Childhood - left unattended, getting lost. Things that happen to every child, and are never forgotten. But it isn't clear which comes first. You could argue I got lost because I was left unattended. But my stepmother only realised she had left me unattended because I had gone off and lost myself. It needed me to do something first to create subsequent explanations for other people, a rationalisation for how the thing had happened in the first place. Later on in life we get lost in other ways, but the sense of being lost remains the same. It's not that we ourselves forget something - the way to a place, a conviction or a belief; it's that those things forget us - a different kind of mother turns her back, and, as a result, we lose our footing - a getting lost which isn't our fault, because we have no ascendancy over its causes.

We had been having a picnic near the bottom of the hill, just away from the footpath. My route was more direct and also less circumspect. I might otherwise have avoided the brambles, but it did not occur to me that there were easier or more difficult ways to attain the same objective. I was carried along by my eyes, which had become instinctively fixed on the point within which that landscape seemed to concentrate itself - the place where the curve of the hill flattened into a line, and above which there was nothing but sky. Of course, my quarry receeded as fast as my running feet approached it - there is always more to a hill than meets the eye. But ultimately I knew I would get there. Indeed, the squat trees had already subsided; the brambles were disappearing; and, at last, the ground flattened out into the shape on which I had fixed my eyes. I could have taken that opportunity to look beyond the town, toward the valleys and ultimately the mountains that surrounded it. But instead I turned my head, only interested in the place from which I had come. Nevertheless, I must have had some instinct for alterity, for what I saw now, clearly before me, was a different town made alien by my flight from it. I wanted both to distill it and negate it, to reduce it to its essence, but also to release something fundamentally different from its essence - perhaps, somehow, the sense of all it could not be, so that I could put something between myself and its own implicit sense of identity. It was as if its waterways would only make sense when I could see them as coloured bands between the stone streets, as if its four gates contributed less to its underlying meaning than the continuous wall within which they stood, and which I could now hold squarely between my eyes. I think I half imagined that I might find the town was only a part of something greater - a town within a town, or else that the landscape about it was greater than the hillocks and little glades of trees where half an hour before we had set out our tartan cloth. I thought I might see everything hovering in the void, a town nestled among hills, and, beyond it, nothing but a few comets and balls of rock whirling soundlessly through the ether.

"It's security," someone said to me - "the sense of security. To hold all the world before you, so that you can see your place in it." I remain unconvinced. I wanted to go away from that place and leave no tracks. But it was not fear or regret that made me burst into tears a moment later; it was what I suddenly realised I had left behind - a guardian reduced to a smudge of red outside a town reduced to a shape - a private intimacy I could not see how to recapture.

Whatever sense of desolation I felt though was short-lived. I was not alone, even if at first I had seen nothing through my tears. Wandering in that same high place above the town was a girl about my age; she must have come up the footpath, but the fact she had no guardian didn't seem to concern her. Doubtless, our isolation should have united us in that windswept place; but when she realised that I was watching her, and walked toward me desultorily, she did not seem to share my sense of loss. If she did, she felt it in a different way, and one that I could not have understood.

"Do you think that we can be friends?" I asked shyly. Perhaps an odd way to start a conversation, but I didn't know any better.

"I don't think so," she said decisively. "I'm going to be a nun, and nuns don't have friends." She seemed to derive a certain satisfaction from the idea - not exactly that she wanted to hurt me by denying me something, but that some greater force precluded her from acting the way she wished, and a part of her acceded unconsciously to its implicit sense of authority.

"Why don't nuns have friends?"

"Because they worship someone secret, whose name you aren't allowed to say. It goes like this ..." She carelessly scrawled a kind of insignia in the sand.

I wasn't interested. If we couldn't be friends, then I had little time for the man or god capable of reciprocating her affection. Already I was hoping that she might relent, and that some day - perhaps next week, in fact - we could repeat our trip up the hill and watch the town as it appeared by night, when all its definitions would be reversed, like the underside of a dream.

"Why are you here, all alone?" she asked. "Did you get lost?"

I might have asked her exactly the same question, but instead I just assented.

"Did you run away?"

"Yes."

"So now you're lost. But I suppose everyone could see you here, if they bothered to look." She was looking down on the town dispassionately, as if it belonged to her, and somehow she despised the implicit claim it had upon her.

"What do you suppose you'll do?" she continued.

"I should go back, before it's too late."

"Can you see your mother from here?"

I pointed hesitantly at the red blob, far below us. "I think that's her."

"Then go there," she said simply. "It takes much less time to go down than to get up."

"I want you to come too," I said. "Because if it isn't her, then I'll have to come back here, and then I'll be all alone."

She made no reply, but seemed content to follow me. It wasn't my stepmother, after all. It was a drape of red fabric snagged in a bush, something whirled from nowhere by the wind, an elementary symbol of neglect. I would have cried again, but she had her hand in mine, and already I trusted her, as if her very aloofness were some kind of implicit assurance that she knew the way, and her small head held the answers to more questions than I could ever ask.

We reached the bottom of the hill, and she followed me two or three more streets to the avenue where I lived. Without my stepmother, things felt strange, and though I knew exactly which house I was supposed to enter, the prospect of entering it without her vaguely unsettled me, as if the same woman who had eluded me on the hillside would elude me here, too, and I would only find an empty house, and not know what to do with myself there.

"Is that where you live, then?" she repeated, more to confirm that her duty as my guardian was at an end, than any other thing. "Is it? Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Then tell them Zalman's daughter brought you home."

My curiosity couldn't help but get the better of me - "Zalman's daughter?"

"Christiana," she said, almost regretfully, as if I were trying to take something away from her. "Zalman's daughter," she repeated firmly, reestablishing something, a point of safety." Now go home, and don't get lost any more."

 

Uncle Pedro sat me on his knee. As usual, he was talking about women's backs, how good they were, and how much he regretted not being born a woman, so that he could have one himself. The conversation seemed absurd, but my stepmother evidently took it more seriously than I did, frowning when I burst into laughter and ran out of the room. She brought me back - "That's disrespectful," she said shortly - somewhat absent-mindedly, - as if she had dropped something she had been holding, and retrieved it without looking at what it was. Now Pedro was talking about something else - the cost of roses in Flanders. Not poppies, he would affirm with comical significance, raising an eyebrow. Roses, dear lady. Then, of course, one had to discuss the best way to make friends with a cat. They are very independent, but, you know, they have a soft side, too - a soft spot, so to speak. Right under their tummy, in fact. Perhaps there was some pattern to his thoughts; evidently my stepmother believed there must be, for she listened attentively. But Pedro just seemed to enjoy talking; he would never shut up. It was almost as if, being so fat that he couldn't move around and do a lot, words were the only thing he had left.

I was bored; I asked permission to leave the table. Uncle Pedro was little more than a crumpled newspaper and a moustache, slouched on the settee in a fog of cigar smoke. He drank port; through the course of the afternoon his speech became slower; the words became shorter. Finally he would lapse into monosyllabic irrelevance, and, as I went past, put out a hand and give the top of my head a brisk rub. Perhaps I should have curled up at his feet, or brought back a bone for him. I felt like a stray in my own home.

From the garden I could see the hill; they called it the Law - a Gaelic word, I believe, meaning no more than a mound of some kind. But the name had always intrigued me, as if to climb that hill were both a transgression and even a strange kind of duty. There were other houses too, but ours was closest to the foot of the slope - an ideal situation, since we enjoyed a full prospect of the country while remaining, nevertheless, a decisive part of the town.

I went out into the garden once more. Christiana was there, picking cherries, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"What are you doing here?" I asked instinctively, half pleased to see her, half conscious that nevertheless she owed me some kind of explanation.

"Who's business is it for you to ask me what I'm doing?" she returned tartly. "You're just a boy; but I'm going to be a nun."

"Well, I live here ..." I began. Perhaps I myself wasn't overly compelled by the argument, feeling, as I did, that living in a specific place hardly constituted a claim to anything in particular; but it seemed hard to find anything more definitive for my defence.

"And so do I ... if I choose," she echoed. "My father owns everything, so I can live anywhere I want."

"We could build a house at the end of the garden," I reflected. "And then you'd always be able to come to tea. I don't think my stepmother would mind, so long as you didn't tread on anything."

But already she was shaking her head. "It's too warm to live in your garden," she said with careless resolution, "and nuns don't like the warm." Just as before, she seemed to take a strange pleasure in self-denial, as if thereby she could requite her conscience for something she believed she had done wrong. Or no, it was subtler than that -- as if she wished she had had the power to transgress in the first place, and was using this purposeful cynicism to give credence to the possibility that she actually had.

"It's not very warm," I contested. "If you keep still, and there's a big wind, you get cold in no time at all."

"I like to make my teeth chatter with the cold," she retorted, with a mixture of eagerness and resignation. "After I've had my bath, I put the window open and stand there. Once I got them to chatter for ten minutes, and they only stopped for a second because my jaw was tired. And I pull my hair, to help make it fall out. It isn't easy being a nun, so I have to practise, you know." By now she had finished picking cherries. The basket was full, and, after looking at me thoughtfully for a moment, she produced a handkerchief from her pocket - "Tie it around my head, like so ..." - Already I guessed that she was destined for some ministerial errand, and that, if this was not the acknowledged garb of a nun, yet in some sense it stood in the stead of something similar. My first thought was that she was bound for the dirty street-ends of the centre, to distribute her benificence much like the soup kitchens which sprang up there at dusk. But we did not stop in the market square, and she passed the hospital without a glance, although I had smiled hopefully in its general direction. She neither paused for the beggars under the awnings nor the tinkers packing up their wares. Indeed, it was only when she reached the long line of jetties to which the fishing boats were moored that her pace slackened, and, hand in hand, we walked together to the end of the pier. Everything smelled of seaweed and rotten wood.

"The sea is very hungry," she said, throwing a handful of cherries as far away as she could. "It only gets to eat rocks and fish, but I know it would like cherries, because I asked if it liked fruit, and it didn't know what fruit tastes like. If you throw them in the black bit between the waves then it swallows them up. Or sometimes it spits them out, but it might eat them again later when no one's looking."

She neither turned to me, nor needed to; the peremptory tone alone was enough. As I suspected, she made no complaint as I dipped my own hand into the basket of cherries, and when they were all gone she left me with the basket to carry, and we turned back toward the town once more.

"Did the sea like his cherries?" I asked.

"Yes, he did," she replied shortly.

"Do you think we gave him enough?"

"If you give him too many then he'll get stomach ache."

She was wearing the same dress she had worn when we first met on the Law. Somehow I had the impression that she wore it often, although it was hard to say exactly how. The strong contrasts of the black and white blouse seemed to define her, and I couldn't imagine her being any other way.

"What else does the sea like doing?"

"He likes reading."

"Do you think he would like to read The Pilgrim's Progress?" I asked on impulse.

"He's already read The Pilgrim's Progress."

"Did he give it back?" I couldn’t help asking sceptically.

"He'll give it back when he's finished with it." Perhaps vaguely aware that she had contradicted herself, she pressed on: "He's read all my favourite books. But I don't think he's finished with them yet, because he's very slow. I think he might be dyslexic."

"Don't you mind him keeping them?"

"He's not keeping them. The sea doesn't keep anything. He just looks after things for a while."

“I would get in trouble for that,” I said thoughtfully.

"My father has a horse whip behind the door,” she added brightly, inspired by the idea. “Oh yes, he whips me within an inch of my life; he doesn't scruple to hold his hand. But I don't give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry."

Now she was reciting from a different book - a kind of palimpsest of other books, their leaves intermingled by the swell, and woven together with just enough of the present that I felt its claim upon me. Nevertheless, it was also a book fully cognisant of the fact it remained to be written, and therefore one which could not be judged, forever compelled to mean exactly what she wanted it to mean; indeed, perhaps it was this ability of hers to seem to live above judgment that most drew me towards her. For an instant I saw beyond the caprice of her overbearing martyrdom, and what I saw was the brilliant, penetrating blue of some sky which must have lain far beyond the harbour, and it was a sky filled with motion of all kinds, and the freedom to move in all directions. But later, as we sat together in Zalman's garden, I could feel the greyness once more creeping in beneath the blue, like mist settling softly on the land or wafting in gently from the sea. I heard the thin sound of the wind in the long telephone lines that sagged across the rambling, distinguished and yet somehow everlastingly grey grounds of the estate. It was like a country within a country, but it was a country in which nothing ever began, and nothing ended, either, like a servant whose master has fallen asleep. We sat beneath the tree; I seem to remember she was trying to hold a flimsy parasol to give more credence to the fact we not only understood but even enjoyed the heavy book in a strange tongue she had stolen from the study. As if, by making ourselves unfamiliar, we ourselves could meet with unfamiliarity. We were both comfortable and uncomfortable, beneath that garish, impossible umbrella, spelling the unknown words in a lack of shade, but at least sharing our incomprehension together, as if thereby we opposed it on two fronts.

She shut the book with a bang.

"Let's escape together," she said. "Do you want to escape?"

"Where would we escape to?"

"It doesn't matter. You can choose," she said, although I sensed that my potential choices were strictly limited.

"Well, we could escape over the Law," I hazarded.

"That's boring. There's just more hills, and then more hills after them."

"Then we'll escape over the sea."

"That's where I want to escape to, too. But you'd have to build a boat first."

"Do you think we could steal a boat?"

"Nuns aren't allowed to steal things. Except little things, sometimes. You build a boat, and then we'll escape. It isn't a proper escape if you don't make the boat yourself."

This seemed a good idea to me, and I told her so.

"Do you promise, though? You won't forget?"

"Yes, I promise."

"Then close your eyes, because I've got something special to show you."

I closed my eyes, but couldn't keep them closed for long. The garden was full of hillocks and changes of gradient, where the remains of gravel paths had spilt into the weedy undergrowth, and here and there a paving slab, skewwhiff and covered in moss, would make you trip. She led me to the tumbled ruins of a shed behind the house. Hard against the bounding wall, the structure had never seen sunlight, and everything about it breathed a sense of mildew and decay.

"You can pull them off as easy as looking at them," she said. It was true; years of neglect had rusted anything that might have held the shed together. Already its walls had started to sag, and the wood was so rotten its only clear support was evidently the effort of will it made to stay standing.

"You'd better take a piece with you, so you can plan the dimensions," she said. "You'll have to do lots of calculations to make sure it's sea-worthy, and it bears at the right depth, and that sort of thing." As usual, she was both vague and precise, confident about the need to plan and even a few concrete details that needed to be addressed, but entirely wishful about whatever that nebulous thing was - vision, determination, practicality - that ultimately carried a thought to some material conclusion. For myself, I was as happy to believe in things as she was, and her own sense of vision indeed made up for a deficiency of mine. So I pulled away one of the boards which was already hanging by a single nail, and put it under my arm.

Dinner was monotonous, as I imagined all dinners here must be, along with every other meal. Zalman assured me that only interesting people visited him, and therefore I must be interesting myself. I did not follow the logic, since it seemed to me that any friend of Christiana's had liberty to come here, and I knew I had offended him by my silence, although in some strange way I also felt I was destined to offend him, simply by my existence.

"Do you play chess?" he asked, irrelevantly.

I shook my head.

"A pity," he continued. "It's such an interesting game; I play it very much myself."

He looked at me, as if trying to ascertain something. "But then you already know that, don't you? Deep down, I mean."

I wanted to say that I had no idea what he was talking about, but, taken metaphorically, I had to acknowledge a kind of truth to his assertion. I already knew that he was authoritarian and cold, and that the hand of logic had meddled everywhere at the expense of beauty throughout his mansion. Deep down, as he put it, this seemed as fair a description of chess as any for one who had never played the game and had only hearsay and prejudice to go on. But there was a winter chill in his words, and I felt unsettled by his allusive approach to conversation. It was somehow as if, I suspected vaguely, all his facts were old and dead; they were true, and they were facts, and you could do things with them. But they belonged to prehistory, and if I accepted the call, the summons of his speech, he would use language to uproot me and rework the world about me.

"So this is the game that we are playing,” I retorted. I didn’t exactly mean it as a challenge, but rather to force this speculative conversation to the impasse of yes or no, at which point I could regain my footing. However, the lack of conviction in my words only helped to perpetuate the general mood of somnolent abstraction, and I think for a moment we both glimpsed something which could only have been possible where the fabric of language spreads thin; it was a kind of shape created out of the differences between us, a one-sided certainty upon which we had equal claims, but which in its entirety meant two completely different things, and accordingly only the edge of which each of us was capable of perceiving. In the stillness, somewhere far away, a bell had started to chime.

"Not really.” The mood had was broken, and I felt a sense of relief. All that remained was anger or dismissal, for what else could he fall back upon? But Zalman would not be hurried.

“Chess could be a name for this game, but I would not say for certain that it is chess,” he pursued. “Nevertheless, it shares some similarities with it, namely that for the weaker player, only one strategy is infallible." He spoke quietly, stroking his moustache. Then he looked at me challengingly, as if to see if I knew what that strategy was. After a long pause, - "The man who doesn't play at all," he finally conceded. Infused with irony, the comment had become a mere commiseration: I could not have guessed this answer, and, even if I had done so, its knowledge would not avail me.

"But he hasn't won," he added emphatically, as if now he were narrating something that had really happened, or even were taking place this very instant. "He hasn’t won at all; the stronger player has won by default. A game has still been played, and there is, as there must always be, one victor - one loser. One doesn't get out of this by refusing to play. Neither in this game, nor, indeed, in the game of life, either." – “And yet, who would refuse to play a game of chess?" he concluded both sharply and persuasively. Now it was a threat again - the threat of the inexorable. It was as if he thought the attraction of a game of chess were too great for any sane man to turn down, even if he knew deep down that it assured his destruction.

"Of course, I play on a slightly larger board than yours … Knight to B3," he murmured under his breath. I stood up; I wanted to stand up, and I found that I was standing up. The observation made no sense; I had done what I intended to do, surely? But I had also fulfilled the instructions awaiting me at B3, wherever that was, and somehow my intention and desire had become separated, even if, after the fact, they agreed that they tended toward the same end. Then I noticed that Zalman’s hand was fidgeting slyly of its own accord, as if it wanted to test some combination of moves. Catching sight of my thoughtful expression, he frowned.

"Quite so. It's nearly nine," he said suddenly, looking at his watch. "I had better let the dogs loose. I always let them loose at nine. There's just time for you to get your hat and coat before I do, if you were quick."

"I didn't bring a hat," I said.

"Then you'll have a competitive advantage."

"Please could you wait until I get to the gate," I began.

"Please could I wait until you get to the gate ... And then what?"

"And then I could tell you that I was at the gate."

"And how would you tell me that you were at the gate?"

"I could shout very loudly."

"Maybe I wouldn't hear you. Maybe I would think you were at the gate long before, and set the dogs loose on you?"

I smiled, pretending to enter into this joke of his; and he, in turn, smiled back, assuring me it was a joke. But it was as if he didn't really want to convince me. Instead he wanted me to get lost in the place that his smile was coming from, go down the wrong staircase and then try to come back through a passageway that would never connect.

"The fact is, young fellow, those who are in, are in; and those who are out, are out. Just now, you're inside, where it's warm and cosy. But you don't belong here. You belong over the hill, in a different place. And to get to that different place of yours, you have to cross my garden. Now the rules of the garden are different from the rules of the house. They don't have feelings, and they don't have memories. They just have purposes, but their purposes are blind, and you can outwit them in two ways. By being cunning, or by being determined not to get caught. I wouldn't give a brass farthing for your guile, or anyone else's on a dark night like this, so let's not be frightened; let's just run as fast as we can, and never look back, eh?"

But for all my fear, and in despite of his injunction, I could not forbear a last glance back as I ran toward the gates. As if on cue, Zalman was framed in the rhombus of the hallway, waving his arm - "Keep running, keep running; you're almost there," he said faintly. And then there was a scuffling among the bushes, and suddenly a volley of barks. I had closed the heavy gates behind me long before those lithe silhouettes, howling at their loss, had reached the prescribed limits of their realm. But I wished then, as even now sometimes I wish, that I had abided long enough to see them for what they were, since afterward both their ferocity and the narrowness of my escape were forever magnified in my dreams.

 

I took a knife from the kitchen and began to carve a miniature model of Christiana's boat-to-be. The bell rang in the hallway. It was the priest. He looked down absent-mindedly as he passed me, as if he felt he should apologise for something, but had forgotten what it was. Then he was on the staircase, and moving desultorily toward the landing above me. As usual, the black book had seized his hand, like a small dog he could not shake off, and, as he passed, I felt the anaemic wash of resignation and defeat that spread out in his wake. I thought of boulders and dust, and the fragments that remained. My mother and he would drink tea together and discuss scripture. It was very hard to understand - for them, for us, for the world. It was very hard to understand, he would repeat, before lapsing into reverent silence, as though this were an answer in itself. And so they, the two of them, would meditate on all that could not be explained, the apparent contradictions that shielded us from the light.

I was not permitted to take tea with them. Or rather, I was permitted, but not in practice tolerated. It was as if some interdict had been written, and then placed face down on the table between us, and we could only guess at what it said, although some of us evidently had stronger opinions than others on the matter. I didn't care. I watched through the keyhole, always a favourite vantage point, preferring to see them both bounded by that iron abraxas which would keep them in, knowing that at any moment I could replace the key and snuff out their little life forever. The priest was trying to explain the Trinity once more. It was a theme to which he perpetually returned, although it seemed less that he was fascinated by it than that he was pursued by it. He did not want to explain it, and yet there would always be some new slant, some new intonation, or a pause in just the right place, which would unlock - if not the meaning, then one of many doors that kept us from the meaning, although who knew how many more doors might yet remain? "One God, Three Persons. All three in unity with the One. But indivisibly Three, and indivisibly One. Not Three deviant from the One, or One diluted into Three. And so it is that ..." And with that "And so it is that ..." I sometimes felt, against myself, a little sunshine breaking through the clouds, as those four simple words - One and Three and God and Persons - became linked with - and asserted as the substance of - a hundred other associations I could not have guessed in advance. I might not have believed in the words themselves, but in their ability to associate with other words and thus make connections with disparate things, it was as if their potential alone were a kind of power; and I would draw circles on the floor, inscribing "I", "You", "He", "She," - and imagine to myself the emotion I felt as I brought each one to the fore in my mind, and then combined it with one of the others, trying to see if what resulted could think for itself, if it was at peace, and what the colour was of the dew upon its brows. Then I imagined a Trinity of Past, Present and Future, placing She in the Past and He in the Future, heaping by turns nostalgia upon the one and wonder upon the other, seeking from each the authenticity both my mother and the priest seemed to lack.

Now he was standing in the doorway, looking over the universe I had redefined, which conveniently stretched no further than the balusters of the stairway to the left and the door jamb and carpet rail to the right.

"Well, that's not right," he said at last, breathing heavily. "He has to go at the start, since He was in the beginning, and forever will be. As for the rest, though ..." But as for the rest, the combination of circles, stars and arrows, he was unable to decide. One piece was out of place, that was plain. And, with one piece out of place, how could any of the rest make sense? After a fashion, I saw that he had taken refuge in the Trinity because it was undemanding. He would take a few cautious steps forward in the way of association, just enough to literalise his abstractions and give them form. But as for which went first, or which caused which - his mind misted over. Content with the fusion of Unity and Difference, content with every detail of the world to which he might expose this stern oxymoron, he would have been as unwilling to ascribe ultimate causality as to have added a paragraph to Genesis himself. A regretful shepherd, in his eyes I sometimes saw the ghosts of his flock - sometimes, on the contrary, they loitered altogether more materially about the garden, tapping at the windows, or spilling out onto the street, - and I saw how he carried them, the idea of them, lightly and tenderly, like a bundle of dry twigs, even if they were a burden to him, all the same. I knew I would despair if I ever saw Christiana's face among them, and several times I wishfully dreamed that the priest had somehow got his bottom stuck in a bucket, and I had bobbed him off from the shore, cerise cassock and surplice flying - and perhaps even abetted by a purple bedsheet, - to be swept far away by the same, stern winds of faith that had brought him hither.

The priest had finished beholding the miracle in the stairwell. He was on the point of asking me something, but my eyes must already have told him that I would not know the answer. Not my ignorance: it was my own lack of faith he must have sensed, and maybe this was why he could not leave the thought of me alone. But I had a belief which did not start from the Bible, even if perhaps it reencountered it somewhere. I could not be certain, since, courtesy of Christiana's undiscriminating largesse, the household copy had recently joined the stacks of Neptune's nightly reading, and I was unsure quite when to anticipate its return.

"Next time I come, remind me to bring you something," he said. "I had the thought just now. It's a book, but I think you'll like it. I read it when I was young, about your age, in fact, and it explained things. It explained things so well ... Your mother would understand, I know, because she's a very sensitive lady. She would see straight to the heart of it." Beside him, my mother had assumed a strange attitude, as if she felt she had been summoned on purpose to overhear something, but also had to pretend she was only there by accident. Now, seeing that he had finished, she said something about his being too kind, and he said something about not being kind at all. Failing to forsee a productive argument, I went upstairs to my bedroom and opened the window. The front garden was now almost empty; most of the priest's parishioners either had other business to attend to or had given up all hope of seeing him again. But an old man in a hat and an old woman in a shawl were still sitting on the grass next to the blackberry bush, and looked up sadly at me; they were little more than the clothes they inhabited.

"He's finishing his cup of tea," I shouted.

They nodded and smiled faintly, satisfied, but a little troubled, all the same. Then they stood up, as if conversations were formal things and it was bad manners to conduct them sitting down. The way the old woman cocked her head, I could feel the question coming: "And what else, my dear?"

"He's eating a piece of cake."

Satisfied, they slowly sat down once more and prepared to wait. I was going to add that it wasn't a big piece of cake, but I felt that one lie was bad enough, and therefore any superfluous embellishment was inexcusable, - not to mention the fact it probably would have had them both standing up again. Either way, I had broken the monotony of their waiting, and also reminded them why they were waiting. Fortified doubly in this way, I hoped the priest would not disappoint them when at length he opened the door to gather them up again.

 

*

 

"Have you finished my boat yet?" she demanded. But I had not finished the boat; I had not even started on the boat. In lieu of it, there was the prototype, in defence of which I could only assert that it was a prototype, and I had made it. Nevertheless, occupying as it did some strange and inescapable state midway between finished and unbegun, it came as no surprise to either of us that my mother had contrived to lose it in her pocket - an innocent enough mistake, and an innocent enough fate to befall a well-intentioned but somehow permanently nascent idea.

“So you haven’t even begun; you’ve shot yourself in the foot at the starting pistol; you can’t even raise the conjecture to move from there to here,” she added automatically, as if she were searching around in the space that was left over, where idioms and meanings overlapped one another like a dark sky among the rain, and discarding everything she found. It was an innocent, propitious place she was combing over, however insolent and stricken it must have appeared to her, and I saw that her anger was in fact no different from her martyrdom; alike, they were a brooding, bitter search for finalities, infused with an excess of emotion in compensation for deficiency of faith.

“What sort of being are you, you can’t even make a boat? How are you ever going to survive in this life of mine?” she persisted, with such absolute conviction that for a moment I wondered if it were true, and, like a laying on of hands, only a ghost had trespassed upon her possibility. In fact, I could only hold her by the hands; my emotions were without purchase, having nowhere to begin, and I did not want to listen to or become caught up within her accusations. In her enthusiasm, I reminded her instead, she seemed to have overlooked a fundamental fact, namely that days have hours, and boats have parts, and in order to achieve anything we are dependant on our feet and hands, obstructing the use of which there are all too often a hundred pressing matters of chance or necessity over which we have no control. I had not built the boat, Christiana, because Zalman's garden is surrounded by a wall, and is entered by a pair of gates unlocked only upon request. While I myself had on occasions the privilege of that open sesame, sadly the remains of his decaying shed did not, and there was no more possibility therefore that the two of us might leave together than that I might consume the duck pond or grow a tail.

"But you climb over the wall," she said, shaking her head in mild wonder. "How are you supposed to get through the gates if they're always locked?"

I wasn't entirely convinced by this explanation, which seemed far more to substantiate my argument than to refute it, but there seemed little point in arguing.

"You've got to find a tree close by the wall," she explained more tolerantly, as if giving orders to someone who couldn't be expected to think for himself. "Then you can climb along the branches, and jump down."

I was thinking of many things. First of all, I was afraid. Secondly, I knew nothing about climbing trees, although I felt assured this was generally possible, and that, as a rule, boys - particularly boys - were adept at climbing trees. What I actually said, though, was - and I'm not sure if it were true or not, but I believed it as I said it: "I didn't see any trees very close by ..."

Something snapped in Christiana, and, pulling herself to her full height - which was still almost a foot less than mine - she shouted with the strangest mixture of sorrow and contempt - "Then dig up a fig tree and plant it there!"

I don't know whether it was more anger at me for what she must have perceived as inconsiderate ineptitude or simply a general anger that her plans had gone awry, and that, for all our talk and enthusiasm, the two of us were no closer to her dream of escape than when two weeks before we sat beneath the sagging wires with a broken parasol in an overgrown garden, trying to read a book which made no sense. Either way, I felt a sense of remorse, and with that sense, something else came into being. I began to feel at the mercy of the mist, and simultaneously to see its beauty. I knew that I wanted to be very far from here with her, and yet even now I was looking down upon the two of us with what I could only call nostalgia for the fact we stood together in a place neither of us wanted to be, and the fact the two of us also stood alone there.

"Well, maybe you've forgotten all about me," she said, still hurt, "But I certainly didn't forget. I've made a flag to go on top, but I'm not going to show it to you until you make the boat. And I've packed supplies, so if you don't finish it soon, they'll all go mouldy."

"What sort of a flag is it?"

"It's a blue and white flag. It isn't very big," she confessed, "but it looks nice, and it goes on top. I'll have to make a proper sail out of a sheet, but that's easy. You just use some nails or something, and get a big straight bit of wood from somewhere. And then when the wind comes, it'll blow it along."

 

Stung by her reproaches, I resolved that evening to regain her favour and enter Zalman's garden after nightfall, when both he and Christiana would be asleep in their beds. Several times I opened my bedroom door, but the priest was always there on the stairway, either ascending or descending. Unsure whether he had gone home and since returned, or whether somehow he was still attending the original occasion that brought him here, I decided it would be impolite to remind him about the book he had promised, although at the same time I wished I could do so, since it would give me an excuse to confront him and leave the house without his taking offence. As it was, I could not pass him in silence, and my lack of inspiration became an actual, physical check upon my movements, confining me to the bedroom itself. Thus for some time I watched him walking slowly up and down below me, glancing hopefully at the door to the living room, the door to my mother's bedroom, and even upward, on occasions, toward my own door, as if it did not really concern him from which direction his salvation were to come; he would always be able to justify its necessity in the end. Suddenly I remembered the old man and woman outside in the garden, and opened the window again. It was growing dark, but the sky was still light - a condition I think they call the gloaming. The similarly coloured streets were fast resolving to uniform zig-zags; their colour seemed to have drained away into the horizon beyond them, and by a similar token the two supplicants seemed to have become little more than small, grey hillocks. I waved my arms, until I had attracted their attention, although a vague movement and the sound of something snapping underfoot was the only real sign of sentience.

"He wants to see you now," I whispered.

The doorbell rang, and the door to the living room opened. My mother hurried out, seeming not to notice the priest. Preoccupied, she had the decisive expression she often wore when she was interrupted from her work, and determined to make minimal mental concession to a temporary distraction. She was holding a neck scarf; she had probably just picked it up and then forgotten why she had done so. Unconsciously she hung it over the priest's arm and continued full pelt down the stairs. The priest, seeming to read in this an invitation of sorts, immediately turned himself and followed her; for some reason both of them were naked from the waist downward. At the foot of the stairs a few words were exchanged; the door opened and closed with a bang. Doubtless concluding that they were together for the same reason, and the celerity with which they had issued a sign of their pressing desire to get things accomplished as quickly as possible, the old man and woman somewhat inopportunely decided to hurry to the gate ahead of them, where my mother, now consubstantial with the priest, was obliged to follow them.

I waited a while, then looked out the window a last time. The garden was empty, as was the lane beside the house. Ten minutes later, carrying a ball of string, I even had the moon to myself, as I set out toward the centre of the almost deserted town. Here and there people had drawn curtains; sometimes there was a light among them. But though they sat squarely side by side, none of these windows knew the least thing about the next, and the only thing they illuminated was their loneliness. I was trying to put a face to these people whom I would never encounter, the ones that made up the whole, but which did not require, individually, to be seen, and I felt sorry that it was only people like the priest and my mother, who were probably less deserving, that ended up sharing the dreamy reality of my heart with me. Already I was with my thoughts, beyond the horizon, in a place free of gradations and difference, and in which every potentiality was realised without loss or waste, every destiny unambiguous, each thing fulfilling the end for which it was conceived.

Perhaps my thoughts had moved too quickly for me to conceive them clearly, or maybe it was the act of following itself that had frighted them -- something I was convinced the priest would understand. Either way, the next time I paused it was half way up a kind of spider's web of string with which I had succeeded in entangling Zalman's perimeter gates. In my mind's eye, I had seen the coil of rope; I had seen it whip tight about a gate-post and secure itself; I had even heard the hollow sound of its heavy knots jarring lightly against the iron gates, and a part of me still wanted to believe not only that all this was possible, but that this was how these things were supposed to be. But a part of me nevertheless was unable to overlook the clumsy youth fast snaring himself in an entirely redundant rigging of muddy knots, when he might just as easily have climbed the cross-beams without their aid at all; and it was this part that now sullenly asserted that Christiana's boat would never see the light of day, and that, even if it did, there was surely nothing beyond the horizon for it to escape to, in the first place. I jumped down into the garden, and tried to disentangle the string behind me. But it seemed impossible to get a purchase upon the knots; everything was tied willy-nilly, and, the whole structure less resembled a surreptitious means of ingress than some kind of bizarre Christmas decoration.

A few hundred yards away, the outlines of the house seemed smudged against the sky, and all I could see of the shed was the broken moon whose fragments had frozen on the holly bushes beside it. But I started to walk towards it along the border of the path, using the gravel to guide me, and when at last I reached the first tree, then I knew that at least I was as far as the first tree, and in the hedgerows a bird started to clatter about somewhere. Beside the second tree the clouds were fast scudding over the surface of the sky, and I could feel a mounting electricity drawing me deeper into the darkness, toward the space among the bushes from which our escape would begin. Surely in that place everything should have become clear, I reflected afterward, had not a stuttering star suddenly dashed itself against the chalky whiteness of the paving stones before me, its shafts scattering carelessly with the impact, their glowing trails quivering where they fell. Clods of grassy earth streaked out, and, somewhere near the centre, a single walnut at a slight angle.

"And what's this?" the voice asked. "An interloper in my grounds in the dead of night? I strongly doubt your intentions could be honourable. So which is it? Have you come to slit my throat, or have you come to elope with my daughter? Or perhaps you're a more traditional, a more canonical thief. Maybe, after all, it was just the valuables - all that gold and silver - that you had in mind?"

I shook my head, uncertain if I was visible among the trees, or if it was a blind and more general address. Even if I could have spoken, I sensed the absurdity of confessing that I had actually come to steal a garden shed.

For what seemed an age there was nothing but the wind in the leaves and that wretched lamp shining in my face, beyond which, try as I might, I couldn't make out the least shape at all. Then the voice spoke again. Now it was studied, cold, and final, the same voice I had heard when Zalman had threatened to set the dogs on me.

"Well, master burglar, you've disturbed my sleep, so I'm going back to bed. You've found your own way in; I'm sure you can find your own way out." The light vanished; there was the sound of gravel shifted by firm feet that knew exactly where they were going. With surprising softness an exterior door was closed somewhere, and then it was silent once more.

Just me - alone - in a garden now heavy with ground mist and the damp smell of the night. It was the second time he had disowned me, and I sensed that a third encounter might prove fatal. With a flash of intuition, I saw an angel with a rusty sword casting me into Eden. No, that wasn't right. Everything was back to front; I was supposed to be cast out, but I was being cast in. And it was supposed to be a flaming sword, but the flame had died, even as Eden itself had, and if there was nothing overly ceremonious about the way I was tumbled over the wall, there was even less about the angel who threw me there. He had dirt on his face, and I could smell the sweat under his arms. So I found myself beneath a cankered tree in some place in the middle of nowhere, from which everyone else had since departed - not just Adam and Eve, but all their generations, and even the end of time itself. They had all left the garden, and sailed over the horizon on Noah's boat, leaving me here in some primeval time that had no destiny, and even God himself had forgotten. At any rate, judgment had been passed, and I had sat through the sentence. Having dispatched my obligations on that count, I was now free to crawl where I chose. So I turned back toward the gates, but where they should have been there was nothing but hedgerow, and all attempts to retrace my footsteps only seemed to work me deeper into the thicket, although I now passed and repassed the shed many times, always seeing it from a new angle, and, as often as not, a few stars blinking between its misshapen boards. Maybe this was what Zalman had meant when he said the garden had no memory; it could not even remember how to get out of itself, and thus, in a sense, it gravitated toward its essentials, the darkness and errance within which it was secured. It was only when I had given up all hope of finding my way back, and determined to huddle for warmth in a corner somewhere, that I was startled by a further address.

"How can you be my friend, if you can't even make a boat?" The new voice came from the window just beneath the turrets of the roof. It was rhetorical rather than condemnatory, the product of frustration rather than anger. Where the face should have been there was just shadow, but there were two white arms of a nightgown on each side.

The key turned in the lock, and she gravely moved the gate ajar. I saw that she had come out in her bare feet, doubtless at her father's bidding. There was something of him in both her carriage and her stride, the same sense of unquestioned principles, that same quiet and implicit demand for the world to be a certain kind of thing and the people within it to act in identifiable ways. I meant to tell her I was sorry, but the words, when they came out, had a dreamy irrelevance; neither of us said what we expected to say; we were, the two of us, too tired, anyway, to know what we said.

"Aren't you afraid of the dogs?" I asked.

"What dogs? I don't remember any dogs. Oh, that ...", she added as an afterthought. But the gate was already closed; she was half-way back to the house already; or, at least, she was many steps away from me. Or rather, all that mattered was that she was on one side of the gate, and I was on the other. As if walking in her sleep, she had carried the speculation away with her, and whatever she realised with her "Oh, that ..." was no longer a part of any conversation between the two of us. Instead, it was an understanding that belonged to the house and the garden and the patrician who slept there, while I was left in the small hours with the road back to the Law, in its own way as equally private and impossible to explain.

Somewhere it must have begun to rain, but in my excitement I was thinking about other things. Already I was regretting that I had ever got involved in an enterprise which seemed doomed to failure, and which, far from drawing Christiana and me closer together, only seemed destined to estrange us. It was nice to believe that it might happen, but we were very young, and there was a very wide world against us, and if no other children had escaped by boat, why should we set a precedent? But most of all I was angry for being powerless, and for being seen by Christiana to be so. Somewhere water was gushing from a broken gutter, and I stood there to feel the slap it admonished upon my head and shoulders, but it gurgled on regardless, and in the tedium of all things I must have nodded off, since the next moment it was only a trickle, and beads of it were hitting something resonant somewhere - perhaps a rusty drum in a cellar, and, looking up, I saw that there must be a high wind, for the clouds had never moved so fast.

"I'm very cold; I'm soaked through and through," I said to myself, making my teeth chatter the words. Somehow I felt convinced that I could warm myself up again, if I could only say them fast enough. All the way home I repeated the strange mantra. But now it was raining in earnest again, and I felt a sudden sense of trepidation for the things which must become unseated by the water coursing in the gutters, and sliding like fish scales down the cobbled streets. I reached Dame Mizzen's house, believing for an instant that this was where I wanted to go, but its windows had been boarded up, and already it was straining at its moorings, the ragged pennant of its chimney whining and whipped to and fro by the wind. I knew that inside someone was kneeling by the fender, that there was cold ash in the grate, and fire irons hung on a wall I had never seen but now would always remember. Strangely, I had never felt more conscious of my presence in any place than I did just now, in this dark and lightless town. Rain-soaked, I felt the material mass of me pinning me down from both inside and outside, an impenetrable and meaningless substance that was sliding about the damp maze of the streets in place of an identity. The hills had become subsumed entirely in mist, and even the lighthouse at the end of the harbour must have drifted away, perhaps to loosen the seaweed from its rocky keel, or else to seek shelter in a cove somewhere further down the coast. I passed the library, only to find Christiana again, sitting dolefully on the wet steps, still in her nightgown, and I suddenly wanted to gather her up forever and hold her tight against me, like a sharp little word wrapped up in a shawl. Under her arm she had a package of books to return, and, sitting down silently beside her, I felt an animal anguish for the leagues I hadn't climbed up, for the continents I hadn't crossed with her.

"Let's talk. Are you hurt? Are you hurt? Let's talk," she kept repeating. "Your heart cries," she added under her breath. It made so little sense, I thought she was talking about an umbrella, and so we started to argue about something, and she turned her face away and dipped the head of her parasol in the inky puddle at our feet. Now she was writing something, perhaps the name of a god, but the piece of space that I would fix after this one keeps flapping, and whichever piece you pinned up, it would be just the same. Everything was raining and writing about her.