In his spacious London apartment, he held regular parties.  Weekends were crazy.  People would fuck in the corner and others would write on the walls.  Joe was fiercely 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 said.

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 The Interpretation of Numberless Worlds – but was very secretive of its content so no one ever found out what it was about.  Joe was a mysterious 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, man, fucking circles, overlapping each other.’  He fixed his gaze on me, desperate and pained.  ’It gets so you can’t breathe,’ he said.  ’We don’t serve anything but the circles.’

At the time, I never understood him.

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 silent monsters.  Whatever system Joe belonged to had been wiped clean by the walls of 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; and she sat herself reverse cowgirl and slid 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, sweetie?’

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, as they sat together.

‘I do this,’ said Lucy.  She lit a cigarette and shook the match out.  ‘But I go to men’s houses.  I get paid a lot more doing that.’

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, a strip of pain across his lower back.  ‘Where do you live?’ he asked her.

‘In the city.  I have my own place.’

‘So 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.  A great silence engulfed them.  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 a great unease.  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 place, Gregory was drunk and depressed 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.  He was properly drunk.

‘Were you a virgin?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said.  ‘Was I good?’

‘You made me come,’ she lied.

Gregory chuckled, but it was sad and alone.  ‘You’re pretty, you know that.’

Helen couldn’t help but blush.  She tucked a strand of loose 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.

‘You have nice skin,’ she said, stroking his arm with her fingers.  ‘Usually we get old men in here and their skin is horrible and they smell funny,’ she said.  ‘We 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, surprising them both.  ‘I have six months.’

She gasped and put a hand on his shoulder.  ‘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 didn’t know what to do.

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

Helen glanced away, still in shock, and with her voice breaking she said, ‘I was at school.’

All of a sudden she was very lost.

‘Shit.’  He began to focus.  ‘Is this your first job?’

She opened her mouth to speak but could form no words.  Instead, slowly, she closed her eyes and nodded.

Gregory left her sitting naked on the bed.  On the way out he thanked the madam and made his way down the stairs, into the night of Christchurch city and on to the bars to get loaded.

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; one of the few things my father taught me to enjoy.

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.

The cottage was spacious, much bigger than he had imagined.  It was very old with black slate flooring and an open living space with a kitchen to one side.  At one end, under the chimneybreast, was a vigilant stove.  His means for warmth.  Oak beams stretched overheard and the walls were the colour of rough limestone.  With no individual bricks, the walls were not straight or even but jutted out in great lumps as though they had been pressed into place by a giant hand.  And all over, everywhere, something oddly familiar.  Something dressed in mystery.  And that smell?  Old oak soaked in lime-wash.  The same scent his mother must once have known.

Myers went through each room, turning on all the lights, pulling the sheets off the furniture and sneezing in the dust he disturbed.  In the back room were two single beds.  No duvets.  On a table lay three rag dolls.  He picked one up and held it, put it to his face.  It felt familiar.  Still with the doll in his hand he found the bathroom.  It was like a blue cave, utterly different to the rest of the cottage.  It had the same stone but was painted blue, like being underwater.  To one side was a cast iron bath with gold and white taps, reminiscent of the 40s and out of place against the lagoon-like paint.  He turned them on, made sure they worked.  On opposite walls, mirrors facing each other gave the appearance of endless rooms, endless Henry’s, endless dimensions.

There was only one room upstairs, the master bedroom.  It was warmer here and not just in temperature.  It was homely and inviting.  The same oak beams of the lounge reached diagonally above the bed, crossing over each other to form an X.  When Myers knelt on the bed, he could look through this X to the living room below.  The vigilant stove was at the end, black and smooth.  Waiting.

Satisfied with his exploration he went downstairs, clutching the doll to his chest.  The cottage seemed to be in working order.  But there was no kindling, no anthracite.  This meant no fire.  He found an electric radiator and plugged it in but had to stay close.  The walls and floor were like ice.  He tightened his scarf about his neck and put on his hat.  The stove still had some logs inside, black and singed.  He figured he could get them burning once he had more wood and anthracite.

Hunger.  He searched the cupboards of the kitchen and found a tin of baked beans.  He turned on the cooker, heated the hobs, then the beans in a saucepan.  He had ham sandwiches in his bag, and together with the beans he filled himself up until he couldn’t eat anymore.  He spent the rest of his first night sitting by the radiator, wondering what he was doing here.  He sensed that somewhere, hidden in this cottage, this village, was an answer.  He listened.  The window frames creaked in the cold.  A clock ticked on the wall.  And on his lap, he clutched the rag doll.

Since leaving London, Myers had caught three different trains.  He navigated his way through a circus of stations, his heart racing as he found the platforms.  At each rung of the journey he lugged his gear, awkwardly, the weight of the backpack pulling his spine left and right.  At every station trains fed on people, filling themselves like hungry machines.  It was chaos in perfect harmony, the kind of chaos that left Myers in a state of perpetual search.  Everyone else seemed to understand, to walk, to run, to harmoniously find their way, as though the ethereal world of train stations was something closer to them than it ever could be to Myers.

A throng of bodies waited eagerly to embark.  The buzz of conversation, the glare of impatience.  This was modern interaction on a grand scale.  A mad arena.  Myers took stock.  We are the gladiators.

It was dark now and with London behind him he was on the coastline of Wales, the final leg of the journey.  His nerves twitched.  He couldn’t see outside for the night had swallowed the day and the window reflected the insides of the train, a twin Myers fidgeting in his seat.  Briefly, he thought of his father and felt pain hurl itself into his throat.

Turning his face to the glass he found he was pale and sick.  His eyes were dark and tired, exhaustion wrapped around him like a blanket.  Years of working on building sites had given him a strong and wiry frame, neat and solid, but now he looked worn away, perhaps from the journey, or perhaps from something else.  He rubbed his fingers against his calloused palms, a habit he’d acquired as a youngster, and tried to see past the ghost staring at him in the reflection.

With the black outside, he could no longer tell what direction the train was going.  It could have been a rocket ship tumbling through space, no correspondence with the Earth.  The train stopped and started in pockets of station light, changed directions twice, split in half once.  Myers grabbed his bags and hauled them to the rear carriage, still unsure if it was the right thing to do.  His carp bag, heavy with carpentry tools, clipped the headrests of seats as he went down the aisle.

As the journey continued, the train became quiet.  He was thankful for that at least.  And now he had a table to himself with plenty of legroom and the calming sense of solitude.  He stretched out and tried in earnest to soothe away his anxieties.  He supposed that when he reached Llwyngwril, if he reached Llwyngwril, he would probably be the last person to disembark.

The dark whirled by.  The carriage rattled.  He’d never been so far from home and his feelings were mixed, as though he could not confirm or authenticate his journey.  As he stared into the dark, lost in his thoughts, the sound of a pub grew loud in his ears…

…The bitter taste of scotch down his throat.  A glass rattling with ice.  Myers licked his lips and scanned the barroom.  It moved in firelight like a thousand orange snakes.  Cigarette smoke was attached to the light and old drunks were sitting at the bar.  There were paintings, chairs.  Two men played pool, the clop of the cue and sink of the ball.  Opposite him, John Higgins, his father’s best friend, was still wearing his funeral suit and looking very old, a roll-up hanging from the centre of his mouth.  He was tired, his movement heavy.  He yanked away his cigarette and spoke through a rim of smoke.

‘Years ago your parents owned a cottage.’  He coughed the words, his voice full of phlegm.  ‘You were born there.  Did you know that?’  Myers shook his head.  ‘When they left, they gave me the deeds.’

John Higgins slapped a key on the table, slid it across.

‘Time you went on a journey, Henry.’

Myers nodded and the train came back.  The lights flickered.  John Higgins in the window, face printed against the dark.  Holding the key up to the light, Myers turned it in his fingers.  He wondered what more it might unlock, for already it had drawn him into this journey.

He’d left nothing behind, had few possessions.  In a moment of brazen courage he’d quit his job at the construction site, gave his month’s notice at the bedsit, said goodbye to his friend Joe Harris, and said goodbye to London.  Now the unknown ahead.  The fear.  The adventure.  The human transition, the spiritual transaction.  He wondered, deeply, what new life he was buying into.  His father’s words came to him from beyond the grave.

‘Life’s a train ride, Henry.  There’s only one stop that counts.’

Thirty-seven years of living in his father’s shadow, and now two months after his death, that shadow still clung to him.

Higgins said the cottage wasn’t far from the station.  But it was late and Myers would have to find it in pitch black.  He had a torch in his backpack.  Careful planning.  But what if he couldn’t find it?  What if I’m stranded in the middle of nowhere with no bed, no warmth?  I’ll freeze.  To be brave, he wondered, to feel power and not necessarily have it.  Feeling would be enough.  He turned back to his reflection.  Beyond him the dark.  The sky and the land were the same.  And now, occasionally, bits of orange light broke through, sugar in the black, bouncing in the distance.  Signs of life.

The girls had walked many miles so they stopped to eat a sandwich.  They said hello to the old man who returned the greeting and smiled.  He asked them where they were from and they told him Cambridge, East Anglia, and soon they were sitting beside him on the bench and talking.  They spoke about their cottage and the old man told them he once knew the owner now lost long into his past.

The girls asked if he was enjoying his day and he said he was, that these walks were tough on his feet but good for his heart and here on the coastline he could admire the solemnity of man washing away in the sea; but he never ventured much further for he did not enjoy the towns.  Meeting people on the trail was fine, he explained, for these events were quickly over.  But in a town he might get caught in conversation that confused him like an obstacle or crossword where words became marbles in his mouth.  He didn’t know why this was but ventured a guess that perhaps it had something to do with the persistence of man when among stone and iron creations.

He told them he had lived in these parts all his life and he thought it was wonderful that the young could find such peace in his home, and they agreed, and he asked them if they were here looking for their identity.  It seems to me, he said, that these days it was harder to come by an identity and he asked them if they had looked for it among the rocks or the trees or the sea and the sky.  They considered his words but felt they had already found themselves and the old man chuckled and said this couldn’t be true for the young always feel they have everything in order but can never tell the difference between the reality and the fairytale.

He explained that as they got older their lives would unravel like saps of thought where knowledge would spread and learn from the years they had left before them.  But it was such things the old man didn’t wish to sound wise for he too was still a student of all there was and only the stars or the warmth of a fire contained any truth.  He had grown philosophical, he explained and the old man lifted a leathery hand and swatted his words back into the air, and the girls smiled and when they finished their food and had sat for some time looking at the roll of the land they finally stood and bid farewell and carried on with their journey.