BONELINES
Phil Smith  & Tony Whitehead 

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In Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage, authors Phil Smith, Tony Whitehead and photographer John Schott lead us on a ‘virtual’ journey to explore difference and change on their way to an unknown destination. They create a pilgrimage we can all follow, even if confined to our homes.

In researching the Guidebook the authors went on an actual journey. Bonelines​ is the secret story of that journey. Given the present circumstances it now appears prophetic, prescient and helpful, so we have decided to bring it into the light.  ​It is written in novel form and will be published online in weekly instalments. Here is the first instalment. 

​(You can find details - and order a copy of - Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage here.)

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Bonelines
  Instalment ​5   (Chapters 11-19)
Tony Whitehead & Phil Smith

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Chapter 11
 
January 1876
It was all blurry, always had been blurry, always would be blurry, this day like any other. Most blurry were the three dresses; the cream dresses; some light material for the hot day, and wraps against the cold that was coming with the night, the wide brimmed hats to keep away the burning sun exchanged for cream headscarves. It was always blurry to the boy; although he knew the deep reason for things, he could never see distinctly the things themselves. All was a kind of oneness to him. There were many causes, great causes, indeed, he overheard the whispers every day as the white gentlemen came and went, and then the shifting Egyptians gliding through the palaces of the whites, on home ground, a word here and a word there, but what were they causing? He noticed how these adults understood everything about what was happening, that they were the captains of happening, yet seemed to have so little idea of why the things that happened by their own agencies did occur and occur in such a manner. The captains were always surprised, like the dragoman pilot was always caught out by the gusts and breezes from the defiles. But he, just a donkey boy they sneered at, he understood the origins and conspiracies, motives and machinery, but never the results thereof. What a strange boy he was, he had thought to himself, as the party had passed through the moon-shadow of the giant triangles in the desert and the camels that had been drawn instinctively towards the river.

He knew his own motive as fear, the constant and faithful companion of his life. It had always been so, and he could not comprehend now how so little had happened to hurt him. But he knew the why of it; he saw every day the power and the authority in relaxation and guessed from the stories he had heard in the streets how quickly that might change. He had grown too big to be unrecognisable around the exits and entrances of Shepheard’s, the recruiting officers had pointed their sticks at him, and he had known precisely why and how he must run from the environs of the hotel, though not to where and not for how long. That had been decided elsewhere; in the deep dark, that was clear. While all on land had become blurry again; but the white family had allowed him aboard, as if in a dream, drowsing in the bitter and merciless sun, the afternoon had sought to spite itself, defying the dragoman who had thrown a sheet to the deck in his fury and kicked him in the stomach when the ladies had turned their backs, retiring to their cabins. Cringing under a bulwark, the donkey boy had felt all these things, but he did not have words like these; the words he heard were different, and although there were many signs and strokes about his day, no one had ever explained them to him; instead the things that others called words or writing were like wisps of smoke, flocks of sparks that were quickly extinguished. For what he understood was something quite different; a rushing cold fire that was coming to cover the land, and he knew why it was. He had read its motives in the shapes of the gutters, the cracks in the bones, in the gaps between the triangles outside of the city, in the arrangements of the grains of sand in the desert and in the breakers of the dunes, the distance between their crests and the caprices hiding in their vales. There was nothing in this place that would be good for a while. 
        
The Nile was deep and its reason was drowning. What it did was to fertilise the plane, he had overheard the sisters’ tutor say one day, but he knew from the sands that the why was to drown them and bring forth from nothingness the green shoots by drowning; only by drowning did new life come and so the same catastrophes would happen every year. Like a real and true mother drowned her son with love, a river drowned all that stood in its embrace, from the women washing clothes on its banks to the glittery expanses of the dunes. Even from insipid yellowish nothingness great lawns suddenly sprang and made a garden of the arid expanses.

So he understood fully the why of the sisters. Why there were three, and must be three; why so many and why one or two would not do, though all that would happen would happen all the same and whatever the number, and why the why could only be this way. He knew the importance of the three to the why of the crisis, this he knew the moment he threw himself at their feet and saw in the hems of their skirts and the whispers they made with the sand the reason for their trip upon the Nile. He felt every moment of their preparation; the summoning of the servants, the payments to the bickering pilots, the girding of the picnics, the combing of hair and the tightening of the sisters’ dresses. He felt their nakedness and their vulnerability. Though he saw only the final parts of their preparations, he felt the tremors that had begun them. He eavesdropped the conversations of the suppliers and drivers as they conveyed, interpreted, finessed and commented upon their milky orders, uninhibited by the presence of the donkey, and he knew what they intended with every one of their inflections; how impressions were conveyed and received, amplified and adapted to each others’ motives; how these separate acts were forming up towards an inevitable catastrophe that would suck him down with it, just as much as the coming defeat in Abyssinia and the raging torrents in the ravine at Gundet would swirl about the routed fellahin in currents of blood and abandoned ordnance. He had as well drown in water as in blood; he would not fight for the Khedive.

Fleeing the fury of the dragoman captain, the donkey boy had crouched in the bows and felt the waters parting ahead of him, sliding away behind him, as if he were falling down the defile of a liquid mountain at the head of the wind. Though he could only tentatively grasp the great why in the river beneath the many whys of her currents, he knew her limbs, her thin stretching arms, the relentless teeth fringing her hundred lamprey mouths, the thousand trailing fingers with which she fondled the undertows and vortices, changed the direction of all things, and the beak of the shell she concealed within her, its emerging through soft plains and expansive terrains, ready to break what must be broken, drown what must be drowned, raise what must be raised. He knew what both the lowliest servant and the greatest of the white fathers had intended, but they could not know the river’s intention. They knew nothing of its grander scheme, nor read from its currents and greasy surface its immediate or complex aims. And so certain was he where they, his betters and equals (for no one was below him, hence his unfettered connection to the deep things), were uncertain, that he had placed his foot upon the boat and levered his body from the safety of the square stones of the quay; his intention was never to let down the honour of serving the genius of a place, whether it be the greatest of pharaonic tombs or the humblest of hotel kitchens, never to ignore the almost imperceptible whisper of all that had been denied him, for he knew that that was the reason-to-be of every living and unliving thing.

The swan-like dababeeah was sixteen miles off Minioh, the squalls ripping at its big lateen sail, twice the length of the vessel, towering over its hull, just as Gebel el Tayr, the Mountain of the Bird, towered over the sail and just as the great dome of the stars towered over the mountain below. The dragoman shouted and cursed about sandbanks and shallows and the treacherous curviness of the Nile, but the sisters would not let him moor. They waited in their cabins; and at the rounding of a point, the walls of the mountain rising sheer from the river’s edge, the donkey boy felt the first gust of will among the squalls. The dragoman screamed, the crew reacted, but before they could let go the field-sized sail, a fist of wind flying down the defile and ploughing up the surface of the Nile was in its cotton and was turning the boat about to face its full force, upending it into darkness. The coconut wood mast speared at the bottom of Iteru and Aspidogaster parasites tightened their septa within the soft sponge of their hosts, Cleopatra bulimoides, slithering down the blade-like stems of hydrophytes. The wheel of life turned snail like, the tiller circling its shaft, the rudder unhinged and flapped wildly like the tail of a crocodile slapping down the river.

The world turned upside down, the donkey boy floated with the three sisters down into the deep darkness; the blurry passage to his death no more nor less distinct than all the other misunderstandings that had marked out his short life. The long tresses of the sisters spread like fans and as they all fell they left the mad rush of the surface behind, the cotton slips of the sisters swirling elegantly about their tumbling limbs like the pleated skirts of the Ghawazi dancers of the Dom people. The donkey boy knew that there was something skirted far below, the mistress of the winds and streams, her wandering fingers reaching out to the far coasts of all the world and drawing the foreigners to herself, sacrificing her most favoured donkey boy so that these beautiful strangers might share the knowledge she had, in sending her opaqueness, shared with him. High above them now, the upturned hull of the bababeeah casts its shadow, cutting out a curved triangle of seventy feet of  blackness from the moon, while at its stern the waters thrashed and struggled, the dragoman and his crew caught in a syndicate of crocodiles; their struggles, seen from the cliff high above, appeared to be a war with a single monster possessed of tens of scaly pointed arms, mounted with leathery teeth, the whole a giant lacerated mouth biting and biting again at the surface full of sailors. While down below all was at peace as the donkey boy led the three sisters, by an invisible halter, down to meet the reason of all thought and the motive of all motors.
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On January 30th, 1876, The Times of London announced the drowning in Egypt of three nieces of a prominent Recorder, the daughters of a clergyman of significance and sisters of a curate in a Devon town. While their Cairo correspondent would carefully note the efforts of divers to recover their bodies, he desisted from publicising the results of their endeavours: a tangle of hair and slime, feathers and limbs, of female bodies stretched out of all natural definition, twisted in the fierce turbine of billions of tons of water their pretty teeth now mounted in every inch of their flesh, their bellies confused with those of swans or some other kind of foreign bird, and tongues and toes, so extravagantly puckered in the cold waters as to drag them out to the length of crocodile tails; the whole mess of recreation never was satisfactorily untangled for their three coffins, but occasioned much horrid cracking of jaws, sluicing of fats and scything of heads to pack something like a young woman into each of the oblong crates.
For seven days the steamer crossing the Mediterranean with the containers in its hold was haloed in the surrounding sea by luminescent shoals, while above an unnatural star trespassed on the charts of the mariners below; in the daylight the ship’s condition was much worse and its passengers were recorded in the log, though nowhere else was any word ever recorded of it, nor conversation even whispered once the cargo was released, as having stayed in their cabins day and night to avoid the shadow of a bulbous thing, trailing long glistening streamers of sinew a few feet beneath the surface of the ocean, escorting the steamer around the Rock of Gibraltar, through the Bay of Biscay and only as the Cheek Stone at the end of the Devil’s Sett was passed to port, disappeared.                  
                              
 
Chapter 12
 
The car ride up to the Forest Inn was an uncomfortable one. Kentish collected Mandi from a flaking boudoir where she had been left to “freshen up”. With what? He returned rather too quickly, Mandi thought. Next time she would be brutally frank with him. In the car, making their way to the edge of the Haldon Ridge, the meeting place for the wheel rolling, were Bob and Janine, stalwarts of the Old Mortality Society who Mandi had met briefly at the meal.

It had horrified her. Slithery muscles and oyster innards tangled up in unnaturally long tentacles of pasta. Gobbets of the sauce unavoidably splashed shirts and tops, which the guests enthusiastically peeled off and threw over the backs of their chairs. Only for more sauce to dash hairy chests and pendulous breasts. Mandi had done her best to remove the stains from her blouse; as if she were some frightened and exploited intern. Not ever an enthusiastic participant, she had been to those parties; they always felt to her like scenes from spy movies where the trainee spooks are forced to humiliate themselves, so that all their fellow agents share at least one secret about them. Mandi was loyal to no one; she kept secrets for company. When asked at tills for her ‘loyalty card’ she could become abusive.

Trying to distract herself from the late middle aged gangs of aspiring dilfs and milfs, Mandi had become more greasily tangled than the linguini. The movement of objects in the minestrone reminded her of a configuration of waters she had seen off the shore of the Sett. Pretty soon those who were not already moaning under the tablecloth, or banging against the table legs, sending ripples through Mandi’s soup, had sidled off for sex in the ballroom’s generous variety of side rooms, leaving only her and Kentish at the table. Never for a moment did he raises his eyes or offer any interest; he carefully wound spaghetti around his fork and brought it smoothly to his lips. Then sucked in the snakes of pasta, as if inhaling them. He alone was unstained.

Mandi replayed these horrors as the lanes she recognised from her taxi ride were replaced by those of a vale she had never seen before; anonymous fields and winding narrow ways bereft of signage. There was nothing to make her feel uneasy, yet the place seemed uneasy about itself. Mandi decided she should stop transferring her own feelings to the vale, but it was better than having to think about Janine, who had left the shuddering dining table before Bob. Mandi had detected a helpless lasciviousness in Bob’s eyes that undermined any higher purpose he or the Club entertained. They might just as well have planted Pampas Grass on the big house’s driveway.

Why this need to over-claim on the same shoddy desires everyone else had? Mandi had conjured plenty of demons under her sheets, unlocked doors to lands that boys had never imagined existed. The Old Mortality Club were fancy frauds selling the ‘same old same old’ as exotic goods. The market mechanism in the magical realm was malfuntioning. It needed the smack of an invisible hand upon its esoteric product?  

Gazing at the dire fields, Mandi laughed out loud at the thought of Grant, Bob and Janine writhing around in squelchy congress to ritual mumbo jumbo invented in a bungalow in Stevenage sometime around 1954. She wondered how she knew that, but she was pretty sure she did. The sex might be ancient but not the liturgies. They did not come from hollow hills or blasted heaths, they came straight out of the suburbs and sneaky boredom of dirty minds. As Harold Macmillan had said at the time: “you’ve never had it so repeatedly” and “we’re all sex- magickians now”. Three generations later and they were repeating the same ‘transgressions’. Vomit. Decades of wasted time! Did they think they added to a giant willow man with every fake ritual and vanity publication? Mandi’s mood did not make for easy conversation. She could feel a blog post coming on.

“I’m sorry to hear of your loss,” Janine offered.

Mandi gave a short, bland note of thanks. Leaving few hooks on which to hang a reply.

“Looking forward to tonight, you two in the back?” snarked Kentish cheerily. “Fifth year. Seems to get bigger every time.”

“And spoiled”, added Janine “it’s too well known now, and the Morris Men bring their crowd.”

Mandi’s mood darkened further. Morris?

“Are they going to do that again?” asked Bob “I’m not so sure they do any more, you know. They can keep on saying that it’s all about poachers and hiding their faces in some bucolic past they’ve imagined for themselves, but I don’t believe ‘em. They’re blacking up! The local Black and White Minstrels!”

Kentish cackled and slapped his thigh, catching Mandi’s knee in his excitement. Janine and Bob echoed from the back seat and popped up and down in glee. Mandi wanted to punch them all. Complacent crap. She was already sketching an easy 800 words on why Morris Men should paint their faces black, and then fuck off and die. It would have everything: race, the sneering middle class, political correctness, laisser-faire neo-nationalists in fake costumes telling invented stories about sons of the Devon soil. A stew of hypocrisies to which Mandi would bring a long handled spoon; no more appetizing than The Old Mortality Club’s soup.

The pub’s car park was packed.

“What will you have?” asked Kentish

Kentish was a ‘gentlemen’ as well as a priapic scholar. Mandi decided on a half of cider, relieved she would not have to brave the heaving bar. The winding lanes had left a blur of minestrone whirling before her eyes; through which she spotted a group of blacked up dancers holding decorated pewter tankards.

“I’ll hang out here.”

“Half a cider it is, my dove.”

Mandi was not Ken’s “dove”; she was no one’s buzzard, peregrine falcon or sparrowhawk either, though she would far prefer to watch proceedings from high over the forest, particularly if she could watch Kentish rolling down the hill in a cape of flames. Her bubbling but bottled fury concerned her at times. She laughed at her inner snowflake.

The folk-revivalists had begun to circle and mass. One woman dancer stood out above the ranks, well over six feet tall. Quite a presence amongst and above the crowd; the male dancers were tiny. Folk seemed to orientate to the Amazon, swarm about her, hover in her presence. As with all the Morris Men she wore black rags and a black top hat decorated with pheasant’s tail feathers, her face was smeared with shining grease paint that made the whites of her eyes and her straightened teeth glow like moonlight. Her bulk lifted her physically, but it was her piping voice that transcended her companions. Here was a confident woman, Mandi thought, as she wandered over to say hello, hoping that a conversation might add some colour to a story she had already topped and tailed in her head.

“Hi” said Mandi, confident of her reception, and told the usual lies about a web feature for the Huffington Post, “it’s about issues around Morris Men blacking up their faces. Do you mind answering a few questions?"

"Morris Men?" said the tall, blacked dancer.

Mandi sighed quietly to herself.

The Amazon tore open her jacket of rags to reveal a prodigious pink sports bra onto each cup of which had been printed a foaming beer mug. Christ, thought Mandi, it is not just the swingers at the old house. Mandi waited until the woman had buttoned herself away.

"How would you describe yourself then?"

The hint of unhazed aggression in her tone was not lost on the Amazonian, who took a long sip of beer from a pewter tankard handed her by a raggedy Obby Oss.

"It's all bollocks," retorted the gangly dancer. "We black up, always have done and always will do!” There were cheers. “It's nuffin’ to do with people of colour, it's to do with people round these parts back in the day painting their faces black to avoid the gamekeeper, sent to god knows where if they were caught...”

“Nailed on a post in the larder!” someone offered.

 “You could get a death penalty for wearing a black face in the forest”, continued the pink-bra’d Amazon. “Wearing it is a protest against the old oppression."

“Mind if I quote you on that?”

“Go right ahead, kiddie.”

People of colour? Parroted from an unconscious bias course, no doubt. Mandi imagined the towering dancer on weekdays in a council office, processing forms, with breaks for indoctrination; scared of showing her bra there, Mandy bet herself, for fear of causing extra anxiety among middle management already out of their heads with stress.  Why couldn’t they paint their faces whatever fucking colour they wanted without a justification from fake history?

"What do you think about councils in the Midlands banning Morris dancers who black up?" Mandi asked, trying a different tack.

"Well, we're dancers, we don't want to piss people off. Bans are a bit heavy I suppose, why not look at alternatives, paint your faces dark green or whatever.”

“Unfair to Pepe!” heckled a bystander in wellies.

“Maybe not brown up there, know what I mean?” She giggled. “I think we'd be open to suggestions..."

First hint of censorship and the lusty sons of the earth were toast. 

"Kelly's talking shit."

Mandi turned to the heckler. A non-Morris man standing to the left of the flexible dancer. He was wearing a Barbour, chords, and black wellies. Mid 40s, Mandi guessed. Local, for sure.

"What the fuck do you know, Dave?" replied Kelly with a smile.

"I happen to know it gets harder and harder to organise this event every year with all the fucking regulations and shit. Never mind banning these Al Jolson wannanbes! Why don’t they ban the whole effing shebang for good measure? This and the maypole?"

Dave leaned in on Mandi.

"All we want is a bit of fun.” He leered into her face. “But you can't do that nowadays without treading on some friggin’ byelaw."

Despite this bullying manner, this man was speaking Mandi's language, in a crude patois. Yet she had no common cause with him; she knew what he was, straight off. She doubted if this Dave (now undressing her with cider addled eyes) bothered much about state regulation or the serfdom of the individual. He probably thought Ayn Rand was something traded on the currency markets.

"Breaking the law?" Asked Mandi, the upward inflexion handing Dave plenty of rope.

"Oh yeh," replied Dave, leaning further in, "a few of us started this whole thing back a few years. I were a kid, then. Old Bob over there were chatting with this bloke who was doing a bit of tree work for him up on the hill. The bod reckoned that in ancient times they would come up here, midwinter, and roll a flaming great wheel down the slope. Summat to do with a coven of pagans or some such shit; either they did it or it was to burn them out. He probably got the wrong place, anyway, he was a right twat. Been listening to those freaks down Lost Horizon, probably. Anyways, Bob’s telling us about this at the bar and Nigel, who owned the pub then, you could see the pound signs in his eyes! He thought it might conjure a good evening’s takings; he weren’t expecting the whole mind, body and spirit circus!”

Dave drew pound signs in the air with his thick forefinger.

“Anyways, a mob of us helped ourselves to some old wooden cable reels up at the Palmer farm, luvverly bit o’ hay, paraffin. Bunged a few quid to Help for Heroes, or whatever it was in them days, and you’d got a genuine heritage event, just like that! Tommy Cooper! Just like that! Do it around Christmas, a Yule type thing and, bang again, you've got a nice dollop of free advertising. Worked a fuckin’ dream. Got a decent crowd straight off. And these hilarious fuckin' witches and wizards all got hold of it too and they made it even bigger with all their pals, brought their costumes and ukuleles, and they bring along some fair totty too, fair play to ‘em… pardon my Franglais! As good as the fuckin’ Wicker Man it was, till the Elf and Safety killed it! Ha ha! Got on telly and everything. Put this place on the map. That's when it attracted the twats from the council."

The twats from the council. Mandi already knew this story. She felt like a deer sinking into quicksand, dropping deeper the harder she kicked. A thick mud of words came racing up her nose, closing her ears and eyes, the background chatter, the noise of the pub crowd, the music, the din, the rooks in the trees, the distant passing trains down towards the coast all fell away. There was only the sucking and drawing down of Dave’s folktale. The forms of the people around her, of Kelly Blackface and the feather crowned dancers turned into a bright darkness. That silent fug; when she could not speak and the world – or something like it – closed right in.  No passing angel, just her and Dave in a cave with no walls. Him chirruping about adults scared of kids who can’t make up their minds what sex they are, kids scared of themselves, something about the old religion…. But, it all felt wrong. Dave was taking her words, from somewhere, and twisting them around other stuff. He came on like an inadequate troll, but Mandi knew, just by looking at him, that he was not who he was pretending to be. He was trouble. Putting up a wall that looked a little like her. She had met people like Dave before; looked like fools, unaccountable agents of unattributable malice. No training, no station chief, no cell, lonely sole members of a leaderless resistance with enemies and no comrades. But they knew exactly what they were doing, even if they couldn’t explain it. Dave started in about a Punch and Judy show on the beach, how the council made the old chap change the act to something “more acceptable to diverse audiences”. Dave affected Punch’s voice. His visage changed, as he squeaked, his features became more pronounced. Then, he spoke like Judy. A calm, reassuring tone, not quite a puppet voice, but female, less like a squeaker and more like something familiar. Dave was speaking to Mandi in a voice that was more and more like her own; she could hear it singing to her, very softly echoing Dave:

“Muddy Mary, mother of God,
Killed the Old Boy in his bath,
God went to Hell
And started to smell...”

Was he taking the piss? She wanted to say something. Dave’s version of Mandi’s voice was becoming more and more distorted inside her own head, her words all fouled up. As if at the end of a long tube she could hear herself speaking about cyberspace, freedom and men’s rights, while Dave began to strut and punch the air, thrusting his hips: “wanna be in my gang, my gang, my gang!”

He stopped, his head turned as if it sat on his shoulders like a mask on a turntable.

“Well? Do you?”

What? Dave’s face was changing again. His features softening. His hair less grey, a hint of strawberry, and it was longer now. And where were the dark shadows beneath his eyes, and the stubble? Now Mandi really wanted to make Dave stop, but her arms were pinned to her sides, her tongue lodged in the roof of her mouth. She tried to think into his mind, appeal to him, but the more she got inside him, the more he got inside her, operating her own voice in anxieties she had buried long ago. Hadn’t she danced to Gary Glitter hits at right wing parties shortly after the paedophile’s first arrest. Well? What about Bowie? She was protesting the hypocrisy, but even so, if it came out, at the wrong moment, all her work for kids’ rights… something dark and powerful was trying to bind her…

“Bandy Mandi think’s she’s so bright

But bandy Mandi’s just not right!”

Bandy Mandi? How the fuck did he know? She had forgotten that! One of the boys at Lost Horizon had made it up. Sung it again and again whenever she wanted to speak. As Dave kept singing the rhyme, his jaw opening and shutting like something run with strings and wire, she noticed a trickle of blood roll down his chin from the corner of his mouth.

“You’re …”

The blood became more profuse. Dave dipped his head forward, then back, clearing his now long red hair from his bloodied face. A pause. Nothing. Just Mandi and Dave gazing at each other. Mandi and something else. Whatever it was, slowly and deliberately, lifted its hand to its red mouth and with a twist and a tug removed one of its upper front teeth. The action was so sudden and so startling that Mandi stumbled back in shock, wincing. He, she, whatever it was, held out a tooth in the palm of its open hand, offering it, with torn pieces of gum, to Mandi. Who reached out for it.

“Oi, daydreamer! Here you go! It’s a nightmare in there” announced Kentish, gently touching Mandi’s arm with the half of cider.

Mandi looked round. Then back to Dave. Who was sharing in some banter with Kelly Blackface.

“Oh, oh… ”, Mandi stammered, taking the glass in trembling fingers; checking her other hand for teeth. She was unsighted. Kentish began to berate Bob and Janine about how packed the bar was.

“You, OK?” asked Janine. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

“No. I heard one.”

“Sure you’re alright?”

Mandi made no second answer.

“Oh, she’s OK”, interrupted Dave, now a little worse for wear. “Me and Mandi are bessies, aren’t we, love?”

But Mandi was looking at Dave with fresh eyes. On the lapel of his Barbour, raised above the brown corduroy, below a UKIP pound sign badge, was an enamel badge with a small red triangle, tip pointing downwards. She hadn’t noticed that before. Dave moved away, into the crowd, shaking hands and patting backs as he went. His gestures drew many smiles. For Mandi, something like ‘service as usual’ returned; that High Definition illusion of 360 degrees wraparound reality. She could see the hairs on midges in the air, the veins in leaves and the residue of that horrible thing with broken teeth and shattered jaw that was stalking on her shoulder.

“Mister Kentish?” she whispered.

“Doctor Kentish!” corrected Janine. Kentish waved her objection aside.

“Doctor Kentish, can you see… something standing right behind me?”

“April, you mean?”

“Wha..?”

Mandi turned and the glamour was gone. 

“This is the archivist I was telling you about.”

April’s face was broad and friendly. Mandi was not ready for her homely presence. When April spoke it sounded to Mandi as if it was from deep underwater. That April was one of those seals you could watch through thick glass windows in the tiled wall of an aquarium.

“I’m sorry?”

April repeated herself and this time the only words, two more than before, Mandi caught were ‘teeth’ and ‘hyena’. Then something happened. Like someone pulled the carpet out from beneath all this crap. Everything got sharp and sensible. Mandi knew what to do. She held out her free hand to April. 

“Doctor Kentish said you might be here.”

“Grant rang me about your enquiry. We’re going to try and help you. I’m not promising anything, but there are certainly local connections, by the sound of it. Give me a little time and I will check what we have in our stores.”

“Sorry, did you just say ‘hyenas’ teeth’?”

Kentish and April laughed.  Mandi felt her angry self-possession returning.

“Can I get back to you?”

April held out her phone and Mandi, woozily, typed her number into April’s memory.

“Don’t thank me”, said April, “thank Grant!”

Mandi turned to Kentish, but he had turned away, his eyes following Dave’s progress through the crowd.

“Wha..?  O, please don’t take any notice of our resident Brexiteer! Everyone round here voted that way…”

“Makes sense…”

“The community did not, of course,” said Kentish. “Magic does not respect borders.”

“I heard that!” yelled Dave. Though he could not have…

A great shout went up from within the trees.

“Best make our way up the hill,” said Kentish. “Be a shame to miss the local sun god eating its children!”

“I wish it would!” shouted Dave, from the heart of a surging crowd of newcomers arriving from the car park. Bob and Janine honked like geese, their laughter clattering down the darkening valley from where a huge yellow-painted wheel was slowly mounting a tiny lane, its rim turning above the tall hedges. The steady flames of torches, held aloft by their bearers, flickering on its tin veneer.    
 
Chapter 13

The driver smiled as he passed the gates of Lost Horizon. Nothing was lost on him now. He gunned the 14 year old family saloon up the sharp incline, the old engine struggling to bear its measly load past the giant 1930s pub that only ever seemed full for Christmas lunches.

Two miles further down the coast the road rose once again, out of one of the small coastal towns. The driver had barely noted the passage of time.

Things were threaded together now. In the headlight beams he searched for the obscure turn he knew was there. As a brief suburban layer fell away, he saw the darkness at the side of the road and turned in, then pushed down hard on the accelerator and sent the car scything through a rusty metal gate; it sprang apart like a family of frightened deer. Exhilarated by his success he gunned the machine once more and it began to speed downhill, bumping along the grass track towards the cliff edge. This was his lucky day.

The driver knew the lie of the land, knew the muddy lane took a sharp right turn just before the thorn bushes and the sandstone precipice. He kept the wheel steady. He had never felt like this. Anyway, if he had, the memory was useless to him now. He was living in the moment. All the bills, failures, fuckups, belittling and bullyings, handed out and received, the emotional ice age, estranged son, mountains of pills and hours of painful consultations, humiliations handed out every minute of every day by a bastard world every bit as emotionally illiterate as he was; the whole goddam thing had vanished in the moment of his decision. Gone for good. Like him. He felt like a million dollars.

A sole moth flickered across the windscreen.

Cruising towards oblivion, he felt the car shake as it hit three deep ruts in quick succession. It reminded him of some music he had heard long ago, but... he never heard music now. He kicked the accelerator down and the wheels began to spin. Don’t fuck it up now. Everything was going so, uncharacteristically, well.  

He felt the left wing clip something. In the nearside wing mirror a wooden fence pole cartwheeled into the darkness. The blow sent the car rightwards across the track and, skidding now, it glanced off a grassy bank; the driver was struggling for control. Get it over with. Fast, fast. He slammed down once more on the accelerator; it felt so light, and the car seemed to float for a moment, the headlights frozen, all went smooth, but nothing moved except the wheels racing on the spot, showering liquifacted mud in giant red spurts back down the green lane. The old car halted, the more the driver powered it, the quicker the wheels turned and the less momentum he got. The abyss, so close, seemed much further away. 

He rethought; but he had never been good at this. He took his foot off the pedals, let everything stop and then he started again, very, very gently. At first nothing gripped, but then, inch by inch, the car began to move slowly forward, towards the drop. If it took him an hour he could not care less; his resolve was crystalline.  At last, he was moving in the right direction. Inch followed inch. Glimpses of well trodden path, a point of barbed wire, something like an airborne seed, a well of shadows, the eye of a rat, withered and ruined ferns bending their split heads... then it all went silent and fell into slower motion.   

Incredible.

He was out of gas. Like, why would he need to skimp on fuel now, what would the cost of another gallon have mattered?

The windscreen, such a movie of motion and dynamics a moment before, was dull and sulky. Walking himself to the edge of the cliff had never been part of the storyboard. He stiffened. Upright in the driver’s seat, staring ahead, tense. Like a test dummy.

The four angels stepped out of the darkness. White figures, female forms in tight jumpsuits. In place of wings; rifles. Moving out of the headlight beams, they paired off down the sides of the vehicle and the driver quickly wound down the front windows on both sides.    
   
Two eyes, shadowy mascara, framed in a white balaclava.

“Can we help you?”

“I’m fine, Just leave me alone would you? I want to kill myself.”

“We can help you with that.”

“Who are you?”

“What does that matter to you?”

“It doesn’t. Nothing matters. I’m just asking a question.”

“If your brake is on, take it off. Then I’ll answer.”

It was not, but he checked.

“No brake. So, who are you?”

The white figure placed two white gloved hands over the sill of the window frame. “One question, if I may?” She did not wait for approval. “Do you feel that you could have done better, or others could have done better by you, or was there always something in you that would fail?”

“Something in me.”

“Good.”

The four white figures immediately gathered to the edges of the car.

“Wait, wait... I’d like to talk with you some more? I don’t have to do this right this minute!”

The four white figures, as if in chorus, looked up; their eyes were cold. With one orchestrated shove they lifted the tyres out of the rut and the saloon began rolling over the greasy lane, silvery purple under the newly emerging moon.

Through the window the driver, 53, divorced, yelled: “who are you?”

And a voice from the pack of four white figures shouted: “We are the white snipers of the Beyondist Bund!”

As the car careened through brittle cast-iron railings and over the edge, the driver cast a last glance in the rear view mirror; unsure if the four white-clad women were waving him goodbye or were raising the right-handed Roman salute, before the saloon smashed into the blades of limestone below. There was no explosion like in the movies, only the hiss of compressed air escaping, a gentle groan of metal relaxing after impact and the quiet slurping as broken bones pushed further up into organs, while severed arteries and shredded muscles settled down into unfamiliar combinations.
The four white figures stood upon the broken cast-iron, gazed down from the cliff top as a cloud of dust bloomed upwards. From inside the car, a puzzled figure climbed, transformed, oozing a strange kind of new life, bent into a novel shape, a veil of blood folding down from his forehead and gathering on his chest. Faint, adrenalin racing through torn muscles and propping him up, soaring on broken bones, he raised his eyes as the four women raised their rifles. Red lasers cut through the night and the driver looked down at the jiggling dots playing on his blood soaked vest and missed the wave that crashed over the rocks and washed him into the darkness.
 
Chapter 14
A crowd gathered at the entrance to the green lane that led up to the crest of the ridge. Beside it was the field down which the flaming wheel would soon be rolled. The wheel itself was pretty much as Dave described: an old wooden cable reel packed with straw and bound up with chicken wire.

Mandi stood alongside Grant, Bob and Janine on the edge of the throng. The archivist woman, April, had run off up the lane to take photos. An unseen barker called the group to order.

“As it has been done for generations, so it shall be done! With this wheel we shall set the sun on its summer course!”

There was something comfortingly familiar in the unlikely archaism. A proportion of the crowd, mainly the Morris dancers, responded with an affirmative “aye” and raised their pewter tankards.

Dave, his arm around the waist of a distracted woman, turned to Mandi.

“That’s our young Spike, he got himself a few of those “How to be a witch” books. Top job I’d say.”

“Wiccan lite”, Grant laughed.

Mandi looked up from her empty glass. “I’m going to grab another while the bar’s quiet,” she said, falteringly.

The invisible Spike continued: “And so shall it be that this eve we set the sun’s fire in motion, enlivened, that she may be full this summer and gift a bounteous harvest…”

Grant leaned over to Mandi. “And all the tills may overflow with silver!”

Mandi started to wander back to the pub. What was Dave’s game?

“Mary bold and bounteous be!” shouted Spike.

A pain gripped Mandi’s stomach; something was in there grabbing at her insides.

“Mary bold and bounteous be!’ called Spike a second time

Mandi stumbled against the oak bench by the pub door.

“Mary bold and bounteous be!” shouted Spike a third time, to which the crowd now roared a ringing “aye”. The voices crowded in on Mandi’s dizzied head; they pushed and shoved. Sharp elbows dug into her soft tissue. She felt sharpened blows in her stomach. She wanted to throw up. The wheel rollers had set off to the accompaniment of pipe and drums and excited chatter.

“You OK, Mandi?” called Grant.

“Yes, fine, I’ll catch you up…”

Mandi was not fine. She was feeling decidedly sick, the rhyme of Dave’s was whirling around her head, along with the image of the bloody tooth. Where had that gone? And Gary Glitter. In the background was a sound that Mandi felt impelled to repeat. “Mary, Mary, Mary. Mary… bold and bounteous be…” But it was more blurred than that…. It might have been “Many, Many, Many…” It was something between “Mary” and “Many”…

 Mandi retched and the contents of the pasta meal she had had at the big house filled her nose and fell to the ground. Pieces of chewed vegetable and worms of spaghetti spattered the tiled porch.

“Oh dear, are you OK?”

“Oh I’m so sorry,” stammered Mandi, the surprise jolting her back into reality.

“Had a bit too much, love?”

It was one of the bar staff stood over her, partly pitying, partly laughing. Half a cider is not a bit too much.

“No, I …” Mandi started to reply, but vomit was drooling from her chin.

“Hold on. Don’t worry, we’ve all done it. I’ll get you a glass of water and some tissues.”

“Thank-you” said Mandi, her voice now that of a nine year old. The nausea was passing, replaced by dire embarrassment. And something else. Not just the tininess and vulnerability of a child, but the painful openness, the naivety that let in terrifying things. Her body, so carefully self-controlled usually, had acted without her consent. Mandi prided herself that she could cleanse her system after a heavy night out and still kill a thousand word blog post before breakfast. She had been exposed; and nothing warranted it.

“I don’t know what happened…” Mandi started to explain. The barman returned with water, tissues and a bucket of sand. Genuine old school, thought Mandi. It took her back to primary school.

“… it must be something I ate?”

“That’ll be it.”

“I’ll walk it off,” said Mandi, sipping the last of the water. A little unsteadily, she wandered off towards the green lane where the wheel rollers had begun. Now, they were already high up on the hill. Mandi could hear their drums and shouts. A flicker of flame.  The sun was low in the west, dipping towards the tree lined ridge. Half way up the gentle slope the lane forked, offering Mandi a choice of flaming throng or a quieter tree lined route to the summit. Her head was clearing, but the sting of infuriating humiliation remained. Not feeling sociable, Mandi chose the quieter left hand path. When her attention was taken by a loud cheer, she turned and the flaming wheel was already rolling down the hill. From her viewpoint she could see, despite the lowering sun, that the trajectory it was following could, if forces allowed and obstacles permitted, take it all the way past Lost Horizon, over the Sett and into the sea. She partly wished it would, preferably with that idiot Dave and few others attached to it.

"Sod you," Mandi muttered aloud.

Down below, the burning wheel had escaped its minders and leapt a hedge, careening into the kitchen garden wall of a large house, the shape of which had been cleverly concealed by the large trees of its windbrake. The crash had brought people running – it was a fair way off now, but they looked like scientists in white coats from an old movie, then men in suits arrived – and an altercation was developing between the people from the old hall and the firewheel revelers. Raised voices floated up the hill, but any precise sense was lost in distortions of distance and the self-righteous hysteria of all concerned.   

When Mandi was starting out she had briefly worked for a PR consultancy based in Slough; her team she had been enrolled into the company's "Full Power" exercise. As part of which, Mandi had to take a 16PF psych-profiling test. Mandi’s follow up phone call from the test interpreter had not gone well. ‘Mike’, probably ringing from a work station in Shanghai, struggled through the results of her multiple guess questionnaire.

"Do you get easily bored?"

"Right now? Sure."

"Do you wish that you were more persuasive?"

"I wish I could persuade the company to stop wasting its money."

"Do you find it hard to cope with embarrassing situations?"

She told the interpreter that she was never embarrassed.

“Aren’t you embarrassing yourself now?”

After putting down the phone she felt burned up with fury. Outside her window, a robin had landed on one of the lower branches of an oak and burst into song. She gazed at the robin, and for a moment it gazed back.

"What's your personality, little one?" Mandi had whispered. The robin had flown off over a hedge and away across the fields. Now, another robin squeaked a territorial demand, gave her a look and flew away. Mandi laughed, but a strange thought struck her; had the robin appeared when she was angry in Stroud? Or just now when she was ‘remembering’ it? What if birds – or at least the timing of their appearances to us – are the products of our feelings? 

A second fork in the path, just within the forest, was marked by a partially rotted way marker.

"Keep going left," Mandi thought.

The sun was now well within the tree line. Mandi knew that she could just turn round and retrace her steps, she had noted the turnings; but she reasoned that if she kept going left, she would end up where she started. Like in those old lost-in-the-desert movies. And something about not walking the same path twice. Patently she was marked somewhere on the map of ridiculous.

The further she walked, the more the nagging thoughts fell away. A sense of resignation fell over her. Not an unpleasant feeling. Perhaps all that snowflake nature folk ritual connectedness crap had helped clear her mind; it had been a strange day. She recalled an op-ed she had written called "What is nature anyway?" for some eco-modernist loons she despised, but who paid well. For their entertainment, she had called out the author of ‘Last Child in the Woods’ for facilitating privileged middle-class parents who lacked things to berate their poor conservative clone children about.
"It's not the kids who spend all their time in front of the screens, Richard Louv! Those are adults in the offices and the call centres and they need to get out more. But how could they, Richard?  Because then who would you call to renew the insurance on your electric car? Believe me, the kids are happily connecting to nature down the park every night with a bottle of White Lightening."

It was a crude argument, but it had written itself. Mandi was paid handsomely, and it was partly true.

The path led her to a clearing. On one side was a stunted oak tree, its deformed branches, perpendicular to its trunk, reaching out over the space.

There was a loaded feel to the space; as if her arrival had interrupted a conference of oaks. A gentle breeze approached, the trees on the fringes hissed at the wind as it passed through. Mandi's attention was grabbed by movement in the lower branches of the squat oak.

Curious, she wandered over. Out of the undergrowth, shockingly close up, a middle aged ruddy faced man emerged, stumbling on a fallen branch. His clothing was somewhat loose given the season. He was perspiring.

"What the fuck," said Mandi in surprise.

"I'm just foraging," he said nervously. Mandi heard the ping of his phone. Digging frantically in his pockets, he checked the message, and looked back up at her, helplessly. Unable to describe his mistake. Then he excused himself and hurried off into the undergrowth.

What had just happened there?

Looking down on the ground where the man had stood, a black carrymat was curling at the ends, froth on the lip of a discarded Starbucks coffee cup was hardening, a single black crumpled sock unrolled disconsolately and a set of car keys winked. He will be missing that, she thought momentarily. She looked up at the old oak.

"Welcome to Merrie England, you twats."

Above her the branches were festooned with hundreds and hundreds of used condoms, hanging like fruits. Some coloured, others perfectly transparent save for the obfuscations of spent matter. Each momentary crisis, maybe planned for days by text and apps, passed in seconds.

“What's love got to do, got to do with it…”

Mandi hummed, taken aback by her bitterness. Why should a libertarian care about what other people chose to do with their bodies?  But this sexual detritus was simply dismal. There ought to be some sort of aesthetic merit. A quick shag on a crumpled mat in the woods with a loser from the 'burbs’, not her idea of a beautiful thing… but it didn’t seem to have struck these people as anything very beautiful either… maybe that was partly the ‘appeal’, the ‘fuck you’ to beauty, a perverse dummy around the evolutionary imperative, a refusal of the tyranny of the attractive. Nasty. She could get that.

The sun had disappeared from the branches, swallowed by a hollow. Exhausted, Mandi slumped down beneath the condom tree. Sod hygiene.
"I really need to get over myself," she muttered.

The experience of sitting beneath a tree was markedly different from how she had imagined it. It had been a long time. Mandi shuffled impatiently, violently, attempting to find a comfortable support from the oak’s unyielding substance. For a moment she was even convinced that some bastard had tossed his needles there, but the scratches were from twigs. She looked up, her lips closed tight, just in case something fell from the tree. She wondered if the latex blossoms were actually growing. Male flowers almost ripe and soon to drop their seed?

Mandi remembered her friends Toby and Jane back in DC who had a cat called Rubber. A rescue animal, the long-haired ginger tom had come with the name, allegedly because of its habitat of rubbing up against people. Jane had wanted to change the name to something less embarrassing to call out at night. She was unimpressed by Mandi’s suggestion: ‘Polyurethane’.

Beneath the oak, Mandi pursued a procession of thoughts. Cats’ names, Toby and Jane, their kindness, those November walks in the park. Autumn leaves. Law firm offices; handsome paralegals moving like raptors. I see your lips, those summer kisses, the sunburned hands I used to hold. One thought after another. The summation of your life's thoughts. Sell your book…. Ugh, what? Robins and feelings?   Well, Mickey, what if there ain't no next book…

A branch cracked. A couple of roe deer broke cover, bounding through the trees, pausing briefly to gaze back at Mandi, then on into the gloom. Mandi gently closed her eyes.

"I am Panagia."

The words fell into her.

"I am Panagia."

Something barked, far off.

Then the woods were still and the silence squeezed on her eardrums. A tinnitus like hissing faded in and out, then settled down at wild track. Her mind, trying to make something of this audio Rorschach test, came up with its own whirring. No summation was forthcoming. Thought stopped. There was Nothing.

Mandi opened her eyes. Had she fallen asleep? For how long? It was dark, but it had been dark already, hadn’t it? When did it get dark? A little to the right of where the roe deer had disappeared, an empty space. She peered into it. No information was forthcoming. As with the silence, there was nothing that her mind could make anything of. A perceptible and recalcitrant nothing.

"I am Panagia."

With the third repetition of the phrase, an image appeared. A gem in the ring of emptiness. A figure, her hands raised, pleading. At her heart, a writhing.

Another branch cracked. Footsteps. The glow of a torch. Mandi started and instinctively turned her head in the direction of the new intrusion.
 
Chapter 15

Bob and Janine were chasing the burning disc down the lanes with Grant at the wheel of his borrowed saloon. As hunt followers, this kind of adventure came as second nature. It was a wild hunt! The flaming wheel careering down the hillside, at first within the trees, had somehow glanced off their trunks rather than come a cropper, then leapfrogged a stile with enough momentum to kick over its wooden step, plunge down a rough field steered by a quad bike track and then swing wildly through the one gap in a frost-crumbled boundary wall, climbing a pile of cracked rubble, and roll across manicured grounds before hammering in a shower of sparks and ashes into the fragile bricks of the elderly kitchen garden.     
     
“Wow, they are going to be in such deep shit!”

Bob sounded delighted.

“Who lives there?” asked Grant.

“O, the aristocrat family are long gone,” explained Janine. “It’s Mandun Hall. They’ve taken the sign down. It’s some kind of company offices now, they keep themselves to themselves…”

“Not anymore they don’t,” said Bob, turning the saloon into the metalled driveway, past a quaint lodge. After a hundred metres they were stopped by a metal gate with warning notices about dangerous dogs loose, privacy and no public right of way.

Grant wanted to turn back.

“It’s a shame while we’re here,” wheedled Janine. Bob jumped out and swung open the gate and jumped back in. Grant drove through, reluctantly, without stopping to close the gate. As they slowly approached the big house it emerged from behind a massive windbrake of trees. A confrontation was already building in the grounds; a straggle of the Wiccans-lite were angrily harangued by white-coated and smartly suited residents of the big house. A parcel of crows was joining and scattering repeatedly above the affray. Fists were raised, not by the pagan yokels, but by the white-coated technician-types. Their physical prowess was likely to be unimpressive, but the flood of people from the big house had increased and the locals were outnumbered. The men in suits drew what looked like professional expandable batons from their belts and began to lay about the more aggressive of the pretend pagans.

Janine gasped. Bob braked.

Across the driveway, blocking their further progress, were four suited men in line abreast, a fifth in the centre, a stride ahead with his hand held in the traditional ‘halt’ gesture. At the fringes were four handlers with straining Dobermans.

“We’ll be needing your magic, Grant…”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Bob, beginning to climb out of the car. “Dogs like me.”

Janine reached over the front seat and with remarkable strength yanked him back into his seat.

“What the…”

“Do something, Grant…” begged Janine.

Grant pinched the bridge of his nose; this was the moment in the movie when the wind machines would blow all offending narrative obstructions onto the editing room floor. But somehow they were not in the movies anymore…

“O for...” and Bob began to open the door again, and again Janine reached over and placed an expanding hand over his shoulder and pulled him back into the leather upholstery.

“What the…”

Bob span round on Janine but she was already nodding to something outside, to their right.

Bob and Grant peered through the gloom.

“Let’s get out of here!”

Grant gunned the car, reversed, performed a clumsy three-point turn and accelerated through the metal gate he had left open. As they turned, Grant looked up the grounds to where the wheel ceremony celebrants were being escorted lamely from the property. Among the suited men, their telescopic sticks still hanging from their fingers, seemingly in a position of some respect and power, was the unmistakable figure of Dave the joker, the Amazon Blackface stood behind him in the adjutant position. Grant was even more surprised by the swooping crow that landed on Dave’s shoulder and seemed to turn Dave’s head with its beak in the direction of Grant’s car, sending the magician ducking beneath the side window.

“Jumping Baphomets, did you see that!” shouted Bob. “The women behind the hedge? They had guns!”      
     
 
Chapter 16

Danny's day had not gone as planned. Or rather, as fantasised.  Recent personal circumstances had left him bereft of intimacy; now with time and diminishing returns from the screen's cold show, desire had become a haptic affair. His choice might be wrong, but it was excitingly basic. He was driven: things would happen. The internet, ever generous, supplied Danny with locations, times, preferences, etiquette ("don't touch unless invited"). The prospect of others, an audience, a crowd and the firm slap of discipline were almost as appealing as the hope of contact. He had rifled the online encyclopedias of England's Areas of Outstanding Natural Desire. There was even advice on disabled access!

Danny's journey to the ridge was a mixture of rising excitement and submersive self-loathing. Despite this longing, he soon decided he was not emotionally cut out for this sort of thing. He thought too much; at least he thought he did. He wanted to be like the crowd on the estate he had done a health project with. Unthinking and insensitive; they had sex on tap. How did that work? For people living “chaotic” lives they seemed to organise that pretty efficiently.  Of course, he was not supposed to think that. He was trained not to think like that. But some kinds of people felt less and some kinds felt more, at least he felt so. He pressed on, the tightness in his chest and the sweat on his clenched hands did not abate. “I have not become an animal”, he told himself.

The parking spot suggested by the website usefully came with GPS co-ordinates. They really had thought of everything. Danny had expected more cars, greater anonymity, he reasoned it might still be early. He turned off the engine and reached for his mobile. He flicked through his Facebook newsfeed; the happy contented lives of his friends were not what he needed right now. He reached for the ignition, this just wasn't him, but before he could turn the key, the doors of a red Honda estate parked by some wooden benches swung open and a young couple stepped out. The woman was blonde, perhaps in her thirties, confident, a young Julie Goodyear. Her basque suggested she was not there for birdwatching. No binoculars were evident. The bloke was older, well built. A builder by the look of him, thought Danny. He faltered. What if this was a set up? The guy looked like he could handle himself. The couple glanced once around the car park and then walked purposefully along the track and into the line of the forest. Danny hid his wallet under the front seat. The door of the car just behind Danny’s closed with a click, the lock was beeped, and a single man, same sort of age as Danny, followed the couple at a discrete distance.

This was it, Danny thought. He wished he had left his Facebook feed alone. What was it to be? Enter the forest for a visceral and momentary thrill and suffer the shame at his leisure? No contest; something right there was always going to trump hazy prospects of future guilt. Which was why he never put himself in situations like this. Any chance that he could drive home and drink himself insensible with his self-worth intact were gone. He opened the door.

The couple and their follower had vanished. Danny followed the faint track through the ferns. Just within the tree line, the path forked.  No sign or sound of anyone. He had not expected a search; just to queue. Listening carefully yielded nothing but the insistent alarm of a nearby blackbird.

“Singin’ in the dead of night…”

He chose the right hand path. The blackbird appeared from the brambles.

"Oh, hello! What do you want?" he asked.

The kindly exchange lifted Danny from the matter in hand. Into something worse. Danny recoiled and the bird flew off across the woods in the direction of the estuary, perfectly framed by the canopy and the forest floor.  His earthy response to Julie Goodyear began to fade. Maybe he could pass this off as an evening stroll?

The right hand path had led Danny up a steep bank towards a clearing. Danny sweated from the climb. Much more of this and he would not be up to a shag. Despite his work for the community health project, he had rarely bothered with the functioning of his own body; no one on the project would dare confront him about it. He had never discussed with his expert colleagues how his ego stayed so firmly in control of his state of mind, how when he got ill, it would obsess over its demise. The body, Danny reasoned to himself, does not fear death as it knows it will be reborn or recycled, but his ego's annihilation really upset him. So now it was an irony that when the chips were down, the bastard thing wouldn’t let his wants have free reign. But, then, he hated his body too. So here he was, again, thinking too much and doing fuck all about it.

Danny's monologue was brought to an abrupt halt by the condom tree.

"What the fuck…"

He was disgusted. And out of breath. He loosened his shirt and sat down on a conveniently discarded black carry mat, flicking to the side an old coffee cup and a dubious looking old sock. Disgust instantaneously faded into a glorious resignation and serenity. It was so quick! He had never felt anything remotely like such euphoria. He wondered if he had sat on a discarded skag needle. He was going to be OK! He was not the creep he thought he might be, and this brought a smile so wide to his face that it hurt. All of his fevered planning, the anxious drive, that all fell away. The robotized programming of his armoured shell loosened; he began to undo the straps. He could sit right here, naked beneath the condom tree, and everything would be really, really, really OK. He was gently closing his eyes, when he heard the pad of approaching footsteps.

His eyes snapped open. Had he fallen asleep? How long had he been there? It was still dark…  

Anxiety returned at the thought of having to explain himself, a lone male, in the woods, sweating and sitting on a carry mat beneath this particular tree. They would say he was a pervert, or a limp dick. He could not win from here on in. He sprang to his feet hoping to get away before being seen, but it was too late; far, far too late.

The raven-haired woman was clearly surprised. Danny stumbled for words, but he felt he should at least try and explain himself. 

"I'm … I'm … I'm just foraging…"

The words were as much a surprise to him as the appearance of the woman. “Foraging”?  What was he? A hunter-gatherer? Bear Grylls, for… Without waiting, he stepped quickly away from the woman and the tree and fled into the thicker forest.

"Fuck," he repeated to himself over and over. "She's probably going to report me. I'll be cautioned by the police. Health charity worker exposed… Fuck, fuck, fuck…"

After half an hour of wandering about randomly trying to guess the right path in the increasing gloom, he found his car. Then he felt the ground of the car park cave in. He felt the forest close around him like an angry and lascivious crowd. His keys were not in his pocket. He knew – how did he know? – he knew for sure exactly where they were. Back in the woods beneath that tree. Must have fallen out of his pocket when he was asleep.

Danny picked his way back to the tree slowly, using his phone torch to light the path. He really did not want to meet that woman again. That surely would be the end of his life.  What if she made an accusation? What was she doing there, anyway? He clambered up the hill to the clearing, surprised at how quickly he found it.

"Jesus, what's that?" he whispered to himself.

The torch on his phone was not so powerful, but it shone enough light into the gloom to pick out a vague figure. Danny shivered.  A trick of the light combined with fatigue, maybe. He strained to see.

Wow.

The figure stood some eight feet tall, slender and motionless. Its arms, if that is what they were, were held upwards in a gesture of supplication. From the waist, twisted tendrils fell down to the forest floor.

"Fuck."

Danny stalled. He felt his mind fail. Nothing in him knew what to do or how to do it. He needed his keys.

"It's just the tree!" He shouted at the thing. "You’re just the fucking tree!"

That had reasoned with it, he decided. He walked slowly forward, keeping his torch on the spot where the tendrilled figure was. As he drew nearer the vision transformed into a broken trunk, with drooping branches, weighed down with condoms, draped with a little ivy.

"Oh thank god," he said aloud, and dropped to his knees by the carry mat, head down searching for the keys. To his massive relief, he found them. He sat up and sighed. He could now go home, grab a few drinks, more than a few, sleep off this fucking nightmare.

“Danny?”

Danny looked around. An indistinct voice. Again, hushed.

"Hello?" He responded nervously.

The whisper came again.

"I'm just looking for my car key…" explained Danny, gesturing awkwardly to the earth and the trash, "and I'm sorry."

His voice seemed to be speaking for itself. "I'm sorry," it said again.

The whisper, a repeated phrase, now became more distinct.

"I am Panagia."

"Look, I'm sorry, I need to go home. I'm not a bad person… please, let me go…"

Danny felt tears on his cheeks. He felt the massive figure in the shadows driving them down his face. He felt its terrifying, body-bending power. He was scared by how turned on he was by the thought of the mutilation of his body.

"I'm not a bad person, I'm just, you know, confused or something… please don’t tell on me…"

His voice sounded like that of a child. The child he had been once. The tears continued to roll down his face, but they were nothing to the waves of memory and loss that were pummeling him. As they fell, Danny felt a huge release; as if a tumour or a stone were expelled from his belly. Something was becoming unblocked. It was OK to be Danny. It was OK to be all the conflicting and confusing wicked and desiring things that Danny is. It was OK to say one thing and think another. And not know; ignorance and knowing nothing was fine with Her. Not knowing anything really. It was OK that the world was confusing and that he didn't really understand other people or what they were there for. That it was OK to desire what you did not know, that it was the giving up on the need to begin again, turn over new leaves and break new grounds, and guilt was the first portal and he did not need to go through it… he had the keys, he should run now… For the first time in a while, Danny felt warm towards himself, at the same time he was coldly petrified by the dark figure that seemed to grow up in front and above him, sucking in all the shadows from the forest, silencing the blackbirds, and through the tears he laughed and laughed and laughed. And then he screamed and screamed and screamed.
 
Chapter 17

Dream Diary
(Mandi Lyon, sole entry, undated)

At the beginning of the dream I was flying. A group of birds were either supporting me or flying alongside me. I felt no fear of the height. I felt very light, ‘light as a feather’, ha ha. I thought of this phrase in the dream, I laughed at it in the dream. Down below me, the landscape of the area was laid out partly like a 3D model and partly like the real thing but seen from a distance. From what I could see it was all very accurate, from the sea and the Sett on one side, across the fields to the foot of the hills, then the villages in the West clustered around the Great Hill, like it really is. I was not seeing this from any particular direction, but from all directions. Then it was more like a game board, or a very cheap movie set. It got more intense then, the hills were more mountainous and there were prehistoric mounds, barrows, standing stones that I didn’t recognise. There were also people in the fields, and under the trees. I assumed these were from the ancient tribes who once lived here. I hadn’t noticed anyone before; and these people were careful not to show themselves. Even though it was ancient times, there were lanes just like there are now; with macadam tops, so it was a bit mixed up in terms of time, but the basic geography was right. There were also beings that weren’t right; black dogs with red eyes, a giant person with bat wings, hobgoblins, and walking electricity pylons and parades of trees, zombie-like trees, a Labrador made of gold (!) came running down past me, I was on the ground by now, though I don’t remember landing, and a pack of animal ghosts (cats, dogs, other pets) came racing by, a hairy lurching thing with a tail following at the back with a colony of wolverines. They ran into the forest and I followed them, they disappeared and for a while I was very lonely; then I felt a presence and there was a glowing tree in a clearing, right in the middle with the moon shining down on it. It had been daylight before, now it was night. The tree was covered in white glow-worms that all began to fly and settle all over me, on my arms, in my hair. It was very pleasurable, except for one worm, on the back of my hand that began to insert itself, like a living cannula, into one of the veins, it was very painful and the other glow worms began to do the same thing. I said: “these aren’t actually snakes, these are legless lizards” and the worms all laughed and pretended to be drunk, it was crazy, they were all very long now, and hanging out of my skin and lolling about pretending to be drunk, so I was surrounded by a writhing skirt of these things which felt really slippery, rather than the dry skin they have in real life.

hen I said “you’re not wet”, they replied that they had come to show me something about the sea. Then one of the worms that had inserted itself into the flesh just under my breastbone began to expand massively like a balloon blowing up and opening the flesh out; it disappeared into the hole and I bent over to look and I was looking into a cave with snakes running down the walls like water and I thought ‘I can see right into myself’. What was a bit odd and didn’t make sense was that although I was bending right over, I wasn’t seeing the cave upside down, but right way up. Inside the cave was a part that was much darker than the rest; I strained to see what it was, but there was nothing there. Then a huge figure walked right across my vision and I fell backwards and cracked my head on the rock and the figure was standing right over me, it was female, it had huge windmill sails growing out of its back and poles with red flags stuck into its collarbones and it was protected by a guard of squids psychically controlled by this thing I knew was called “The Navigator” which was mostly a body of bones and a huge helmet with a full-face visor and it communicated with me and said “we are the true people” and I saw human people running down the lanes, nineteenth century people in clothes of that period, terrified of the squids, and jumping into boats, which didn’t make sense as a way of escaping sea monsters. I tried to tell them. The animals – and this now included the squids and the black dogs and the slow worms – caught someone and they began to rip this man’s arms to shreds with jaw bones and teeth they had taken from the floor of the cave inside my stomach and – this was right in front of me – I could see them peeling huge slices of flesh off this man’s arms and then his chest and stomach and they peeled them down until they trailed on the ground and he looked like he was wearing a huge skirt of his own flensed fat. The man wasn’t in any kind of pain, instead he was really excited, his eyes turned back inside his head and his arms were up in the air like ‘happy-clappy’ worship, and his mouth was a shape like “Mandi bandy up from the deep / Rode the big squid in her bare feet” and that’s when I realised he was worshipping me...  I looked down at myself again and I saw that I was the landscape with the mounds and hills and valleys and cave and that my teeth were broken standing stones and out of my back grew these huge pages with a title like ‘The Pocket Book of Birds’ and the pages began to flap and I felt an incredibly cold wind and heard a beating and I held out my arms with the flapping pages on them and on either side of me were exact copies of myself and together we began reciting a spell in birdsong and the whole forest shivered and out came the creatures, nameless things, all sorts of weird confabulations of teeth and string and blubbery heads and instead of the Sun there was a giant darkness in the shape of something that I knew, I knew really really really well, and I wasn’t allowed to say, I struggled to think of its name, but just as I had it I forgot it again and I woke up with a horrible start... under the tree, draped in condoms, yeeuch, and I was so stiff from being propped up against it I could not move, but I could see a pair of feet in front of me ... and I had to really strain, hurting my neck to see whose feet they were, and a voice said “you are awake” and all the toes on the feet, there were eight on each and twelve feet, they began wriggling and wriggling and I jerked back and hit my head again and I blacked out in the dream and I woke in the real forest and there was someone coming.     
 
Chapter 18
Mandi was not at all sure what to do. She knew movement would give away her presence. If she stayed sat at the base of the tree, however, the intruder might go by without seeing her. But the intruder’s torch was scanning the ground, shining directly at her. Mandi's pulse raced.
"Jesus, what's that?" she heard the intruder say. It was a man. He must have seen her. Yet he was not letting on, despite the torch surely revealing her sat against the tree. Maybe he thought she was a corpse or a hobgoblin. He walked slowly and deliberately towards her, shadowed behind the torch’s beam.

Then, without a word, he dropped to his knees.

Was he praying or something? Mandi was seriously worried now; this guy was acting like a maniac.  She wanted to get up and run, but she had seen that film. That scene never went well for the woman.

"Hello?"

The figure spoke.

Mandi thought quickly. It was not a definite “hello” as if he had seen her or recognized her. It was more of a question.

He whispered something again and then more clearly: "I'm sorry."

He seemed to be sobbing now. This was way too freaky. Mandi tried to call out, but something had clicked in her lungs, she made almost no sound at all. The man continued to kneel, a few feet from her, wailing now and throwing his head back and forth.

"I'm not a bad person, I'm just confused!"

He kept repeating this. Mandi dare not move; yet her initial horror was giving way to a kind of calm. She gazed at the kneeling figure, a palpable sense of compassion towards him rose from somewhere inside her. It was not something she recognized; it was part of the pathology of her fear. She wanted to reach out and hold his head in her lap and comfort him. To have the power to soothe his brow and snap his neck.
It was now just him and her. Everything else had melted away. And he was laughing, joyously. And Mandi was laughing too.
 
Chapter 19
The robin was the first to sing that morning. Followed by the blackbirds. And in the top of the condom tree, a song thrush. Its percussive and insistent notes finally woke the slumbering Mandi. For a few seconds she gazed around her, empty. Then the thoughts began to rush in. She had been there all night. She was alone. She was OK. She really was as stiff as a board. Getting to her feet, carefully testing her muscles and avoiding the condoms – she could have sworn that there were fresh ones that had been hung on the branches since she fell asleep – she stepped into the clearing and gazed out on the view down to the valley. The vista had an unreal quality, the colours, so bright, were childlike; it was like looking at a bad painting or a model made with egg boxes and poster paints. The kind of place those creatures, the nameless things with weird conglomerations of teeth and sinew and slubbery-dubbery brains, might come racing out of the trees. Instead, what came was the black-clad figure of the caretaker.

“Come on, Mandi, you’ve been here all night.” He looked around. “It’s not the safest place in the world.”

“How did you know I would come here?”

“Same reason everyone else comes here.”

“Sex?”

He snorted gently.
​
“The spirit of the place.”    
 
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