The next hours have the furtive quality of a nightmare. Separated from those you love, desperate to get home, across a city and beyond. And these are the details that have lain dormant for all these years, and, with the inexplicable workings of the mind and memory, have decided to reappear on this summer’s morning twenty-one years later. I’m in the back seat of a car, on the right-hand side, eyes next to the window. Ayesha’s mum is driving; Ayesha is next to me on the back seat, holding my hand. The North Circular, moving eastwards, drizzle now falling. Images of Mark fill my mind, his bearded face, his low chuckle, meeting him for lunch at University College, the way he stroked the side of his nose as he read, his gentle wisdom, his love of Socrates. But nothing that can be said now, here in the car, beyond giving directions. Head for the A12 Chelmsford, Colchester. I’m numbed. Close my eyes. This will go away. Blinking through the glass smeared by the rain, I can’t understand how the red buses still make their way through the streets, cars still accelerate away from traffic lights. The insane normality of appearances when my world has been destroyed. London suburbs melt back into the night with the last black cab, catseyes now lead us curving north-eastwards. Just the hum of engine, every undulation of the road. At one point I come out of my trance and thank Ayesha and her mum for doing this, and they say of course it’s OK. I’m more exhausted than I can ever remember. We’re now heading down the slip road for Colchester. The familiar roundabout, I guide us along the Avenue of Remembrance to the second roundabout. Left towards the station. The familiar meeting point, tonight turned into something terrible. The young priest Father Michael is here, on the platform, with my sister. We hug and sob for I don’t know how long. The tragedy that always happened elsewhere, to other less fortunate people, has come home. We have now become the people who others pity, the subject of hushed glances and shivered relief, enabling others to feel that perhaps their daunting problem that evening was not quite so impossible to face after all.
Down dipping lanes, curiously I can even remember Father Michael’s car – a dark blue estate. He takes us a different way home, not through Stoke-by-Nayland, but down the lane past the Copella farm, to the Boxford bypass. At the house, a police car, an ambulance still there. Oddly, I cannot remember the moment of meeting my mother. Was she even there when we got back or had she gone to formally identify the body? Later that night I walk with my brother, up the middle path together through the little wood, vowing that, whatever our differences in the past, this will make us closer. Up to the place where it happened. Needing to know details. Needing to be told. We stand on the gentle slope of the field. You can still smell the burnt stubble. The burnt earth. He’d been burning the little piles of wild oats that he’d made in the summer at the side of the field. The field he was working in when J. and I embarked on our first walk together six weeks before, my father stopping to wave. A breeze must have spread one of these small fires to the stubble, and then as he tried to put it out, being overcome by the smoke. Corinne and Meg had found him – they’d been blackberrying along the top hedge. There are details that I never want to know, have never asked about, and this moment is one of them. Walking back, near to the house, I overhear a policewoman talking into her crackling walkie-talkie, and I catch the words ‘victim was an elderly gentleman’. These words shouldn’t matter and yet they do, I find myself furious with the WPC. You know nothing about him so how can you speak about him? Gentle? Yes, he was a gentle man. Elderly? Absolutely not. Fifty-three years old. His first day of early retirement from UCL.
By the way, grief never leaves you. It just changes its shape.
*
Why now, why on this June morning do these images surface? The dream, of course. Yes, but why that dream in the first place? That cannot be called peripheral vision, surely. And today, for the first time, really, I think about Ayesha and her mum on that journey. What must those hours have been like for them? Knowing that nothing could be said, nothing could help the distraught person in the back of the car. Ayesha was never very emotionally expressive at the best of times, so this must have been torture for her. What did they talk about on the way back to north London? Did the house feel different to them when they walked in? Did that phone call hang like a spectre in that upstairs room?
But there is something else here. That night journey down the A12. Without being conscious of it until now, I’ve been repeating that same journey, again and again, over the last months. The decision to write at this place by the sea means returning to my past, every two weeks. And the night drives down from London, I’ve told myself there’s less traffic, fewer lorries, but surely there’s another, deeper reason. As if part of me has never accepted what happened that evening, as if I’m still trying to find an answer in that night road, in the speed and the blackness. Some things can only be released through the rapidity of thought that comes with movement. For most of my life, not needing a car in London, I’ve taken the train from Liverpool Street, that’s the journey I’ve known every detail of. Only in the last months have I got to know each curve and rise of this road. And how to explain the mystery of a journey, a landscape? Even along the dullest motorway, at moments, you can be ambushed by something, a force field of energy. Just past Colchester the road begins to dip down and down, a sign to Stratford St Mary, a long curve round to the left, under a bridge. The point where Essex becomes Suffolk. There is no rational explanation, but driving down this hill at night, at this precise point, I feel my future, present and past all colliding. My body begins to shudder involuntarily. There is so much we cannot know. Or maybe our bodies know before our minds.
*
A month ago I drove down late, after a long talk with a friend whose father was dying in a hospital in Australia. Although I’ve never met the friend’s father, I felt as if I knew him well, through my friend’s vivid accounts of his life – of his passion for literature (reading Turgenev and Gogol aloud to his son as a bemused eleven-year-old), and his energy (in his eighties he was still obsessed by mountain walking, doing thirty-mile hikes, complaining that his son couldn’t keep up). A force of nature. So I’m shocked by my friend’s resignation. He seemed upset that the doctors hadn’t ‘let him go’. His father had been extremely ill for months, and now has no knowledge of what’s going on around him, or who anybody is, and has just lost his sight. I asked if he’s going to go out there, to be with him when he dies, but he said no, that they’d already said goodbye to each other last year. ‘We knew it was the last time, and I felt we’d said all that could be said.’
I pack the car, gulp some extremely strong coffee to stay awake, and head out of Hackney at just after eleven. A need for very loud music – the Clash gets me out of London and onto the A12, then a frustratingly dull programme on the radio about poetry in Cuba. A squall of rain, then heavier. Past Chelmsford and it’s now torrential, visibility very limited, cars slowed to 40, 35 mph. I pull into a petrol station to let it pass. Inside the shop I get a sandwich and talk to the guy working there. He says it reminds him of monsoon rains, he hasn’t seen anything like this since he was a child in Kerala. As I eat my sandwich in the car, the rain still unrelenting, battering the roof of the petrol station, I look back at the man in his illuminated bubble and consider the strangeness of the world we now inhabit. The distance between the noise of the Indian village of his childhood and working the night shift in this petrol station on the A12. Was this the England he dreamed of as a boy?