been some way of telling Michael that there was nothing filthy between them, that the badness was all Jim of Blackaton's, and that what Jim had done to Michael that day on the moor was in no way related to the lust and yearnings that had begun to stir inside him soon afterwards. Touching another person could be forgiven; it was different from the thing that Jim of Blackaton had done to Michael – an act of such violence that it had split the skies open and let the darkness into the world, an act so powerful that it could tear two friends apart like a bolt of lightning cleaving a tree. How deluded they had
been to fall under the spell of shame. How little they had understood about the nature of things. He wanted to tell Michael that he could be clean again and that the beauty that had gone could return.

*

While he was walking, constantly moving, his feet creating their own rhythm, his past seemed weightless and distant. He was a stranger in the past and the present was moving, moving. He reeled through this present – he had a purpose at last, if only just to keep on walking.

He walked north along by the sea now, through the ludicrous beauty of those summer days. He walked to the rhythm of everything that had come before and everything that lay ahead. And, all the time, it – all of it – was singing inside his head,
dum, dum, dum-be-di-dum
.

Sometimes, he had to make his way into a village to buy some bread and eggs. It did not worry him particularly that he was running out of money. He would find a way, he was sure. People addressed him along the road; some wanted to ask and others wanted to tell. It didn't matter much. It was all the same in the end. As long as he didn't give too much away.

But, for the most part, he kept his eyes downcast so that he was unaware of any effect he might have on other people. And, often enough, he wondered why he was there at all.

Not long after the episode on the beach, he was crossing a meadow and passed a lamb sleeping alone. He stopped to watch it for a moment, wondering why it was not with its flock. He looked around and saw the rest of the sheep moving slowly, like a patch of bog cotton, in a field further up the slope. Just then, the lamb woke and raised its head to the bright day. It looked
so fresh, so new to the world, that Gabriel had to laugh. ‘You'd better hurry up, if you want to catch up with your friends,' he said. His voice frightened the creature, which struggled to stand, and, as it did, he saw with dismay that an extra pair of legs was sticking out from its belly. Gabriel flinched, and looked away.

*

After reaching the sea again, he began to weary of walking and sat down, resting his head between his up-drawn knees by the side of the road. The road was not busy, but every now and again a lorry would drive past at high speed, churning up clouds of dust in its wake. He whistled between his teeth. Birds looked down from a wire. Soon, a lorry slowed down and stopped beside him, spewing fine road dust and car fumes.

‘Where're you headin', boy?' the driver shouted out of the window.

Gabriel got on to his feet and brushed down his trousers. ‘East,' he replied with insouciance.

‘Hop in. I'll take you as far as the bridge at the old ford.'

Gabriel thought for a moment, looking around, before he picked up the backpack at his feet and climbed up into the passenger seat.

‘I'm Bob,' the driver said, cheerfully, putting the lorry into gear and releasing the clutch. He was a small and plump man. Almost bald, he wore his shirtsleeves rolled up, as if to show off the mat of ginger hair that covered his arms and hands.

‘I'm Gabriel,' the hardening boy replied over the engine noise, and decided that that was as far as he would go.

Then they went. The road began to move, faster and faster, into a tunnel of high hedges – too fast for his mind, which had walked at its own rhythm for over a week. He felt nauseous and
closed his eyes hard. The wind tore at him through the open windows. He leant out and opened his eyes. A raptor circled in the empty passage of sky above the road. That's when he noticed a peculiar smell from the back of the lorry.