wanted to be off the map. I imagined the roads becoming track-like, sketched roughly over the terrain like tangled spider silk. I saw trees larger, hedges wilder, the shapes of distant mountains torn against a perfect sky. Above all I saw no people, no animals, and no birds.
I studied the map of the area just to the south of the empty zone where I determined to stake my nebulous claim. And I resolved to travel there.
By train, bus and walking I took myself to the top of this sheet. There was no road north, just a brambled gap in the hedge. I pushed through the clinging stems and looked north with a broad smile. I had told no one where I was going.
I walked for a long time.
Later, much later, I began to worry if I was anywhere at all. I had no idea when I would reach somewhere with a railway station. Or a bus station. Or a bus stop. Or a minicab office. It became so quiet I hoped for a jet to split the mocking sky. That evening I travelled into what seemed a kinder landscape; the lanes began to meander and sink between hedges as the sun sank lower and the air cooled.
My rucksack was heavy and painful on my sunburnt shoulders, and it was clear that I would soon have to find somewhere to put up my tent. At the brow of a gentle decline I saw ahead of me a dark wood massing about a miledistant. It was there, I decided, I would spend the night. The wood began at a fork in the lane where a small cottage lay beneath the purpling shade of the twilit trees. At the gate stood what I thought was a man, bent with age, holding a scythe upright, the blade swinging idly above his head.
I walked on, into the chilly shadows of the trees that grew along one side of the lane. I walked until I was out of view before I lurched off the road into the wood. I squeezed through the shrubbish undergrowth, picked my way through a head-high tangle of brambles, and found myself alone in the wood. It was the most silent wood I have ever been in. It gave the impression of being dead, despite the verdant appearance it had given from outside. The dense leaves of the wood had been forced skywards by the burgeoning deadness of its interior. The expired leaves and twigs beneath my feet cracked like chicken bones. There were no birds. There was nothing here.
Yes, I’d made some kind of mistake. I was here by mistake. I knew this with a certainty that was shattering. But night was irreversible, my situation was irreversible. I could do nothing except unpack my tent, erect it, and crawl inside. I couldn’t do anything except that. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t think of anything except the distant, faded sound of a stone sharpening a blade. I thought I heard or I heard chicken bones snapping and a rusty gate that creaked painfully on its decrepit hinges. I lay in my sleeping bag with my clothes on, with my shoes on, staring straight ahead, defencelessly conscious of the sound of my breath, horribly awake, off the map and out of sight and away from the map.
Silently I begged for the dawn. Trees, skeletal in their naked brittleness, swept down, brushing the fragile canvas of my tent. There was some grotesque sort of distant footfall, or anyway a noise I couldn’t account for. And occasionally but always, the slow, sly, shrill cry of the gate, opening and closing impossibly in the cloaking darkness of the dead of the night. Maybe a sound formed itself into the shape of my name, twisted itself and warped its voice into a terrifying parody of my name and of my ideas and of my plans and of my future. Maybe a sound slithered into my tent shaped like footsteps or knife-sharpening or chasing or a hollow realisation of the impossibility of escape. Maybe that’s where I still am, cocooned in a flimsy, fabricated defence against what it is that I desire most; a damned region that lies off the map, unpeopled, empty of birds, bereft of animals, where the sky is torn from the land, and where I am caught for ever, desiccating, last week’s insect caught in forgotten,
I studied the map of the area just to the south of the empty zone where I determined to stake my nebulous claim. And I resolved to travel there.
By train, bus and walking I took myself to the top of this sheet. There was no road north, just a brambled gap in the hedge. I pushed through the clinging stems and looked north with a broad smile. I had told no one where I was going.
I walked for a long time.
Later, much later, I began to worry if I was anywhere at all. I had no idea when I would reach somewhere with a railway station. Or a bus station. Or a bus stop. Or a minicab office. It became so quiet I hoped for a jet to split the mocking sky. That evening I travelled into what seemed a kinder landscape; the lanes began to meander and sink between hedges as the sun sank lower and the air cooled.
My rucksack was heavy and painful on my sunburnt shoulders, and it was clear that I would soon have to find somewhere to put up my tent. At the brow of a gentle decline I saw ahead of me a dark wood massing about a miledistant. It was there, I decided, I would spend the night. The wood began at a fork in the lane where a small cottage lay beneath the purpling shade of the twilit trees. At the gate stood what I thought was a man, bent with age, holding a scythe upright, the blade swinging idly above his head.
I walked on, into the chilly shadows of the trees that grew along one side of the lane. I walked until I was out of view before I lurched off the road into the wood. I squeezed through the shrubbish undergrowth, picked my way through a head-high tangle of brambles, and found myself alone in the wood. It was the most silent wood I have ever been in. It gave the impression of being dead, despite the verdant appearance it had given from outside. The dense leaves of the wood had been forced skywards by the burgeoning deadness of its interior. The expired leaves and twigs beneath my feet cracked like chicken bones. There were no birds. There was nothing here.
Yes, I’d made some kind of mistake. I was here by mistake. I knew this with a certainty that was shattering. But night was irreversible, my situation was irreversible. I could do nothing except unpack my tent, erect it, and crawl inside. I couldn’t do anything except that. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t think of anything except the distant, faded sound of a stone sharpening a blade. I thought I heard or I heard chicken bones snapping and a rusty gate that creaked painfully on its decrepit hinges. I lay in my sleeping bag with my clothes on, with my shoes on, staring straight ahead, defencelessly conscious of the sound of my breath, horribly awake, off the map and out of sight and away from the map.
Silently I begged for the dawn. Trees, skeletal in their naked brittleness, swept down, brushing the fragile canvas of my tent. There was some grotesque sort of distant footfall, or anyway a noise I couldn’t account for. And occasionally but always, the slow, sly, shrill cry of the gate, opening and closing impossibly in the cloaking darkness of the dead of the night. Maybe a sound formed itself into the shape of my name, twisted itself and warped its voice into a terrifying parody of my name and of my ideas and of my plans and of my future. Maybe a sound slithered into my tent shaped like footsteps or knife-sharpening or chasing or a hollow realisation of the impossibility of escape. Maybe that’s where I still am, cocooned in a flimsy, fabricated defence against what it is that I desire most; a damned region that lies off the map, unpeopled, empty of birds, bereft of animals, where the sky is torn from the land, and where I am caught for ever, desiccating, last week’s insect caught in forgotten,
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