Chapter 1

Nowhen

The blackness was complete. Somehow I wasn't afraid, though I felt that I ought to be. I just couldn't manage it. It was odd. I wondered where I was; the last time I had been in this sort of situation had been once in a sensory deprivation chamber. Perhaps that's where I was. I tried to remember how I had come to be here. Nothing. I couldn't remember anything. I felt fear then, but it was distant, a small thing, inconsequential. It was odd, the blackness; I tried to move my eyes, I may have succeeded, but there was no change in my vision so I couldn't tell. I tried turning my head, to no avail; for all I knew my head could have been revolving at 45 rpm, but the blackness gave me no clue. A vision of my disembodied head spinning on a turntable came unbidden to me; at least it was something to look at.

I waited.

I may have slept, though I don't think so. How could I tell? Everything was black. I did the things that one does to open one's eyes and there was no difference as far as I could tell. I was bored. To relieve the boredom, I tried once more to remember things about myself. There was nothing. I became discouraged and gave up. This made me angry, what else was there for me to do? I tried another tack, if I couldn't remember personal things, what could I remember? I cast about for something basic, a beginning. An idea came began to grow, something about first principles. And suddenly there it was, fully formed and complete: 'I think, therefore I am.' This was not my idea, I knew that. How did I know that? Frustration grew and for a time I wallowed in it.

I think, therefore I am.

What am I? Who am I? The questions multiplied but I ignored them, trying to find the answers had failed before and only led to further frustration. I shelved them and thought about thought. I pondered how I knew the meanings of the words that I was thinking. Meanings. Abstract words have abstract meanings; perhaps if I thought of something more concrete I could get further? What concrete concepts should I think of? Now that I had an approach to my problem, I felt happier, but my problem was now a different one. My situation did not encourage anything more than cerebral concepts...

'Cerebral', that was a concrete word. Well sort of, what did it mean? Of the brain or something like that. The brain was certainly concrete. I remembered a diagram I'd seen once in a biology textbook. 'Book', another concrete word; I loved books. I shrugged aside the question that this begged. 'Library', shelves and shelves of books, just waiting to be read, bliss! Bloody hell, stuff was just pouring out - associations were fanning out from the central concept too fast for conscious recollection. Typical! You wait for half of eternity for a concrete concept then an infinite number of them arrive at once! 'Bus', big red things, that carried many people and travelled in convoys.

I remembered sitting on the rear seat of a bus with a girl. Kissing. Groping. Now this was more like it! I couldn't remember the girl's name, or mine for that matter, but the kissing was nice. More than nice actually; I drifted and let the memory play out. I could almost feel her tongue as it...

The vision faded and I was left with the memory of a memory. Still it had been pleasant while it lasted. My mind fizzed; I remembered that this was how I felt sometimes when I woke from oversleeping. Perhaps I was asleep and this was all just a weird nightmare. 'Horse of the night', 'lady of the night', sex. Every train of thought seemed to end in sex. I tried again, 'Road', surely that was innocuous enough? 'Road, 'car', 'backseat',... all right, I knew when I was beaten. I wondered at my preoccupation with the three-letter word. Jesus! Now I was thinking in euphemisms! 'Purple prose', I wondered at the derivation of that phrase. I recollected something about a period of American history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I seemed to recall it being called the 'purple period' but was 'purple prose' named after the period or vice versa. I mentally shrugged my shoulders. 'Shoulders', 'body',... yeah, yeah! Enough already.

All of a sudden, I could feel my thoughts becoming disconnected and random. Vague associations skittered off in all directions and I felt myself fade away. I wondered vaguely if I would be back. Sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream...

Blackness, a familiar feeling, I wondered how long I had slept. If this was a nightmare, it was taking an extraordinarily long time to play itself out. Now that I had opened the floodgates, as it were, odd memories would pop into the forefront of my mind. A game of cricket played between the upper and lower 6^th. It had been a balmy day, we'd imported a ringer, he was our age but he'd left school a couple of years ago. He played in his spare time for the county 2^nd or 3^rd team; even so he was the fastest bowler I'd ever faced. While we waited for the lower 6^th to arrive he'd persuaded me to face him while he bowled a few looseners. I don't think I saw a single ball, I heard them though; they fizzed, the air over the lines of stitching made a noise that I had never forgotten.

I remembered a running catch, with the ball coming from behind me over my shoulder. I knew as I ran that I would catch it, the ball seemed magnetically attracted to my hands. The cheers of my team were wonderful. The vision of the game sat, jewel-like, in my mind. As was proper, the older team beat the younger team, and we all repaired to the pub across the road from the playing field. Underage drinking was tolerated there, even though the police house was less than fifty yards away. Actually, most of the upper 6^th was eighteen or over anyway. We'd reflected that, now it was legal for us to drink, we spent less time in pubs than we had the year before!

I remembered the feel of being held between soft breasts...

Uh oh! Back on that track again. Since I'd failed to remember anything personal by directly trying to remember, I tried sidling up to some memories, using the cricket match as a starting point. This approach was marginally more successful, though I remembered nothing specific. I seemed to have the impression that, for most of the players, my presence was barely tolerated; the cheers when I made the catch were special because I rarely received such approbation. Unfortunately I couldn't remember why.

I waited some more.

Blackness. Try as I might, I could discern no variation; wherever I directed my attention, the uniformity of the blackness was absolute. It was almost as if I had no eyes. I became alarmed as I wondered if I was blind. Again, the strong emotion was distant, almost as if it were happening to someone else and not to me. While I was contemplating the thought of blindness, I noticed a difference in the blackness.

There, in the corner of my view, was a change, a tiny scintillating dot of light. I was entranced. For I don't know how long, all I could experience was a monotonous, monochromatic view, and now there was something different. I was afraid to concentrate on it, in case it vanished, like so much of what I experienced here whenever I tried that. Eventually, I could resist the temptation no longer and focused directly on the point of light. To my relief, the light remained. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that it was doing nothing interesting, apart from simply existing. However, in my sensation-starved state, I was not complaining.

Even so, it was a long time before I noticed that the light was changing. Slowly, it grew. First it was a point, then it became a line, and finally, as it approached, I could see it was like a string of pearls. Each bead glowed with an opalescence that was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. The beads continued to grow larger. It occurred to me that maybe the beads were stationary and it was me that was moving. No sooner had this thought crossed my mind, than I began to feel the sensations of falling. Like my fear earlier, it was muted and distant, but it was enough for me to reinterpret my current reality as a flight towards the beads. By now they filled my whole field of view; they were not so much beads as bubbles. Inside the bubbles I could see people; I yearned to join them, to have some contact with another person. By the time I'd thought to count the beads or bubbles, I was too close to see them all; I seemed to be headed for one somewhere in the middle. I was just starting to wonder about this when I slid through the surface of the bubble I had been approaching...

1994

Angela was crying. Like this was something new. She was always crying when I was around. Of course, whenever I was around, she always seemed to get hurt and her mother blamed me. Angela's crying became louder and I looked down at her arm where I was gripping it tightly. I let go and I stared at the bruises starting to form. I'd really done it this time! Angela was inconsolable; she seemed to delight in getting me into trouble. I waited, resigned, for the inevitable.

"What have you done to her this time? You wretched boy!" The strident tones of Angela's mother reached my ears at about the same time as I saw her face being pushed close to mine. Her expression was angry. She grabbed my ear and turned my head so she could point out the marks I had made on Angela's arm. I said nothing, there was no point, and anything I said would only prolong things. I was the villain of the piece.