The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore (14 page)

We walk through blue milkwort and yellow horseshoe vetch and there's the smell of wild chive or onion and, then, what might be the scent of thyme, except it's too faint to be sure. Along one stretch of track, as we near Grennard Hill, we come across honeysuckle tangling along fence wires, and, round the next bend, quite absurdly (given the lateness of the season and the cultivated nature of the plant) a clump of pæonies.

They're long past their best and wilting for a drink. One crimson flower is still in bloom – just – but the remaining flowers have dropped their petals.

“This is weird. They don't grow in the wild,” I say, removing my backpack. “And they've usually flowered by now.”

“It was a late spring,” Elin remarks. “Maybe that put them back. Maybe a bird carried them and a vole buried them,” she says.

I laugh.

She lowers her pack and massages her shoulders, then reaches into a side-pocket for her water. “I remember reading an article,” she tells me, “about a woman in India who, whenever she travelled by train, would take packets of seed with her. She'd lean out the window and scatter the seed as they went along. Apparently there are heaps of flowers along some stretches of track now.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“When I was a kid, about eleven-years-old,” I tell her, “I stole two packets of seed and scattered them across a demolition site. Nasturtiums came up for a couple of years until they built the new bus station there.”

“Northampton bus station?”

“Yeah.”

She puts the stopper back in the flask. “You stole them?”

“I didn't mean to. Some mates went shoplifting and I got caught up in it.”

“You took two packets of seed? Not sweets or toys?”

On Grennard Hill, with evening pulling tight around us, we find another spinney and pitch the tent close by. The sun drops low and becomes a yolk of bright orange in a salmon pink sky, and the day's shadows lengthen and begin stalking us. It's set to become an evening of fire and shadows on a day of stones. Stones, trees and earth.

As I push the tent pegs into the ground on one side of the groundsheet, while Elin works the other side, it feels as though we're not alone in this place and that someone might be standing in the spinney spying on us. I look over my shoulder, but see only shadows.

“What's the matter?” she says.

“Nothing.” But once we've spread the flysheet over the tent and tightened the guy-lines, I say: “I'm just gonna stroll over to the trees and take a pee.”

“Be my guest. I'll unroll our sleeping bags. Wouldn't mind closing my eyes for a few minutes.” She pushes the hair back from her face and she's squinting with tiredness. “Might have a catnap before we start cooking. Ten minutes'll do. I'm beat.”

There's no one in the spinney. Only trees. I look up into the foliage as I splash the ground at my feet, and think I see someone looking down, but it's just a face of leaves – an optical illusion that reminds me of Kate's Leafy George. Sculpted from the shadows of leaves, I see a face, a nose, an open mouth and a mane of hair that grows out and out until I'm looking at the crown of the tree, and then the face slips away from me.

If the sense of being watched remains though, even as I return to the tent and find Elin sleeping, there's nothing malevolent about it, and so I lie down too. For what seems like an age, I dream of open spaces and sunlight and oceans of sky; of stones and shadows and trees and earth, and of yesterday and today and…

Tomorrow we'll climb Furze Hill and cross Wansdyke. We might follow its route a while, but then we'll carry on to the White Horse hill figure on Milk Hill, the Neolithic camp on Knap Hill and Adam's Grave long barrow on Walkers Hill. This'll bring us to our last mile into Alton Priors, where we'll reluctantly drive away from the footsteps we've followed and return to the uncertainties of our present.

I stir first. My mouth's dry, my throat rasping. Sleep is the easiest sea to drown in. The lapping of dreams against dreams. I struggle awake against the flow, knowing we have to eat, but drowsy with the warmth of the evening, the whispering of the grasses, the comfort of these waters. We're in the proximity of long barrows and sacred circles, magic lines and the echoes of long-forgotten truths. Shivering, I try casting it off.

“Wake up, Elin,” I say, shaking her slightly.

“What time is it, Robinson Crusoe?” she groans.

“Time to wake up. It's almost dark.”

“It's not morning?”

“No.”

“Thought it was.”

“We fell asleep; longer than we meant.”

“Nice though,” she croons. “Put water on to boil, eh. You make a brew and I'll cook tea.”

“Okay, sleepyhead, it's a deal.”

“Mmm.”

In the last of the day's light, I find dry wood scattered among the trees and start building a real fire; a fire to sit over and feed against the dark uncertainty of night.

Crouching on haunches, with the billy swinging in its own nest of heat, the flames erupt into a beacon of spear-jabbing, dancing brightness and molten darkness, and I glance over my shoulder at the woodland.

Darkness has its own form of shadow. There are shadows among the trees that grow like ivy and mistletoe. Each standing stone is pitted where shadows attach themselves daily, season after season, age after age, creating footholds for lichen. If I stay here forever, I'll be robed in a cloak of shadows too. And yet the fire's brightness creates new folds of
darkness, beyond which I'm blind.

Am I a part of this world or apart from it? Familiar or at
odds?

But the warmth of the night and the whispering of the grasses and the singing of the fire comfort me into stillness. The night is at bay and I won't be a stranger to it.

“I think I've caught the sun,” I say, as we sit on a log I've rolled into position.

Elin cracks a second egg into the pan and scrapes shell away from several rashers of bacon and the heap of fresh mushrooms. The mushrooms hiss and bubble in their own juices, which trickle into the spitting egg white, turning everything grey-brown.

“You should've worn a hat like I suggested,” and she'd wag a finger if she wasn't busy. “My, you're a stubborn bugger at times.”

“Yes, Mother. It's mainly my neck and arms. I can still feel the heat there. A hat wouldn't have helped.”

“Like a mule.”

After we've eaten supper, we feed the fire until it swells and its crackling laughter natters with the night, then we stand and dance a few brazen, clumsy steps among the shadows, letting ourselves know there's nothing to fear. And because it's still and we feel strangely euphoric, and because there's few opportunities in a lifetime to do such things, we undress one another as we dance, until we step out of our clothes and dance naked across the dark.

As we dance, my gut tightens into a knot. I ignore it for a few steps but it rises to a lump in my throat, and then, as quickly, transforms into a lightness which spins through my head, disorientating the moment and startling consciousness. I stumble.

A swan's trumpet call and the slow beat of wings. The trees
shift and the earth spreads wide and moist.

The grass is wet with evening dew and cold against my back and bum. She lies next to me and I turn, turn, turn to kneel between her legs.

“Yuk,” she says, “it's wet.”

I roll with her until we've changed position and I'm on my back again, gazing across at a forked tree, which stands sentry in front of the spinney. She's above me, wearing the galaxy like a shell. The moisture is refreshing and welcome now.

Now that I'm burning.

She presses up and peers down.

“Are you alright? Your forehead's sweaty.”

“Never better. Just hot, that's all.” Then, remembering, I laugh until I'm giddy and can't hold the silence any longer: “Babies!” I shout. “COMING UP!”

“Ssh,” she laughs.

Lying prone, arms spread, I'm a swimmer doing backstroke. These limbs stretch wide across this cool ocean of grass, clawing deep. Splashing out and ripping handfuls of grass with each stroke, I rub them down Elin's back, roll the grass against her thighs, push the bruised wad into the hair where our pubic mounds meet.

“
Mons veneris
,” I say. “Mound of Venus.” ,”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

She's salty with the sweat from two days walking. Our bodies are earthy, peaty; her hair tastes of wood smoke.

Crying out, she scratches me and, knowing I can't, I groan, “Hold on!” Looking across at the tree, in one swimmingly long instant I notice everything I've failed to notice before:

In the altar of the shadows, braced wide against his own proportions, stands a phallic tree god: Phallus dei. This god has a penis almost as tall, erect and solid as himself, and he leans back to maintain balance, and leers at us from the corner of one eye. He is timber and stone and fifteen-feet tall. He owns a wooden grin and his teeth are sharpened flint points; he has knots for eyes and a crown of leaves for hair. He is anchored to the earth, who is his mother, but he lusts after the sun and the moon, day and night. His penis is a maypole for the seasons to dance by… and there's a figure standing close to him, watching us.

The figure of a woman.

Hold tight to Elin. Mustn't lose myself.

She's little more than a silhouette, but I can tell who she is by her stature and the way she sways her hips slowly to a music only she can hear, arching her arms above her head and making a fan of her fingers. She'll have long chestnut hair and pale skin, and eyes of glistening burnt umber; her lips will be as full and glossy as a polished olive, warmer than sun-baked terracotta at the end of day and… I'll know every inch of her, from her smile and her sadness to her loganberry nipples, all the way to her one clear it or is of life – as she knows me.

We're still connected.

I almost say her name, but bite on my lip.

And corn-blonde Elin is wearing a shell, and Phallus dei stands sentinel, close by, and gawps and laughs and is rooted to the spot. And Elin smiles and I come and, strangest of all, don't lose my erection.

Evening glory.

“Don't go,” I say.

“What?” she says. “Where?”

The shadows change shape and I lose sight of Kate, but Elin's closer than ever. She's deliciously close, straddling the altar she's turned me into. I'm about to retch, but breathe deep, until the scent of torn grass fills my lungs, and then it's
alright again.

“Tom, are you alright?”

“Never better. Just hot – so hot. Never better.”

“Tell me.”

“What?”

And I fall out of one world into another.

There's a gash in the landscape, out of which I spin. Her womb is moulded from clay and rain, hollowed by the seasons, lined by leaves, baked by the sun; her eyes are the wind singing. Phallus dei sprouts a long tongue, like a white snake, from his flint-toothed grin, and then becomes a tree again.

“Lie still,” a voice says.

I twist beneath her – Elin – and spew into the grass.

“Take a deep breath.”

When the sky stops accelerating and the gash vanishes, Elin's kneeling over me and a fire flickers at the edge of my vision; semen trickles down my thigh and a string of vomit dribbles from my mouth.

“ – something you ate,” she's saying. “Perhaps one of those mushrooms. Or heatstroke. You passed out – fainted. Twice.”

“Think I'm going to be sick again.” And am.

When the craziness has passed, she steers me back to the tent and zips me into a sleeping bag. All I'm left with is a sore head and a pain-wracked stomach and a nervousness about sleeping; little of which stops me from drifting into a sleep which is deep enough to be dream-free, but not immediate enough to purge my memory of events.

In the morning, the headache and stomach pain will be gone, replaced by a huge thirst, but the visions will linger and live on in a peripheral world.

As we pack the tent away, I'll say: “This is a beautiful spot. I might come out here again sometime and plant a couple of our spruce saplings down in that spinney. It'd be a good spot for them.”

“You can't do that.”

“Why not? We'll never afford a place with a garden big enough to take them. They need to grow somewhere.”

“It is a beautiful spot,” she'll agree.

“I'd like to stay here forever. It's unspoiled.”

“And live off berries and nuts and mushrooms?” she'll tease. “All tainted by years and years of insecticides, pesticides and herbicides.”

“I'd make an enclosure for animals – goats, poultry, sheep perhaps – and sow a few crops.”

“And reinvent the wheel, then the car, then the motorway?”

“Even so,” I might add.

“Poor Robinson Crusoe. I'll think of you from afar, and especially during winter. If you're lucky I'll send you a letter or two – by pigeon post, of course – to see how you are, and if you're ready to escape the past.”

“Even so.”

*

Martin Reynolds is a sneaky shit, but in Class Six we have to do a group project on a foreign country and he teams with Gazza and me. We draw China out of the hat and begin making a plasticine banquet of Chinese food, we copy heaps of notes from two books, make a poster about the Chinese calendar and zodiac (drawing a picture of each year's emblem), and I get the brainwave of making a ceremonial dragon mask using papiermâché.

“Walters has got gold paint in his desk,” Gazza says. “We'll paint the face gold and red, and have ping-pong balls for eyes.”

“And red crêpe paper coming out the mouth like flames,” I add.

As we work on our pictures representing the Year of the Rat, the Year of the Monkey, the Year of the Rabbit, the scale of our dragon grows bigger.