I have been in the sun for a long time now, probably too long. My hair is damp with sweat and my skin feels stretched across my face. Of course, I could have stayed home instead, and taken care of the thousand and one things I need to take care of. But to miss out on such beautiful weather would have been unbearable — like being buried alive. So I set off early this morning. And I've covered a lot of ground since then. The order is a bit hazy though. There was a forest, I'm sure of that, with a nice cold stream running through it. There were also some green hills dotted with sheep. And a valley between them, full of bleating goats. Blee-ee-ee-ee-eat. And a village, or a barn, or something like that.
Anyway, right now I'm in the middle of a giant field, surrounded by tall red flowers. Tall red sunflowers, to be precise. I identified them at once, in spite of their unusual colouration. What gave it away was the way they were looking at the sun, beaming down its solar goodness like so many radar dishes tracking a big yellow spaceship across the sky, saying, Surrender yourselves at once! We do not take prisoners and we don't like being invaded!
The devil's in the details, as my father always says.
Actually, there's something stranger about these Helianthus than their colour. As soon as I get close to them, they forget about the sun and rotate their heads towards me. It isn't a sudden motion, but it isn't slow either: I don't need time lapse photography to watch their stalks twist, their big round faces turn to look at mine. And as long as they keep me in their sights, they are surprisingly sensitive to my movements. When I stoop to fiddle with my sandals, dislodging a pebble or chip of wood, a ring of red faced spectators stoops forward with me. And when I stretch my neck, tilting it towards each of my shoulders in turn, they mirror me with their flexible stems — as if I'm the instructor of an aerobics class for flowers. At first it made me uncomfortable, being watched like that. Then I began to enjoy being the centre of attention. It's not as if people ignore me normally — far from it. At home I am often the subject of discussion at mealtimes. And at my job, when I used to have one, I was always greeted with friendly smiles in the abrupt silence that fell as I entered the lunch room. But this is different: it's as if the flowers are worshipping me, drinking me, as if my face has usurped the sun.
I stop walking and raise my foot. Something in my sandals again. I hop on one leg to keep my balance, prising the sole outwards, noticing how my footprints overlap on the dried up soil. When I get home and undress for my bath, white stripes will criss-cross my feet, standing out against the tan and dirt of my travels. I'll also have sharp white borders around the sleeves and neck of my tee-shirt, only here the neighbouring flesh will be red and not brown. I have pale, freckled skin, the kind that burns easily, and I need to apply more sunscreen. But the tube is empty now — like my lunch box and my bottle of water. The last of its contents are mingling with the sweat on my forehead, stinging my eyes, leaving a pleasant, summery scent in my beard. I am annoyed at myself for running out of provisions like this. Especially after all the preparations I made: as well as food and water, I brought a book of poems (paperback, the binding is melting), a field guide to the edible berries of a different country, a flower press, paper and a wide selection of coloured crayons, a ready rolled joint, nothing to light it with, an inflatable cushion, a bag of mixed herbs and a pocket sized atlas of the stars. I even packed everything the night before and laid out the clothes I'd chosen on a table. And all for nothing. It doesn't seem fair. But I'm old enough to know that life isn't fair. It only does as it sees fit, doling out contentment and frustration, ecstasy and terror, pretty red flowers and horrid grey motorways.
That said, I am beginning to doubt the prettiness of these flowers. I'm the kind of person who takes it for granted that the natural world is better than the fabricated one, richer, more real. But isn't this field, with its even rows of plants, as monotonous as any car park? And come to that, just as artificial. I might not be an expert on agriculture but I know that flowers don't grow in lines on their own. Someone must have planted them, some fat-necked farmer on a wheeled machine, engine belching out smoke, hydraulic limbs scooping holes in the ground and stuffing them with innocent flowers. It wounds me to think of it. Is anything safe from these heartless machines? I cry out loud. I shake my fist and the answer of the sunflowers is a numberless shaking of heads.
I decide that I can no longer tolerate mankind's desecration of nature, that the time for despair is over and the time for action has begun. I start planning the downfall of global capitalism and I don't stop until I notice one flower watching me more intently than the others. Much more intently. Compared to the way its head quivers and starts with my every movement, they seem like apathetic observers now, armchair voyeurs sprawled in front of television sets, one pudgy hand always threatening to zap me away by remote control. I amuse myself for a while by dodging left to right, watching its sensitive petals flex back and forth, its heavy seeds tumble like tears from its face. Then the heat gets the better of me and I stop moving. Or almost stop: the mimicry of the plant alerts me to my slightest movements, the rising and falling of my chest, the blinking of my eyes. I am fascinated, not so much by the flower as by myself, by the expressiveness it reveals inside me. Its sensitivity grows even more acute when I step closer, as does my awareness of a slight sharp odour of pollen, an almost inaudible swishing sound that accompanies its adjustments of pitch and roll, a bleeding of the dark colour of the seeds into the vermilion of the petals, forming a blurred purple crown around their base. I reach up to touch its face. It trembles at first, but then I notice a reciprocal pressure from the spongy blackness behind the seeds. I continue to press and the firmness grows beneath my touch, like a timid voice gaining confidence in reassuring company. Soon I am pushing quite hard against its head, using the flat of my hand or both hands together; I am wrestling it in fact, from side to side, trying my hardest to make it yield. I feel as though the flower is willing me to destroy it; and I am only too happy to accede, as the sweat stands out on my back and my own smell mingles with the overwhelming musk of pollen. I pinch the stem near the top, digging in with my fingernails and pulling upwards with my other hand, trying to decapitate it. The stalk is tougher than I expected, stringy and elastic; only after a great deal of twisting and tearing does it finally split apart. Now I am holding the flowerhead by the bottom of its short green neck, twirling it round, noticing how the wet fibres in the place where it broke leave light green stains on my fingertips.
I wipe my hands on the back of my tee-shirt and throw the flowerhead into the field. I half expect the other flowers to track its flight, romantics following a shooting star. But instead they stay motionless, fixated either on me or on the sun. Actually, it seems that less of them are watching me than before, that my sphere of fascination is shrinking. I wonder why this is: maybe the novelty of my arrival is wearing off, or maybe the long hours in the heat are exhausting them as well. They are finding it more difficult to twist and untwist their weary stems, just as I am struggling to keep lifting my feet and putting them down again, or to believe that this monotonous action will bring me any closer to my goal. My goal? I am surprised to hear that word in my head. As far as I was aware, the whole point of going on this trek was to get away from such things as goals, from the tyranny of progress and completion. I hope I'm not turning into one of those people whose lives are ruled by a mania for efficiency, who are controlled by control, who react with such fury when they return to their desk to find the photographs of their children in slightly different places. No, if I am to have any end point at all it should be the total annihilation of ends and points, the reduction of my life to a continual flow in which all steps (I interrupt my monologue to scratch the nape of my neck) all steps are smoothed like rocks beneath a river, or like the stairs of some ancient castle, worn by countless feet, each taking its tiny toll on the hard, rectilinear cruelty of the stones, returning them (I start on my shoulders now, twisting my arms behind me to get lower down my back) returning them to the organic chaos from whence they came, like branches cracking through the walls of a deserted building and budding into (I abandon myself to an orgy of scratching — clawing at my chest, my stomach, ribs and arms). I have no idea why my skin is so itchy all of a sudden, why my clothes have become so abrasive. I only know that when I take my tee-shirt off and throw it on the ground I immediately feel more relaxed. The breeze picks up and the flowers wave gently back and forth. I feel like I could start waving too, as the cool air moves up and down my body. I slide my shorts down, bunch them over my sandals, flick them away with my foot. I am in my underwear now — my sandals, backpack and underwear. As I walk the tips of the leaves brush my body, the vivid colour of the petals reflects on my torso; and I notice something else as well, a dry ticklishness like a powder settling on my skin. I take my pants off and drape them on a nearby stem. Fewer and fewer of the flowers are watching me: it's as if nudity is the norm here, and the shock of my arrival was simply due to the fact that I was clothed. I cast my mind back to when I entered the field — a long time ago, a previous life — and chuckle at the earnest tramper I was. I remember bumbling through a farm with many buildings (compounds for donkeys no doubt, and silos for chaff and pulses and other foodstuffs). I encountered a farmer and pretended, to myself as much as him, that I knew where I was going — striding purposefully down a track that led nowhere, pausing for a moment to shake my head, as if the mistake was entirely out of character. "The field's over there," was all he said, leaning on his scythe. And I wondered how I could have missed it, endless expanse of red and green. I remember how profusely I thanked him, how sardonically he watched me picking my way around cow pats and muddy puddles towards the farm road, then checking — checking! — that no big tractor or mudstained truck was about to run me over. I was never sure if he owned the field or only worked on it; nor if his directions were meant as a warning or an invitation. Come to think of it, I wasn't even sure he was a farmer at all. He looked the part, weathered features, stocky frame; but he had the air of someone whose time is spent waiting rather than working. Waiting for what though? Something tells me he'd have laughed if I'd asked him, showing the gaps between his strong white teeth.
I am taking shorter steps now, and longer pauses between them. This isn't lethargy: it's a new kind of consciousness growing inside me. Or rather, below me. Every minute I pass without moving, only breathing, my awareness of the soil beneath me increases. Down there is a world of life and growth, worms and seeds, a rich black place where the roots of plants stretch out to touch each other like lovers holding hands in the dark. It's something I've barely thought about before: like most people my life has been confined to the vacuous strip between the ground and the sky. But now it's hard to think about anything else. Every time I stop a vegetable inertia ensnares my legs, vines choking a tree, and it requires a conscious effort to move again. What would happen, I wonder, if I didn't make it?
The veins in my legs, trunk thick or tendril thin, sprouting downwards through the soles of my feet; my arteries turned to long woody fibres, sucking in nourishment from the black soil, branching outwards, questing.
I mop my brow in an exaggerated motion. I should have worn sunglasses, I tell myself, a hat at least. This is my way of asserting that the sun is playing tricks on my mind, that I didn't mean all that nonsense about wooden veins and lovers holding hands in the dark. I stand completely still for a moment, both to get my bearings and to prove to myself that when the time comes to move again it won't present a problem. Based on various observations — the path of a low flying swallow, the breeze on a licked finger — I decide which way to go. I set off briskly, parting the flowers with both hands.
Eventually — convinced that I've lost my way forever — I stumble across a tarmac path. It runs in a straight line for a long way in both directions, I can't see where it ends. The wall of flowers on the other side casts a ragged shadow on its surface. No doubt if I followed it for long enough, sandals sticking and unsticking on the heated tarmac, I'd find my way back home. It's impossible to believe a road so straight could fail to take me where I'm meant to be. Where my responsibilities lie. I eye some of the larger sunflower leaves, wondering how well they'd stick to my skin.
I am marching down the road with my private parts covered by shiny green foliage. Sweat is pouring off me, only now do I appreciate the partial shade of the flowers. As if to remind me of what I've lost, the sunflowers are watching me again, following my progress, mocking. My rucksack feels so heavy on my shoulders. The cushioning on the back and straps is burning hot, a brand against my skin. I squint through the heat haze rising from the path, expecting at any moment to see a farmhouse roof or the glint of a car. But it seems to go on forever. I wonder why I was so keen to leave the field, it seems incomprehensible now; only an obscure sense of duty, or belonging, or some other terror keeps me from returning. Where am I going? I ask myself. Not for the first time, not by a long way. But on the straight black road the question takes on a new and disturbing resonance. When I was blundering through stinking ditches, rat filled sheds, electrified fences, it would have only reassured me to ask where I was going: I was going nowhere, I was lost, dazzled, same as usual. But I'm not lost now. I'm moving in a straight line, which implies a destination, and I can't see where this is, which implies that I will never get there, or worse, that it doesn't exist, that the road itself is my destination, and my onerous trudging will lead to nothing except more trudging. Experimentally, I stop moving. The heat intensifies, sweat pours down my naked back, between my buttocks, films of it appear on the grooved synthetic topsoles of my sandals. The flowers are glaring at me more fiercely than ever; I picture myself seen from above, black dot in a parted ocean of round red faces. The image frightens me into walking again. The air is still but my movement brings a breeze to my face, a slight relief.
"Your father and I have been talking," says my mother. "We think it would be for the best if you tried living somewhere else."
Her face ripples above the path, blasted by heat. She is wearing the flowery dress she always puts on on the first day of summer.
"It's not that we don't want you here, love. Not at all. We just think it's time you moved on, you know — gave yourself a new start."
I rub my eyes and open them on the blazing tarmac. I carry on walking, sandals measuring a sticky beat. I've let myself go, I think, let things slide too far. And what do you do when you slide? You climb back up, slowly and painfully. One foot in front of the other. The figure of speech chimes with my current situation and in my mind my problems already seem diminished.
"Come in, shut the door," says my boss. "The door," she smiles, "shut it."
I hear my own voice, mumbling.
"That's right," she says, "it's shut now — I can tell by the way it isn't open."
I see a tramp by the side of the road, rummaging through a bin. His fingerless gloves pick through wrappers and crushed cartons, pull out pizza crusts, bones. When he looks up his eyes are as big as the windscreens on the buses that veer past, the sunglasses that avoid him on the pavement. I see everything reflected in those eyes, everything: the closed door of what was home, the benefit offices, clinics, anonymous meetings, the hard face of the street, softened by booze, dawn and the pavements filling with people, too fast, buses and workers and busy people. I can even see myself, a tiny head above a huge curved hand, extending half a biscuit forwards: "I'm sorry," I'm saying, "I already ate the other ones, but it's really tasty — it's got a plain chocolate coating on top."
I blink: salty liquid in my eyes, tears or sweat, it's not clear which. I feel an overwhelming sense of guilt. It cannot be explained by the wretchedness of the tramp — who has anyway vanished in the protean haze of the path. It has that special, dizzying quality reserved for the guilt of self-destruction, a vertigo too violent for someone else's fall. I'm sorry, I weep, through a tragedy-mask face, I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it. Didn't mean what? The question seems irrelevant here, as the sun beats down on my skull, the flowers gawp at my pale flesh. I'm just so glad I've found the road now. So thankful. One last shot at salvation, kiddo, and I'm not going to blow it, no sir, not this time. Two of my fingers become a pistol with my thumb cocked behind them. I shoot the horizon, my mistakes, blam! blam! As the gunsmoke clears and the acrid scent leaves my nostrils I begin to see things in a different light. The scorching sky is an affirmation, not a curse. The monotony of the road is reassuring. The melting tarmac smells of industry and honest work. I thank god — yes god, I am no longer afraid to use the word — for showing me the way. Otherwise I'd still be walking along the rows of flowers, among the pretty, deceitful flowers. No doubt they curve infinitesimally, those rows, so that anyone following them would think they were straight, only to realise hours later, after they'd thrown away their compass and folded their map into a swan with contour lines on its wings.
"The field's over there," says the farmer, leaning on his scythe. He bursts into gales of hearty laughter. I try to ignore him and carry on walking, resettling my backpack on my shoulders. But it's difficult now; my head feels light and heavy at the same time and my feet are too far below me. The louder he laughs the weaker I feel, or the other way round, it's hard to tell, it doesn't matter. How nice it would be to lie down for a while and scratch a furrow in the dirt with my fingertips, feeling for the cooler soil below the surface. Forget all this striding and striving, this cacophony of being alive. I slap myself on the cheek. This won't do, I tell myself, won't do at all. I can't let some ruddy-faced yokel sap my motivation like that; I've only just found a way out of the shocking mess my life is in and already I'm contemplating losing it. If all I'd been offered was help — little gift wrapped up in smiles, ribboned with pity — my indifference would be understandable. But I've been offered something infinitely more valuable: the chance to help myself. And I don't mean to squander it, sprawled by the side of the path beneath a canopy of sunflower leaves, shrouded by sunflower leaves, stretched out full length with my face very close to the pale grass growing in the shadows, watching a ladybird make its hesitant way onto my thumbnail, listening to the farmer's laughter roll on and on above me, pine-cool stream flowing over my head.
The ladybird's forewings crack open. Then they close again, a polkadot dome around its body. As it crawls towards my knuckle, my skin registers its presence but not its weight: it doesn't seem to have any weight. Something happens and its forewings lift high, become a red sail above its flying body. Now it has too much weight, a black sack slung in mid air. What was it that happened? The ladybird doesn't know; it only moves in and out of the vast spaces between the leaves, drawing my eye into the caves and mountains of its shrunken world. I hear its wings, a tiny but constant whir, and somewhere behind them the crash of an animal startled, running away. I scramble to my feet, eyes gleaming like a fox at night. What happened? I look along the empty path. I turn and notice two flowers, recently disturbed, swaying towards each other and spreading apart, kissing then breaking apart. In the row behind them two more flowers are doing the same; and again in the row behind that. A corridor of bending stems stretches through the field. I think of palaces and tree-lined avenues, a king strolling with his hands behind his back. Or a hillside covered in wheat, the wind's spectral fingers raking through it. I take a deep breath and start along the corridor.
Be back in time for tea, I think. How funny! As if it matters what time I'm back, apologising to my mother for letting my food go cold, hurrying upstairs to my room, dropping off my bag and shouting back at her, Yes, I'm feeling fine, I'll be down in a minute, I know, but this time I will, leave me a plate and I'll put it in the microwave, okay, I'm sure the dog will like it. Then my bedroom, the curtains drawn. Their pattern luminous in the rectangle of the window, drab in the gloom around it; also in the dark strip where they overlap. Muzzy light shading the television, oil slick colours in the fingerprints on the screen, spokes of the same on the CDs strewn around the stereo. Shoes, books, dirty clothes, a radio alarm clock, its aerial a vinyl clad wire, a packet of chewing gum, three of the pieces tumbled out, a tower of coins, toppling over, some leftover weetabix glued to a bowl, a layer of dust, settling everywhere, showing up white on black surfaces, making stencils out of stationary objects, forming greyish clots in the corners of the room.
As I pass between the flowers, steadying them with my hands, the corridor vanishes behind me like a tremor beneath a healing touch. What a contrast, between my progress now and on that burning road! I can barely feel the ground beneath me. I seem to be floating to wherever I am going, from whatever I am leaving behind.
A conversation reaches me from downstairs. Or the tone reaches me, low with concern; I know the words already.
"Smells like something's died in here," says my dad, appearing in my room. His voice flows over me like chocolate. "About time it came back to life – eh Buddha?" He strides around the room, he always strides, he never walks, or wanders. "What do you want with these anyway?" — he picks up the empty jar on my bedside table — "I thought you could meditate yourself to sleep." As he turns the jar in his fingers, its printed label seems to unroll forever, narrating an endless, admonishing story: … to be taken out of the reach, of young children who do not, under the influence of alcohol, do not, young children, the stated dose … My father is talking again but I'm not listening. I'm gazing at the curtains with the sun behind them, at their pattern of interlocking flowers. I can feel a weight growing on my limbs, my neck, moving from the extremities inward; I can't tell if it's impossible to move or only impossible to want to. As my eyes close I hear him say something about the facts, facing up to the facts…
The corridor ends in a gap between two of the flowers. It's as if this row was never finished — as if the farmer overlooked it in his haste to optimise yield, increase profits. I smile to myself: there are still a few cracks in the system, a few places the machines haven't reached. Then I smile again, at my silly talk of systems, profits, machines. In the middle of the gap there is a round hole, about a foot deep; it seems to have been dug recently. I undo the velcro straps on my sandals and kick them into the field. Then I arch my back in a great stretch. I rifle through my backpack, discarding the stuff inside it, ballast, useless junk. The last thing I get rid of is the ruined book of poetry, brown glue oozing down its spine and discolouring my fingers. `Metamorphoses,' it says on the cover. I throw it away and the bag as well. Then I step down into the hole, feeling the soil well up between my toes, the sunlight fill my eyes.
