The Memory Palace. Gill Alderman

tucked them inside the road map of France and left his study with its confusion of books, papers and ideas; shut the door on it. In the bedroom, he rummaged, flinging socks, pants, shirts on the bed. Bliss it was to be alone, each member of his family far from home engaged in pursuits he could ignore, each task complete, all the bills paid with the monotony of forging sentence after sentence down the years: twelve volumes of his New Mythologies, the Koschei sequence; two other novels; three collections of short stories. And all the ghosts accounted for.

      When he had packed his canvas grip he went downstairs. In the hall the ivy girl, the dryad his wife had carved a dozen years ago, bore her containment with grace. She was but half a girl, the remainder a contorted and leafy stem from which she stretched up, always reaching for the moon – his children called her, simply, ‘Ivy’ and hung their hats and coats upon her limbs. Just now, she wore a cricketer’s sunhat on her tangled head and a silky Indian scarf about her slender waist. He took the keys to the Audi from her outstretched hand.

      ‘Goodbye, Alice, I’ll soon be back,’ he said softly, speaking to the household ghost; but she did not answer him. Instead, the tawny owl called from his roost in the cedar tree, ‘Who-o-o-o?’

      Dark now, enough for stars. He walked on the lawn and looked up at them. They used to shine more brightly; he had forgotten the names of their constellations. He looked at the fantastic bulk of the house with its turrets, machicolations and flying buttresses. A fancy place for a man of the cloth – but a good home for a writer of Fantasy. He had already paid off the mortgage.

      The car was still on the drive – he hadn’t bothered to garage it the night before. He had paid for that too. Any top-of-the range car would have done but he had always had an Audi of one kind or another, since his first successes. He moaned about the cost of it, and enjoyed it.

      The red car was his escape vehicle, deliverance from jail. He laid the map on the passenger seat and flung his grip into the back. Perhaps he would stop in Christminster, see Sandy; perhaps not – and, for once, decisions did not matter. Nothing mattered, except one fact: that he was now on holiday. On the road, he sat alert in his speeding chair, in control. The car filled the quiet, starlit lanes with noise and rushing lights but, within, cushioned from the world, he found and felt a new intensity, a rebirth of the spirit, free of its monetary and marital chains. That was the illusion. He cherished it.

      On Ottermoor he turned aside from the A-road, braked gently and stopped the car beside a gateway. He stretched the ache from his hands, unbent himself and got out. The shire lay before him, silent, dark; it might have been a haven of hope, a place to nurse – what? Not ambition: he had had enough. Dreams? There were too many. Those big fields and the marshy thickets which were all that was left of the old moor were spoiled, despoiled: by today’s constellations, the clusters of orange lights above a roundabout; by the whisper of tyres which had replaced the song of the wind; by the small size of the modern world, forever shrinking, caving in upon itself. He could hardly see the moon for manufactured light. There were no otters.

      The morning blazed upon him. Another scorcher. He adjusted the air conditioning and the sun visors, put his sunglasses on, flipped through the CDs, selected – ah, the old favourite, Layla. It flung him straight back, into 1973; and yet was just sound, a pop song; he felt none of the despair – no, the anguish with which he used to experience the song. ‘Darling! Won’t you, please?’ In those days he had not known what to expect of the next day, much less the future undefined and, while he wondered how (and where) he might seduce Helen Lacey, wailed internally with the music, wrote short stories, went to parties, danced with a variety of women, even with his wife – what was a party in the seventies if it was not a long dalliance to music, truly a series of sexual overtures? ‘You’ve got me on my knees.’ No more. He was mature, old to some, and he knew how the world wagged. He turned the volume up and felt return also, as he passed a string of company cars, the sense of adventure and urgency which had set him going; he forgot his painful hands. They, the suited men with order books and briefcases, must be thinking (for they had seen him coming up, a red dot in their mirrors), ‘There the bastard goes.’

      Here on the motorway time and motion, art and science, were united. On the endless ribbon flowed, grey lanes merging and parting, pale bridge-arches springing nimbly, artfully, over the traffic, gone to be forgotten as the music played. He ought to slow down but the fast car’s marque was a logo and an advertisement of his abandonment to the luxury of speed. The four linked circles on the bonnet were symbols of the diverse worlds he had set out to pass through, but not linger in. He had become a gypsy with no goal but the next horizon.

      Names and numbers flicked by. The names of the service stations were more relevant than those of places, directionally astray, for the new geography of the motorway had obscure rules where north, south, east and west were always left. The traffic moved frenetically, dancing down the shimmering lanes. He was a part of the cavalcade, held safely in the steel and upholstery of his car, passing from lane to lane, putting his foot down, overtaking with all the energy and dynamics of the vehicle at his command. Outside the ever-changing constant life of the road, the blue lamps glimpsed ahead and the smooth deceleration to a steady seventy; fellow-travellers gliding by, black, white or Indian, once a Dormobile full of red-necked Australians. Lorries were a species apart on high: Norbert Dentressangle, Christiaan Salvesen, Geest and Reem Lysaght. A transporter bore yet more, cars to fill the M25, a fleet of new Renault space wagons with the iridescent colours of beetles’ wings, metallic green, bronze, amaranth, blue.

      ‘Bloody caravans,’ he muttered as he passed a swaying line of them. Caravan of caravans? Caravans of dreams? Squat wagons, like him in going south pursuit of lost ideals; lightly and impossibly named: the Sprite, the Lapwing, the Pageant, the Corniche, their destinations uncorrupted birds, whispering salt marshes and the sea, the easy hedonism of topless beaches in the South of France, castles (in Spain perhaps) or moated chateaux lapped by vineyards where wine could be tasted and bought.

      Helen’s painted caravan had been the gateway to ecstasy.

      The aching sensation returned again on the M26. He flexed his hands against the wheel. Sod it. But he wasn’t going back. Some aspirin or paracetamol would settle it or that new stuff, what was it, Nurofen? Check with a doctor – in Dover maybe? No. He would leave all that behind him, with Sandy, Jilly and the family stuff, and the completed The Making of Koschei.

      He pulled off the glaring tarmac into a service station. It was called The Clover Patch, and he laughed cynically. He felt tired and persecuted. A group of lorry drivers stared at him, and at the 20V: envy. He paid for his coffee, drank it quickly and, on the way out, bought a paper.

      Ten minutes later, he stopped a second time to pick up a hitch-hiker, a young blonde. She did not appreciate his car nor the acceleration it was capable of; he could see one of her hands, tightly gripping the material of her loose, art student’s smock, and she sat silent, utterly without small talk. On the busy motorway he had no chance to turn his head and be polite, smile at her.

      ‘Going far? Dover?’ he asked.

      ‘I dunno,’ she returned and he, the writer, the man whose business was with language, was immediately struck by the earthiness of her accent. ‘I’ was almost ‘Oi’. He negotiated a way past a coach and glanced at her, about to ask: Was she born in his shire? She returned his look, a sprite of ancient mischief capering in her speedwell eyes; and yet there was a deadness on them, a dull glaze of the kind he had seen when he drowned the blue-eyed kittens. She could not be, she was – very like the hanged girl, Alice Naylor. It was luck, some whim of a guardian demon, that he did not steer into the crash barrier, and the girl lurched forward in her seat.

      ‘For God’s sake, do up your seat belt,’ he said, took one hand from the wheel and passed it over his face.

      He overtook a pair of lorries, trembling with the effort, and had to tuck himself in smartly behind a minibus. The leading driver leaned on his horn. The fast lane was empty. He veered out to a chorus of horns, and accelerated. 85, 90, 100, 110 – what was the engine capable of? He glanced to his left: the girl had gone, vanished just as Alice Naylor used, without a goodbye or a smile, to leave him in turmoil, bereft and aching to touch her beautiful, insubstantial body.