CHAPTER 1

I came ashore, scraped off the fat, and dressed. I walked up the pebbled beach, and over rocks, and headed inland across rocky fields.

At length I came to a tremendous road, running south-east: to London. I clambered down the embankment, and began to walk toward London along the rough stony path at the road’s edge.

As I walked, it began to snow. The flakes falling through the crisp, cold air were firm, and settled on my shoulders and hair without melting. The slush thrown up by the passing trucks, however, threatened to soak and chill me. I stopped, and harvested some of the many plastic bags that gaily adorned the bushes of the embankment. From these fine, waterproof bags I fashioned a crude suit. To allow me to perspire, I incorporated flap-covered slits at the vital points, made with my little knife. Flat against my heart, I made a special pocket, for Angela’s lipstick.

An eternal river flowed forward forever at my right hand as I walked on: vehicles of all sizes, all colours: some tiny, low, and fast, some huge, swaying, sloshing: some with lights flashing: and occasionally my favourites, immense vehicles carrying many other smaller vehicles on their backs.

At the far side of that river was a thin, never-ending island of grass and bushes.

Beyond that island flowed forever toward me a second mighty river, in necessary balance.

That first day's walking, the vein and the artery of the nation's body pulsed in a long, slow rhythm beside me, the great pulse into the city after dawn, the great pulse out of the city as night fell. And at night, the red river of light flowing into the city, the white forever leaving.

Above it all, the high orange lights illuminating the vast road, the vehicles, the swirling orange snow.

In the full of the night, the snow grew heavier and began to drift deeply at the foot of the high embankment to my left, pushing me out into the slowest lane of traffic.

I was encouraged to continue for another hour by the friendly horns of the truck drivers, willing me on with long blasts, but at length I grew too tired to continue.

I harvested another crop of plastic bags from the embankment bushes, and added more layers to my costume until I was as snug and warm as any man in England. Wading uphill, through the deep snow of a deeply drifted drainage gully cut into the embankment, I found the deepest spot and dug a simple snow-hole.

The dense snow above and around me muffled the roar of the river of cars and trucks and vehicles of exotic function. I looked up, along the snow tunnel, at a little patch of sky. I settled my plastic-clad hip into a dip in my snow-bed. Wisps of steam drifted through the slits and from under the flaps of my suit as my perspiration escaped me, into the cold air.

At the tunnel mouth, as the orange clouds cleared, a single star appeared. The star stood steady in the sky as the last snowflakes danced about it and died away. At last it stood, alone.

Imperceptibly, as the world turned, the small star, too, drifted away from me. Love... love is a puzzler. The soft, distant swoosh of trucks through slush lulled me at last to sleep.

CHAPTER TWO

The next day, I was awoken by the low morning sun shining on my shelter. A light drift of fresh snow had closed the entrance to my snow hole with a thin crust, so that I opened my eyes in a space as weightless, translucent and featureless as the centre of a pearl.

I stretched and yawned. Perspiration had saturated my clothing in the night but, trapped against me by the plastic, it had warmed agreeably. Comfortable and snug in my layers, I stank pleasantly of myself.

I stood, and broke out through the powdery crust. The sunlight, bouncing off the surrounding snow, dazzled me. Squinting, I walked hip-deep along the gully, down the embankment, toward the deep, roaring rivers of cars, with a great crackling of plastic and crunching of fresh snow. I melted handfuls of the fresh powder in my mouth and drank the clear, pure water. Then I searched through the debris under the snow at the mouth of the gully until I found a large plastic cider bottle, in the traditional amber plastic.

I cut a broad strip from around the bottle with my small knife, then made a notch in the middle for my nose. Notches, then, at either end of the strip for my ears. After a couple of fine adjustments, and the trimming of excess plastic, I had serviceable protection from the glare of the snow, and the risk of snow blindness. The curved plastic clung snugly to the sides of my head. Little weight rested on my ears, or nose. This was good, for my nose had shrunk in the cold until it was so snub it would have had difficulty supporting my eye-protector unaided. After urinating through a flap in my plastic suit, I rubbed my nose vigorously to make it bigger, and continued my journey.

CHAPTER THREE

It was long, hard walking of a kind I hadn't had to do since my Tipperary days. It brought back pleasant memories of rounding up sheep for farmers, on the low hills around the Orphanage, and of herding the sheep along the road into Town, to the Market, or Abattoir. Indeed, my happy memories extended back to a time when the grandparents of those sheep were lambs and I was but a boy.

When I was a young Orphan of nine or ten summers, nothing pleased me and the other young orphans more than to chase and tackle lambs, rolling them over in the long wet grass as they kicked and bucked and bleated, before letting them go, so as to chase them again, till all were exhausted and the Orphans lay down with the Lambs. Then we would usually bite off the testicles of the males, for which we were paid five pence per gonad by the farmer, and an icecream from Father Madrigal for the lad with the greatest haul of Balls at the end of the day. Later, we would play hurling with them until it grew dark and we had lost the last testicle in the long grass. Oh, there is no childhood as happy as the Tipperary childhood!

Although those particular lambs, of course, would not have been the grandparents of the sheep we herded later. These and other memories filled my heart, and I sang as I walked.

Occasionally, colossal signs warned of tributary streams of vehicles about to join the great river, within half an hour’s walk. Quite why the signs were there I don't know, for I could see and hear the sidestreams joining the mainstream from a good mile away. The great size of the signs indicated they may have been for sight-impaired walkers.

Such tributaries, however, were often the very devil to cross, and I decided at length to walk the more pleasant, landscaped, woodland path that ran between the twin rivers of cars. Unable to find a zebra crossing due to the slush and snow, I decided to trust in the courtesy of the drivers. I began walking across the five rows of traffic that made up the river.

In Tipperary, when walking the little roads, all who knew you would beep their horn and wave as they passed you. I was delighted to discover that, in England, total strangers did the same; one after the other; hundreds of them. The friendliness of the drivers was almost embarrassing, and I tried to wave back individually at everyone who waved at me, which slowed my progress considerably.

Several vehicles were so distracted, waving at me with one hand and beating out a merry tune on their horn with the other, that they mounted the grassy central path, jumped the low strip of metal that ran like a spine along the middle of it, and passed through the bushes into the oncoming river of traffic. These cars were then borne away, backwards, so quickly, whence they had come, that I had no time to return their waves.

Despite these distractions, I finally made the central path. The snow-carpeted grass was pleasant beneath my feet, and I made good time toward London. The occasional tarmacd breaks in the grassy track were easily crossed, for they seemed rarely used. Trickier were the huge circular islands, many with trees on them, which marked the meeting of rivers, and around which cars swirled clockwise. Fording the broad river to these islands was peculiarly difficult. The planners of the Approach to London, though they had done a lovely job with the landscaped path, seemed not yet to have properly signposted all the necessary Pedestrian Crossings. Without adequate signposting, some of the drivers seemed, quite understandably, under-prepared for the sight of a pedestrian walking out in front of them. But a couple of friendly waves were all it took to sort out these little misunderstandings.

CHAPTER FOUR

Towards dusk, I started to pick up some of the freshly-slaughtered rabbits which lay along the edge of the river of cars, among the corpses of crows, rats, foxes, hedgehogs, badgers and cats. Most of the freshly killed rabbits had been immediately crushed, recrushed and flattened by subsequent vehicles. However, some had been thrown clear onto the grass by glancing impacts. The best, with their guts unburst and their flesh unbruised, were those rabbits who had merely broken their rear legs, and dragged themselves off the road into the grass to die.

I had so forgotten the lessons of my youth, while living the sophisticated life of Galway City, that I lifted my first rabbit by the ears, to carry it. How the other Orphans would have laughed, could they have seen me! Gravity, of course, caused it to copiously piss down my leg from its death-loosened sphincter. Thankful for my plastic suit, I quickly reversed the rabbit. Sighing, I bent a rear leg back at the joint, to raise the tendon out from the bone, and made a slit behind the raised tendon with my little knife. Tucking the paw of the other leg in behind the tendon, to make a loop of the legs, I carried the rabbit easily on my bent little finger, in the usual manner. I did not wish to carry rabbits in my black bag, due to the fleas, and blood, and excrement. Besides, the narrow strap of my bag, even with the little I was carrying, tended to cut a groove in my shoulder and numb the arms after a while.

Soon I had three good-sized rabbits dangling from my gloved fingers. I stopped at the next big island, and set up camp. In the heart of the small grove at the centre of the island, I found dry sticks and several types of edible fungus. I gutted and skinned the rabbits, started a fire with flints and dry moss and the steel of my knife, and left rabbits and mushrooms to cook while I built a shelter of branches.

As night fell and the temperature fell with it, great open lorries circled the island, mechanically scattering rock salt into the river of slush, to stop it freezing in the long night. I watched from the central grove, as I slowly ate my baked rabbits, each stuffed with a different variety of wild mushroom.

After sucking the baked marrow from the last of the rabbit bones, I made my way to the edge of the island and searched the shore for the little heaps of rock salt. The drowsy waves of late night traffic swept past me, around the curve of the island and away to London down the great river. Carefully, I collected my salt, and filled my pockets with the discarded plastic cutlery which was abundant on the island’s foreshore.

I returned to my little spark of heat, clutching a double handful of whiteness; the hard white cubic crystals of the rocksalt mingled with feathery, brittle crystals of snow. I poured the soft fistfuls onto warm, flat stones at the fire's edge. Soon the heaps slumped, settled for a second, and slumped again. They swiftly halved in size, as the snowflakes collapsed and melted away into a dark puddle on the flat rock. The puddle soon shrank and drifted off as steam, leaving the small piles of moist salt to dry.

I scraped the skins of the rabbits clean of the last fat with the plastic cutlery. My own little knife was too sharp for this scraping, for I did not wish to nick the skins. The discarded fat and plastic blazed and spat in the fire, giving good light. I carefully and thoroughly massaged the dry salt into the skins, to dry and tan them. As the fire died, I wove a frame from hazel wands, and pegged out the skins to stretch and cure.

Before I slept, I took the lipstick from the pocket by my heart and removed the top. I took out the brittle yellow triangle of paper. I read it again by the glow of the dying fire in the heart of the glade: the mysterious clue to my origins: Gents... Anal... Cruise...

As I read, I wafted the open lipstick beneath my nose, its feminine perfume dizzying me so that the letters blurred before my eyes. How strange, that mere chemistry could have gender. Inhaling these volatile oils, a female figure shimmered at the edge of vision, at the far side of the fire. Beyond the warm, trembling air, the dark became a woman.

Carefully, I put it all away.

At length I fell asleep, the lipstick moving with my heart.

In the morning, the skins and frame were easily carried on my back. As I walked, the skins cured slowly in the sun and wind. Once they were cured, dry and supple, I could take them from the frame. A few more days. I would sew them then, with bone needles, and with sinew and tendon as my strong thread.

CHAPTER FIVE

In a few days, I had a jacket of rabbit fur, lined with rabbit fur.

By the end of a week, I had a suit. For variety, I added hardwearing badger trim at hem and cuff. My amber goggles I lined at the nose-notch and ear-notches with white rabbit fur, from the soft belly of a young rabbit, sewn neatly to the plastic. First, using a wire heated orange in the fire, I melted sewing holes in the plastic. The wire slid through with a hiss, leaving a raised rim of molten plastic around each hole to cool & set into a reinforcing eyelet. Then I sewed on the shaped strips of skin using the bone needle & the delicate but strong front leg tendons. The warmth of the soft fur, and its gentle caress, caused my nose to maintain a decent size on even the coldest morning. The goggles sat better, and I was pleased.

Occasionally I was reminded by a warmth in my belly of the hidden presence of the Ring Babette had given me. Deep in my navel, at my precise centre of gravity, it seemed to gain energy from my walk.

Once, I woke in the night and saw a white light shining from within my navel, illuminating the branches above me, bright leaves and hard shadows. As I woke, and tried to focus, the light faded to a dim pale green and dimmed again to a deep blue, and went out.

Steadily, I progressed towards London.

CHAPTER SIX

A day passed.

Another.

Then, for a full day, I forgot the spark of individual humanity contained in each vehicle, and saw only one eternal river of life; a fluid, continuous flow of animate metal.

Next morning, an hour into my walk, this hallucination of unity, abruptly, ended. The absolutely separate nature of each vehicle became apparent. With a shock like a thump to the heart, One became Many.

I admired their collective beauty. And then I passed through the curved and coloured surfaces and saw the similarity of so many uniquenesses, in all their tiny variety of colour and scale, like the leaves on a tree. Like the trees in a forest. The lives within unique and separate, each from the other. Lives suspended for now in their hard shells, like spores: spores from which life would pour, once conditions were again favourable to life. Once these million spores had come to rest, in hospitable towns and friendly cities, or lodged in the precarious warmth of a farmyard. Life reemerging and blooming in the rich, nutritious house with its warmth and its food and its family, the warm precarious house, isolate among the desolate fields.

I smelt the house, as perhaps a gust of warm air wafted up from the depths of my plastic bags, bearing the smell of bread perhaps from some warmed crumbs in the depths of an old bag, and I cried "Mother," and startled myself out of the illusion.

And I walked on for the next mile or two unillusioned, my tread crisp on the crust of snow, the crunch of frosted grass, and what drove past were cars and trucks and vans made in Birmingham and Stuttgart and Japan. I felt tired.

I decided I would make camp early that night.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I came to an island, the largest yet, and the fairest. The curve of its shore was so gentle that it scarcely curved at all, and at its centre was a vast woodland. I slowly circled around the great wood, as was my habit before settling.

The grass beneath the snow felt lush and thick beneath my feet, and the soil well drained. There was no human sign upon the land. This snowy field ran in its great white circle about the dark wildwood. No eight-ox team had ever broken this carucate of ploughland. My heart exulted. This fair island had no antecessor. No loanland, this, nor held by any man in bookland tenure. Neither inland nor warland, I would grant myself my own fief.

“I claim you,” I said aloud to the island. “You are mine.”

And my words emerged in a warm breath that condensed into a white cloud above the white island. And my words moved off across the land, towards the dark wood. Later, if it grew still colder, perhaps my words would cool further, from liquid to crystal, and fall as snow across the land they claimed.

CHAPTER EIGHT

In the morning, the tiny hoccus was dry. At a touch it dropped, in a smooth flow, into a flatter, wider pile. I stood, and looked about my laund: defended by the eternal river, there could be no purpresture upon my demesne.

Alone in the cold morning air, a free man in England. The snow began to fall upon my island. I savoured my freedom, as the snow fell through the cold air.

This empty freedom.

No, I would not hold this land.

I would not be held.

I packed my camp and left the fair island.

Ahead lay my true love, my parentage, and destiny. The island disappeared behind. Occasional buildings now appeared, off to either side. I walked the snowy path. A free man in England.

CHAPTER NINE

The snow thickened in the sky and deepened on the ground, as I walked on toward London. No wind blew now, and the flakes fell straight down. The occasional buildings were becoming rows of buildings, far to either side. Soon I could see only their vaguest silhouette. Then the silhouettes themselves faded and were gone. The cars slowed now, thinned in number. Their vague bulks murmured by me at a fast trot, then a slow trot, then walking pace, so that they laboured to overtake me.

Now minutes went by without a car or lorry at all. When there was one, it was barely moving, or had stopped and I was overtaking it, so that the turning world seemed broken and the natural order thrown into reverse.

Then came a curious thing. The endless path ended. I stepped off the hidden grass and down, through the deepening snow, onto the hidden tarmac and strode straight on, toward the next island or the continuation of the interrupted path: and on I strode... and on... and there was nothing. I continued, guided by wheeltracks in the snow to the left and right of me, their edges softening and ruts filling under the relentless snow. Once, I thought I heard swans flying low and slow above me. But it must have been the slow, low beat of some other thing, inside me or outside, for I looked up into the falling whiteness and could see no whiteness move with purpose across the general pattern.

The twin rivers had ceased now entirely to flow. I waded on.

With no rabbits moving and no cars to kill them and no grass on which to track them and no burrows in which to find them, I decided not to eat.

With no islands on which to stop, and no materials to burn, and no trees for shelter, I decided not to sleep. The snow so heavy, the light so dim, I took off my goggles and put them in my inside pocket, beside Angela's lipstick. Against my heart.

I strode on. I ignored the occasional faint tracks, at right angles to my path, with their hints of other roads, other goals. I was intent on London, and my love. I did not stop: day died, night fell with the white flakes. The orange light of street lamps flickered and caught, and they changed colour in mid-air.

Dawn came, pale, pink: the orange light died.

The flakes were white.

The cycle repeated.

The endlessness of the fallingness of the flakes in my vision led me at length to the curious illusion that I was rotating backwards endlessly, feet over head, and that the flakes were fixed points in the still air. The illusion was pleasant, and I indulged it. Hours passed. Days?

I grew sensitive to the weight of the invisible buildings bulking to the left and right of me. I navigated by their mass. Perhaps I detected them by their soft effect on the infinite flake-fall. The gentlest funnelling. A calming of the light. A canyon’s twin reflection of the delicate crunch of the snow beneath my feet, as the earth rotated beneath me. As I rotated above it...

The sensation of a gateway. The tingle in my fillings as I passed under an invisible iron arch. The sensation of the path narrowing, buildings vanishing, a taste of distant trees, the smell of the memory of last summer's leaves. All was pleasant to my lulled and mesmerised senses.

I rotated endlessly backwards along the surface of an earth rotating around its axis as we both circled a sun, rotating as it circled a swirling galaxy whose intricate mechanism performed a collaborative parabola influenced by and influencing all the rotating, circling atoms scattered through a universe disguised as matter but, in silence under all, a single mighty mote of energy in flux and motion changing form and place through space and time.

Dizzy, I fell over.

As I slept, I dreamt that Angela's hand reached out to me, and I was happy: but her hand kept going, through my skin, into me: I was sad: her cool hand closed around my heart, and pulled it out.

Love's a puzzler.

I woke up.