As I walked out, I made a detour to the coffin, placed a hand at the foot and said goodbye.

I did not get to know my Auntie as well as I should have until the illness was diagnosed.  In her later months, when I could, I would go round to see her for a cup of tea.  The conversation would, inevitably, turn to death and funerals.  It was a tiring and dark affair, and I realised how utterly alone she must have felt, knowing what we all knew was the truth.  The spectre of death hovered over her, filtered out and touched those around her.  But amongst it all, overpowering the inevitable, was her strength and courage, and we drank from this, fed on it so we too could rise above the horror of it.

A particularly acidic woman, she had a cutting sense of humour, a fierce intelligence and insight.  She brought her children up with strong morals, and a strong work-ethic.  They have turned out well and I know she was proud of them both.  The love she held for her grandson, who was only a year old when she died, was both powerful and unconditional.  He gave her great pleasure during those last days.

I forget that my Auntie is gone, but every now and then I remember.  Trying to comprehend her non-existence is like hitting a brick wall.  She is gone.  Dead.  No more.  Where there was thought, feeling, humour and speech, now there is nothing.  I read somewhere that death cancels everything but truth.  I am forced to confront my own truth, as are we all.  I desire now to rid myself of the neurotic.  Who am I exactly?  What do I want?  Where am I headed?  These questions, for so long a mystery, are no longer malleable, but stone, exact.  I now know the answers.  So, if for nothing else, I thank her for that.

Seeing everyone react to my Auntie’s passing made me reevaluate my position in the family.  It changed the way I viewed them.  My mother was filled with regret for not having had the chance to say goodbye properly, the way she had wanted to, the way, I guess, she had envisioned.  This regret, I could see, was eating away at her.  And suddenly I could see my mother, I could see her not as my mother but a woman, a young girl grown-up, filled with a lifetime of thought and experience, memories of love and pain and joy and sadness.  At the funeral, as she spoke of her love for her sister, one question turned over and over in my head.  What has my mother achieved?  The answer; everything I am.

My friends were relaxed about my staying.  They did not accept social boundaries, which made them incredibly refreshing.  But I was worried about the other tenants, the one’s who were paying.  I worried I was taking up space, stinking the place out with my dirty washing and my well-trodden feet.  Having moved around from city to city my clothes and hygiene had taken a hit.  I fantasied about having my own space, perhaps living with a woman who shared my sensibilities.  We would eat biscuits in front of the TV, and talk about saving the world.  Holier-than-thou progressives.

On the train to Bristol I read a book on Marx.  ”Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die.”  Later in the book I read a passage from the author that read, “it is tempting in this terrible century to abandon any attempt to change the world.  Mostly we take refuge in personal relationships or, in the case of those with the talents and the economic opportunities, personal achievement.”  Those words, printed so fine on the page, were swirling through my head.

Bumming from city to city as I was, I found myself drawn to a simpler life away from the metropolitan world.  Perhaps such self-interest was precisely the problem?  I was searching for a frontier, although I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant.  If there were any frontiers left in this world they had long been knocked down or scattered like cards on a table.  But at that time I was determined to settle in Bristol, a stepping stone of sorts, an incremental move towards an end goal, whatever that might be.  At first it was exciting and adventurous, engaging with old friends and hoping for the best.  But that night, lying under the blankets in the cold boilerless house, the reality had started to set it.  It wouldn’t be easy.  Find a job.  Find a room.  Find something to keep me occupied for a year, and then maybe, just maybe, things would slot into place.

I applied for nine jobs in two days – cleaning work, coffee baristas, the kind of jobs designed for my generation.  Searching for jobs in a jobless market was no fun at all.  I was more like a passenger.  The captains didn’t have a compass.  It was like swimming for hours only to find you were still in the middle of the ocean.

I took my CV for a walk.  It didn’t want to go, so I leashed it and forced it and dragged it out of the house.  CV’s are the first to get shot when battle commences.  It’s often bloody.  You pull yourself back from the streets, wounded and dehumanised, clambering through the front door.  You don’t want to go back out there.

That afternoon, as the snow fell, I strolled along Gloucester Road, admiring the independent shops promoting their wares and supporting each other like a community should.  Glozzy Road, as it’s affectionately known, is the longest independent street in the UK, or so I am told, and they don’t take kindly to big business setting up shop on their turf, although it does and has happened.  And still, when I thought about it over coffee, Glozzy Road was no different to the high street – people staring into empty windows like fucking morons, hypnotised by the aesthetic.

At this stage in my life I was distrustful of people.  I’d been let down in the past and had grown wary of establishing new relationships, be them social or professional.  I saw very little to like in people, but I came to realise it was rarely their fault.  Really I was frustrated because, like me, they were clutching for answers – a light, a rock, something to hold onto, something to fix the gears.  The world was like a great clock, fragmented and consuming, corrupted and corrupting.  It was, as Habermas said, colonizing the lifeworld.  And perhaps, I came to realise, those frontiers I was searching for were the pockets that resist this colonization.

So there I was, torn and displayed, newly arrived in Bristol and attempting to tap back into the very thing I was against.  And perhaps, further still, there were no options, no originality, no frontiers.  I was reminded of a quote by Georg Simmel.  ”What we regard as freedom is often in fact only a change of obligation.”

I have never been a bad-looking woman. I have my father’s face and my mother’s eyes, but not their manners.  I left those on the road between Roswell and LA.  I’m far from ugly, but far from the prettiest.  I have a full-figure and long legs, and in a bar like The Glenview, I’m a light for moths.

After some time, Hank coolly stepped from his stool and approached.  I watched him walk over.  He had strong powerful legs.  His head was large and bulbous, sitting uncomfortably on his shoulders, and the cave-like overhang of his brows lifted up and down as he spoke.  He said he liked my dress and the black beads around my neck.  He bought me a drink.  There was jazz on the radio, a sense of culture in this otherwise backwater bar.  The barman, with his one queer eye twitching like an eight ball, poured us drinks until we ran out of money.

Hank and I laughed at the world, laughed at its hopelessness.  When he spoke, voice unbothered by doubt, it was hushed and comical, a contradiction to his large bulk and pock-scarred cheeks.  I was riveted.  He said unusual things.

‘We’re all just waiting,’ he told me.  ’Doing little things, and waiting to die.’

We fantasised about getting away.  We could get on the boxcar, get the hell outta here.  It could clock and clack us someplace new, a place where the booze was free and the people weren’t slime.

When the bar kicked us out, we ended up at Hank’s.  He lived in a rooming house in the black quarter.  After sex we lay in bed, smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap wine.  Hank rolled that giant head of his and looked at me with a frown.

‘Say, I don’t know your name.  What’s your name?’

I tapped away a plug of ash.  ‘What the hell difference does that make?’

Hank and I moved in together on South Union Drive, not far from MacArthur Park.  We lied to the landlady, posing as a respectable married couple.  What a cop!  The word “respectable” vanished with the drinking and the arguments.  The landlady thought I was pregnant.  Sure, pregnant with beer.  It wasn’t long before she asked us to leave.

We went from place to place, leaving a trail of broken glass.  We had some great times, some furious rows.  He loved me in that dress and we fucked every day.  The first few times he was really nervous, an amateur, a real kid.  But I taught him a few things and he got better.  We laughed and we drank and we fucked.

Hank couldn’t stand me flirting with other men.  He would get jealous and fly into a rage, get arrested, wake up in the drink tank.  I would disappear for days, hitting the bars, sleeping with other men.  I know he loved me more than I could ever love him.  He was my best friend and my drinking buddy, but I had no mind to commit.

When I was gone he would invite the drunks and bums to our place to keep him company.  He was a heavy drinker and it took its toll.  He got ill, vomited blood.  At the hospital they told him one more drink could kill him.  He came to me and I helped him as best I could.  To take his mind from the booze we went to the racetrack and won or lost money.  It became a regular thing, but it wasn’t long before Hank started drinking again, slowly at first, mixing milk with his shots.

After a while my promiscuity pulled us apart.  Hank met some broad with no neck and disappeared to Texas for several years, while I continued cruising the bars and the beds of those stupid enough to buy me drinks.

I often wonder what Craig would think of me now.  Craig was my first husband.  Like me, he was a heavy drinker.  That’s what killed him.  It was a car crash, but the booze was driving.  I should have helped him, could have listened.  I could have saved him.  I’m not the only widow to blame herself.  We had two children together, Jo and Mary.  I don’t know where they are.  I think of them often.

Some years later, I bumped into Hank in the street.

‘I saw you with that bitch a while back,’ I said.  ‘She’s not your kind of woman.’

He smiled.  ‘None of them are.’

Hank and his Texas girl had broken up and he was back in town.  It had been years since we’d seen each other.  During that time I’d managed to find work here and there, drifting aimlessly through life.  It was now 1962 and I was working at The Phillips hotel.  They gave me a room and money for drink.  I invited Hank back and we sat on the bed, reminiscing about old times, sitting there amongst the empty bottles and cans.  Soon we were making love.

I put on my best dress and my high heels.  I didn’t look as I once had.  I caught sight of my reflection.  My figure was melting with the years.  Sex had lost any meaning.  I knew Hank was disgusted by me, and he tried to hide it.  As I walked from the bed to the bathroom, my ass hanging low, I caught the look on his face and felt hurt clutch at my chest.

One morning after the Christmas holidays, he arrived to find me drinking heavily, sitting in the chair and staring out the window.  I was wondering where my life had gone, where my two children were.  I wondered how they were doing.  I wanted to know so much, but the answers had vanished in fifty-one years of life.

I’d been given booze, gifts from the tenants, and the bottles and crates filled every corner of the room.  Hank tried to stop me from drinking it all, tried to take some of it away.  With my gaze out the window, I told him to leave, and he did so, reluctantly and without conflict.

I woke in hospital.  I was so very tired.  My eyes barely opened, but the great hulk of a figure, a dark silhouette, blurred into view.

‘I knew it would be you,’ I said, and Hank smiled.  He dabbed my brow, and I fell back to sleep.

for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough: -

I pick up the skirt,

I pick up the sparkling beads

in black,

this thing that moved once

around flesh,

and I call God a liar,

I say anything that moved

like that

or knew

my name

could never die

in the common verity of dying,

and I pick

up her lovely

dress,

all her loveliness gone,

and I speak

to all the gods,

Jewish gods, Christ-gods,

chips of blinking things,

idols, pills, bread,

fathoms, risks,

knowledgeable surrender,

rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad

without a chance

hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,

I lean upon this,

I lean on all of this

and I know:

her dress upon my arm:

but

they will not

give her back to me.

           - Charles Bukowski

(note: this is a fictional account of Jane Cooney Baker, derived from Howard Sounes’ biography of Charles Bukowski, Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life)

At his London apartment he held regular parties.  Weekends were crazy.  There were a lot of drugs. People fucked in the corner and others would write on the walls.  Joe was intelligent, a scrapper and a dodger, but the desperate took advantage of him, picking his bones clean of love and money.  He knew this - it was self-inflicted.  He could argue anyone into a corner but it pained him to do so.  He preferred a fistfight.

‘You know where you are in a fistfight.’

He drank a lot.  He liked wine.  He was scared of touching superglue tubes.  At night, usually around 2am, he worked at his desk on something he called Numberless Worlds – but was very secretive of its content so no one ever found out what it was about.  Joe was mysterious, an idiot savant, outlawed by his own behaviour.  No one could deny he had some form of psychosis.  He qualified the speculation with odd statements.

‘We all die in places that don’t matter,’ he once told me, high on speed.  We were passing a joint back and forth.  ‘All we have are circles, fucking circles, overlapping.’  He fixed his gaze on me.  ’It gets so you can’t breathe,’ he said.  ’We don’t serve anything but the circles.’

One day he got thrown in hospital and I went to see him.  I found him in a corner, skeletal and false, sitting in a chair with that death-look in his eyes while others around him danced with life.  Whatever system Joe belonged to had been wiped clean by the hospital, and I wondered if he was too far-gone to ever reshape himself.

Some months later, I heard that Joe cut his wrist with broken glass and had died right alone in that place, in that corner of that hospital when no one else was there.

Unlike the night before, this time he entered Lucy.  She sat herself reverse cowgirl and reared up and down until he climaxed.  She was sweet with him, yet firm and commanding, sensual and erotic.  He was very drunk, very damaged.

‘There you go honey,’ she said, smiling.  She was pulling up her lingerie.  ‘Did you enjoy that?’

Lucy was older than Gregory by five years, with tattoos on her arms and curly blonde hair.  She smelled of ivory soap.

‘Yes, thank you,’ he said.

The room they were in was decorated with purple and gold fabrics.  It was an attic and above them stretched wooden rafters.  There was a large double bed with netting.  Beside it was a red panic button.  The shower was in an adjoining room.  Gregory wondered how many men had been in here.

‘What do you do during the day,’ he asked.

‘I do this,’ said Lucy.  She lit a cigarette and shook the match out.  ‘But I go to people’s houses.  It pays more.’

He sighed.  ‘It’s been a long time since I was with a woman.’

‘It’s okay, sweetie.’

Gregory was very drunk and feeling sick.  There was dull ache like a strip of pain across his lower back.  He rubbed at it, kneading his fingers into his kidneys.  ‘Where do you live?’ he asked.

‘In the city.  I have my own place.’

‘You live alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have a boyfriend?’

She looked at the floor.  ‘No.’

‘But you’re very nice,’ he told her.  ‘Very nice.  You should get someone.’

She was biting her lip and nodding.  Outside the sounds of Christchurch drifted up through a window.  The room grew hot and stuffy and Gregory, pulling at his collar, began to feel uneasy.  As if sensing this, Lucy stood from the bed and put her cigarette out in the ashtray on the side.

They were both frightened.

Later that week at a different parlour, Gregory was drunk and depressed, sitting on the bed with another girl beside him.  They were naked.  The room was warm and smelled of lavender.  Helen was very thin, young, a brunette with large brown eyes.  She was quite beautiful.  ‘I’ve never done that before,’ Gregory told her, slurring his words.

‘Were you a virgin?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said.  ‘Was I any good?’

‘You made me come,’ she lied.

Gregory chuckled.  ‘I think you’re very pretty.  The prettiest girl in Christchurch.’

Helen blushed.  She tucked a stray hair behind an ear.  Around them the air was tight and hot on their skin.  The sound of the air-conditioner buzzed and clicked by the far wall.

Gregory swayed.  ’Am I pretty?’

‘You have nice skin,’ she said.  She stroked his arm with her fingers.  ‘Usually we get old men in here and their skin is horrible and they smell funny.  I got excited when you walked in.’  She paused, glanced reluctantly at the door.  ‘You’ll have to go now.’

‘I have a brain tumour,’ he told her.  ‘I have six months.’

She gasped and put a hand over her mouth.  ‘Oh my.  Is that true?  I’m so sorry.’  She was close to tears.  Her arms trembled.  ‘You poor thing.’

‘I have nothing to live for,’ he said.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again.  She seemed about to get up, but remained seated next to him, looking unsure and awkward.  Scared.

Gregory was drowsy, his head spinning.  ‘What did you do before you worked here?’ he asked.

Helen glanced away.  All of a sudden she appeared very lost, childlike.  Still in shock, and with her voice breaking, she said, ‘I was at school before I came here.’

It hit Gregory like a shot.  ‘Shit.’  He began to focus.  ‘This is your first job?’

She opened her mouth to speak but said nothing.  Instead she closed her eyes and nodded.

Gregory stood.  He left her sitting naked on the bed.  He had sobered up.  Guilt and confusion ate away at him.  On the way out he thanked the madam, then made his way down the stairs and into the night of Christchurch, searching for the nearest bar.

As he watched the flames rear and flicker, he saw himself as a child sitting in his father’s car with his father at the wheel and wearing the same white shirt and tie he had always worn.  Outside, the countryside rolled up and receded.  Myers put a hand on the glass to block the sun, which as it disappeared was bleeding beautiful reds and yellows into the earth.  Myers, a boy of ten, closed one eye and imagined himself balancing on the horizon, bathed in beauty.

His father was halfway through another lecture, his voice loud and gruff.

‘The city is where the money is, boy,’ he was saying.  ‘Not the countryside.  In the city, people are mad enough to fork over more money than they own.  Take the Bible for example,’ he said.  ’People believe the bible was written by the infallible hand of God.  And yet the Bible was penned by the fallible hand of man.  And even if God did communicate with man, there’s no way there wouldn’t be errors in the translation.  I would imagine God’s language is pretty complicated.’  He clipped Myers around the ear.  ‘Are you listening to me, boy?  I’m teaching you a valuable lesson.’

Myers nodded.  ‘Yes, sir.’

‘You see, boy, my position is one of trust.  If a customer trusts what you tell them is true, they’ll buy from you without prejudice.  And if you’re really trustworthy they’ll devote themselves to you.’  He wagged a finger in the air and said, ‘Don’t underestimate the power of lies, Henry.’

Looking back now, Myers felt sick to his stomach.  His father had been a deceitful man, and he wondered how his mother, a woman he barely remembered, could have been so entwined with him.  He remembered his mother like remembering a dream.  The only memory he had of her was one of her sitting in sunshine with her head back to catch the rays.  She had been a beautiful and sad woman.  In the same memory, she stood and turned, as though facing an audience, and reaching out she spun a wind-turn with her finger.  It clicked and blurred, and as it spun darkness fell on her face and she glanced up at the sky.  Then she was gone.

Myers stared at the flames in the stove.  His hands had a tremble, his breathing was laboured.  He glanced about the cottage.  Pushing back his chair he stood and went to the backdoor and opened it.  Rain spat in his face.  With what light there was, he was able to make out a metal bracket in the brick by the door, a bracket that once held something in place.  A wind-turn.

My father moved us to London.  Why?  When my mother died?

Back inside, he opened the doors of the stove and poked about with an iron poker.  The flames were dying.  He cursed.  The kindling had burnt but the logs had only blackened and not caught.  He grabbed more firelighters, broke off large chunks and threw them in, the smell of chemicals burning his nostrils.  He covered the firelighter with more kindling and struck a match.  The flames reared up, fierce red and bold.  Maybe now, he thought.  But once again, after ten minutes, the fire died.  He went through this process all night until he’d exhausted the firelighters and the kindling was all but gone.  He could get it lit but not keep it going.  The logs were not catching.  He needed anthracite.  If it carried on like this, he’d never get the cottage warm.  The floors and the walls were ice cold  He couldn’t relax.  He could see his breath in front of his face.  Damn it!  A failure at fire!  His father would have enjoyed this.  Myers imagined him watching from some ghostly realm.  Laughing.  Warmth.  None of it.

With my mind racing back to those early years, I found myself hanging from a window, smoking a Lucky down to the butt and listening to the traffic on the road.  I’d been in Berlin 14 days in the company of Liana, probably the most beautiful woman I’d ever known.  Behind me on the laptop, Górecki’s Symphony No.3 was playing.  Earlier that evening Liana and I had been to the ballet, which had been performed, rather badly, to this very music.  I’d sat in the audience, trying to keep still beside a giggling Liana, my stomach in knots and panic in my lungs.

It was my 31st birthday.

On our way back from the ballet, feeling released from an awful pressure, we took a diversion to Raphael’s and bought some weed.  We turned up in our evening dress, like two professionals on our way to a fundraiser.  Raphael’s apartment was simple, minimalist, slightly grubby.  On the side he had a tank of exotic fish, and on the walls pictures of jellyfish.

‘I love jellyfish,’ he told us.  He was leaning over his coffee table and building a joint.  ‘It’s the alien of the sea.  The stalked-jellyfish is my favourite.  It moves with grace.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Liana.

Nothing moves with grace, I thought as we walked home.  Recently I’d been reading up on cybernetics and had come to the conclusion that life might be a series of movements preordained by some spectacular system.

I’d always been assaulted by the big question of existence; and it had become such an obsession that I thought I hadn’t been born for any other reason than to find the answer.  It was a pattern of irony I couldn’t escape and it caused me great distress.  For as long as I could remember I’d suffered from drops in mood, followed by extreme highs, sometimes feeling elated and depressed at the same time.

With Górecki playing behind me I began to feel more inclined to accept the state of things.  I finished my smoke and flicked it away out the window.  With her back against the wall, Liana sat in bed under the covers, her face boyish and beautiful in the light.

As she smoked a J, she launched into a rant about her current boyfriend, waving the joint about like a pointer.  ‘We’re in an open relationship,’ she was saying.  ‘We see each other, but we fuck other people.  Sometimes I worry that he hasn’t understood that an open relationship isn’t about falling for other people.  It’s just fucking.  I’m not sure he gets that.’

There was something spectacular, even exciting, about her honesty.  She attacked form like a person shunned by it.

‘What side of the dial are you on?’ I asked her.

‘The right side,’ she said.  ’And do you think we can change the music?  It’s depressing me.’

I scrolled through iTunes, found Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus and hit play.  A beautiful choir filled the room.  Liana groaned and buried her head beneath a pillow.  ’Are you kidding?’

I figured it was time to say goodnight, so I switched off the music and went for a walk.  It was past midnight and I’d been 31 years old for precisely 24 hours.  With the moon scythed in half above me, I walked the roads of Neukölln, making my way slowly up Karl Marx Street.

Berlin, at night, is a beautiful, clunky city.  I imagine from the air when dusk sets, the city lights spread open like a vine, dark buildings turning a multitude of colours.  I think of Berlin as a dazzling industrial grid, a hymnbook of history, and of love and life and blood.  And dotted throughout are the established citizens who know something of sadness.

When you stroll through Berlin, occasionally by a building entrance, you’ll come across small bronze plaques in the pavement.  On them read the names of those who were taken from that building, the year in which they were taken, the concentration camp they were sent to, and the year in which they died.  These are not imposing memorials, and being underfoot they are easily missed.  The idea is to stumble upon them.  They bring you into sharp focus and take you from the trivial daydream and into the reality of past horrors.  Sometimes, when finding one at my feet, it felt as though at that exact moment, there was nowhere else I was meant to be but gazing at those names etched in bronze.

I found this experience unlike the Jewish Memorial, with its stone blocks arranged methodically into grids.  The Jewish Memorial is all around you.  And the deeper you go into it, the further from society you are.  Stone surrounds you and the city quietens to a hum, to a silence.  The ambience here is constructed.  Your world is constructed.  It is peaceful as it is painful.

I floated far up Karl Marx Street until I came to a beautiful church, radiant in floodlight.  I sat on the curb and stared up at it in awe.  It stood on an island amongst the traffic with its sun-stained bricks and its spires touching the stars.  I am not a religious man, but I do appreciate the beauty of Christian architecture. It was one of the few things my father had taught me to admire.

As I sat pondering, a homeless man asked me for a cigarette.  I was smoking American Spirit, and I rolled him one and together we sat and smoked like old chums.

‘Are you British?’ he asked, in his tough German accent.

‘Yup.’

The answer seemed to satisfy him, and we were quiet for a time.  The man beside me was filthy.  He had a sketchy brown beard and longing eyes, and what looked like shoe polish in his hair.  I could smell the booze coming from his clothes and his lungs.  There was a whole world on his face, a world far from mine.  And yet there was something familiar about him, and when at last he spoke, it was as though he knew something so empowering that for the briefest of moments I found I envied him.

‘I met someone who had power over my life,’ he said, looking up at the church.  ‘This person, they used this power against me.  I could be a dog,’ he said, ‘because that’s how everyone treats me.’  He scratched his nose with a filthy nail and squinted his eyes shut.  Ash from his cigarette fell into his beard but he made no attempt to remove it.  He wobbled slightly, and then pulled himself upright.

With the cigarette clutched between his teeth, he said, ‘Let me tell you, friend.  Let me tell you because I think you should know this; knowing and understanding are two different things.  People can know things about you, but that doesn’t mean they understand those things.  You are who you are.  If they don’t accept that, then they’re not worth anything in this life.  And believe me…’ he closed one eye and said, ‘all things in life should have value.’

This man, whose breath smelled of weeks-old whiskey, left me speechless.  He groaned as he stood, and once up, he glanced about as if he were discovering for the first time where he was.

He decided on a route, but as he entered the light of a streetlamp, he began to laugh like a man possessed.  He turned, tapped a finger against the side of his head, and shouted, ‘There are no old songs in here.  In here, it tells you everything is and should be reborn.  Through the sadness, it says, there is always hope.’

With that, he was gone, and I made my way back to Liana’s, feeling numb and stupid.

That night I dreamt of a fire and a machine that ate people, and my father and Liana were both there, and Berlin was made of glass, and the whole world was wrong somehow.  Then came a blinding light and suddenly I was on a beach and the world was suddenly put to rights.  When I woke up, for a brief moment in that early morning glare, I thought I saw my father standing in the doorway.

‘Don’t mind him,’ said Liana.  ‘He always does that.’

I glanced nervously at Robin, before sitting with Liana on the moss-covered roof.  We watched in wonder as the sun hit the earth, spreading yellows and reds through the town, colours boiling in the sky.  We shared a joint and, lying back, I read aloud some Daniil Kharms, which made us laugh and coo with excitement.  I wasn’t used to getting stoned, and reading like this was a fascinating experience.  I could see, for the first time, how carefully constructed the sentences were, how they leapt from the page and into my head and swallowed me up.

Liana told me she enjoyed breaking into abandoned buildings and exploring them, and suggested we do that now.  I declined, too paranoid and edgy.  Robin hadn’t moved.  But occasionally he’d lower the rifle and peer down the barrel at something, before hoisting it back up again.

With the dying light against her, Liana jumped up like a child at a fairground and started walking the metal girder that ran along the edge of the roof.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I said, getting up.

With her arms out for balance, and her voice taking on authority, she said, ‘If vegetables were intelligent, the onion would be the most intelligent because it knows how to make someone cry.’

Recently, too much acid had jangled her mind; turned her into a soldier of light.  Sometimes, she would answer her own questions in a funny little voice, or squint her pearl black eyes as though being struck by a thought.  Right now, she’d crossed to some other place, a world only she could navigate.

‘That’s beautiful,’ I said, hoping to pacify her.  ‘Really.  But can you come down, please?’

‘God!’ she said.  ‘I’m not going to fall.  There’s a roof down there.’

The roof she referred to was the slant that led to a freefall.  We were six floors up.  One slip and she’d tumble down, slates in tow.

Behind me, Robin let out an agonised howl.

When we got back inside, much to my relief, we cooked a meal of rice and vegetables.  As Liana prepared dinner, I leant out the window and smoked a cigarette.  Across the street, weird things were happening.  Lights flickered in someone’s apartment.  I stared at it.

‘I’m thinking of going to Prague,’ I said.

Liana turned from the pot of vegetables she was stirring.  ‘I’ve always wanted a friend in Prague.  It’ll give me a reason to visit.’

‘Well,’ I said, uncertain.  ‘I don’t know.’  I took a drag of my cigarette and my voice dropped an octave.  ‘Maybe Prague.  Or somewhere.  I’m not sure.  I’m not going home just yet.’

‘Me neither,’ Liana said.  There were other worlds in her eyes, secrets she could unlock at any given moment.  ‘I’m not going back to England,’ she said.  ’This is me now.  This is my life.’

Outside, sirens wailed in the night, like a city locked in battle.

I looked at Liana and realised just how much we’d changed; from when we’d first met each other years before at Arts College, and how the two of us had been the other’s competition, each striving for the creative tools to be the best.  Both of us throwing pain and joy and love into our work.  My paintings had always been dark, foreboding commentaries on society.  Such naivety.

Years ago, when I was volunteering for a mental health charity in my hometown, I would sit with the service users every Friday afternoon, playing dominoes, cards, board games.  We drank tea and coffee in an atmosphere that got me depressed.  Most of those I worked with were also depressed; they were schizophrenic, borderline personalities, bi-polar, and somehow when all together in one room, they were too much for me.  The feeling was one of unnerving silence, as though a horrible secret had been dropped into the room and no one was allowed to speak about it.

On one occasion, I never discovered why, one of the service users took a knife from the kitchen and slashed his arms, and the service was suspended for the day as myself and two members of staff tried to calm him down.  After the ambulance took him away, I was left with the sense that something real had happened, something agonizing, something that mattered in a world that didn’t.  The man’s pain had frightened me.

I realised then, that pain is not a singular occurrence.  It changes from moment to moment and sooner or later it buries you.  When I was a boy, I had a nervous twitch in my neck.  My father, a man of deep religious faith, filled a bucket full of ice and ducked my head into it until I learned not to be nervous anymore.

Nobody knew about that.  Nobody but Liana.

Suddenly I felt very sad and in no mood to engage with anything.  I fired my cigarette from the window and it spiralled off into the dark like a firefly.  I glanced up at the night sky where, amongst millions of stars, the blink of an airplane made its way over the city.  I gazed at it, longingly, as though looking for instruction.

Liana put a hand on my shoulder.  ‘Come on,’ she said, leading me from the window.  ‘It’s time for dinner.’

Pulling his collar up, he crossed the bridge and walked alongside the stream.  The sun was still warm and high and he began to sweat under his heavy coat.  The street trailed into a path that took him to the railway track.  He crossed it and shut the gate, careful on the ice.  The sound of the sea drifted up from somewhere ahead.

Further down, the dark blue of the Irish Sea rolled and pitched, the waves kicking at the shoreline.  He came to a pebbled beach where the sea met the shore and he stopped to take in the view.  Dotted along the rim of the beach were large wet boulders, grey and featureless and somehow, thought Myers, resembling dead seals.  He made his way carefully across the pebbles and stepped up on a boulder and looked around.  The beach was long and empty of people.  It shone and glittered wet in the light like a scatter of diamonds.  Behind him, Llwyngwril was locked in the hillside.

The waves of the Irish Sea were calling a foot from his boots.  To his right, angling into the distance, was the Cader Idris mountain range sitting jagged-like on the peninsula and half covered in snow.  Their peaks were immersed in pink cloud.  An ancient dirge to the world.  Directly above him the sky was very blue, but in the distance large black clouds loomed, black as frozen coal.

Myers walked the beach, picking up pebbles and shells and putting them in his pocket.  He applied significance to them and the act of picking them, trying to grasp some meaning, a reason for being here.  In this cold and icy place, he was a million miles from London.  There was no mania, no noise.  He stopped several times to take deep breaths, as though each breath was signing a contract with the sea.  A contract to forget the city.  To forget his father.  Myers imagined his father standing at the water’s edge, lithe and mean.  Watching.

Stop it!  Stay focused.  Think!   He had no anthracite.  He wasn’t sure how important this was to light the vigilant stove, but Higgins had warned him not to use coal or it would set fire to the oak beam above.  There were only four logs in the cottage, a box of firelighters, and no kindling.  The beach was full of wood washed ashore, so he bent down, picked up a stick and examined it.  It was wet-through and cold.  If he collected enough, dried it out, he’d have kindling to last a week.  Surely?

Resigned to his mission, he headed back to the cottage, stopped there for a cup of hot tea, grabbed two large carrier bags and went back to the beach.  He spent the next hour filling both bags with potential kindling, a lone figure on the cold beach.  He must have looked ridiculous, he thought, bending over, freezing his hands off putting twigs and wood into bags.  He felt like a child, so pretended he was one.  This is fun, he told himself.  But it wasn’t.  If the locals saw him, if he got into conversation, they would probably tell him the wood would never burn.  Too damp.  Too wet.  But if he could get the logs burning, he could dry out the kindling in front of the fire, or in front of the radiator.  He had to try.

Soon the warmth of the sun began to fade, dark clouds soaking up the light.  It got extremely cold.  He pulled his hood up.  When he got back to the cottage he laid the kindling out in front of the heater.  He was surprised to find that after an hour, some of the wood was drying.

Impressed, Myers took a photo with his phone before making his way onto the narrow roads, his boots trying to grip the icy ground.  Just round from the cottage was the local shop.  It was a tiny, almost insignificant place.  He walked in and found the shelves all but empty.  He grabbed tins of beans, frozen vegetables, a pizza, a box of firelighters, and laid it all out on the counter.  He asked for anthracite, but the shopkeeper, a friendly but suspicious man with one long eyebrow, explained there had been no delivery.  It was the weather.  No kindling either.  The whole area was out of stock.

‘You could try in Tywyn,’ he said, a voice like gravel and all business.  ‘Do you know Tywyn?’

‘I only arrived last night.’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘Just down the road.’  Anxiety in the words.  ‘Bwthyn Gwyn.’

‘Bwthyn Gwyn, eh?’  The shopkeeper was eyeing him.  ‘That hasn’t been occupied in years.’

‘Anthracite?’ Myers said.

The shopkeeper keyed another price into the register and put the item on the counter.  Myers put it in the bag.  The man scratched his eyebrow.  It looked stuck on, almost optional.  ‘Well Tywyn might have some,’ he said.  ‘But I doubt it.  We get our supply from them.’

‘Is it far?  I don’t have a car.’

The shopkeeper stopped what he was doing.  ‘You’ve got no chance then.’  There was amusement in his eyes.  ‘You won’t get that back on the bus.  Comes in bloody great sacks.’

‘When’s your next delivery?’

‘Thursday.  How long are you staying?’

‘I’m not sure.’  He paused.  ‘I thought I’d get some peace and quiet.’

The shopkeeper chuckled.  ‘Well,’ he said.  ‘There’s a man -a deliveryman- in the village.  If you can find him, he might be able to bring you some back.’

Myers smiled, picked up the bag.  ‘Thanks a lot.’  He didn’t ask for the deliveryman’s name, or how to find him.  If he had to, he’d carry the anthracite himself.