silver

ALL my life he’s been with me. For as long as I can remember – from our first day at school until now. He’s almost part of me. Brother, friend, drinking buddy. We’ve shared wet days, dry days, a lot of happiness, some misery and at least three girlfriends. He’s my mate. We’ve talked the talk and walked the walk. We’ve travelled in many lands together. Never equal but always compatible. He was the clever one. Miles ahead of me. Miles and miles in front.

His brain was a mystery to me and to nearly everyone else from the start, from our very first day together at infants’ school. He saw things I never saw and he felt things I never felt. I wasn’t the only one who realised he was special – for a while he was quite famous. Among his many talents was an amazing ability with maps and charts. He could look at a map, no matter what scale it was, and interpret it so brilliantly he could actually describe the landscape almost exactly as it was. I suppose he was a mystic, really, because he saw more than any map could possibly describe. He looked at that square yard of paper, which had taken cartographers years to compile, and he could form a picture of it immediately.

The Ordnance Survey made him into a bit of a celebrity on a TV show, and the army tried to use him too but he wasn’t that type. The poor bloke had enough wars of his own to fight. But that knack of his was quite brilliant. Recently I came across a word which describes him perfectly – he was a hierophant: a man who could explain mysteries. He could decipher and enlighten. But as with all great minds, this wasn’t enough. He wanted to take it a step further – into the unknown, into a realm of the brain which no-one had entered before. And that’s when he went beyond my reach. After that I lost him, in a way. We weren’t close again for a long time.

His descent started a few years ago, and I can tell you where – precisely. If we could find his battered old maps, which he used to keep in a locked cabinet by his bedside, I could find that house for you today. God knows where the maps are now, but he still has the key on a silver chain around his neck. He seemed always afraid of losing those maps, as if he’d die or get ill if they were taken away from him.

One day when we were sitting in his kitchen and he was recreating a map in his mind’s eye – he used the word imagining – his forefinger fell on a solitary house in a certain part of the country which is far away from all the primary routes.

‘You know something,’ he said meditatively, ‘I can see that house right now. It’s something to do with its position in the landscape. It will always attract a certain sort of person. Location and all that. The way it faces towards the river, in a bit of a hollow. It feels lonely, patient, resilient. It’s the sort of place which attracts compassionate people. Retired teachers. Guardian readers. People with empathy. They try to cheer it up. I can see bright colours. Turquoise curtains and outbuildings which are really bright red I think.’

He described the place in detail.

To cut a long story short, we got in my car and we went looking for that house. We didn’t need a map, of course, because he took us there as truly as if we were guided by satnav. And when we found it, on a rather dangerous bend in the country, it became quickly apparent that he was absolutely right. We had to park in a lay-by for a while because someone had driven into a ditch and I’d had to call the emergency services; but we stayed long enough to confirm his ‘intuition’. I knew from the outset that he wasn’t playing games; he was never a prankster and he disliked anything that smacked of dishonesty.

I left him at his door, expecting to see him the next day, but I didn’t see him for a month. And when he reappeared he was a different person. He rang the doorbell at one in the morning, when I’d just dropped off to sleep, and I answered the door to a man who was almost dead on his feet, as if he’d just ran a mile with a pack of rottweilers behind him. When he recovered I gave him a bottle of brandy and a duvet because he was too far gone to make any sense that night. In the morning he’d disappeared, leaving a note which left out more than it said. I’ve still got it:

Sorry about last night, thanks for putting me up. Owe you a bottle of booze. Can’t tell you much at the moment but I broke into that house we went to and took it all a stage further. Very exciting. Old geezer asleep upstairs. As I thought – Guardian reader, film fan etc. Searched the place and eventually found what I wanted, some maps. Bullseye! Superb quality, among them an early Bartholomew chart of a region in Scotland. Beautiful. Took it with me and ‘imagined’ the place as well as I could in a night, then caught a train up north. Picked up a girl on the way, going to the same parts. Just been ill, on her way back home. Want you to meet her. She can do the same thing as me but with paintings, found she could do it when she was a kid, something to do with angels. Hah! The Scottish map took us to a wild part of the world. The place I ‘imagined’ turned out to be a croft with a rusty roof and little more than a woman inside it and an urn full of ashes – I’d predicted the woman but not the ashes. This time I didn’t break in, telling the truth seemed easier so she invited us in and we stayed a couple of nights. Bit of a weirdo. Clairvoyant, read my hand. Not very good news at first but she says things will turn out OK in the end. We got some good lifts all the way back to Wales... then something strange happened – we got a ride which took us past that house on the bend, the one with the red barn. The woman in Scotland had mentioned it. That house keeps on cropping up. Spooky or what! It’s up for sale now. Anyway, must dash – will let you know what’s happening ASAP.

Again, I heard nothing for several weeks. Then he arrived at my door again in a terrible state, shaking all over and covered in scratches. For a day he said virtually nothing, sitting in an old deckchair at the bottom of my garden, wrapped up warm in a rug. I managed to get some soup down him but he seemed stunned, and he was a lot thinner than before. I got just a few facts from him; he’d lost the girl during an escapade which had nearly cost him his life. Wishing to go one step further again, to push the boundaries of his world, he’d visited the council archives and studied – for days, it transpired – an antique map of the nearest city, and then he’d imagined it as it was in the early 1900s. Unable to speak by now, he wrote a note to me laboriously on a notepad I gave him, and I was shocked to see that his handwriting was in copperplate:

On May the first, shortly after four in the afternoon, I successfully ‘imagined’ the northern suburbs, including a section of the promenade, sometime in the past. It was the first time I’d tried this technique and I didn’t get it quite right – there was a time warp and I became confused over which age I was in. I entered the area during Victorian or Edwardian times; the very first man I saw was wearing a homburg hat and an astrakhan coat. The street names seemed to be in French, which I cannot account for; perhaps the map I studied had been lying next to a map of France. I followed the man – who looked remarkably like my father – and watched him enter a house. Finding my way to the back of this house, via a back alley which I had stored in my memory, I climbed over the garden wall and hid in the shrubbery, from where I witnessed a statue being unveiled in front of a large group of people. While I was watching them my experiment began to fail, due to a lack of concentration I think. The scene in front of me faded and I found myself in the present. At this point I noticed a wonderful aroma wafting from the same house – delicious chocolatey smells, which were so intoxicating I made my way to the back door and knocked, overcome with a desire to taste the cake being made inside that house. I was so absorbed in my own thoughts that I failed to foresee what the reaction might be to a stranger appearing out of thin air, so when I came face to face with a rather frail old woman she screamed and started to lunge at me with a chocolate-covered knife. I ran away as fast as my legs would carry me, through the next garden along, which is why I’m covered in scratches.

With this he burst into tears and struggled past me, pushing me out of the way. That glimpse of his tearstained face was the last I saw of him for six months or more.

In early December I responded to a stern rat-a-tat on my door and opened it to a distressing scene. Two policemen, looking as if they meant business, stood on either side of him; he was handcuffed to one of them. I invited them in but they declined, wanting only confirmation of my friend’s identity. After I told them his name and last known address they took him away to the police station, and I was allowed to see him only briefly after all the interviews were over.

It seems that he’d led a wandering existence based on crude maps he’d picked up at tourist information offices. He’d been to the Loire Valley, picking fruit, and many other places in Europe. In a bizarre twist, he’d felt so homesick while in Spain he’d stolen a map of Britain from a library in Madrid so that he could gain enough impetus to return home. He ‘imagined’ a place in Snowdonia so well that he soon found himself living in a hut somewhere in the mountains, where he’d been found by a man inspecting a new wind farm up on the moors. He’d nearly starved to death, and was hallucinating by now, imagining that he was living with angels.

After his visit to the police station my friend disappeared from sight for a long time, almost a year. The seasons came and went, and I’d almost forgotten about him when I received a letter from a hospital to the south of the country. This is what it said:

Dear C,

I beg of you one last favour. My journeys have got me into trouble again, and I’m in a hospital somewhere but I cannot find my way back home. After promising the magistrate never to look at a map again I did keep my vow, but one day I started looking at some of my old school text books and came across a map I’d drawn in pencil when I was in primary school, showing all the rivers of Wales. Unfortunately I found it impossible to resist temptation so off I went again. I was doing fine until I was taken in for questioning after being caught on private land. Eventually they brought me here in a van with no windows so I’ve lost the thread of my journey and no amount of imagining will get me home again. So I’m trapped without a map to get myself out again. PLEASE help me. They won’t even let me out in the garden. Can you find me? I want to come home now.

Your old friend, A.

It took no great feat of intelligence to trace him, and I found him in a psychiatric unit in Carmarthenshire – the silly sod had been following the River Teifi from the mountains to the sea. He was overwhelmed with emotion when he saw me and cried with gratitude, holding on to my arm as if he feared I would go without him. Passing myself off as his brother again, I eventually secured his release and took him home with me. He seemed to get better and by the end of the year I’d found him somewhere to live in a block of council flats at the other end of town. I went to see him now and again, and was saddened by the slow change in him. By then he was hitting the bottle quite heavily and I’m not sure if he was fully sane. He was telling me a great deal about his fellow residents, not that he’d met them. Having vowed never to touch any form of map ever again he’d turned to the postal service, in the way an alcoholic moves from whisky to meths. It transpired he was ‘imagining’ his neighbours from their mail, their newspapers, and any other documents he came across, such as delivery notes. He was particularly interested in a sleepwalking builder on the top floor.

When I arrived at his flat one day the place had been boarded up. But it didn’t take too much ‘imagining’ to know where he was. I found him at the local hospital, in a sorry state again, having succumbed to the booze and general despair. Again I had to lie, telling them I was his brother so they would let me in to visit him. He was in a six-bed unit with a motley crew around him, people he seemed to know quite well already – there’s a camaraderie among the sick if they’re well enough to care. They all looked at me as if it was my fault, so he introduced them with a certain dignity, something he’d always done well; it was the child in him. They were a bunch of freaks, worse than him.

Next to him was a woman being visited by a strange-looking man in a pork pie hat and white trainers clutching a posy of sweet peas. Over the aisle there was a bloke who looked surprisingly like a Mexican, having a blood transfusion, then an old man who was really ill, surrounded by monitors.

Look, I said to him, after a bit of a chat, this lot are in a worse state than you. But there’s hope yet. I’ve got an idea.

It meant taking him home to my place, cleaning him up, and getting him off the booze. He was pretty desperate by now and he wanted to live, so he agreed.

I gave him a clean batch of clothes and he moved into my spare room. I also gave him a map, a camera, an artist’s set and plenty of paper. And then I drove him around Wales for a month until he’d got the hang of what I wanted.

What I’d bought him was the Ordnance Survey’s historical map of Ancient Britain, showing all the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman and Medieval sites in the whole island. All he had to do when we got to those places was to imagine them in the past.

He took to it like a duck to water and produced an outstanding body of work which has been used by almost every publisher in the land. He’s a contented man these days, gone a bit thick round the middle and prone to afternoon naps.

But he’s back among the sane again, and he’s in the land of the living. Sitting with my back to a standing stone on Anglesey one day I told him the worst secret I’d ever kept to myself – that I’d slept with his ex-wife one night in the distant past.

I know, he said calmly as he sketched a vibrant mass of people eating frog and fish stew at a spot not so far from us. I’ve known for a long, long time.

It transpired that his wife and I had gone for a walk soon after our misdemeanour, using one of his maps, and he’d been able to imagine what had happened from the way we’d folded it.

He even made a sketch of the scene, with the two of us talking about what we’d done and deciding that we’d never ever tell him.

His gift is stronger than ever now, but he’s learnt how to use it in a way which gives pleasure to himself and other people too. Life has a funny way of surprising us. After he was released from hospital he continued to call on the ward for a while to visit the people he’d met. He came home glum one afternoon because the old man had died and most of the others had gone home. I was worried in case he started to drink again. But in the following weeks he returned a happier man every time. The sole remaining person – the woman in the next bed to him – was making a steady recovery and was expected to live, against all odds. My friend seemed very happy about this, and he’s been cheerful ever since. I think maybe there’s a love interest by now. Initially he’d been touched by her devastating story – she’d had to close her post office business, and her husband had run off with someone else at the same time as she’d become ill. She’d almost given up. But she was on the mend, and in their mutual catastrophe they’d found friendship... maybe more. She was going to buy a house in the country, and he was thinking of moving in with her.

Life goes on, he said to me yesterday, with a pastel crayon in one hand and a beautiful drawing in the other. He folded the map away carefully and sat in the sun for a while, looking at me. And then he smiled that old smile of his again, and went indoors to make us both a cup of tea.