BUT SO FAR FEAR JUST looks like the inside of an old London Underground train. The seats are covered in tatty green velveteen with a repeating orangey pattern. The floor has a layer of dirt so thick that the real floor could fall away and no one would even notice. The carriages are joined together with creaky mechanisms that you can see (or so I imagine) when you look through the window in the adjoining door. I sit down and a whistle blows. The train starts to move. It slowly creaks its way to the end of the platform and then, suddenly, we’re going at what feels like three hundred miles per hour, through a long tunnel and then out onto a landscape I don’t recognise. I absurdly think, ‘This must be a Circle Line train, since we’re going above ground already’; then I realise what’s wrong with what I’m thinking, and I stop.
I don’t like this landscape. I don’t like it at all. The syrupy feeling I have in the Troposphere is now gone, and I feel not simply cold and tired but completely hollowed out, as if all I am is skin. The train speeds up again and I can’t help but look out of the window. Looking out of the window feels a bit like when you look on the Internet to find out if your symptoms suggest terminal illness: you know they will, and you know you shouldn’t look, but you do. Outside of this window is just one big field. But it’s not a green, hopeful field: it’s basically mud. And on the mud, I can see burning houses. It should feel just like I do watching the TV news – that hyperreal sense that nothing you see in two dimensions on a screen can ever really happen – but it does not feel like watching TV. The houses that are burning outside aren’t just any old semis from the news: they’re all the houses I’ve ever lived in. And I’m inside, and I can’t get out; my parents are inside, and they can’t get out. I know my sister is already dead. But more than that. This is fear without hope: this is the image of me asleep in my cold bedroom back in Kent, wearing the thick pyjamas my mother got me back in the days when we still spent Christmas together. In the image I am not just fast asleep; the smoke from the fire has already knocked me out and now, as I watch, the leg of my pyjama bottoms has caught fire and the skin around my ankle is starting to melt. I won’t ever wake up again. I am just going to melt, and I won’t even know anything about it.
After the fires, all I can see are floods: water creeping up and up the outside of the same houses – my houses – until they are completely submerged; until even the people on the roofs, and the people hiding in the attics, are soon dead. My whole family; everyone I’ve ever known. On one level, I know I don’t care too much about my family – when did I last see them, after all? But I’m there with them now as we wait for help that does not come; as we accept the moment when the water becomes too high and we all fall into it. There’s nothing apart from the water: it’s black and cold and it stinks like death. And I’m the first one to go, to stop trying to hold my breath and actually breathe in the black water. That’s it. Blackness. My useless body sinks down to where the street used to be. And, in this train of fear, I’m sweating, and my heart’s beating so fast that it’s like one long heartbeat, or maybe no heartbeat at all.
The worst thing about the images outside is that there is nothing else apart from them. And it’s not simply that I cannot see anything beyond the houses and the mud: I know with the deepest certainty possible that there is nothing out there beyond what I can see. There isn’t any me here; there is no train. I will die in all those houses and there is nowhere else to escape to. There’s no sense that this will ever exist ‘around the corner’, or on TV, or be happening to someone else. This is what it must be like to open the door to a dead-eyed man with an axe. This is what it must be like when you haven’t fought him off (after all, how could you?) and you’re tied up and you know you’re going to die. You’re not watching this happen to a fictional character; you are experiencing it for real: it’s me; it’s the end of me. Or, worse: you are like a fictional character, but not one of the leads. You’re just one of the victims along the way.
The train lurches on. The alleyways I’d usually never walk down after dark are all there now: a world of dead-ends with rapists patrolling the thin dark passages like the ghosts on Pac-Man. I am stabbed a thousand times by people who don’t know my name, or what books I like to read, or that if my life wasn’t such a mess I’d quite like to get a cat. I watch myself bleed to death like a farm animal in an abattoir, while parts of my own body lie scattered around me, hacked off and discarded. I pray for unconsciousness, but it doesn’t come. Oh, Jesus. I can’t stand any more of this. I feel what it is all like: I’m having an operation, but the doctors don’t know I’m actually awake. I experience a motorway pile-up. I see Adam dying a million different ways. Then I’m killing Adam: I’m killing him in every possible way, and I’m killing everyone else, too. I’m in prison, and I’ll never escape. I have no choice.
I have no choice.
I have no choice.
Every millisecond of this horrible journey is an epiphany in which I realise that this is it. This is my last moment of life, and any idea of free will disappeared long ago. And each epiphany is, at the moment I have it, absolutely irreversible. It’s not the moment when you think ‘Shit! That was close.’ It’s the moment after that, in a world where you are the unluckiest person on Earth, and there’s no one to help you and no one to care, especially when everyone you know is already dead . . .
I can’t stand this.
Console? I say, weakly, although I can barely believe that such a thing still exists.
It comes up.
Where do I get off ? I ask it.
You get off at your station.
Where is my station?
You have to be able to see it.
What?
You now have no choices.
Well, I knew that.
I want to stand up and go and ask the driver to stop the train, but I know that there is no driver and this isn’t really a train. I’m surfing on a wave of fear that’s moving faster than . . . What did Apollo Smintheus say? Incomprehensible speeds. Think, think. Don’t look out of the window. Don’t . . . I look.
And then I realise that I’m not alone out here. There’s actually something worse than being alone with your own worst fears, and I’m just beginning to see what that might be. Faintly – not above, below, in front of, or behind my images of fear, but in some other relation to them – I now sense the howling spectre of something else: layers upon layers of other people’s fear. There are misty representations of money burning, of someone being fisted by his own father, of toys that tell you to ‘fuck off ’ and then rip out your throat, of the idea that there is no such thing as reality, of someone being abducted by an alien and strapped to a table in a white lab, of nuclear war, of a child drowning, of hundreds of children drowning, of it being all YOUR FAULT, of choking on fish bones, of lung cancer, of bowel cancer, of brain tumours, of spiders – thousands and thousands of spiders, of a prolapsed uterus, of sleep apnoea, of eating, of any kind of sex, of rats, of cockroaches, of plastic bags, of heights, of planes, of the Bermuda Triangle, of the live rail, of ghosts, of terrorism, of cocktail parties, of crowds, of the dentist, of choking on your own tongue, of your own feet, of dreams, of grown-ups, of ice cubes, of false teeth, of Father Christmas, of getting old, of your parents dying, of what you might do to yourself, of coffins, of alcohol, of suicide, of blood, of not being able to take heroin again, of the thing behind the curtains, of soot, of spaceships, of DVT, of horses, of fast cars, of people, of paper, of knives, of dogs, of redundancy, of being late, of being seen naked, of scabs, of leap years, of UFOs, of dragons, of poison, of accordion music, of torture, of any kind of authority, of being kicked while you just lie on the ground trying to protect your head until you become unconscious and can’t protect yourself any more.
You – why don’t you look out of the window for a while?
My eyes are now shut. Incomprehensible speeds. What does that mean?
I can’t breathe. The man with the gun . . .
There’s no man with a gun, Ariel.
There is. The whole world is only made of men with guns. There’s no one else in the whole world, just me and billions of men with guns. I feel sick.
Incomprehensible speeds. I can comprehend the speed of light. I can comprehend ten times the speed of light. The only thing I can’t comprehend is infinite speed . . . That’s what Apollo Smintheus said, didn’t he? Or did he just say that the train track was infinite? Anyway, what if we were moving at infinite speed? Although I can’t really comprehend it (which is, I think, the point of ‘incomprehensible’), something travelling at infinite speed would actually seem to be at rest at every point that it travelled past. Something with infinite speed, travelling in a loop, should be able to be everywhere at once, surely? Maybe more than once: who knows? So maybe I don’t have to wait for my station. Maybe my station is simply there, outside, and I have to find it.
I don’t want to look out of the window, but I do. Now my own fears are in sharp focus again. Everything I’ve ever written is on fire. Someone’s rubbing my name out of every document in which it’s ever appeared. I don’t know where these images are coming from. They appear to be random, but maybe . . . I try to think of Adam again and, as if I’d ordered the memory in the consciousness equivalent of the most efficient fast-food restaurant in the world, there he is, outside the window, fucking my mother. He’s fucking my mother and saying to her: ‘Who’s Ariel? I’ve never heard of anyone called Ariel.’ He seems to turn and see me watching them. Then he laughs. He pokes her in the ribs and points at me and they both laugh. ‘I don’t have time for this now, Ariel,’ my mother says. ‘You’re not the centre of the universe, you know.’
Cars, I think. Driving. Driving towards London from Faversham. Come on. I’m escaping from the priory; from the Project Starlight men. And then I see/feel it. I’m in my car and I’m zoning out into the fear. In the image through the train window I can see the men racing behind me in their black car, driving down the almost-empty motorway with the grey sky above and the snow lying in fields, on rooftops, and alongside the long, curving hard shoulders. I can see them behind me and I know this is the end. In a film, I’d shake them off. But they’re going to run me off the road, and no amount of gutsy driving or intelligence is going to save me. My life is going to end in a crunch of jagged metal, with my blood spurting onto the windscreen. I don’t want to go there, to this place, but I have to. I have to get into that place from this one. My mind is open at that point, I instinctively know that. And the men aren’t really there: that’s just the fear.
At least – I hope it’s just the fear.
How do I get off ? Not knowing what else to do, I walk towards the doors.
The image is still the same one outside the windows. I focus on it, and then I press the button to open the doors. The train’s still moving but the doors open and . . .
It’s six a.m. – just gone – on the A2 and the sign is telling me that if I keep going, I’ll end up in London. That’s not what I want. Or maybe it is? No. I need the M25 and then a road to Torquay, wherever that is. I glance in the rearview mirror: still no black car. There’s another sign ahead of me pointing to the various exits you could take if you wanted to go to any one of the various Medway towns. I haven’t lived around here long enough for any of the names to mean anything to me. Except . . . One of them does mean something to me. It’s the town where Patrick lives. But – oh, shit. I’m having déjà vu. I remember being here before and taking that exit and getting Patrick to come and fuck me in the toilets for a hundred quid.
Except it wasn’t déjà vu. It happened. It happened, and then I went to Molly’s school and then I got lost in the Troposphere and then I time-travelled back here, in a train full of fear and . . . So much for paradoxes. I pull over to the hard shoulder and take out a cigarette. At the same time I check my purse to see if I still have the rest of Patrick’s money. No. I’ve got the £9.50 I set out with and very little petrol. I light my cigarette and pull back onto the road. I’m going to Torquay. And I can’t help smiling. I’ve no idea where I’ve actually been, but – oddly – for the first time since I first went into the Troposphere, I don’t feel at all mad. I feel absolutely fine about what just happened. I’m not a whore after all, I think as I drive off again. I got what I wanted without actually doing anything. Or did I actually do it and then overwrite it with something else? Oh, whatever. I put all thoughts of Abbie Lathrop – and the KIDS – out of my mind and, as I drive towards the M25, I try to make myself vow never to try Pedesis again.
It’s just gone midday when I park in a big, anonymous car park next to Torquay Library, about 250 miles from the Shrine of St Jude in Faversham. There’s no snow in the south-west, but the sky is as grey and flat as the one back home, as if January has been reformatted in two dimensions and broadcast on a cheap black-and-white portable TV. The Troposphere always seems flat to me, but this is worse; I’m not sure that the real world, with its dirt and its people, is exactly where I want to be. But then I’m not sure the Troposphere is a good place for me, either. I still have half a tank of the petrol that I ‘forgot’ to pay for, but now I need food, and coffee. There’s a café just across from the library, next to a big slab-like church of a denomination I don’t recognise. I decide to go into the café before using the public Internet terminals that I hope are in the library. I’m going to search for local castles and see what I find. I remember Burlem’s memory of the one in his town: the one he thought of as being like a giant’s ring, ripped off and left on a hilltop. If that doesn’t locate it, I’ll try something else, but I’m not sure what.
Even though I have my plan, I still sit in the car for about five minutes before I do anything. What a journey. I drove about two hundred miles before I stopped looking in my rearview mirror for the police (who I assumed would want to ask me questions about the petrol) and the Project Starlight men. Some time after that, I lost track of where I was. I pulled into a town I thought was Torquay, but there was nothing at all to distinguish it from every other town I’ve ever seen in Britain, and I couldn’t be sure that I’d actually reached my destination. There was a large roundabout with various signs to industrial estates, and a Sainsbury’s supermarket off to the right. I pulled into the Sainsbury’s car park and got out of the car for the first time since the petrol station on the M25. My legs felt shaky. I walked in and went straight up to the kiosk and bought a cheap packet of tobacco.
‘Where am I, exactly?’ I asked the woman, after she’d given me my change.
The way I said it made it sound like a completely normal question. But the woman looked at me as if I were completely odd.
‘You’re in Sainsbury’s, dear,’ she told me.
But after some further conversation, I realised that I was not in Torquay and got some pretty good directions that led me straight to the library.
So now I’m in a car park that is indistinguishable from any other car park in any other town, and I watch as people unload buggies and small children, or pack away large, shiny carrier bags with the word ‘sale’ on them. Two women go past, both in those new mobility scooters that look a bit like dodgem cars, and they seem to be arguing about something. The grey concrete is smeared with old fag ends, familiar take-away wrappers and polystyrene coffee cups. I look beyond all of this, towards the thin line of bare-branched trees up a small hill separating this car park from the road above. The trees are the only things that stand out in the greyish-whitish smudge of official buildings and the sky. And then I see something in the trees: six or seven squirrels all moving at once; one in each tree, or so it seems, moving and jumping and rearranging themselves constantly, like pixels on a screen. Their bodies are silhouetted by the pale light of the sky behind them. It’s winter, and I can’t imagine what they find to eat in a place like this. Aren’t squirrels supposed to hibernate? Do they have a god looking after them or does nobody pray for squirrels? I shiver. What if Burlem isn’t in this place any more; or what if I can’t actually find out where it is? I imagine what it’s like to live as a squirrel – or any animal – in a concrete, urban space, where everything costs money. What will I do if I can’t find Burlem? I can’t go home; I think it’s fair to say that I have no home any more.
I wonder if the book is still safe.
I wonder if the men have got to Adam yet.
And I feel a pulse like a fist, hitting me first between my legs and then somewhere in my stomach. Is it possible that I’ll ever see him again?
I stop thinking and get out of the car. There’s a hoarding layered with rained-on, peeling posters, most of which are advertising a pantomime starring someone from an Australian soap that I’ve never heard of. Above that there’s a sign: no overnight sleeping. Shit. I never realised that you could be stopped for just parking your car somewhere and sleeping in it. I walk over to the ticket machine, the cold wind jabbing at my face as if I’ve stolen something from it. As I’d feared, it’s extortionate to park here: about a pound an hour. I pay for half an hour and then use my fingernail to smudge the time on the ticket as I walk back over to my car. Then I prop the ticket in a hard-to-see place on the edge of the windscreen, so only the date is showing, before locking the car door and walking across the road and through a tinkling door into the café.
It smells of soup, plus something sour that I can’t identify. It’s almost full-up, but I manage to get a seat in the corner by a display of greeting cards, jewellery and Fairtrade muesli. There are various pictures on the walls, depicting slim white women in Africa leading choirs of small, brightly clothed children; or helping equally brightly clothed women pull water up from a well. I realise this is a Christian café just as a late-middle-aged woman in a yellow twinset comes to take my order. As I ask for the carrot and parsnip soup and a black coffee, I notice the leaflets that are scattered around, and the poster on the wall advertising the times of the service in the church – presumably the one next door. And I wonder: what kind of god is created and sustained by the hundreds of people who must pray here? Apollo Smintheus is the result of six people’s prayers, and he seems real enough. What does more prayer do? What sort of god does it make? And is this god – the one made by the people here – the same god created by the people in the church near Burlem’s house? Is it the same god created by the people in the Faversham priory? What would a god like that look like? I suppose if I met him in the Troposphere, he’d look exactly as I’d want him to look – probably an old man with a white beard: the atheist’s view of a Christian’s view of God. And what does he do for these people? What must it be like to have millions of people telling you what to do? And I also wonder: what does he ask in return?
While I’m waiting for my soup, I study one of the leaflets. It talks vaguely about ‘joy’. But I haven’t seen anything joyful since I’ve been in this place. I haven’t seen anything joyful since . . . I can’t actually remember when the last time was. And that’s why I like reading Heidegger and Derrida and Baudrillard. In that world, life isn’t a matrix of good and bad; happy and sad; joy and failure to achieve joy. Failure and sadness are there to be examined, like a puzzle, and the puzzle is open to anyone. It doesn’t matter how many people you’ve slept with, or whether or not you smoke, or whether or not you get something out of damaging your own body. You can have a go at the puzzle that assumes imperfection and never asks you for anything.
I look down at my wrists – the pinkish, silvery marks – and then I glance around the café. Most of the other people here are middle-aged and dressed in respectably unstylish catalogue clothes. They scare me a little; not because of what they might do to me (these people never do anything: they’re benign), but because of what I am in their thoughts. These aren’t the middle-aged women I remember from the estate I grew up on – women who’d cackle and smoke and discuss the benefits of giving blow jobs without your false teeth. Neither are they like the social workers who’d come round every so often to check we weren’t being sexually abused by these women’s husbands (it was more usually the sons). No. These are of the same species as the women I remember from the bakery and the corner shop: the ones who don’t bother to stop talking about your crazy mother when you walk in because they think you’re too stupid to understand. They’re the school secretaries who could have simply told me I needed to wash my clothes more often, rather than talking about it behind my back and, eventually, reporting me to the head teacher. They’re the kind of women who would never wear flattering clothes – or anything black – because looking attractive equals sex. There’s only one other young person in the café: a blond guy with shabby clothes who looks like the sort of RE teacher who’d spend a long time talking about world religions and not so long on Christianity. He looks at me for a moment and I see a familiar desire in his eyes. It’s not romantic desire: it’s for sex, raw sex, and it’s because I look like I’d be up for it. Compared to everyone else in here, I look like a whore. But, of course, that’s the point of these women. By being what they are, they make you a bad person by comparison, even if all you’re doing is wearing lipstick. I try to give him a look back that says ‘Not today, thanks’, and then I pick up the leaflet and pretend to read it again until the woman with the yellow twinset comes with my soup.
When I’ve finished my soup I look around in my bag for a notebook, so I can write a list of things I’m intending to look up in the library. I take out the tobacco as well. I’ve rolled my cigarette and put it to one side on the table, when the woman comes back to collect my bowl. I drain the last of the coffee and offer her the cup, too.
‘You can’t smoke in here,’ she says.
‘Oh – I know. I wasn’t going to, don’t worry,’ I say, smiling.
‘Yes, well, just as long as you know.’
‘What’s your god like?’ I ask the woman, before I can tell myself to shut up.
‘What’s God like?’ she says.
I should never have asked this question. ‘Yes,’ I say.
‘He looks after the people who believe in him,’ she says.
And then she walks away.
As I leave the café, light my cigarette, and sit on a wall to smoke it, I remember the various times in my life when I’ve tried to find out about religion. It often starts with a logical idea: that so many people around the world believe in a god, or a way of life, that there must be something in at least one of these approaches. So I go to the local library, or the university library, and there’s always that moment – perhaps similar to the moment before you choose the bread you want in the bakery – where there seems to be so much possibility. So many books; so much ‘truth’. Surely it can’t all be false? Surely it won’t all be the same? But all the books do just seem the same to me. They all have the same hierarchies. They all have leaders. Even Buddhism has rules over who can really ‘belong’ and who can’t, who is in charge and who is not. And all the leaders are men.
I remember once flirting with Roman Catholicism, when I was seeing a guy who’d been a choirboy as a kid, and who seemed to get something out of the whole thing (and had worked it all out so you could be a Catholic and still have dirty sex). I got a couple of books and magazines from the local church and started to read up on it. I’d kind of bought all that stuff about the Virgin Mary, and was in the process of trying to convince myself that a religion that took a woman so seriously must have something going for it. Then I read a humorous anecdote in one of the magazines about a time when Pope John Paul II was visiting some town, and the nuns who were supposed to cook for him messed it up and ended up giving him fish fingers. Obviously the point of the story was that it was funny that the Pope had eaten fish fingers, but I couldn’t get over the detail that the pope had nuns to cook for him. Surely religious leaders are supposed to be somehow wiser than the rest of us? But I realised then that there was nothing special about this system at all, nothing that made it more profound and extraordinary than the rest of society. If someone who had given up his whole life to thinking about goodness and rightness and truth still expected nuns to cook him his fish fingers (because after all, nuns haven’t got anything else better to do, and none of them are ever going to be priests or become the Pope, because women aren’t good enough for that), then something was very wrong. How could he have missed the bit about everyone being equal in the eyes of God? If this was the wisest Catholic, I certainly never wanted to meet the stupidest one.
Perhaps this is similar to the anthropic principle, but I am a woman, and after a lifetime of experiment I know I am capable of everything men can do, except things that specifically require a penis (like pissing standing up). I mean, it’s so obvious it even sounds a bit silly to repeat it, a bit like saying ‘All humans have heads.’ So what does religion know about me that I’m missing? Am I worth less in an a priori sense? But that would be utterly nonsensical. How is it possible that religion, which claims to be more profound than anything else, still has less of a grasp on humanity than any personnel department in the country?
It’s not just Christianity, either: how could the Buddhists have missed the bit in their thinking about freedom from desire, when most of them seem to desire to be reincarnated well, and in such a way that they can be a man, and be called a ‘venerable master’, and tell other people what to do? Why is religion so disappointing?
You expect it to tell you something you don’t know, and all it ends up telling you is the stuff you’ve known for years, and that you long ago decided is wrong.
Over to my left is the big grey wall in front of the church.
Are we the Thoughts of God? a poster asks.
No, I realise. It’s the reverse.
I put out my cigarette and stop thinking.
The library is a large square space with two floors. There’s a checkout desk in the middle of the ground floor, and bookshelves all around it. The second floor is basically just a gallery with a big hole in the middle, so you can stand up there and watch what’s going on downstairs, or sit at one of the small desks and try to work, if you don’t mind all the noise. I remember the library I went to as a kid. It was always deadly quiet and, at least in my memory, everything in it was orange, including a little sunken bit in the kids’ section that to me felt like a huge abyss, and that I would beg my mother to let me go and sit in.
I walk up to the counter.
‘Hi,’ I say, when a bearded librarian walks over to me. ‘I want to use the Internet.’
‘Are you a member?’
‘Of this library?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, no. Sorry. I’m not.’
‘Are you a foreign student?’
‘No.’
He smiles. ‘We can give you a day pass. You’ll need to fill in this form . . .’
He gives it to me. But I’m wondering whether I can lie on it, and if so, whether they will check. I certainly don’t want to leave any written record of myself.
‘Maybe I’ll see if I can find the information I want in a book first,’ I say. ‘But I’ll try this if that fails.’ I did want to look up the Web site of the cult of Apollo Smintheus, as well as look for the information on the castle, but maybe I won’t bother. After all, I am vaguely in debt to these people.
‘Fine with me,’ he says. ‘Can I help you locate a book?’
I think this is the most helpful librarian I’ve ever come across.
All the university librarians just act as though you’re getting in their way. That’s not to say I’m not missing the university, though, and I don’t know where else I’ll ever find a secular green space with no take-away cartons on the ground. For about the thousandth time today, I have a pang: I’m not going back; I’m not going back.
‘Um, I’m interested in local castles,’ I say.
‘Ah. Any in particular?’
I smile. ‘No. Just generally. I want to look at the shapes of castles.’
That sounds mad. I think quickly. ‘It’s research for a book.’
He looks impressed. ‘And it’s Devon castles you want?’
‘Yeah, I think so.’
‘Well, you’ll need the local history library then.’
Oh, shit. ‘Where’s that?’ I say.
‘Oh, it’s that little room over there,’ he says, pointing to a door in the corner. ‘You shouldn’t really go in if you’re not a member, but I should think it’ll be all right. Obviously you can’t take any of the books out. And I’m afraid you can’t take your bag in with you.’
He signs me in and takes my bag. Then he gives me a laminated pass.
‘Just go straight in,’ he says.
The local history library is a dusty, low-ceilinged room split into three distinct sections by the layout of the shelves and the position of several desks and one microfiche reader. I instantly feel comfortable in here, around the musty smell of old books. There’s no one else here but me, and I wonder if I’d get arrested for just crashing out here at the end of the day. Probably.
I drift around looking at faded old spines of parish records and biographies before I realise I’ll need the computerised records to find what I’m looking for. There’s a terminal in the corner, just under a CCTV playback of what’s going on in here. I sit down, but it feels odd seeing myself on TV, and I’m a vague shadow in the corner of my eye as I type in the keywords ‘castles’ and ‘Devon’.
There are several books on Devon castles, and I choose a couple with pictures and take them to one of the desks. I flick through the largest book, which contains line drawings of all the major castles in the area. Exeter Castle and Powderham Castle are too grand and rectangular, as are Berry Pomeroy Castle and Bickleigh Castle. Gidley Castle and Lydford Castle are both too square. There are several castles by the sea. But the castle Burlem was thinking of was on a little mound. Finally, I find pictures of two castles that are on mounds. They’re both circular. My heart is like a machine that’s been turned up a notch. I’ve now got two choices. I almost know where I need to go. I have to look at another book – this one with more recent photographs – before I see that one of the castles is now really just a ruin, like a tooth left in a giant’s mouth.
But the other one looks exactly like Burlem described: like a giant’s ring thrown on a hilltop. And I can see what he meant about the absence, as well. The picture I’ve got here in this book, this aerial view, certainly does make it seem like the space – the thing that isn’t there – is more important than the walls, which are. If you look at the castle for long enough the walls blur, and it’s as if they don’t have any point at all, except to keep all the nothingness in.