I remembered his presentation to the head of the BBC’s science programmes, as he outlined the projected series in which I would take part. Confident as always that he held his audience’s attention, he had prowled around his display charts of brain sections and ECG readings like a pitchman selling the human brain to a party of intrigued visitors from another planet.
“The central nervous system is nature’s Sistine Chapel, but we have to bear in mind that the world our senses present to us—this office, my lab, our awareness of time—is a ramshackle construct which our brains have devised to let us get on with the job of maintaining ourselves and reproducing our species. What we see is a highly conventionalised picture, a simple tourist guide to a very strange city. We need to dismantle this ramshackle construct in order to grasp what’s really going on. The visual space we occupy doesn’t actually coincide with the external world. Shadows are far deeper than they seem to us; the brain softens out the sharp contrasts so that we can analyse them more clearly—otherwise the world would be a mass of zebra stripes …
“Consciousness is the central nervous system’s brave gamble that it exists, an artefact that allows it to make its way around the internal and external environments. In fact, we’re beginning to think that time itself is a primitive psychological structure that we’ve inherited from the distant past, along with the appendix and the little toe. Yet we’re totally trapped by this archaic structure with its minutes and hours trailing after each other like a procession of the blind. Once we get hold of a more advanced notion of time—let’s say, time perceived as simultaneity—we reach the threshold of a far larger mental universe …
“Why do the dying think they’re floating through tunnels? Under extreme pressure, the various centres in the brain which organise a coherent view of the world begin to break down. The brain scans its collapsing field of vision and constructs out of the last few rings of cells what it desperately hopes is an escape tunnel. Right to the end the brain is trying at all costs to rationalise reality—whether it’s starved of input or flooded with sensory data, it builds artificial structures that try to make sense of the world. Out of this come not only near-death experiences but our visions of heaven and hell.”
Everyone had been intrigued, but the BBC declined to buy the series.
“Dr. Sutherland,” the head of science programmes had commented, “your description of the dying brain rather resembles the BBC…”
* * *
“Dick, my watch has stopped.”
“Let me see. No, it’s 3:45.”
“It must be later than that…”
I stared at the motionless second hand and tried to work the winder. My fingers felt as cool and sensitive as a jeweller’s, but I had the sudden notion they belonged to someone else. The second hand moved again, then halted for a further indefinite movement. A deep ruby light filled the garden, as if the sun had begun to overheat. I leaned forward, almost falling from the chair, and peered at the vivid cyanide blue of the sky.
“Sit back and relax.” Dick stood behind me, reassuringly patting my shoulder. “There’ll be a little retinal irritation to start with.”
“Dick, I’m moving in and out of time.”
“That began some while ago. Look at the garden and see what you make of the colours—they’re probably drifting down the spectrum.”
I pushed Dick’s hands away and wondered if he was playing another of his devious games. He had always been strongly competitive and envied me both Miriam and my China background. There was a sly look on his face which I remembered seeing in his office at Cambridge, like that of a fisherman who had hooked an unexpected catch and was just out of reach of his gaff.
The spools of the tape recorder were turning, but I noticed that they were spinning towards each other. Assuming that this was another piece of antiquated BBC equipment, I waited for the unravelling tape to loop into the air. The black plastic case had separated from the frame, but before I could warn Dick he had stepped away from me to his camera.
Colours were floating free from the surfaces around me. The summer air had become a translucent prism and the blades of uncut grass were touched by a layer of emerald light. The giant Russian sunflowers that I had grown for Alice and Lucy wore crowns of gold that drew them towards the sky. A haze of dense ruby air suffused the foliage of the cherry trees. The scarlet paintwork of Lucy’s pedal car was separating from the battered metal, a glowing carapace that some skilful technician had painted on the air and which I wanted to press down onto the rusty shell.
The untidy garden glowed with chemical light. The apple tree and its treehouse formed a chalet-sized cathedral, its branches a stained-glass window in which the broken toys were set within their own haloes. The dragon patterns of the Chinese carpet under my feet, the shaggy bark of the pear tree scored with Henry’s initials, the creosoted panels of the fence were releasing the light trapped within themselves. The green veil of every leaf and stem, the scarlet of Lucy’s car, were detachable skins below which the real leaf and car were waiting to be discovered. The sunlight and its generous spectrum were gaudy pennants celebrating the unique identity of the smallest stone and twig. Refracted through the prism of their true selves, the leaves and flowers were glowing windows in the advent calendar of nature.
“Jim, look towards the camera…”
Dick sat in the armchair beside me, the tape recorder on his lap. Its spools still turned in opposite directions, but none of the tape had become entangled. As the light in the garden grew more intense I was struck by the remarkable lustre of Dick’s hair—some overeager makeup girl at the studios had fitted him with a shoulder-length toupee of copper fleece. Light coursed through its filaments, and I wanted to warn Dick that his viewers would see every fevered mole and freckle in his cheeks. The blood raced through the enlarged capillaries, turning his hands and face into a set of inflamed maps.
Stifled by the seething room, I stood up and stepped through the French window. I walked across the garden, my feet sinking through the electric haze that lay over the grass. The stones in the rockery shone like gems set in jeweller’s velvet, and the soil in the flower beds was warm with the glow of compost giving life to itself.
My arms and legs were dressed in light, sheaths of mother-of-pearl that formed a coronation armour. I looked down at the simple headstone that marked the grave of Henry’s Dutch rabbit, waiting for the creature to reconstitute itself from its own bones and lollop through the glowing grass. In the waking dream of this illuminated garden, time and space no longer pressed their needs. The contingent world was rearranging itself, and serial time was giving way to simultaneity, as Dick had promised, where the living happily consorted with the dead, the animate with the inanimate.
I waited for Miriam to appear among the trees. She would walk in this garden again, while Alice and Lucy played with their younger selves and I met the youthful husband I once had been. I looked back at the house, but Dick had vanished and his camera stood on its tripod beside my empty chair. Charlton Road ran through a nave of light towards the river, and I assumed that Dick had gone to collect the children, telling them of their new playmates waiting for them at home.
I followed the pathway around the house. The silver envelope of my car floated in the drive like a tethered blimp. My neighbour approached with her elderly retriever, whose frayed coat and white muzzle glowed like a lion’s. Shepperton lay before me, a town of matadors and their families dressed in their suits of light. The traffic moved down the high street, the cars exchanging their vivid auras. A helicopter crossed the river, its blades throwing silver spears at the great elms.
I crossed the road by the war memorial and entered the riverside park. In the distance, under the willow trees, my children were playing with balloons they had bought at the sweet shop. Globes of painted air hovered between their hands. Behind them a young woman walked through the forest. Her blond hair floated among the leaves, shedding haloes onto the ground at her feet. Breathless, I was struck b
y the grace of her walk, as she calmed the trees with a gesture and settled the starlings with a smile. With her unguarded beauty, she reminded me of a princess in the jewelled caverns of Gustave Moreau. I waved to her, hoping that she would touch me with the same calm grace, but she was following the children towards the river.
Losing my way in the overlit foliage, I sat down on a bench and stared at the unmoving hands of my watch. The world paused as time held its breath. The light was now so intense that it bleached all colour from the foliage of the elms. The grass around me was a carpet of milled glass, the trees hung with pendants of ice carved from the crystallised air. My eyes were exhausted by the whiteness of the world. Alice and Lucy ran towards me, figures in an overexposed film, all expression blanched from their faces as they played in their snow palace.
The river was a glacier of opal, moving past frosted banks. If time stood still, the water would fail to break under my feet. I walked towards it, ready to step onto its corrugated surface, aware of Cleo Churchill warning me away with her Moreau smile. She was pulling at my arm, but I knew that we could cross the river together and rest with the children in the meadow facing the park.
I called soundlessly to Alice and Lucy, who stared at me in a puzzled way, as if they had forgotten that I was their father. Then Dick Sutherland was running through the trees towards me, holding my shoulders and guiding me away from the water. I sat with him on the white grass, while the doors of the sun closed around me.
* * *
Three hours later I lay in my bedroom, a pillow under my back and my neck aching from the strain of staring at the sky. An interior dusk had settled over everything. The garden was sombre now, the muted colours locked away within the trees and flowers, as if depressed after their brief freedom. I tried to shield my inflamed eyes from the sunlight reflected off the passing cars. My entire nervous system was irritable and exhausted, and I could neither sleep nor rest. After rescuing me from the river, Dick had driven me back to the house and left me to recover while Cleo cooked an evening meal for the children.
Distracted by a call from a TV producer, Dick had allowed me to slip away to the park. Already I regretted taking part in the experiment. Dick’s carelessness, whether deliberate or not, had nearly led me to drown myself. Annoyingly, he was far more interested in my messianic attempt to walk on water than in my vision of Shepperton as a solar garden, a sleeping paradise waiting to be woken from every stone and leaf.
Trying to steady my mind, I stared at the bedroom ceiling. Whenever my gaze lingered for more than a few seconds a festering sore appeared in the old plaster, as if my eyes were transmitting a virulent disease, a Gorgon-stare that turned a minute insect stain into a throbbing infection. Soon the suppurating plaster was covered with a plague of boils. Trying to recapture their paradise vision, the optical centres of my brain were misreading the smallest cues in the play of light across the quiet room.
I covered my eyes and listened to the children enjoying an impromptu party with Cleo and her daughter. Their voices calmed me, but when I moved my hand I saw that flies covered every inch of the room. Their trembling wings seethed on the sheets and pillows, cloaking my hands in black mittens. Trying to drive them away, I touched my scalp and found that a piece of my skull was missing. The tips of my fingers dipped into the soft tissues of my brain …
Hearing my cry, Cleo left the children and ran up the staircase. She sat on the bed and placed my hands in her lap, shaking her head over the afternoon’s folly. Looking up at her concerned face, I could still see the nimbus of light that had followed her through the riverside trees. I remembered the benediction she had bestowed on every starling and blade of grass.
“Jim … shall I telephone Richard? I ought to ring your local doctor.”
“No—but call Peggy Gardner. I’ll come out of it soon.” The last person I wanted around was Miriam’s sometime physician, still under the thumb of Midwife Bell and ready to cast doubt on my fitness as a parent. Shortcuts to paradise and shamanistic visions belonged to the dubious realm of backstreet abortions and nutmeg addiction. I moved my hands gingerly to my scalp, relieved that my skull was intact. “My fingers are so sensitive—I thought I’d pushed them into my brain. Are the children all right?”
“They’re fine—I’ve invented a new game for them. They think you’ve got sunstroke.”
“I have! That intense light—for a few seconds this afternoon I saw … heaven and hell.”
“That must be one of Richard’s overdoses.” There was a hint of criticism, as if she were well aware of Dick’s ambiguous experiments. “I hope it was worth it.”
“Yes … yes, it was.” I held her hand, waiting as the termites faded into the walls. Somewhere inside my head Cleo was still walking through the riverside forest, waiting for me to join her in the palace of light. Its doors stood ajar among the homely elms. In that paradise vision all her shyness had gone, she no longer hid her eyes behind her long hair and ever-ready smile. “It went to pieces at the end, but I saw something I’d never seen before, a dream of…”
“The real world?”
“All the real worlds. Everything was its original self…” Trying to explain myself, I reached out and touched her hair. “I told Dick that you looked like an archangel.”
She moved my hand from her cheek, frowning at my foolhardiness. “That should do wonders for my career. I hope you repeat that on the programme.”
“I will.” I raised myself and sat uncomfortably on the bed beside her. I wanted to embrace Cleo’s broad hips. One day she and I would make that river crossing together. “Cleo, tell me—was there any film in the camera?”
“I assume so—why?”
“People are easier to control when they think they’re going on television. It’s just Dick…”
“Perhaps you’ve been too trusting—but I imagine he understands you.”
She paused at the door, looking at me as if aware for the first time of my real motives for embarking on this risky expedition across my head.
* * *
If Cleo was prepared to put aside her doubts, Peggy Gardner was resolutely disapproving. During the next days I prowled the garden, staring at the sunflowers and the broken toys, as I tried to understand why the light had left them. The whole of Shepperton was drab and inert, exhausted by the effort of briefly becoming its real self. While the children were at school I walked down to the river, searching the trees for any sign of Cleo’s presence. As the sunlight pierced the foliage I caught hints of that magic glade where she had walked with the birds, dressed in light.
“You’ve let a Trojan horse into your mind,” Peggy told me, mustering a show of sympathy. “What were you really trying to do?”
I conducted the air, thinking of a reply. “‘Place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible…’ It was stranger than I expected—I was actually looking inside my own head.”
“But, Jamie dear—we already know what’s there. It’s obvious to anyone who’s read a few pages.”
“Shadows on the wall. Dick was right—I was watching the brain at work, seeing it assemble pieces of time and space into a workable dream of life.” I pointed to the walls of my study and the sunlit garden. “All this is just as much a stage set as anything in Shepperton Studios.”
“And what happens when you move the stage sets out of the way?”
“To be honest, I don’t know yet.”
“You’re going to try again?”
“In a month or two. Dick is keen to film me.”
“Mad … all this for a television programme?”
“I’m humouring him there. It’s hard to describe the intense light, the sense that one’s about to witness some huge revelation.”
“But what?”
“I’ll find out. The same light lay over Lunghua on the day the war ended.”
“It never ended—for you.”
Peggy stood in the open doorway with her back to the garden, looking at me in the same kindly and to
lerant way I remembered from the children’s hut, when I had outlined some madcap method of finding food for us. The light touched her strong shoulders and the handsome hips I had never held. In a real sense we knew each other too well. Sex was for strangers, and as soon as one ceased to be a stranger desire died. Miriam had always been careful to keep part of herself veiled from me. Perhaps one day Peggy and I would become strangers to each other, as we grew older and apart …
The light shifted, a retinal veer. For a moment I saw Peggy suspended in the air above the pear tree, angel of our suburb. I imagined this spinsterish doctor in her sensible woollen suit and court shoes, positioned at various points above the rooftops of Shepperton.
“Are you all right?” Peggy was staring at my eyes. “You were miles away. What about the children—is Sally going to look after them?”
“Dick’s asked a friend of his, Cleo Churchill. She brought her daughter and slept on the sofa. She’s more level-headed—I think he’s frightened that Sally might—”
“Poor Sally. You people use each other like deviant children.”
* * *
I kissed Peggy fondly, watched her drive away, and then helped the children with their homework and prepared our lunch. Deviant adults? The reproof stung, however much I reminded myself that Peggy’s stance of responsibility and good sense was more at odds with the world than she realised. She might care for her deprived and abused infants, but she had never loved a child of her own, with all that love entailed. Spectres stalked the little garden of her house in Chelsea. It was not only in my mind that the four Japanese soldiers still waited at their wayside railway station for a train that would never come, as trapped by time as we were. War was the means by which nations escaped from time. Peggy and I and those Japanese soldiers had been marooned on that island platform, waiting for another war to set us free. They had tormented the Chinese to death in the hope that cruelty alone would release the mainspring of war.