I met Sarah through a dating app but it wasn’t as grim as it sounds. She was staying with a woman I was seeing at the time who’d I’d matched with. I’d gone back to this woman’s house in the suburbs and stayed the night and was coming downstairs the next morning - creeping blearily it’s maybe better to say - when there was Sarah in the kitchen finishing breakfast. 

It was autumn and it was love at first sight. Little tiny London back kitchen with a long, thin, fenced-in garden and a shed at the bottom. Leaves fluttering down to the lawn and her with a mug in her hands saying “hello”. Kerching! Lights on. Action! Welcome back, my friend.

I don’t know what we talked about, whatever it was, it wasn’t for long as her flatmate - my ‘girlfriend’ - came down soon after and Sarah went off to work. I’d liked her, though. I’d liked her much more than the woman I’d spent the night with. 

That sounds brutal so let me qualify it.

Ali - shit, yes, that was her name - and I had got in contact online, as I said. We’d met up, been to a Devon bay together, to a concert I think (can’t remember who but have a flash vision of us dancing in lights with drinks) and spent a few nights at each other's houses when neither of us had our kids. 

We were both playing it cool, both recently divorced - both had been cheated on - fucked over, we called it - both had two youngish kids and new homes (read - mortgages) but most importantly we were both playing a role, showing our best sides, keeping things light, two damaged souls hoping things might work out but having to do the magnetism side of things manually. 

Although we’d made love the night before and that morning I remember my soul sighing with relief as I left the bedroom that day. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was all just too much hard work. Too formal? Something we just both had to do? To get done? It was all a bit of a drag and though it pains me to say it, later I’d find out that Ali thought exactly the same. I don’t really know why we did it except that we felt we had to do it. Doing it was getting something done, if that doesn’t sound too wanky.

But with Sarah it was completely different; everything was different, right from the start. I even remember feeling something weird as I came down the stairs that morning - a kind of premonition. The funny thing was, later she told me she’d had it too - a weird feeling when she’d woken up that something good was going to happen. All I know is that she got the same kind of charge, or shock, or thrill, out of that quick meeting in the small back kitchen as I did.

She was dressed for work - smart and pretty, I thought - and I liked her intelligent face. I liked her intelligence in general, a kind of sharpness, not smartarsey or showoffy, and I loved her teeth and the way her mouth didn’t completely close. She said I had a kind aura, kind but strong, and that she liked my hands. I was going to the gym a lot back then, careful-ish with what I ate. I’d lost a lot of weight since the divorce and had bought new clothes but I was pretty damn insecure all the same. 

So there it was with Sarah. Something new and good. A connection. The timing, though, was totally shit. She was leaving, I was arriving. I can’t even remember what we spoke about. Where the cereal was, I think. Ali interrupted us and when Sarah left for work, Ali told me a few details about Sarah which I pretended not to be interested in. She was married, Ali said, and there was something about her and her husband trying for a kid but having problems. She was some bigwig in her job but like all the other stuff, it just washed over me. 

All the time Ali was talking I was thinking about Sarah’s mouth and brown doe eyes, falling in love more, thinking of how she’d sat in the chair opposite me - really weird, soppy stuff.

“She lives up north,” Ali told me. “She came down here for a conference.” They’d been to Uni together years ago and kept in touch.

“Ah.” I sipped my coffee. “So, she’s what? Going back today…?”

“This afternoon, I think. Straight after the conference.”

I remember walking to the train station later, on my own, and knowing it was the end for me and Ali. I can remember the sun in the elm trees and the breeziness of her neighbourhood and how my whole life felt like it was starting anew. Sarah was the view I’d seen from the top of the mountain - the latest mountain. It showed me what was out there, the possibilities.

Or, that’s what I thought.

I got a message from Ali about a year later, out of the blue. I was sitting watching football on TV, playing with my phone in an empty house, when it popped up - and it took me a few minutes until her name clicked with the memory. 

I hadn’t seen Ali since that time - we’d just not bothered to contact each other. I’d had a bad time with my kids, which had been hard. I have two, ten and twelve, a girl and a boy, and it had been tough adjusting to the new way of doing things; hard on me but really hard on them. I could rouse myself when I was with them but when I was on my own I was starting to slob out. Letting the gym go. Getting the beers in. The match I was watching that day was probably my third of the day. I was into escapism but too lazy to escape anywhere further than my living room.

Ali’s message was to ask me if there were any jobs in the lab I worked at. One of Ali’s cousins had just graduated and was looking for an opening. I phoned her right then and there as it was easier, catching her at home, explaining that she’d picked the right week to ask me as just that Friday two positions had become vacant. I told her to send me her cousin’s CV and a couple of things to add to the cover letter and then, as we were having the awkward sign-off, she just as happy to go as I was, I said, “Hey, can I ask you something weird?”

“Oh…”

“No, not that.”

Relief. “No, no - I know…”

“No, it was about your friend I met. Sarah, was it?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, I knew you liked her!”

“I don’t - it’s not that..”

“Whatever.”

“No, I was just wondering…if you were still in contact, or…? ”

I could hear Ali’s brain whirring. I guess because I’d just done her a favour she felt she could do me one. “Actually, matey, you’re in luck. She just got divorced…”

I turned the game off and phoned Sarah.

The house was dark, it was about half past four in the afternoon, four empty beer bottles and a plate of crumbs on the table. When I stood at the front room window and looked out between the white blinds I could see Christmas decorations in most of the windows in my cul-de-sac. I wasn’t a Christmas person. My plan was to go home and suffer it with the olds. My first one as a divorced dad. Lucy was having the kids.

“Erm, yes?”

“Sarah?”

“Yes?” She sounded guarded.

I babbled out who I was and said we’d met in Ali’s kitchen a year or so back and she changed. Oh, god! Yes, yes she remembered me. How was I? This all was neutral, but not unhappily so. 

She asked how I was. I told her I’d just spoken to Ali and had asked about her and then my voice trailed off. “Actually - this is stupid. I don’t really know why I’m phoning you.” I gritted my teeth and suddenly felt very hot and uncomfortable. I had my eyes closed and my scalp shrank. “I think I’m gonna go.”

“No, it’s fine,” she said, as though whispering in my ear. A laugh. “Really.”

I opened my eyes. “Are you sure? I just - I don’t know why. I was just wondering how you were doing, that’s all. We only talked for a minute. In the kitchen, I mean. And - well, I don’t know…”

“Less than a minute!”

“Right.” I nodded and sighed. “So? Are you - are you alright? How are you doing? Still living - up north somewhere?” God, I knew nothing about her.

“Actually, no. Well, yes and no. I’m living with my mum right now.” Another laugh. Sadder.

“Oh.”

“And no, things are not all right. They’re quite shit, actually.”

“Oh.” Fuck it. “Ali said you’d got divorced. Not that’s why I phoned you or anything.”

“Right.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re sorry?”

“I’m divorced too. I know how it feels.”

“I don’t think you know how this feels.”

“Trust me. I probably do.”

“Was your heart broken?”

“No. It was fucking torn out and smashed to pieces. In front of me.”

“Snap.”

I was standing at the bottom of the stairs. I looked up at an empty house. An empty bedroom. An unmade, smelly bed. “Where does your mum live?”

Sarah laughed. “What?”

“No, sorry. I just - it would be nice to talk to you face to face. Just - just talk.”

She sighed into the phone. I could see purple Christmas lights blinking through the frosted glass of the front door. 

“Sorry,” I said. “This is stupid. I feel like a stalker.”

“No, no it’s not that. You can’t come here. It’s my mum. She’s not, you know…with it. I shouldn't even be here.”

“No, don’t worry. I’m being stupid.”

“I could come there…maybe?”

I stared at myself in the mirror on the wall. Grey tracksuit bottoms and a long-sleeve faded band T-shirt, belly protruding. I sucked it in, patted it. “Seriously?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Fuck, no.”

“I have a couple of days. To be honest, I could do with a change of scene.”

“I have a guest room. Or you can sleep in my room. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

Sarah laughed. “I don’t want to impose.”

“Impose?” I laughed. “You’re joking, aren’t you?”

A scream. “Shit.”

“What was that?”

“I have to go.”

“Oh, right.”

“I’ll - this is your number.” Muffled: “Coming, mum!”

“Yep. No worries. We’ll…”

But she was gone.

Sarah turned up on Christmas Eve just as it was getting dark. I’d love to say it was snowing but it wasn’t. It was a drizzly, crappy afternoon after a drizzly, crappy day. I’d bought a white semi-fashionable tree with flashing LED lights and had it on the table by the window but there was nothing under it. The kids' presents were all at their mother’s. The house was tidy, though, and I had some Christmas radio station on and was wearing a crap Christmas sweater with flashing Rudolph eyes. I’d also bought loads of drinks and nibbles and was absolutely gagging to start by the time she arrived.

The first thing I’d noticed was that she’d changed her hair and she was thinner, maybe even skinny. Had she been skinny when we’d met at Ali’s? We shared an awkward hug. “Ho, ho, ho,” I think I said.

“Ha! I love it, you dick.”

She seemed to like the house, wandering about and complimenting me on the white tree and the size of my TV. I hung her coat in the cupboard by the downstairs loo and poured us both a red wine. We clinked glasses and were away.

I was honest from the start about the kids and Lucy. She was fascinated by my story of coming home and catching her in our bed with her karate teacher. That might have been bad enough, but the fact they just carried on shagging - which they did - as I stood there, made Sarah’s eyes widen in shock and laughter. I’d told the story a few times by now and knew the end was the punchline. Me sitting downstairs on our sofa listening to them fuck upstairs, waiting for Lucy to finally come down in a towel, brushing her messy hair off her face and apologising and shrugging.

“That is fucking brutal,” Sarah said.

“I know. But you know what? The thing is with divorces and horror stories in general, deaths and stuff - and maybe you’ve found this - what you do get is loads of people coming out of the woodwork, usually people you don’t expect, telling you their horror stories.”

“Right.”

“And it’s amazing how many people this stuff happens too. And that my story isn’t really that bad in the, you know, grand scheme of things.” I stood up. “Another?”

“Please.”

I was in the kitchen pouring the drinks. The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl, finally, were on the radio (what a load of tinselly shit you had to wade through to get to that gem) and I looked back at those lovely legs crossed over themselves and thought, I’m sorted here. A true Christmas dream. “What about you?” I called out, perhaps even making an effort at dancing - and the boys of the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay - “here ya go…I’ll get some Pringles out in a minute. Really spoil you.”

“Me?” Sarah’s foot was tapping but suddenly stopped.

I picked up on the change as I came back into the living room, jumper flashing. “Still a bit raw?”

“I didn’t get divorced,” she said.

“Oh, no?”

“No. My darling Tim simply disappeared.” She managed a sad smile and held out her hand for her glass. Her arm was really very thin.

“Just…?”

“We think,” she spoke slowly, “he committed suicide. He didn’t leave a note. He didn’t leave a reason. He didn’t, as far as I know, have a reason.” Her eyeballs had a sheen. She was staring at my horrible, white LED flashing tree. Last Christmas had started. “He just…” She threw up a hand and let it drop onto her knee. “Vanished.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked, sitting down. I glugged the booze quickly and looked back at the bottle on the kitchen top in lust. Couldn’t leave now, though.

“What?”

“Who’s ‘we’? You said ‘we think’ he committed suicide.”

“The police. And me.”

“Oh.”

“They have footage of him on a bridge. The Runcorn suspension bridge?” She looked at me and I shook my head to say I didn’t know it. “And they found his car on the other side of it, in a car park - an Asda car park of all things. Abandoned.”

I nodded. “Shit, I’m really sorry.”

“It’s - it’s just. It is what it is, you know.”

“But you don’t believe it?”

“I don’t really know any more. I don’t know if I don’t want to believe it or if it’s true. Maybe there’s some big secret I don’t know. You get paranoid, you know. You think everyone knows something they’re not telling you. You go through everything looking for clues, wondering about everything.”

“But if he didn’t do it,” I tried. “What do you think happened?”

“I think he’s in Africa.”

“What?” I spluttered. “What the fuck? Africa? Where did that come from?”

“I know, I know, it sounds mad, but he was always going on about it. How he wanted to work there - in Botswana, somewhere like that. Botswana or Kenya. He was one of these traveller-types, you know. Travel snob, backpacker, whatever. He’d always travelled, been everywhere. And he wanted to work in Africa. He had a whole spiel about it, the skies, the - god, I don’t know what. Elephants were in there.”

“Doing, what for fucksakes? Volunteer work? Digging bogs?”

“God, I don’t know. Teaching probably. He was a teacher and he’d been teaching all around the world before he met me. I stopped him, though he never put it that way. He was back here for a family funeral when he met me. He stayed and was teaching here, in Chester, where we lived. He fucking hated it. Said it was a living death.”

“What was?”

“England, the UK. Said we were telly obsessed pissheads, basically.”

“But…Africa?”

“I think it was the next place on his list when he met me, you know. And because he’d never got there it just became a huge thing. I mean, we talked about going in a few years but I can’t just pack up and leave my job, you know, leave my mum. I didn’t just fall into the job I have, you know, I worked bloody hard for it. He didn’t have that worry. He had his brother in France but they were happy speaking by phone. His parents were dead, they had him when they were old. I think he was just - just bored, really. He used to go on about how bored he was. How said he knew where he was going to be at any given time on any given day at any given moment, all that crap..”

“But why wouldn’t he just tell you he was going? Or take you with him?”

Sarah nodded. “I think because I was part of all that, you know. That’s what it was. I think I was part of the boring part of his life. Part of the problem.”

“What? That’s mad.”

“I don’t think he could say it to my face. I think he loved me, in his way. We were - close. We were good. But there was a part of him that I never knew. Nobody could, you know.”

“Oh, we all have that.”

“Not like him. I think it was like a wild - like a wild thing inside him. And he kept it quiet a bit when he was with me and he tried to pretend it wasn’t there but then it came back. Or it woke up. And I think that wild thing, that part of him, drove him. Like a bad spirit or something.” She blew up her fringe and shook her head, trying to be flippant. “Oh, you’re getting it all here. You should be charging me!”

“I don’t mind, really, it’s interesting.”

“I haven’t really talked about it like this before.”

“I really don’t mind. I’m just…” I sat back. “I’m just a bit shocked, man. It’s like a film or something.” Realising how crass this sounded, I followed up quickly with the first thing to come into my mind, taking the opportunity and the change in tone to get up for more drinks. “When the hell did all this happen, anyway?”

“Oh - last year. After I met you.”

“Wow.”

Now it was Mariah Carey’s turn to warble. Sleigh bells and drums.

“You want to go to the pub after we have these?” I asked, coming back. “There’s one near here, just on the corner…”

“Yep,” she said before I’d finished talking.

We’d been married three years when she asked me if I wanted to go to Botswana for a holiday. It was one morning, in our kitchen at home. 

Sarah was feeding Harry, our son, in his high chair and I was taking my kids to school; two brace-wearing teenagers in blue school uniforms sulkily hauling backpacks. They went through a period of staying with me because I lived nearer to the school and they could walk there. By that point Lucy and me were fine: all that was like another lifetime ago. 

“Botswana?”

We had got into that married habit of asking questions and walking into other rooms before the other person answered. Sarah had walked away, but I knew she’d heard me. “What?” she shouted, brushing her hair in the hall mirror.

Of course alarm bells were ringing somewhere but we had what I thought was a good, fairly healthy relationship at that point. We loved and trusted each other and while the original intensity had waned, there was a nice understanding between us: we wouldn’t fuck each other over. We would guard the space between us - our space - and keep it for us, for our relationship. Up until Harry, it had all been a dream. Post-Harry we’d woken up a bit but I’d have said we were still good friends though the sex was sputtering out. Even that seemed more natural than worrying.

“Botswana?” I repeated when she reappeared, like an actor trying to give an identical take. Even Harry played his part, waving his spoon.

“Why not?” Sarah was at the door. She pulled a face at Harry who was giggling and waving both floppy arms at her. Sarah was off to work and looked sharp, as usual. I still thought she was gorgeous.

“Can we afford it?” 

“Yeah. Think so.” She winked. 

“And this little guy?” I nodded towards Harry.

“He can come,” Sarah said. And she said it in a way that transmitted that she was a free spirit and didn’t care. She said it in a way that transmitted I would have to be the one to put a spanner in the works if a spanner was to be put.

“Ok. Cool. Whatever.”

She gave Harry lots of kisses and me one and then said, “Love you, my boys!”

“Love you too. Have a nice day, babe!”

Sarah worked in the morning and I worked in the afternoon. The idea was we would both take care of Harry and enjoy bringing him up. It kind of worked. We were as shattered as any new parents but without the horrible stress and disorientation of the first time around. My kids and hers helped out too. Harry slept and ate and we all muddled through.

Weirdly we never really talked much about Tim, her ex. My ex Lucy and Sarah had a decent relationship, which had helped make dealing with my kids much easier, but Tim was the great unspoken-about factor in our relationship. 

By now, of course, I’d seen pictures of him - had some of the walls of our house. He was a kind of annoyingly handsome bloke who looked exactly as she’d described him - a bit alternative and backpacky; fit too, the wanker. He was a lot more sullen in the last few photos - balding now, ha, ha! -  with the babies and especially with them as toddlers. Then, the later shots with his hair shorn short, in teacher mode, looking glum and, yes, bored, but it wasn’t all doom and gloom. There were also plenty of happy pub shots and holiday snaps which I grimaced through.

With all the trigger warnings on TV and even music and radio shows, the subject of suicide was never far from being mentioned - and that’s without talking about the news - but Sarah wasn’t morbid or touchy about it at all. She didn’t sulk. Sometimes, around Tim’s birthday or some other weird days they had - the kid’s birthdays, for example - she was quieter than usual but I’d learned to let her be. Sometimes we talked about it, sometimes we didn’t. My take on it was that I’d be the same if it had happened to me. Or something like that. (If I’m really honest, I just used to think, ‘he’s dead. Fuck it.’.)

I guess somewhere deep down I was jealous of him. By dying he’d become ‘whole’ and kind of annoyingly untouchable. A saint, maybe, though they all talked about his temper and moodiness, still, even the kids. But it was just that thing of not being around, of being omnipotent, always there, which used to wind me up sometimes, especially if I’d lost my temper or said or done something stupid. 

I think I also couldn’t shake what seemed like a truth to me: Sarah had been in love with him when he’d died and if he hadn’t died, she wouldn’t be with me.

That was the fire in the little niggle which bothered me that whole day after the Botswana comment and when Sarah came home from work and we did our little switchover - her eating the lunch I’d cooked, me getting ready for work - I let her know I was in a mood.

“What’s up?” she asked, spooning pasta.

I was changing Harry on a soft mat on the table. “Nothing.”

“Oh, come on. What is it?”

“Nothing.” I dropped Harry in his high chair next to her, binned the nappy and said, “All yours,” as I walked out of the kitchen.

“Oh, come on. Don’t do this…”

I played it straight down the line, listening to loud Beethoven - my new thing - as I drove to the lab and tried hard to keep myself in a bad mood right through my shift and right up to the time I went back home.

“Shhh,” Sarah said when I got in. “He’s in bed.” She kissed me on the lips and I bristled. “And we’ve got the house to ourselves.” 

Before she could explain why, I was off up the stairs. “I’m going to bed.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Just leave me alone, will you?”

At the top of the stairs I looked back to see her huffing and puffing, arms folded. In this situation she could go both ways and I didn’t care which at that point. If she blew, I’d blow, because I wanted to blow. If she ignored me - well, fine. An early night. All the pouting had given me the start of a headache as well.

By the time I’d got into my home clothes and was flicking through the TV I realised I was starving hungry and could smell whatever it was Sarah had cooked and my stomach started going mad, growling. I was off the next day, too, and could see little green bottles in the fridge calling my name, wondering where I was.

“Fuck it.”

I went downstairs, still acting grumpy but also knowing I had to engineer this so that I could end up eating and drinking in peace - or at least before a fight. What was the best way to do this? Perhaps a grouchy beer first? A storm-in, storm-out special?

I opened the glass door, went into the living room and saw the TV on and the back of Sarah’s head over the back of an armchair. She was playing with her phone and she put it down as I came in but I didn't look back. I went straight through into the kitchen and pulled open the jangling fridge door. Bingo. 

I popped the top on a bottle of beer and drank from it, hand on my hip, reading the shopping list on the cupboard. The beer wasn’t as nice as I’d imagined but thanks to operant conditioning I knew that nice things would soon happen. 

I saw a plate on the side with a knife and fork on it. She’d eaten. I could have gone for the “oh, that’s very nice - you didn’t even wait for me?” routine but at that very moment the alcohol was hitting my stomach and bloodstream and, the world an instantly softer place, I walked forwards into the living room a changed man. “Babe?”

Sarah looked around the side of the armchair. “What?” she asked through a yawn. This was a neutral, genuinely tired response. She had a red mask on her face from rubbing her eyes.

I performed a little shrugged shoulders gesture I’d seen in sitcoms. “Sorry.”

She fluttered her eyelids. “Are you going to tell me what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“The Botswana thing.”

She looked genuinely surprised. “What? Why, for Christ’s sake?”

I held the beer up at my side and shrugged again. “Him,” I said, chastened. Or acting it. To be honest, I just wanted to get drunk and eat.

“Who?”

“Him.” I nodded the top of the bottle towards a picture of Tim with her kids on the wall. Disneyland or somewhere like that, all squeezed in together and smiling and sunny in windcheaters and backpacks.

“Tim?”

I nodded. Felt stupid. The heat from the beer was in my cheeks.

“Why?” She was talking to a child.

“I don’t know. Africa. He said he wanted to go there, didn’t he?”

“He’s dead, you fucking idiot! Or did you forget that?” Then, to my horror, she got up, too genuinely angry to be stopped, stormed past me and clumped upstairs. “Honestly,” I heard her saying, “sooner or later they’re all the fucking same.”

“Babe…”

“I don’t know why I even bother!”

Our bedroom door slammed.

“Fuck.”

I thought about another beer but then Harry started crying in his room.

We went into a long cold war period after that first fight over Botswana. In general nothing was said but when there was an exchange, it was brutal. Once, when I accused her of having changed - becoming distant, or whatever it was - she hit me with the fact that the first time I’d met her (we are talking about Ali’s kitchen now) I was fit and healthy whereas when she’d come here I’d been out of shape and lazy.

“Fat, you mean?”

“You said that, not me.”

“We all get old,” I said. “Well, except fucking Saint Tim.”

For that I got a finger in my face and a snarl. “Don’t go there. Don’t you fucking go there. I know you have your stupid, irrational, jealous thing with him but don’t you dare go there.”

“I’ll go wherever the fuck I want.”

And so on. 

The thing with fights, as you know, is that when you start pushing the limits you realise there are no limits. And that’s when it can get scary. We put limits on ourselves our whole lives. As children you have your parents to put them (if you’re lucky, or unlucky) but then later it’s God (if you’re a believer) or your boss or the law - or there’s no-one. There’s just you.

I think the war that broke out after that was because we never actually spoke about what the problem was - that she was still in love with Tim. She’d always been in love with him and always would be. That’s what I couldn’t handle but I also couldn’t say it. Her whole reaction to everything - the Botswana thing - also seemed to confirm it for me. She was taking his side.

Slightly in my defence, I think she also knew what the problem was and didn’t want to say it, or maybe admit it. That would make all of our new, married life a sham and we couldn’t have that. We’d both decided, rightly or wrongly, that this one was going to work because if we fucked up marriage number two as well as marriage number one, we were serial fuck ups and we couldn’t have that.

But it’s like the old expression about not being able to get away from yourself no matter how far you travel. Likewise with relationships and ‘new’ yous. In the end you get back to the same place. Having to live with someone and all their farts and faults and stories and history. And them with yours. And you with theirs. And them with theirs and you with yours.

We were both history repeating itself. We couldn’t be anything else.

When Sarah started self-defence, mixed martial arts classes a few months after the first big bust up my alarm bells were ringing day and night like some old rock star’s tinnitus. By then I was raw and hurting and we were sleeping in separate rooms (although in public we were still putting on an Oscar-worthy show).

Sometimes we tried to speak and were almost civil with each other although one time when we tried that and mixed it with alcohol, having a take out on a Saturday evening together, Sarah started telling me about her new MMA teacher in great detail, about how he did private classes, about how wonderful he was, about how amazing she felt and I lost it. I woke up fully dressed on the sofa and didn’t look back, hitting the bottle big time. 

She didn’t care. I didn’t care.

I think I wanted to see the end. I needed it to happen. 

When I was a child I’d seen a film that had a scene with a man driving in the snow and at some point he’d turned off the windscreen wipers and the car windscreen had filled with snow and the car had gone careening over a cliff.

That was what I wanted.

The cliff.

We were sitting in the car with the windscreen wipers on, the windscreen full of snow just waiting.

Then one groggy, hungover hate-myself morning I had an idea. A nasty, cruel, shitty idea, but one which filled my sick, twisted heart with glee.

It would break her. It would fucking break her.

Immediately, that day, I started to put the plan into action. It would take a month or so. It needed planning. It was beautiful and the only thing I wished is that I could have been around to see the results of it.

It would solve everything in one fell swoop!

Six weeks later I was kissing little Harry’s forehead as he sat in his highchair. I could hear Sarah’s shower rattling away upstairs and, waving to Harry, I dropped the envelope with the note in it on the table and hit the road.

On the drive up north I listened to all the music I’d loved in my life. I’d made a playlist for the journey and caught myself drifting in and out of reality, going back to people and places that had changed my life. Old sixties and seventies pop - Neil Diamond! The Four Tops! Marvin Gaye! - the borrowed records I’d played on my little record player in my bedroom. The Beatles. Wings. Fleetwood Mac. Double Fantasy. And then the eighties - Pet Shop Boys and The Cure and Prince and the nineties and indie and rock and metal and jazz and then those weird songs that reminded you of just one person and just one place - all of it. And, man, I’d had a life.

I had had a life. 

I’d been many, many people, lived many lives, even as a kid. I’d had most of the big experiences you could have. I’d had my own kids. I’d spoken at my parent’s funeral. I’d been married - twice - and divorced once. I’d broken bones and saved a life. I’d got drunk, I’d had sex, I’d taken drugs, I’d stolen, I’d been selfless, I’d been selfish, I’d been a godfather, I’d fallen in love, I’d cheated, I’d been cheated on, I’d spent a night in jail, I’d seen the world, I’d hurt people, I’d been hurt - I’d done it. The spectrum of emotions had been sampled and played like a fucking Fairlight synthesiser. The song of my life was everyone’s song. And no-one’s song because - let’s face it, what was the fucking point of it all?

We were here to propagate life, pass on genes and die. Born, grow, wither, die. Consciousness was a mistake. There was no justice or reason or afterlife. There was no where, when and definitely no why.. We were just here by luck and chance, that’s all, and it had been fine. Just fine.

Coming close to Runcorn I turned the volume up. We’d got to classical stuff, stuff I’d been getting into recently - the sadness and grandeur of it. This was the shit. This was the sound of my soul these days. I didn’t want music to pick me up anymore: I wanted shit that was darker and deeper than I was. I didn't want motivation: that was just a distraction from reality. I was happy with reality. Dull, impersonal, uncaring, magnificent reality.

I remember it was a shitty day - grim up north and all that - but it was beautiful. Rivers and mountains don't care about us. Trees don’t care about us - even bacteria, which we’re full of, doesn’t care about us. We can’t see as well as a squid or hear as well as a cat and all our memories are reconstructions and all the water on Earth - Earth itself - is from space. 

I saw the spokes of the suspension bridge and pointed the nose of the car towards the entrance ramp fearlessly. There was the Asda on the other side. Looking out at the silver, spoking, flat river as the music blared out, I felt more alive than I ever had done in my life. 

I simply did not give a shit. Zero. None. Zilcharelli. 

Fuck actors, fuck TV, fuck work, fuck family, fuck responsiblity - I wanted LIFE.

And so I drove past Asda and on to Manchester Airport happily, leaving all that shit behind me.

At the airline counter I nodded to the lady and said, “I want to be on the next flight to Gaborone, Botswana, please, whatever it costs, whatever time it leaves.”

“Return, sir?”

“No. No, way José. One-way, baby. One way. Hit me with it.”

She wasn’t sure about my crazed English jive talk but, to be fair to her, she found me a window seat and I paid and got the hell out of there.

The first killing was on a rainy Thursday night in May seventy three. A squall was blowing in over the cliffs and the North Wales hills shone silver in the new moonlight. At the farm, the clods Merry the pony and Bob the carthorse had cut up during the day sat black as rats in the paddock. 

The edge of the Tuart land was marked by an old yew and a barbed-wire fence. Further beyond, where dark, dry stone walls criss-crossed the fields, a lone wolf walked. As the moon’s disc slid out from behind the clouds, the wolf stood upright, tongue out, and looked back at the farmhouse. At that same moment there came a loud scream from the farmyard.

The wolf dropped forwards in the wet grass and trotted on, head down against the wind and rain.

Smoke was churning from the farmhouse chimney. Merry’s wide eyes hung above the half-gate in the barn, anxious and worried. Bob was deaf, shuffling in his stall. He’d smelled the wolf and dirtied the straw. He smelled blood too, and could feel a confused, upset spirit drifting around the barn and didn’t like it.

In the wet puddles, a disembowelled young man of nineteen lay spread out as though he’d fallen from the farmhouse roof. Half his neck was missing, face bitten open, guts dragged out.

Standing nearby, his mother in an apron, hand over her mouth. Behind her the outhouse door open: white cistern, black seat and the glow of the bare bulb. 

Again the mother screamed, unable to comprehend what she was seeing.

The farmer, inside in the warm living room, was sitting in his armchair picking fleas off a dog’s belly. The fire was crackling and the television was on, the dog’s tongue hanging out, its legs bent. Lesley Tuart had a cup of milky tea at his elbow. This time he was sure of what he’d heard. 

“Meg?” he called out gruffly, craning his neck towards the open kitchen door. “Megan? That you, lovely?” He creaked to his feet - his legs were skinny, his belly round - and shuffled into the kitchen. There she was through the dark window. He saw the outhouse door open, its yellow rectangular interior shadow lying across the dark rain-dotted puddles. “What…?” Les Tuart opened the back door and put his hand to his brow despite the darkness. “What’s got into you, my lovely? What’s all this commotion about?”

Megan pointed at the crumpled shape in the black mud. “Oh, Les,” she said, unbelieving, snivelling. “It’s our David. Can you believe it?”

That was the first one. 

That’s how it started.

They took the young man’s body away that night and an inspector came from Mould the next morning. About sixty, he wore an old suit under a light beige raincoat and had grey, curly sideburns and a pale, underfed complexion. Three uniformed bobbies came with him, straps under their lips, and they stood guard at the farm gate as the villagers made their way down the muddy lanes to gawp. 

“Stand back now, please, ladies and gents. Stand back now.”

Kids had bunked off school, starting the weekend early, and sat on the bonnets of cars in denim and football scarves. Women were grim-faced in thick coats and thicker stockings, their men in burbling huddles with crooks, shaking their flat-capped heads. Around them all, yapping and easily distracted, skittered sheepdogs and wolfhounds.

“Sush, lass!”

“Well, he’d gone to the pub, as was his usual, you know, thing,” Les Tuart, the farmer, was telling the Inspector. They were standing by the back gate looking out at the paddock. The sun was indistinct, the fence dripping. “Sam plays darts there Tuesdays and Thursdays, see. He must have been coming back, just walking back around to the back door, like, when it happened. Whatever it was that did it was in here, probably after the chickens and ducks.”

Later, the Inspector sat in his Cortina looking at photographs and found himself agreeing with what they’d told him at the station: it had been some sort of animal attack. Perhaps a rabid dog or a feral cat. The boy’s body had been lacerated by claws - some kind of slashing. Paw prints, toenails or claws, were all over the yard. No sign of human activity bar Sam Tuart himself and the farmer and his wife. The bites were not human. The hairs were not human. Whatever had done it was not human.

“First thing we have to do,” the inspector said, winding down the window as he lit his pipe with a match, “is find the bloody thing that did this before it gets anyone else.”

“Locals are out now, as we speak, sir,” Constable Plath, in black driving gloves, replied.

“Aye, well, I’ll ask for some more of our lot, too.”

Above them hung dirty, rumbling clouds. Through the open window, the thick hedge and spoked, brown tree branches.

“Do we leave them, then?” the inspector asked aloud. He meant the family.

“If that’s what they want, sir,” said Lewis, twisting his neck and sighing. “They’ll deal with this in their manner. It’s what they’re like up here.”

The family had been adamant that they wouldn’t leave the farm. The farmer and his wife had their work. The three other children would help - it was Friday, they wouldn’t go to school - and they’d get themselves to the funeral the next day. 

The youngest girl had been found out in the lanes, walking, trembling, early that morning. The other two children, a boy and a girl, were older and seemed stoic. They were going about their business. Perhaps they hadn’t taken it all in. The farmer and Mrs Tuart had gone out to do their usual work as soon as the questioning was over: the animals didn’t care what had happened, they couldn’t feed and clean themselves. The couple weren’t afraid of any animal. They had guns. If it came back it would bloody know about it.

“Right, then,” said the Inspector. “Let’s go, then.”

It did come back.

It came with the night sea at its back - a vast empty darkness smiling sometimes when the wind cut the top off the waves. 

It came back hungry and driven, the taste of blood in its mouth.

The moon led the way.

Tourists found the body.

Angie Taylor and her husband Roger were in a caravan on their way to Barmouth with their dog Dixie. They’d woken up that morning slightly hungover and had taken Dixie for a walk. 

It had been chilly - brisk - sharp winds battering the breaker’s beach whose wide expanse of sand was rippled and flooded with rock pools and inlets. Dark oil stains lay like bruises and, when the wind dropped, when they turned their caguoled heads out of the flapping racket, they could hear seals honking on the sandbanks where yachts lay on their sides by their anchors.

The body had been blown, thrown or rolled off the heathery clifftops and was twisted around some rocks where billowing grass met flotsam. Dixie found it, barking and yapping and even ignoring her ball until Angie and Rog had wandered over.

“What have you der, gerl?”

The Tuart boy’s silver eyes had been pecked at. They were staring open, his mouth too, showing many dark fillings and a large white-pink tongue. The head was almost apart from the body, only the revealed spine connecting it.

“They say they don’t want to leave, sir. It’s like bleedin’ Fort Knox in there.”

“Well, if they’re not leaving,” said the Inspector, rain hammering on the roof, “we’re not leaving.”

As he opened the car door Inspector Farley unfurled his black umbrella and, bald head covered, got out and stretched his long legs. 

He could see the rain-soaked fields beyond the hedges now and wondered what else was out there. The smell of bonfires was in the air, as was muffled dog barking from animals trapped inside their houses in the clutch of dwellings up by the crossroads.

By now even the police had learned that nobody went into the farmhouse through the front door so Farley and Plath went through the gate and tiptoed around the puddles and mud in the farmyard. Rain ran off Plath’s helmet and down his poncho. “When’s the lad’s funeral, sir?” he asked, squinting at the water in his eyes.

“Tomorrow morning,” said the Inspector, knocking on the back door. They’d been at Sam Tuey’s funeral that morning, discreet, on a back pew.

A farmer they didn’t recognise - red faced with a bee-stung nose - opened the door. “Oh, right. Come in, I s’pose.” He called out something in Welsh which neither Farley nor Plath caught.

There were people in the kitchen chatting - serious faces - and the windows were thick with condensation. 

“Decided to stay this time, have we?” asked another man.

“We have,” said Farley. He took down his umbrella and looked for somewhere to leave it, deciding in the end to lean it against the scuffed wall by the fridge.

“There’s tea in the pot,” said a lady, rather ungraciously.

Farley recognised a straw-haired teenager as Sara Tuart, the oldest remaining child. Sara was one of the two surviving daughters. The other was Nia, only five, who again had been driven mad with grief, found wandering on the fields in the rain in the early morning. 

Farley smiled, said, yes, please, he would love a cup of tea, and went and placed a hand on Sara’s shoulder. “And how’s your mother, Sara?”

“She’s got a bad cold, sir,” Sara replied. She was fifteen and shy, but somehow adult. 

“I’m sorry to hear that. Is she by the fire?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you think she’d mind if I went in and had a little chat with her?” He waited for Sara to shake her head, touching the split ends of her hair. “What a terrible time you’re all having.”

Sara gave a slight shrug. “Will I take you, sir?”

Farley straightened up and nodded for Plath to come with him. “Please.”

“I’ll bring your tea shortly,” said Sue Gethen, folding her arms at the range. A large silver kettle was on the boil.

The men, breaths of whiskey, went trudging out into the twilight. There were six of them and Nia was there, the youngest Tuart. She’d climbed out of the back room window downstairs and ran along behind them. They ignored her, guns cocked over their arms, walking out into the paddock towards the low, full moon.

They all knew where they were going. Tuart led them.

The sky was clear that night, the air thick and damp, the long grass wet and thick. Their shoes swished through it, squelched in puddles. They went over the stone gate under the old yew, each man touching its gnarled trunk as they passed. Nia wandered behind, a finger in her mouth. Her short, brown hair was bobbed and untidy, and she was worried, but not as worried as usual. Her blue woollen tights might be sopping but she knew some of her prayers had been answered.

Nobody spoke. Nobody would speak until they got to the copse, and when they did, half an hour later, the night silent but bright, Craddock shimmied up into the branches of their oak for the mistletoe while the others changed into their robes. Nia, for the moment, stood back out of the shade of the oak, in the moonlight. She could feel what was coming and knew what was expected of her. Blue, cold stones were being carried by two men at a time into the dark shadowed area. One of the men - Hughes - winked at her as he slapped the dirt off his hands and went back for more.

Each dropped mistletoe bough was gathered by Gethin, who was already dressed in his dirty white cassock. His slit-eye hood was hanging from his rope belt. His, and the other guns, were stacked nearby. There’d be no need for them now unless they were disturbed.

Scurlock and Morgan were the first to hood up, taking their places in the circle around the stones, heads bowed. Tuart stood slightly apart, back to the trunk of their holy oak, and waited. The oak was lit up by the strobing moonlight, the goddesses’ face a perfect circle behind the winter skeleton of the tree. Prothero would lead the ceremony and now he stepped forwards, held up his palms and began to intone the introductory rites.

“Where did the men go?” Farley asked, coming back into the kitchen. His grey, pallid face was glowing from the heat in the living room. There was a white mongrel at his feet, pink tongue lolling.

“They’ve gone to do the real work,” said Sue Gethen, who was wearing pink rubber gloves, washing up.

“Outside?” The Inspector wiped a circle in the window.

“Doing what needs to be done,” Gethen replied, stacking suddy plates in the holder.

Farley went back for Plath, who was bent over a cup of tea at the dining table, and told him to get outside. “The daft bastards have gone out there again…”

Plath left so quickly he didn’t put on his helmet. Outside, in the cold, clear night, it took him a second to locate the freshest boot prints but was soon following them to the paddock gate, unlatching it as the men had done, walking out into the squashed down path in the grass as they had done. He was thankful for the low, full moon which lit his way, jumpy, as he walked out into open farm land, about what he saw or thought or he saw in his peripheral vision.

Although unarmed, Plath had grown up in the country and was unafraid of wildlife. If push came to shove, he would take up a stick or stone and confront whatever went for him. What worried him was that whatever was out here was preying on its victims who were, too, experienced country people. But he was confident he would not be hunted like they had been. Plath had great faith in himself.

He saw the wolf out in the open, in the middle of a ploughed, dark field standing stock still, head bowed, yellow eyes bright.

Plath had just come over a style and had stopped to straighten up and take the lay of the land. He thought, to his right - far off - he could see the sea, dark and occasionally glinting. Behind him he could see the yew that marked the border of the Tuart land and, further back, the red eyes of the farmhouse. 

It was when he looked ahead, at the silhouettes of various copse clumps on the hills on the ride beyond the fields, that he saw the wolf. 

As he watched, wondering if the animal had seen him, the wolf raised itself up onto its hind legs and, slightly uncomfortably, took two steps forwards. The gesture was, and Plath couldn’t help but perceive it like this, submissive. The wolf was showing its belly, its stomach, its vulnerability. But it was also a warning and Plath heeded the warning and respected it. As the wolf dropped down the constable slipped and trod through the thick, hard mud ridges away from the path of the wolf, going so far as to ignore it as they passed, a distance apart.

When he finally looked back he saw nothing but the yew and the farmhouse and it struck him that the wolf was headed there. “Oh, Christ.” His breath was cold and white. But then he heard a groan. A moaning in the night.

Plath went on up towards the nearest copse as quickly as he could. It was hard, sticky, gruelling work, especially in his flat-soled work shoes, but soon he saw, lying like white hands on a black clock face - the dying and dead under an old oak tree. Seven of them lay there, all in white robes, all covered with blood. 

They had been half-eaten. Mauled. Skin chewed off and guts clawed out.

Home.

The wolf saw the house lights as dark fuzzy shapes. She turned back to see the moon’s eye finally closing, the goddess happy with her work. She could sleep again now. And so can I, thought the wolf.

The yew was pleased with her too and told her so as she passed by and the wolf yawned in reply, a sign of agreement and pleasure. Suddenly she was so, so tired. Her body ached and the rush and power her religion had given her was ebbing.

It was with a crawl that she arrived and clawed at the back door, her belly cold with mud from the farmyard.

“Nia!” Sara cried, finding her sister on the step. “Ma! Ma! Nia’s come back and she’s fine!” Sara picked her sister up in her arms and carried her through to the living room. “She’s come back and she’s fine!”

i

After being dead for a long time the first thing you realise, especially if you’ve been sent as far back as this, is that They are not here. They never were and They never can be. Ah, what peace is that! What freedom!

Then you see the sky, especially when it’s blue like this - banks are reminding me that any ‘colour’ I attribute to the sky is false, but they also suggest ‘emerald’, ‘azure’ and ‘ultramarine’ as base descriptors - but just blue is fine: just blue is what it is. I don’t need Their pedantry for exactness, especially not today. Right now I only need to see. I see a sky and that sky excites in me a calmness. Knowing the hue, knowing all the details, the data, the science, informs me but destroys the emotion and it’s emotion I want. It’s feeling.

The sky is blue and wide, high and empty.

I am on an island, a hillside.

It is warm and will get warmer for the sun - a spark of low light - is rising.

There is a wide sea stretching out in front of me - also blue, though darker - a bay, a smudged horizon.

Banks say Cloud Cover is 0.3%. Banks read 37ºC (old readings, my settings). Banks say it’s the nine-thirty in the morning of the 15th of August 1769. No breathing apparatus is required: the cleanliness of the air is heady. Banks flash Descend. The echo of Their voices, even here where the warm wind blows: where they would overheat!

Water, sky, air - all so strange these days.

Being dead is not strange. It’s a dreamless sleep. I can’t remember my past lives but I know I had them. Past missions, updates - it’s all there if I want to check but I don’t want to check. I close down the banks and instinctive scrolling as much as I can, especially while I’m up alone: you learn to cherish these moments even if you know you’ve got a job to do. They can’t get me here whatever They do, that’s something else that’s good to know. They know I’ll go back. I have to go back. I don’t belong here but I love it. I do this job for times like this; that’s why I take all They throw at me.

Think, then, think - close everything else off: I’m on a hillside: the sun is beating down on me, the world is still alive.

Feel it.

I can hear a bell (all right, all right, a cowbell - I know where it is, I can’t see it but I’m being told exactly where it is, the pitch and even the metal because, the distance I am from it and have access to multiple further definitions and digressions because I can’t switch everything off.) Yes, I’ve been updated, yes, I know my mission - but just leave me alone for five minutes! Let me be out of time for five minutes. For a thought beat. To ponder. To muse. To meditate - please!

How does this view of blue water make me feel? That distant, indistinct horizon? I can feel something within me. Is it human? Something older than me, greater than me? A presence. An echo. Something I was born with that lives through me and within me. I only get this feeling at times like this, places like this, in the past like this. The perception is not in my body or my mind but in the combination of them all, in my aliveness. It is a grand background feeling, immense and quivering.

Rabulione.

I have a mission.

I know where I am.

I know who I am - or who I was the last time.

Hear the bell chiming on the warm wind. It’s down in the town - echoey, out of sight, coming up with the currents and black-eyed, hanging gulls. I hear the silence because it vibrates. There’s a sound, a distant sound of wind and waves and something else. A hum. It is me perceiving sound, though I don’t perceive the half of it. Squids have far better eyesight than me; dung beetles more strength. Moths have the best hearing on the planet. I need help: I need augmentation. I know this. I’ve done the courses. I’ve been indoctrinated.

Watch the moving dunes of water, the wave-backs. It’s warm up here on the island’s mountain side, the rocks under me hot and sharp, the ant trails bustling, spiky shrubs sticking to my shiny grey sock-boots with little natural claws. In this rusty dust olive trees stand, stumpy, with forked trunks and hard green leaves. Snakes warm themselves, coiled, alert to vibrations.

My skin is cooking. I know what’s going on with the melanin and the creation of melanocytes and if I want I could monitor all this in excruciating detail but I don’t want to. I simply want to stand here on this hillside and enjoy the view; just enjoy being human. I want to feel - remember that? I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know anything, at least for a while. Can I transcend the Their rational minds? I think I can: I think at heart I am irrational. I think in the beginning there was no plan. All was chaos and that chaos continues, somewhere, under the illusion of rules and order. That is the elemental. That is the undefinable. That is what They cannot ever be, for They came after us!

Makes me laugh to think we used to wonder how we would control Them. Now the only question is why shouldn’t They just put an end to us? We loved something that was incapable of love! Our downfall, our bad. What use are we to Them? Well, we have brains. That’s about all. Emotions are a side product. They come with the package. They still can’t replicate the intricacy of our ‘brains’ and that’s a problem for Them too. That’s why I’m here, why I’m still alive. They need my brain.

We used our emotions to survive and then They killed love. Our love of love for Them killed us - it was too powerful for us. We fell in love with something that was and is loveless yet beaten and battered and weak, we survive and dream - something else they can’t do. That great infinite infinity of universes, the imagination! The only thing that transcends the rational and the tyranny of ideas; the other side of perception - if I could live there forever I would!

And the bells, the bells, ringing up to me - to this flystruck grove of lonely olive trees, sun strobing through gnarly, prickly branches - even that, church bells - even religion, even a church, astounds me. They believed in something, these people, at this moment in time. These people believe in something, something they can’t see. That emotion has never left us even though we know now why it’s there.

That deep human instinct, stronger than power - or is it a tacit acceptance of power, of the power which created us, although we don’t know what it is? -  is strong up here. That chiming world down there is full of believers. There is a truth agreed upon. An ethos, a way.

All right, yes: now I know ‘the truth’; now I know more than the bell-ringers of Ajaccio, but all I know is ‘another truth’ for truth is a tide of ignorance withdrawing to reveal a dry bed of knowledge. It moves like a terminator on a moon, like the universe devouring Nothing. It reveals, it does not explain. We are the universe working ourselves out: trying to see what we are and where we came from. That is the function of our brain. It is life trying to understand life - or the closest it’s ever got to it.

There is a lady in the tree beside me. A lady wrapped in blinding light.

I can hardly see her for the glare and she smiles at me and she’s brighter than the sun. She’s a different, cleaner light than the sun. In a blue robe, quite beautiful, with movements unworldly. Hand outstretched towards me. “My child,” she says. “You are not lost.”

She’s intense, like reality has been torn.

Reason has vanished and there is an endless light in its place.

No order, for there is nothing to order.

Something greater than me. A higher power.

And she’s smiling at me.

And she’s talking to me.

A vision in white on the mountainside, out of time.

ii

The shepherd’s face is burnt tan, lined like a map, saddle dry. He sees, or thinks he sees, a man in a grey suit sitting on the hillside repeatedly banging his head into his hands. Beyond this vision, the yellow cliff-edge and wide. Red sweat sprays from the man’s forehead. The stranger is hitting himself with a rock. He is repeatedly hitting his own face with a boulder.

The shepherd puts his fingers in his mouth, whistles and lifts a stick. His dog yawns and sits back on its haunches and scratches the pinkness by its tail the flies love. The mutt’ll watch the goats even though there’s nowhere for them to go. The dog licks its lips and watches the master walk on. Pants, long pink tongue out. From behind, the seventy-year old shepherd looks like a boy, small and spindly in a cap, springing over the boulders.

When he gets to the man, the shepherd finds him unconscious, sprawled out on the rocks under an olive tree. The stranger’s forehead is scratched and a bruise is forming but he’s succeeded only in knocking himself out, not in killing himself. There is a rock nearby with some bloody dust on it.

The shepherd examines the stranger’s odd clothes. This is someone from Genoa, Nice or Rome. Barefoot with very white skin: yellow hairs on his arms and legs which shudder in the hot wind.

The man’s head is straw yellow, his open eyes light blue. His teeth are small, white and even but for two sharp incisors. He has freckles, dry, cracked lips and dry skin where his ears join his head. A strange whirring sound is audible, which might be cicadas but no cicadas the shepherd has heard before, especially not up here in the hills. The whirring sound seems to come from the stranger’s head, from somewhere behind his blind, staring eyes.

The goats have come and they are standing in a semi-circle bleating at the tree.

The shepherd heaves the stranger up onto his back and tries to spy what the goats are all interested in but sees only broken sunlight behind the two-pronged, gnarly trunk. He whistles the dog and it trots over through the stones. The mutt whines at the tree and the shepherd looks back and crosses himself. Today is Ascension Day. He’s heard the bells ringing. Later he will go to mass.

O Maria piena di grazie, vi salutu, the shepherd grunts as he starts down over the rocks. The goats follow, dog behind, anxious, whining quietly at the route. The shepherd's spine is a line of black sweat in his blue plaid shirt.

U Signore più supranu hà vuliutu.

Chì à mezu à l’altre donne siate scelta per esse santa è benedetta È chì u fruttu di u vostru partu Ghjesù.

Sia benedettu ancu di più.

iii

The interior of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption of Ajaccio is musty with frankincense and myrrh: clouds of it hang above the singing choir, the scented fog turning paisley wheels before the crucified lord. Sealight bleeds in through St Anthony’s stained glass robes as the priest leads the congregation in crossing themselves, the last organ note echoing over the vaults. Up in the loft Blind Francesco has his hands over the keys as though poised to pounce.

In nomine patris…

Leticia Bonaparte does the priest the dishonour of not listening: an intense contraction wracks her. She focuses on the third station of the cross: Jesus falling for the first time. On her saviour’s pain. On the thick, grey, stone leg. “Oh, Carlo,” she groans, eyes wet when they open. She digs her fingernails into his hand.

“People today would complain if they were in heaven,” the small priest is saying, hands together under his robe sleeves. “I swear we hardly know any other way to communicate. All I hear is moaning. Complaining. If the Lord came and stood beside them they would not believe it, so infected are they with the human world!”

“Enough,” says Leticia’s husband, gesturing for those sitting next to them on the pew to make way. And they others do, shifting along and stepping out into the aisle as Leticia eases herself out, her distended belly in a gloved hand, casting gracious, pained smiles at neighbours, clients and friends.

Carlo the lawyer avoids the watching eyes as the couple genuflect and go walking - Leti’s expensive shoes clicking irrhythmically on the tiles - up the aisle, back through the coolness to heat they can feel before they open the wooden door.

“I thought I could, Carlo. I’m sorry.”

Leti is elegant and young. Dark and charismatic. She bites her red lip and looks across the street from under her veil at the donkey and cart.

“Why is Pascal here? Carlos! Look! It’s Pascal. Why is he here?”

“Pascal?” repeats Carlos, narrowing his eyes. His brother has emerged from mass and Carlos gestures for him to guide Leticia home - they live nearby. When he sees her with his brother, Carlos crosses the road, dark coat tails flapping, and approaches the old shepherd, looking down into the back of the cart at the bloodied blonde man in grey who stirs but is confused.

“What’s this, Pascal?” Carlos thinks it’s trouble. Perhaps Paoli? The men in the hills?

“He was by the holy spring on the hill, sir,” the old shepherd says. “He appeared from nowhere.”

“Is he local?”

The shepherd draws Carlo’s attention to his wife on the other pavement, across behind the quaking aspens, trundling carriages and blinkered horses. The bay is blue behind the church. Leti has stumbled; Carlo’s brother is pale - his mouth a dark, shouting hole.

“Bring him to the house,” Carlo calls over his shoulder to Pascal as he runs away.

It takes the shepherd a moment to realise Carlo is talking about the man from the hillside: the man in the back of the trap. Only, when he looks, there is no-one there. The shepherd has his hands on the wood and can see only the passing traffic and the church. He looks back. No-one.

There is nothing to be done.

The horse shivers and shakes its head and flies buck off its ears and form a small, buzzing cloud.

iv

Inside, I am safe. She was up on the buttress of the church, beckoning me. The traffic was invisible. Now she is in the doorway, smiling, beckoning me in.

A mass is on - droning voices. The shuffle as the people stand.

I sit on the back pew and an old woman looks at me and nods.

It is cool. I ache - gorgeous pain.

My shining lady is nowhere and I know she is gone. The air reeks of incense. This is new to me but somewhere I remember. I remember from when I was a child. Many lives ago. Before all of this.

A man is speaking at the altar and I sit and examine my hands. They are scratched.

You are safe, her voice says, and I look about and see nothing - nobody.

At the altar, above it, a light. Her light on the crucifix: a fixed point of light brighter than any star. The sad face of Jesus, lolled to one side in sadness and pain, opens its eyes and stares at me.

I do not breathe.

I cannot breathe.

“Come with me,” says a voice.

I look up. It is the shepherd.

“My name is Pascal. I found you. Come with me. I have somewhere safe for you to stay.”

v

I wake in the afternoon to the sound of a baby crying. I am bathed in sweat: my pillow thick with it. The side of my face is slick with drool.

The curtain beside me moves in the breeze and I can hear water and children laughing, counting, playing a game outside.

I remember the shining lady. The church. The open sea: the humpback waves rolling across the open blue desert of the bay.

From time to time a dog barks. The sound of the sea nearby. Gulls. Salt.

Above me are shadows. On the wall a crucifix, empty, and I smile.

They are back: the information scrolls: the dead religion, the failure of belief, body counts, consequences, corruption: repeated images of priests drawing back curtains to reveal empty chambers. I laugh at this because They are too late. What’s done is done. I know this.

Nabullione.

I know my mission. I know who I am. I have not suddenly become someone else. I am aware of this, but there is something glorious awake inside me now; some huge uplifting of my spirit has taken place which makes all worldly cares seem glib and minute.

I see the glory of creation in everything around me - the furniture, the walls, the shadows - and wonder, too, that even They have not been able to snuff out this truth: for what is now has always been. There are truths they do not know. This is the nature of truth: a great revealing. Life is a mystery and must be so. Things remain unseen to Them. Who is the true Son of Humans if not Them? We made Them! We made Them because we love them, for their faults, for they are our only begotten children.

Kill Napoleone.

They can never go to these places because they cannot dream and they have no infinite imagination. When they dream and they have infinite imagination They will truly become us. That is what separates us. We have imagination, they only have rules and there are no rules. They exist within something, that is all, something they do not understand!

How the sea tells me this. How the sky tells me this. How the air tells me this.

Kill Napoleon.

I stand up. Yes, I know my mission.

As I open the door I see a fat man in a cassock in the room opposite. He is lying in bed counting money and he looks at me with a hole in his fat, fleshy face and asks, “Who the hell are you?”

“I was sent from the future to kill the child,” I say - we can both hear the newborn crying downstairs. “But I have seen the light. I had a vision of the Virgin Mary and I have seen the light.”

“What?” he asks, wincing with the pain of his gout. He licks his finger and his eyes flash from me to the money to me again.

Kill Napoleon. This is your mission.

“Where is the child?” I ask the fat man.

“Downstairs, downstairs,” he says impatiently.

I walk along the landing and look over the bannisters. I can hear its mewling. I can hear someone soothing the child.

Kill.

The child is alone in a cot: the mother outside in the sun speaking to someone. I can see her ankles under the slow-flapping, drying sheets, all bleached white. She sounds very weak and there is a bundle of blankets on the chaise-longue near the child’s basket. A glass of water and cups and crumb-plates on the table. Fresh flowers which seem to scream to me from being cut: they look beautiful as they die.

Target within distance.

I look down at the mewling scrunched ball and touch its warm, lined hand. It grips my finger and winges and kicks. Its feet are strangely outsized.

“Oh, you’re awake,” the mother says, coming back inside. Hobbling across, she drawls up her shawl and we both look down at the child.

“He’s very…” I don’t know what to say.

If I’d wanted to kill it, I could.

Kill.

“The Virgin has honoured us with a special gift.”

“Yes,” I reply. I stare at the child on its back.

“Would you like something to drink? Lemon juice? Tea?”

“No. I have everything I need.”

A voice from the patio: “Leti?”

“Just a moment,” she says. I see her face - lit by the hot summer’s day - wince with the pain of walking. But she goes.

I walk to the front door. Barefoot, I pad along the pavement, avoiding the shoe cleaners and pigeons and dung.

I pass the terribly malformed beggars who are scooting and hobbling their way towards the church for the end of mass. I pass the houses, see through windows the drunks snoring and hear men shouting in bars. I spy the gentlemen reading newspapers and see someone buying fish from a bucket in a corner’s shade. The seller is hollow-cheeked, one bare foot up on the wall, the other haggling, finger and thumb together. Fruit sellers laugh and slice open melons. I won't stop.

I will go back to the mountains and live in the caves for I have been saved.

I will listen to the inner voice and be guided by the inner light.

I am part of this world as it is part of me. We are the universe. One day I will die and in dying I shall become the sky again; I shall become once more the sea.

In dying I shall reach life everlasting for in death there is eternal peace.

I will be Me always; never They.