Sometimes I think the M4 has defined my life. When I first left home with an overnight bag it was down this road that I hitched, and all those years I was wandering I felt I was just following an extension of the very same road, heading further and further out. If I turned to look behind me again I felt tears prick my eyes, saw myself standing again at the Chiswick roundabout, holding up a card marked 'West'. Maybe this isn't an easy story to tell. I've never completed any of the plans I've had for plays, novels, whatever; I lose control of them so quickly. I'd like to plot out and execute an impeccably crafted story that unrolls in long curling sentences of fluency and precision, but I've lived my life too long by the rhythm of coffee stops and constant shifting, and nothing comes so easy. I'm writing this now in the caff at Swansea train station. Neither a destination nor a departure; just a place to wait. When you stay in a different place each night without a plan you lose the linear thread of time, your memories cluster and fragment. The outside world seems to have some kind of abstract chronology, but even that can falter. You must have had this experience of trying to piece together some story among your friends and soon you find yourself thinking, but A couldn't have said that, he didn't even meet B until then... and it seems that patches of time are compacting and telescoping, that they contain far more than could possibly have happened in the space of one evening, the width of one room. Or even that some events are running backwards and starting before they should have done, branching off and bubbling alongside the main current for a few seconds or hours before they rejoin, so that some things are surely happening to the same people at once, communication zipping instantly across the distance whilst other people just twirl slowly in a little eddy or backwater for years and years unnoticed. I'd like to start at the beginning, but I doubt that I'll be able to. I, we, we always start from the middle of things: thought has no beginning or end, just some kind of an outside to which it is connected. I can go back to what I think of as the beginning but already that's distorted by my memories of or my awareness of what came after, they come crowding in around.
So, here's my story: there's no story. I just nipped out to the toilet, and when I came back there she was: gone. What could I do? Ray calls me up out of the blue and we meet. I barely recognise him at first, looking so straight. He says the same about me with short hair. He's flush, but upset about a good friend who's gone to America and isn't coming back. We sit in a near-empty pub on Wind Street, late afternoon, and chew over all kinds of stuff, like it was yesterday we last saw each other. About an old friend who now walks with a limp, some kids found him asleep in Temple Meads one night and gave him an awful kicking. It takes me a couple of drinks to get up the courage but in the end I do and I ask if he's seen or heard from Anna. There's a song on the jukebox behind us, about meeting up with people years later, and I give an involuntary shudder. Before I met her again that day I'd heard from someone she'd married a young banker. I'd tried to imagine her as a middle class mum with a bob and a 4 by 4, but I just can’t. He shakes his head and says no he's not heard for years.
Once, back when I'd first met her, we'd slept in the ruins of a castle somewhere in Greece. It was only the day after we'd met, and she'd never slept out of doors before. I met her outside a caff, and somehow we just got talking; we agreed to hitch together because she was getting so much grief from the drivers who picked her up. Straight black hair down to her shoulders, and smart clothes, for a backpacker. We climbed up the hill to the castle that evening, she in a light long dress and with her hair pinned up, just as all the other tourists were coming down. With bread and cheese and a bottle of wine we found a flat roof with a bit of a breeze to keep away the mosquitoes and then lay back like starfish to watch the vultures wheel above us, drifting across the sky, mowing the blue. And some time during the night the world turned over, found us spiralling out together into the stars, limbs tangled up in the blankets, waving helplessly...
In her passport photo she had short bleached hair, dark eye make up, large drop earrings. Almost like a different person. I remember us making love in an olive grove under the dappling sun. I remember us giggling as we got drunk on a ferry heading to, I don't know, somewhere, nowhere. Travelling is much more about where you're leaving behind than it is about the places to which you go. It took me years to realise that I could move outside the world I grew up in. The day I was meant to be doing the first of my GCSE's I hitched down the M4 to Chepstow and tramped up the riverbank path to Tintern Abbey, in search of that magical Wordsworthian union-with-nature feeling. No-one told me there'd be an entrance fee. I skulked outside watching the coach parties, then stuck out my thumb again.
Then Anna and me were together in a tourist bar by the beach drinking Ouzo and water, cool, pungent, milky. They were playing the disco trash hits of that summer— ‘Always have, always will’. Late afternoon, sun tiger-striping us through a slatted awning, she with one leg crossed over the other, toying with one shoe dangling half off her foot. We'd been travelling together for a week and a half but I couldn't work out where we stood. Trying not to push anything, to give it time. We'd been laughing a lot that afternoon. Suddenly she dropped her smile and said "I've got to get out of this hole". "I". As soon as she used that word I knew that that was it. I, me me, mine, I felt a stronger tug at my heart than I could explain for having known her so little time. But then I supposed I'd guessed from the beginning she wasn't someone I could ever hold onto. A week later, in a hostel somewhere, I dreamt that as me and my family all looked through some old photos, one slipped to the floor out of the back of the album, and one of my parents had snatched it away. But before they had I'd seen myself and a female twin. "Who was she, why didn't you tell me, how did she die?", I'd begged and argued. They didn't reply. But it was her.
I think it was when I tried to look her up back in this country that I first met Ray and his flatmates in Reading, where she’d been living. They'd all thought she was incredibly sophisticated because she once spent eight pounds on a bottle of wine. At the time they were furious because she'd done a runner from the house to go to Greece, leaving all her stuff which they then had to try to sell to cover her share of the bills. The girls in the house hated her anyway, as girls tend to with other girls who only make friends with boys. And I'd been stuck for somewhere to stay myself and moved into her old room, a little bit insane it seems to me now, with just a thin mattress, my sleeping bag all grubby from the travelling, and her old books in piles around the walls. There was no light-bulb and for ages I didn't get one, just got to know the room so well I could move around it in the dark. Sat in a chair chain-smoking and staring out of the window over the city. I felt I'd been swallowed and half-digested, and then spewed out on the shore again, only to find that the shoreline itself was her.
When I moved in her ex-fiancé kept calling up, calling round, asking where she'd gone. I didn't tell him anything, of course. As if I had a thing to tell. I guess I felt sorry for him, but still I didn't want to try to share that feeling with him. My pain was all I had of my own. Ray found it bizarrely humorous then, probably still does now, that this strange little goblin, as he called her, should inspire such devotion. I guess it was her self-possession that drew us along in her wake. "You poor fools", Ray said to me when the ex had finally gone away one night, "it's the back of her head that you love." He was right of course. And perhaps too it was mooncalfs like us who were driving her on, wherever she was going. And then I was so surprised when I met her again three weeks ago, us both piled into a minibus to some demo. I double-took, but she told me she'd known I'd be there beforehand. Bowled me over. And then that final afternoon last week as we'd been hitching back over, down the M4, we was standing in a lay-by, dark hills
clapped in a fold of cloud. Kissing beside the road when a car pulled up. We trotted over but the driver told us "No, sorry, I just stopped to take a photo". Turned back and found a newspaper at an empty table in the caff, and looked over the headlines. School shootings in America. I remember a song that went "...the newspapers pile up outside the door, I've tried and tried but I just can't, remember what they're for...". I heard it on a crackly old LP that Ray had found under the carpet in his room. At the time I'd thought that was a terrible idea, irresponsible, but now I'm beginning to like it.
One of the kids she used to run around with as a kid at Greenham, a little boy born during the Falklands War, had gone and joined the Army. But mum, I just wanted some structure in my life, he'd said. I guess you can imagine the response. In the service station caff she slowly tells me about her first real love affair, with a girl at her school. They sang a duet together in some kind of school production at the end of the summer term. Then they were inseparable through the whole of that summer, staying over at each other's houses but when they returned to school in September her friend cut her dead without a word.
—I wasn't even surprised she says, I cried and cried, but I never tried to even talk to her, I just waited for the next holiday.
By Christmas the other girl had found a boyfriend. An old song comes into my head—
Western wind, when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down can rain—
O Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again—
and I scribble it down in her notebook as the view hazes out from the steam inside and the windows rattle with the rain. She draws a face with her finger.
—age eleven, twelve I'm saying, do you remember everywhere around you there was this thing, 'society', and you were still desperately trying to be on the inside—
—I think so, yeah. And it's not till you're older maybe sixteen, seventeen, could you feel that you were seperate without shame, could you look at it and not want to be a part of it. God, I tell you, I hated everyone. And I wanted the straight world, you know, I really wanted it, but subconsciously I must have known it's what I knew I would never have, never be a part of—
—I guess. People think they're just watching life on TV but they're wrong, they're really doing it.
—Only they don't even know. But we were a bit different from that anyway, because we thought we were really changing something.
—Well, you were. You did.
—Mmm. But don't thank me for that. I was just stealing hubcaps.
—The difficulty is how to find your place in this world when it's clear you just don't belong.
—But no-one belongs at all. No-one. Can't you see it? Everyone thinks they're the loner, the odd one out, and that they're the only one. It's like the Gnostic idea that the Devil has usurped God she adds, suddenly. That the Devil rules this world. I'm not saying that that's what I believe, what I'm saying is just that if you were to believe that, really believe that, then you'd start to live a kind of counter-life, in which everything you did, every single thing, was against the grain. The Gnostics had a horror of unintentional acts; they felt you must believe in every thing you do or do nothing— to just go with the flow would always, always be evil—
—But maybe, your life could simpler then, if you only ever had one choice at each turn instead of thousands—
—The choice is nothing, sweetheart. You still have to act, you have to do something. That's where we all fall down.
Causality is problematic. If I hadn't met you, I wouldn't be here. But if you hadn't left me, I might still be… I will happily take responsibility for anything but my own actions. It was the conceit of an earlier age for an author to pretend disapprobation of his own work; to dismiss it as a slight thing, barely half-formed, in which yet a number of his friends and connections had had the perspicacity to discern some literary merit that the author could not himself now distinguish, and thus had urged him to bestow the aforementioned work upon the public; when in fact the author had been hawking his precious manuscript from publisher to publisher with fervent protestations of its' grandeur and beauty for some years now, until one had grudgingly agreed to take it on, upon the said author's underwriting some sizeable proportion of the costs. Me, I'd like to pretend that it is my life itself that is my artwork, to pretend I am that most pure of artists, a poet without poems, a painter without any paintings; that it has been me flickering on the edge of my friends' vision all this time, now in shadow, now gone, and that I have been a spirit, a muse to them, always providing that spark that moves them on or stops them to reconsider. Can I keep up this pretence in the knowledge that they seem to have forgotten me now?
.... ......Anna came back with the coffees.
...........Me: "When I first met you you were so different—"
...........Her: "I think that was someone else."
...........And she said to me "You're sweet—" and thought a little, "—but that's not enough—". Kissed me fierce and greedily, then pushed me away. I excused myself to go to the loo. My poor Anna. My poor me. We've spent all these years in between trying to become each other, each idolising what the other seemed to be; her the sorted straight one, me the hobo. And met again only to be horrified by what we see in each other of what we were. I watched a flock of little wading birds this afternoon out on Swansea beach. The tourist board compares it to the Bay of Naples, but if you've ever been there then you'll know that that means five miles of shit and needles. The birds were all scuttling down the soft grey sand as a wave swept out and then back as another drifted in again; living their whole lives between two worlds, neither of which could support them, just what has overflowed from one to the other.