We're a long way from the others now. We can no longer hear the jokes they keep cracking, or the marching songs they break into now and again, half ironically, as they pick their way along the rocky mountain path. Even though it must have been half an hour ago, we haven't said a word to each other since we left them. Since we lingered a little behind as they vanished, one by one, into a narrow passage between two boulders.
We're in a kind of overgrown meadow, with a ridge on one side, skirted by the path, and a bare little cliff on the other. The grass is very long; long and ragged and tipped with brushes of seed. Some of it is green and some of it is yellow and straw-dry. As we walk, it sifts past our thighs and sticks winged seeds into our socks.
She is ahead of me, carving a channel through the grass. I think we both knew that we would come back here, that we would not climb with the others to the top of the mountain, to add our stones to the cairn on the summit, or set up camp nearby, huddled around our propane stoves with the night chill gnawing through our jackets.
We knew it when Sarah said, This place gives me the creeps, anything could be hiding in all that grass.
A stream slices through the turf, not far from where we are standing. The sound of running water is surprisingly loud. You think nature is all peace and quiet, all solemn silence, until you camp next to a waterfall, or walk through a field wired with crickets, or birds wake you at six in the plasticky heat and light of your tent.
The noise of the stream rises and falls; it never seems to repeat. If I listened to it for long enough, I wonder, would I hear every sound in the world?
"Hey," she says, turning to face me, taking a few slip-steps backwards, "What are you thinking about?"
"Nothing," I say.
"I knew you'd say that," she says, and starts laughing.
I start laughing too, but then I stop, because I'm not sure what's funny. I start again, because of the way she stopped as soon as I did, as if worried that she had offended me.
The water sound keeps rising and falling; it's as if someone upstream is opening and closing a sluice gate.
I open my mouth to speak but nothing comes out. So I grin instead, arms kind of dangling by my sides.
She starts to speak too, but then she changes her mind and yawns to cover it up. I catch her faking and she knows I've caught her, and knows that I know this, and seen selves multiply between us like faces and backs between two mirrors, until we have to look away.
Strange, when we were with the others it was only with the greatest self-control that I could stop myself talking to her. No matter how the group rearranged itself, after breaks for food or rest, or difficult stretches where it was necessary to go in single file, we always seemed to end up next to each other. And then it was all but impossible not to resume our ever deepening conversation — even though I was worried that the others would notice how much time we were spending together, and start to tell jokes about us, maybe even sing a dirty song about us.
The weather? Too obvious.
My feelings? Too abrupt.
The view? Like the weather.
A bird begins to sing. It flaps above us, battling the wind, a waterfall of trills and arpeggios dripping from its beak.
I look up, glad to have an excuse. The sky is so blue; the wind has scrubbed it, the clouds are just streaks the brush left behind. Down here, in our little meadow beside the cliff, there is only a low breeze ruffling the grass. I turn to the mountain, wondering how high the others are now. They must have finished that slope where we left them, all boulders and smashed up shale, the ersatz gleam of metal in rock. Maybe they are taking a break — sitting on their backpacks and admiring the view. Who knows, maybe they can see us (didn't Joey have a pair of binoculars?). And if they can see us, they can surely see the distance between us. The distance that we do not seem able to cross, that is like a tiny model, a sprig held up to a tree, of the distance between us and them.
She makes a discontented sound, a sigh or tut or some blend of the two. Then she takes off her backpack and her loose grey tee-shirt and drops them on the grass. She takes her bra off too, throws it at me. It stops halfway, halted by an invisible wall, and flops to the ground.
She watches me.
I sling my pack off my shoulders. Sweat from where the padding was sticks my tee-shirt to my back. I pull my tee-shirt over my head and look at her, a little self-conscious, holding in my stomach.
I stoop to undo my boots, unhooking the laces, working my feet out of the stiff leather. I take my socks off and leave them in the boots, then undo my belt and pull down my trousers and pants at the same time.
She watches me.
"It's warm," I say.
She bursts out laughing.
"Stop laughing," I say, but she will not stop.
I run over to her, bare feet skelping through the tall grass, erection wagging up and down.
"Stop laughing! Stop laughing!"
But she will not stop.
Time seems to get twisted around. The doing and the done and the about to be done all start to overlap. Her breasts push against my chest. Steve leans back on his rucksack and takes a swig from his water bottle. Colour rises in her cheeks, colour and a kind of gorgeous swelling, as if a bee has tickled her face. Grass stands up behind her, one blade at a time, as she walks through it. I come inside her. The path cuts into the flank of the hill and switches back above us, low, scrubby bushes on either side of it. His back is wet beneath my fingers.
I am not him and he is not me. Whatever we pant in each other's ears, whatever flows between us, whatever thoughts and feelings we share, whatever sensations shift and tumble inside us, shift and tumble like a kaleidoscope turning, she is not me and I am not her, and the membrane that surrounds me, the membrane that surrounds me, the membrane that surrounds me
Colours. Coloured lines, the kind a child might draw, with wax crayons or coloured pencils. Their crust and skin. The cracked shiny hide of the wax. The pencil ruts pressed in hard and gone over many times. The powder smudged away with the back of a hand. The grain of the thick grey paper. And the colours, the colours. Green spiked grass under scribbled in blue. Pink and turquoise and tangerine flowers. Purple mountains splatted with cream. Stuffed white clouds and black arched birds and wide yellow sunbeams, wide yellow sunbeams, wide yellow sunbeams fanning out from the round yellow
sun
I lie on my back with one arm thrown across my eyes. The breeze moves the grass above me. There is a film of sweat between my face and my arm. The warmth is pleasant, the warmth of the sun on my bare skin, down here in the grass beneath the breeze.
Finally my cocoon cracks and I roll over with a headache in my eyes. She is sitting, holding onto her knees. She has put her tee-shirt back on.
"What's wrong?" I ask.
"Nothing," she replies.
I kneel behind her, still naked, and put my arms around her waist. She leans her head back against my shoulder and we watch the sun move across the sky. The drunk northern sun, drunk all summer, hungover all winter. I try to kiss her neck but she pulls away and says, What about the others? What will we tell the others?
"Don't worry about the others," I say, still trying to kiss her neck.
She knifes around to face me.
"What will you tell the others?" she says.
I open my mouth then close it again. Sarah, Jasper, Steve, Jane. They pop up like cartoon rabbits, prising stones out of the soles of their boots, sharing chocolate, chatting.
"The others don't exist," I say.
"What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean. They're not here."
"They are here. The others are here."
I turn my head to follow the flight of an insect. It is tiny and dark, a wavering speck. I realise there are many of them, too many to count, a cloud of wavering specks.
I should have stayed with the others.
When I look back she is inside my eyes. In the smashed sticky gleam. The wet spokes of colour; blues, greys, sunburst of mustard yellow. Blue is only blue from a distance. She is in the lens that records, reflects in miniature, everything except me. In the car boot yawning open, retched by curvature, as we waited to get our stuff out of the back. She is inside that moment, that thrilling, dislocated moment, when the tide of conversation ebbed away and left us sticking out of the sand.
I move away from her and lie back down.
"There's no-one here," I say. "No-one but us."
She lies down next to me, on her side, cupping her face with her palm. After a while I roll over to look at her. Our faces and bodies are very close but they do not touch; there is a contour of flattened grass between us. Stems are sticking into my skin, my body nips all over. I sit up and find my jeans and wad them up to use as a pillow. Then I lie back down and look at her with the rough dry fabric of my jeans pressing into the side of my face.
"What are you so afraid of?" she asks.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, what are you so afraid of?"
I kind of laugh.
"I'm not afraid of anything. Not at the moment, anyway"
She doesn't reply. The silence unnerves me a little.
"I mean, right now I'm me. I'm all myself. You only get scared when you're trying to be someone else."
Something seems to tighten in her eyes, some intricate aperture diminishing below the surface, like a camera lens shifting focus.
"You're right," she says, running a finger down my chest, "There's nothing to be scared of."
Her finger continues downwards, following the ridge of my sternum, riding the dip of my solar plexus. My fear shakes and rises and sticks to her touch, like iron filings drawn by a magnet. She traces the thin seam of hair above my navel, the thick black hairs spewing down from my navel.
"When I was a boy," I blurt out, "I had this recurring dream. I would find myself on a path covered with grass and weeds, with trees around, but in a city. The path led under a bridge."
I break off and wait like a wincing cat for her laughter. But she doesn't laugh; she smiles and asks me to continue.
I say, "Sometimes the bridge was old and ruined, a disused aqueduct or part of an abandoned railway. At others it was a brutal cliff of concrete with traffic roaring over it. There was always litter around, newspapers and plastic bags and junk food wrappers half trampled into the mud."
My voice dries up again. I can hear my breathing, the noise of the stream, the scissoring grass. I am terrified. I have to go on.
"There is never any sky. I look up to see it, but there is just a kind of blank background, something pale and grey and dead that fills in the spaces between the tops of the trees and the city buildings. Sometimes there is a river or canal beside the path. Or just a vacant lot, with weeds growing through the tarmac. I think of the scene in black and white, smudged black and white like a very old photograph. But there are colours, it's just — they aren't right somehow. They aren't alive. And there's a empty crisp bag…" My voice has risen in pitch; I want to control it, but like an erection on a school bus it won't stay down. "I don't know why but the crisp bag is very important. All the colour has been bleached out on one side, but on the other it is still glossy red and gold, like it would be in the shop. I know this because I turn it over with my shoe. I stop in front of the bridge and turn the crisp bag over with my shoe, digging it out of the dirt, and see the colour on the other side."
I watch her for a sign, for something. She begins to smile. It cracks through her firm round face, breaking into dimples around her mouth. It is like an earthquake zig-zagging through our quiet meadow, splitting us apart. Her body recedes from me on the lip of a giant stonedark jagged cliff. Her body recedes from me, still lying sideways on the long grass with her grey tee-shirt on and her blue eyes still watching mine.
Then he started gabbing on about a bridge.
Some crap about a coke can or a crisp bag or something like that.
He had this thing about colours. He kept going on about colours.
Why do I always end up with freaks?
She smiles and says, "Kids have sprayed graffiti on the side of the bridge. Its colours are bright and ugly and proud. I see it as a living thing, blooming in spring, bronzing in autumn, shrinking to hooped bones in winter. It grows in front of me, like time lapse photography, all the tags and teams and loves and hates twining around each other and spreading their bright ragged buds into every corner of the wall."
"There is more graffiti under the bridge," she says. "Its colours hum in the dark. I feel as if it is leading me in."
When I am able to speak I say, "I want to walk under the bridge. The path on the other side is bright and framed by the dark shape of the tunnel. It looks like here, only different somehow. I want to walk under the bridge, but —"
"But I'm afraid," she finishes.
"Yes, I'm afraid. I don't know why I'm so afraid."
"I'm afraid because I'm on my own," she says.
"I'm afraid," I say.
"Because I'm on my own," she says.
I feel as if something is moving away from me, and I could catch it, if only I wanted to. The problem is I can't make myself want to.
"I'm afraid because I'm on my own," I say.
She smiles and the thing recedes to a distant speck, a soap bubble drifting away on a sunny day. I hear my voice again, climbing.
"I look through the tunnel to the hard bright shape of the arch on the other side. I see light falling into the tunnel, the slant of sunlight against the concrete or bricks of the arch, always wet and glinting in the dark. I want to walk under the bridge. I can feel light bursting onto me as I reach the other side, see the rough texture of the walls in sudden sharp relief. I know the tunnel joins two things. But I don't know what they are. It's like —"
"Like a tunnel to another part of my mind."
We say this together, her voice, calm and breathy, trailing behind my overcharged voice. Our smiles cross too. They interfere, like waves in a physics experiment. Wonder and delight, reinforced at first, then negated to flat disbelief, lines going stale at the corners of my mouth. Then her eyes widening, lips parting, telling me no, I cannot think what I am thinking. Then our faces back in phase, peaking together, the breath and blood rising inside me, the unmade words fighting to escape.
I kiss her like I'm drowning and her mouth harbours air.
I kiss him, like he's drowning and my lips valve his air.
The smell of her neck is the smell of the grass and the dry grains of mud between it. Our gasps gurgle into the stream. She wraps her legs around me and I hook my arms behind her knees and push her legs back as far as they will go.
His stubble chafes my neck. I rock against him, arching my back, working my stomach muscles. I whisper something in his ear and words spurt out of him like a Texas gusher.
I love you I need you oh god oh my god I love you I
He loves me, he needs me, he needs me, he loves me. I slide my hands down his back to his skinny arse. The sky is blue and upside-down. Grass waves down around me, hanging down around me. I can feel that he's going to come; it hums through his body like the buzz in the rail of a distant train. And when he comes, I might come too, just to feel him melt inside me, just to know that he has lost the power to keep himself apart, that the wall between us has broken down. And I will grind my hips against him, slower and slower, and I will grind my hips against her, and she will flinch and he will flinch and we will flinch from electrocuted tenderness, and we will know that for one moment there was no he or she or I or you, there was only us, us and all the others.
