LITMIR.BIZ

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to get around to making the connection. I have to say I felt rather ignorant and stupid, because this Vincent was, of course, rather famous; in fact, he was amongst the most famous artists the world has ever known. I bought the book for £1.50, took it home and read it from cover to cover.

      Vincent van Gogh, a Dutch artist, had signed his pictures “Vincent”, just as I had signed my gypsy caravan painting. I might have recognised his famous sunflower picture, but I had never before paid any attention to the signature, nor really taken on board who it was that had painted these amazing sunflowers. And I certainly did not know he had painted fishing boats as well. But there it was on the wall above my bed, my boat picture, and painted by the famous Vincent van Gogh.

      He had spent some time in the south of France, I discovered, towards the end of his life. Whilst living there, he had painted hundreds of pictures, some landscapes, some of the people who lived and worked there. A few of them – including mine – he had painted down by the sea, just a few miles from where he was living, in a town called Arles. It was in his room in Arles, in a state of deep depression, that he had cut off his own ear. Mental illness had forced him to spend time in a nearby hospital, but he never really recovered. In the end, he had been driven to suicide.

      The more I read about him, the more I wanted to find out about him, to see as many of his pictures as I could, to go where he had gone, to stand on the beach where he had painted his boats. Such diversion and reveries, of course, did not help me to focus on revision for my Geography and English Literature exams, and even less on my Biology, which I especially loathed.

      But it wasn’t just my belated discovery of who this Vincent was that made me want to go where he had gone, to find the beach where he had painted my picture of the fishing boats on the sand. There were other pictures from the book I particularly liked: one of a little bridge over a canal, and the one of a café bathed in yellow light in a cobbled street under a starry evening sky. I wanted to go to all these places, be where he had been. It wasn’t because he was famous that made me want to go, and it wasn’t just because we happened to share the same name either. It was because that boat picture of his above my bed very nearly killed me.

      I was in my bedroom, at my desk by the window, pretending to be deep into my revision. Moments before, I had been lying on my bed, trying to summon up the willpower to get on with my work. I was only at my desk at all because I had heard my mother coming up the stairs and did not want her to catch me lazing about again. So there I was, hunched over my Biology textbook, looking as studious as I could, and waiting for the inevitable knock on my door. That was when it happened, my near-death experience. No crashing, no splintering of glass. The boat painting – I remind you, it was a large and very heavy picture – simply fell off the wall and landed with a great thud on my pillow, exactly where my head had been less than a minute before.

      One look behind the picture told me that the string had broken, and that same look told me something else I had never known. There was a piece of paper taped to the back of the frame, covered in faded writing. I picked the picture up, and carried it over to the light of the window so I could read it.

      To little Vincent from his grandma and grandpa, on your first birthday, 27th January 1964.

      A long time ago, we went to this beach in the Camargue region in the south of France, where Vincent van Gogh had gone when he painted this picture. The boats were not there, of course, but the beach and the sea and the sky were just as he painted them. It was windy that day, and you can almost feel the wind in his picture. We bought it at a local shop and had it hanging in our bedroom for years and years. It is our favourite picture in all the world. So we thought you might love it too, as much as we have. And, you never know, one day you might go to the Camargue, and stand on the beach where we once stood, in the wind, where another Vincent, Vincent van Gogh, painted these lovely boats.

      With our love always,

      G and G

      Had that picture not fallen off the wall, none of the rest of this story would have happened at all, a story that in the end would turn out to have very little to do with Vincent van Gogh. But without him and his boat painting that nearly killed me that day, and without Grandma and Grandpa I suppose, I would never have chosen to go on my travels, after my exams were over, down to the south of France where Vincent van Gogh had once gone.

      I went on my wanderings by train and bus, and on foot, camping out, always following the bend in the road, a road that I hoped might lead me eventually down towards the sea, and maybe even to the beach where Vincent van Gogh had painted those fishing boats all those years before. It was a road that would take me instead into another world, into another time and another place altogether.

      

       CHAPTER 3

       The Long, Straight Road to Nowhere

      So it was that I found myself that first summer of freedom wandering my way through the strange and mysterious landscape of the Camargue in the south of France, marvelling at the windswept wildness of the marshes around me, at the shallow pink lakes and the canals, at the ancient stone farmhouses, and, everywhere, flocks of flamingos. Every sighting of them lifted my spirits for, beautiful though this place was, it was desolate too and inhospitable, especially when the wind howled and roared, which it did sometimes for days on end. All I could do then was huddle in my tent, and hope against hope that it would not blow me away.

      When at last the wind did die down, the mosquitoes would be there in their millions – every one of them, it seemed to me, homing in on my tent, seeking me out. Sleep was impossible. Cursing them, flailing at them, did not help – it made things worse if anything. I covered my face and neck and arms and hands with the insect repellent my mother had made me take in my rucksack, along with pills for just about every illness I might encounter on my travels. But, as it turned out, none of the medicines she had given me was of much help when I most needed it.

      I don’t know whether it was the water I had drunk that made me ill, or something I had eaten, or some kind of infection from the mosquito bites I had been scratching. I do know that one evening, walking down a long, straight road to nowhere, as it seemed to me, a causeway with pink lakes on both sides, and not a bend in sight, I began to feel strange, as if I were no longer part of myself. My head was full of a throbbing pain that weighed heavy on my forehead. I kept having bouts of dizziness that brought me near to losing my balance, to fainting. Sometimes it felt as if my legs were not my own, that they were stumbling on by themselves, and not under my control at all.

      I remember there were flamingos nearby, strolling languidly through the shallows, lifting their heads between feeding and peering at me quizzically as I passed by. The mosquitoes were gone and I was thankful for that, but then I felt the dreaded wind coming in again, in vicious gusts, trying to blow me off the causeway into the lake. I shouted at the wind to go away, and the flamingos took off in a flurry of beating wings and honking, leaving me alone on the road.

      “Not you!” I cried to them. “I didn’t mean you. Come back! Please come back!” But they did not. Now I had only the cruel wind for company.

      I knew I needed help, but there was no one about, not a house in sight, and the road behind and ahead of me went on forever, as far as I could see, into the gathering gloom of the evening, daylight lingering now only in distant streaks of sunset. The lakes on either side of me were no longer pink but blood-red. But then, to my great relief, the flamingos returned. They came flying over my head, floating in on wide black wings to land nearby, in their hundreds, honking happily at me, telling me, I thought, to keep going. So I did, somehow. They seemed to be walking along with me, through the shallows, escorting me, on either side of the road.

      I marvelled at the elegance of these creatures, at the oddness of their balletic gait, and their absurd, outsize curved bills, at the incongruity of their startling

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