Somewhere East of Life. Brian Aldiss

headlights sweep over him. Past they swish in the increasing downpour, never pausing.

      Bastards.

      He remembers that word.

      A long while later, in hospital, Burnell is to remember the dream of the devil who bit his head off. It really happened. Someone stole part of his memory.

      At last, when the rain is dwindling, a car stops. A woman is driving. A man sits beside her in the passenger seat. It is an old car. She puts a big blunt face out of the window and asks him where he wants to go. Burnell says anywhere. They laugh and say that is where they are going. He climbs into the back of the car.

      All he can see is that the woman is heavy, middle-aged, and has a head of frizzy hair. The man might be her father. He is old, sharp-nosed, stoop-shouldered, wearing a cap. As the car roars on its way, the man turns stiffly and asks Burnell a few questions in a friendly way.

      Burnell wishes to be silent. He is cold and frightened, being reduced to near anonymity. He cannot frame any answers. He remembers he can’t remember a car crash.

      The couple fear he is a loony, and kick him out in the nearest village. He is inclined to agree with their judgement. Why can’t he remember how he came to be on Salisbury Plain?

      The rain has stopped. He stands where they dropped him, outside a row of cottages showing no signs of life. Prodding himself into action – he is tired now – he walks along the road, out of the village. It is pitch-dark. A wood fringes the road. The wood drips. He thinks he hears mysterious footsteps. He turns round and goes back to the village.

      A sign tells him he is in Bishops Linctus. A few widely spaced lights burn here and there. No one is about. He passes a Shell filling station, a builder’s yard, an EMV and video shop. Still it might be the Middle Ages.

      He reaches a pub called the Gun Dog. Its sign depicts a ferocious hound showing its teeth at a partridge. Burnell has no money in his pocket, and consequently is afraid to enter the pub. There are countries whose names he does not for the moment recall where one might enter a hostelry when down on one’s luck, and be treated in a considerate manner; he is not confident this would happen in England.

      He stands indecisively in the middle of the road.

      Unexpectedly, someone is standing close by. Burnell starts, and gives an exclamation of surprise. The silent newcomer is a young man in leather gear and high boots, with a shotgun of some kind tucked under his arm. Hearing Burnell exclaim, he backs away. He steps briskly past Burnell, to walk away along the road.

      After going no more than ten paces, he halts. Burnell stands where he is. The young man comes back, not too close, to inspect Burnell.

      ‘You OK, mate?’

      By the glow from the pub, Burnell sees a strange round head, on which sits a thin young face, twisted into seriousness, with fair eyebrows and stubble on the jaw. Also a bad case of acne.

      ‘Not too good. I may have been in a car crash.’

      The young man is guarded, his manner hardly friendly. He characterizes Burnell’s claim to have lost his memory as ‘all balls’. Nevertheless, after a few questions, he opines that his old ma will help.

      With that, he walks on, adopting a kind of swagger, looking back once to see that Burnell is following.

      Burnell follows. Little option but to follow. Head hanging, shoulders slumped. No idea what’s going on.

      Bishops Linctus street lighting stops where the road begins to curve upwards. Somewhere beyond the lighting stands a line of council houses, back from the road, with cars and lorries parked in front of them. The young man heads for the nearest house, where a light burns in the uncurtained front room.

      They push in through a recalcitrant back door, into a passage obstructed by a mountain bike. A sound of firing fills the house. The TV is on in the front room, from which emerges a woman shrieking, ‘Larry, Larry, you back?’

      ‘What’s it look like?’ he replies.

      In close-up – she bringing a plump face close to Burnell’s – Larry’s mother is a well-cushioned little person in her early fifties, her lower quarters stuffed into jeans. The shriek was a protective device; the voice sinks back to a lower key when her son brushes past her and switches off the TV programme.

      The woman immediately takes charge of Burnell, giving him the kitchen towel to dry himself on, and a pair of worker’s cords and shirt to wear. While he removes his wet clothes and dries himself as in a trance, she prepares him a cup of instant coffee, chattering all the while. As he drinks the coffee, she prepares him a slice of white bread, buttered and spread with thick honey. He eats it with gratitude, and is so choked with emotion he can only squeeze her hand.

      ‘Don’t worry, love. We know all about the bloody police in this house. Knock you about, did they?’

      The picture keeps going out of focus.

      Perhaps he has passed out from fatigue. Rousing, he finds he is sitting on the grubby kitchen floor. He looks up at a poster advertising a can of something called ‘Vectan Poudres de Tir, Highly Flammable’. He looks down at ten red-painted toenails protruding from gold sandals. A hand comes within his line of sight. A voice says, ‘Oops, dear, you OK? It’s the drink, is it? Terrible stuff. I don’t know what God was thinking of.’

      ‘Leave him alone, Ma!’ roars Larry from the passage.

      As he is helped up, Burnell thinks he hears a bird singing.

      ‘Take no notice,’ says Ma, almost whispering. ‘It’s just his manner. He’s a very nice quiet boy really.’

      Shock shot. Larry appears suddenly into the kitchen doorway, in a gunman’s crouch, both hands together in a shootist position, clasping an imaginary gun. ‘Bang, bang. Got you both.’

      Ma laughs, says to Burnell, ‘He’s daft.’ Burnell wonders if events are registering on him, or whether he might still be running across an endless plain. A bird twitters in his head.

      He steadies himself against the sink, which is crammed with the remains of Indian take-aways. He cannot speak.

      Larry unlocks the door of the room at the rear of the house. A large notice on the door, painted in red paint, says ‘My Room. Keep Out. DANGER.’ On it is a poster of Marilyn Monroe with a pencilled-in moustache and teeth blackened, and a large photograph of howitzers firing in World War I.

      ‘You need a good night’s sleep, that’s what you need,’ Ma tells him, looking concerned. She gives him a toffee. As Burnell chews the toffee, Larry sticks his head round the door of His Room and calls Burnell in. He locks the door from the inside.

      ‘Sleep here. It’s OK. Don’t listen to her. She’s nuts.’

      Burnell says nothing, chewing on the toffee. The sporting gun previously tucked under Larry’s arm keeps company with a large six-shooter on a box by the window. However, when Larry pulls a rug and cushion off his bed, throwing them on the floor, a semi-automatic rifle is revealed, snuggled among the blankets.

      A slow panning shot reveals the narrow room to be full of magazines about guns. They are piled up in corners and spill out of a half-closed cupboard. They are stacked under the bed among cartridge boxes. Used targets are wedged behind a strip of mirror: black outlines of men in bowler hats, their hearts shot out, macabre Magrittes.

      ‘Are you a gamekeeper?’ Jaws automatically munching as he forms the question.

      ‘Work on Thorne’s farm. Sometimes I’m a brickie, aren’t I? Out of work. You can doss down there, right?’

      Doubtfully, Burnell settles on the floor. He knows nothing and feels miserable. He cannot remember if he met Larry before. He hopes that if so they are not related. Cousins. Anything.

      Something hard he recognizes as the muzzle of a gun is thrust into his ear. He laughs nervously. Looks up.

      ‘Any monkey business in the night and you get it, right?’