LITMIR.BIZ

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suffocating town – anyone who came within its clutches was unconsciously assumed to have ‘died’.

      Thinking of Dr Miriam – I would have liked to show her just how dead I was, and seed a child between those shy hips – I strode past the war memorial and open-air swimming-pool. The town centre consisted of little more than a supermarket and shopping mall, a multi-storey car-park and filling station. Shepperton, known to me only for its film studios, seemed to be the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere. Young mothers steered small children in and out of the launderette and supermarket, refuelled their cars at the filling-station. They gazed at their reflections in the appliance-store windows, exposing their handsome bodies to these washing machines and television sets as if setting up clandestine liaisons with them.

      As I stared at this array of thighs and breasts I was aware of my nervous sex, set off by the crash, by Miriam St Cloud and the blind child. All my senses seemed to be magnified – scents collided in the air, the shop-fronts flashed gaudy signs at me. I was moving among these young women with my loins at more than half cock, ready to mount them among the pyramids of detergent packs and free cosmetic offers.

      Over my head the sky brightened, bathing the placid roofs in an auroral light, transforming this suburban high street into an avenue of temples. I felt queasy and leaned against the chestnut tree outside the post office. I waited for this retinal illusion to pass, unsure whether to halt the passing traffic and warn these ruminating women that they and their offspring were about to be annihilated. Already I was attracting attention. A group of teenagers stopped as I blinked and clenched my fists. They laughed at my grotesque costume, the priest’s shiny black suit and the white sneakers.

      ‘Blake – wait for me!’

      As I swayed helplessly, surrounded by these tittering youths, I heard Father Wingate shouting at me. He crossed the street, holding back the cars with a strong hand, his forehead glaring like a helmet in the overbright air. He ordered the teenagers away and then stared at me with the same expression of concern and anger, as if I were some deviant usurper he was bound by a strange tie to assist.

      ‘Blake, what are you looking at? Blake—!’

      Trying to escape the light, and this odd clergyman, I jumped an ornamental rail and ran off down the side-street of sedate bungalows behind the post office. Father Wingate’s voice faded behind me, lost among the car horns and overhead aircraft. Here everything was calmer. The pavements were deserted, the well-tended gardens like miniature memorial parks consecrated to the household gods of the television set and dishwasher.

      The light faded as I reached the northern outskirts of the town. Two hundred yards beyond an untilled field ran the broad deck of the motorway. A convoy of trucks was turning off into the nearby exit ramp, each pulling a large trailer that carried a wood and canvas replica of an antique aircraft. As this caravan of aerial fantasies entered the gates of the film studios, dusty dreams of my own flight, I crossed the perimeter road and set off for the pedestrian bridge that spanned the motorway. Poppies and yellow broom brushed my legs, hopefully leaving their pollen on me. They flowered among the debris of worn tyres and abandoned mattresses. To my right was a furniture hypermarket, its open courtyard packed with three-piece suites, dining-tables and wardrobes, through which a few customers moved in an abstracted way, like spectators in a boring museum. Next to the hypermarket was an automobile repair yard, its forecourt filled with used cars. They sat in the sunlight with numerals on their windshields, the advance guard of a digital universe in which everything would be tagged and numbered, a doomsday catalogue listing each stone and grain of sand under my feet, each eager poppy.

      Now that I was at last escaping from Shepperton – within moments I would cross the bridge and catch the bus to the airport – I felt confident and light-footed, skipping along in my white sneakers. I paused by a concrete post embedded in the soil, a digit marking this waste land. Looking back for the last time at this stifling town where I had nearly lost my life, I thought of returning to it one night and aerosolling a million ascending numbers on every garden gate, supermarket trolley and baby’s forehead.

      Carried away by this extravaganza, I ran along, shouting numbers at everything around me, at the drivers on the motorway, the modest clouds in the sky, the hangar-like sound stages of the film studios. Already, despite the crash, I was thinking of my new career in aviation – a course of lessons at a flying school, a commission in the air force, I would either bring off the world’s first man-powered circumnavigation or become the first European astronaut …

      Out of breath, I unbuttoned the clerical jacket, about to throw it aside. It was then, fifty yards from the motorway, that I made an unsettling discovery. Although I was walking at a steady pace across the uneven soil, I was no longer drawing any closer to the pedestrian bridge. The sandy ground moved past me, the poppies swayed more urgently against my pollen-covered knees, but the motorway remained as far away as ever. If anything, this distance between us seemed to enlarge. At the same time, Shepperton receded behind me, and I found myself standing in an immense field filled with poppies and a few worn tyres.

      I watched the cars speed along the motorway, the faces of their drivers clearly visible. In a sudden sprint, trying to confuse and overrun whatever deranged sense of direction had taken root in my mind, I darted forward and then swerved behind a line of rusting fuel drums.

      Again the motorway receded further from me.

      Gasping at the dusty air, I stared down at my feet. Had Miriam St Cloud deliberately given me this defective pair of running shoes, part of her witch’s repertory?

      I carefully tested myself against the silent ground. Around me the waste land remained as I had found it, yielding and unyielding, in league with the secret people of Shepperton. Foxglove grew through the rusting doors of a small car. An unvarying light calmed the waiting nettles along the motorway palisade. A few drivers watched me from their cars, demented priest in my white sneakers. I picked up a chalky stone and set out a line of numbered stakes with pieces of driftwood, a calibrated pathway that would carry me to the pedestrian bridge. But as I walked forward they encircled me in a spiral arm that curved back upon itself, a whorl of numerals that returned me to the centre of the field.

      Half an hour later I gave up and walked back to Shepperton. I had exhausted all the stratagems I could devise – crawling, running backwards, shutting my eyes and hand-holding my way along the air. As I left behind the derelict car and the old tyres the streets of the town approached me, as if glad to see me again.

      Calming myself, I stepped on to the perimeter road. Clearly the crash had dislocated my head in more ways than I realized. Outside the hypermarket I picked an overstuffed sofa and lay back in the hot sunlight, resting among the reproduction fakes and discount escritoires until I was moved on my way by the wary salesman.

      I walked through the garage forecourt, where the burnished cellulose of the second-hand cars glowed in the sun, a line of coloured headaches. Straightening my dusty suit, I set off along the perimeter road. Two women stood with their children by the bus stop. They watched me carefully, as if frightened that I might perform my dervish dance, surround them with hundreds of numbered stakes.

      I waited for the bus to appear. I ignored the women’s sly glances, but I was tempted to expose myself, let them see my half-erect penis. For someone who was supposed to have died I felt more alive than ever before.

      ‘Don’t take your children to Dr Miriam!’ I shouted to them. ‘She’ll tell you they’re dead! You see this bright light? It’s your minds trying to rally themselves!’

      Dizzy with my own sex, I sat down on the kerb by the bus stop, laughing to myself. In the strong afternoon light the deserted road had become a dusty tunnel, a tube of constricting mental pressure. The women watched me, gorgons in summer dresses, their children staring open-mouthed.

      Suddenly I was certain that the bus would never come.

      The police car crossed the motorway, cruising with its headlamps full on in the bright sunlight. The beams flared against my bruised skin. Unable to face them, I turned and ran away down the perimeter road.

      Already I had begun to realize that Shepperton

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