How the story went was something like this, you were twelve when you ended up in care, both your parents dead. The home was large, overcrowded, the dorm you slept in had five other kids in it at the best of times and sometimes two more were squeezed in on camp beds when spaces were short. It wasn't that it was a bad place, just noisy and loveless, and there was always some poor sod getting their head bashed against the wall. It was never you; you kept your head down and tried to fit in. It would have been dangerous to look like a swot, so you sneaked out to parks to read your books and sneaked into cinemas with your friends. You learnt how to steal cars and got a criminal record. You skipped school to smoke weed and sniff glue and drink diamond white some days, but after a while that felt dull so you skipped school to sit on busses and in burger bars and libraries and read books, real books, not like the childish things they made you study at school.
By the time you're fifteen, you're not staying in the home most nights. You're sitting in internet café's and 24 hour burger bars, reading and watching the big people. Strange men have started to notice you, hunched into your coat on your own, big brown eyes and brown curls, not a kid anymore. You're beginning to guess what they want. Some of the kids in your dorm are smoking heroin off tinfoil now, they've learnt to shoplift in the day and the atmosphere is getting worse. You're beginning to stick out as the weird one, the stranger – you've read Camus, and they're getting more and more paranoid. It's getting less and less safe to go home.
It's in the library when you finally meet him, you guess he's old, really old, over forty, but he's immaculately well dressed and he looks good for his age. He's smart too, he's travelled, he knows about history and anthropology and cartography and you are fascinated by maps. You like him. He's a better bet than the guys in the burger king. You go home with him. It's not so bad. You have your own room, and his house is lovely. His jokes are funny. You go to the Tec and re-take your GCSEs. You sit in his fabulous library on the weekends and wade through books. You settle in comfortably to being the geek you were always meant to be.
By the time your doing your A-levels, people are starting to talk. Doesn't matter whether it's true or not, it finally seems to have sunk in in the little town where you live that you are shacked up with, and heir too, a man more than three times your age and have been since you were fifteen. The police come round, see your own room with its single bed and untidily thrown pyjamas. Your friend is arrested and bailed to return to answer charges. Then on your eighteenth birthday, he disappears.
Fuck knows where he went. You heard he had friends in Spain. There's a little legal furore with his relatives and some barbed accusations and there you are, a retired gold digger before you are in your twenties. You looked up university prospectuses and thought you'd go away from this little town that is whispering about you, and the home that seems empty when he's gone.
You're not sure what he left behind, but a sense of unease is growing on you. There's a hole, that he left, or that was always there and he covered. You don't think you'll ever love anybody, not really. Something has broken inside you where the other kids have sex, and chasing and desire. You don't have that. You've seen too much already. It has left an incompleteness in you, a gap, an empty space to be filled.
Dr. Carter, one of his friends calls round to check you're okay every now and again. She tells you not to dwell on it, to forget it, not to be a silly and pretend that its not there. But it's growing in your mind this scar until it is a red wheel of fire that you see in your dreams.
College is fun. You meet some more geeks and finally make friends your own age. You drink cheap weak beer and trip out on mushrooms, learn to roll cigarettes rather than buy straits even though you don't really need to save the cash. It's a warm place, a happy place and you talk very loudly some nights and realise most of it is nonsense. You still have nightmares but you always wake in time, before the black rider catches you. You dance on tables until you fall off. Strangers watch you under heavy lidded eyes; the strange men are there again with stringy long hair calling you into corners with a hey, I used to be someone once.
Suddenly, it is midwinter, it is witch season, it is the first time you notice how stark the land becomes when the sun sinks from it. There's a cold in your bones as September wanes that grows steadily as the mists lay thick and grey on the lowlands and the dewdrops freeze. You suppose it is finally being old enough to have someone you truly miss, it hurts but it is inevitable. It does not stop you moving on. You're still dancing and more and more people are stopping to watch. Some nights you get too wasted and freak out and scare the horses. People look at you quizzically the next day, not quite comfortable as if on those crazy nights you revealed fangs and wings. You're getting good advice to shut your mouth when you've been drinking, which is sound and wise but no fun at all. The truth is you love the rush that is two am chaos, for all you look so sweet.
The truth is it is impossible to resist. Even that night at the traveller's camp when you danced around real fires and smoked what they were smoking because what the hell nights do not become perfected by holding back and there was a chilly taint to the air and frozen stars that whiskey alone would not shift. And you saw yourself as you would be if you were perfect, a clear glass with not a stain of history on your soul. The drum beat loud and you felt sick and warm and you saw the others around you as washed clean souls too, all around you, advancing on you, dancing with you until you were too far away from your friends and these dread locked wraiths pulled a knife on you and tried to steal your cash. You resisted. You woke up in a field covered in blood and crawled the five miles to safety.
You were calmer after that, and people thought you'd learnt your lesson. Your old friend who originally put you up visits you in hospital. It's pleasant enough except for a rather sickening moment where he tries to get you to unbutton your shirt. You get on with things, studying again, setting out on a quieter journey as the harsh winds whip up a snowstorm, and for a while the world is so white and so restful you drown beneath it, unable to want anything else.
Dr Carter died that winter, and you didn't realise how alone you felt until she'd gone. You had friends of course, but no one who was older and worldly wise and you could flatter yourself was truly on her level. You feel just that little bit more misunderstood with her gone. Her memorial service was held in a beech wood, pretty and calming. Sadness became you; it was a power that seeped out, that ability to feel pain exquisitely. The priestess or whatever she was conducting it kept staring into your face. You liked the power, although you had been advised to give it up.
It was that night that he followed you. He tried to talk to you, and you started walking quicker. You sensed something was wrong; there was that way he looked at you, like he was hungry. It wasn't even the inkling he wanted to fuck you, but the feeing he wanted to take something that was yours. You gave clipped, short answers and would not make eye contact. He accuses you of being unfriendly, and you guiltily realise you are. So you make more of an effort, sniping at yourself for your paranoia. You talk a bit longer and you realise he does want what you think he did. He's a big hulking man, not un-pretty and you wonder if there is something wrong with you not wanting to give it up. He tells you you can say he made you; there'd be no shame. Then he tries to make you anyway. You're small but your quick and you manage to get away. When you stop running you have this hideous feeling you have done something terribly wrong, that no amount of rationalisation will make go away.
You would like, for once to feel like something other than prey. It's undignified. You'd like to be a hunter and chase them through the fields in the madness of your desire, but no one seems to elicit desire, nothing human anyway. What you crave is obliteration and after the incident on the hillside you cross the river and give into it.
There followed several months of crawling through the foothills of madness. You were wasted, gone on it, blasted miles away. You kept up an imperious glamour through this time, a skinny bone white beauty of one who is on fire, you burnt clear and cold as the pole star. Life was a hectic knife-edge of misery, craving, blissful surrender and joy beyond what nature meant the body to take. You were a mortal living on ambrosia. Your hair fell out in clumps and you didn't smell too good and yet you dazzled, because you held a force big enough to destroy the world. You wrapped your arms around yourself because you were precious.
All through this, you were never truly alone. Sammy, the village idiot, the town good guy, still chased you around like a lovesick poodle. He was too stupid to understand the appeal of your craziness, but he hung around as if fascinated by it. You loathed him, but he had his uses. You needed someone to carry you home at nights and check you ate every so often. Give him his due, he only tried it on once, and then you slapped his face and told him "it's not yours."
There was another one too, although he should remain nameless. He was the one who understood what you were going through, because he was there once, but had now gone way beyond the stage where there was even any twisted pleasure. He sorted you out. He should have been an ugly warning of what the future held, a bald bag of chicken bones with abscessed skin and enormous starving eyes, but he fascinated you, like a Buddha. He was someone who had given in to the downward pull utterly, submitted his whole body to it, passed beyond the needs of the flesh. You were awed by him, and somehow secretly jealous.
Somehow you knew you'd never get that far. You knew you were a survivor deep down and it felt plebeian and graceless in the face of such surrender. You carried on the journey. The road turned dark.
The very stones of the walls bit into you. You forgot you had known anything except what it was to fear and need. There was pain of course, there were aches and exhaustion and a scratching inability to sleep. Your mouth was always parched because even water was tainted and made you throw up. That was bearable; the torment of the mind was not. Black riders lurked on the edge of your vision turning the air to ice, and filling you with a sense of dread unless you gave into them.
In the end you and the nameless one argued over a stash. He tried to kill you, you think you might of tried to have killed him. Anyhow, when you woke up he was dead and you were in a detox unit with bloody Sammy sponging your brow. You recovered. You became that smiling, plump, mop-haired kid that you took a detour from being less than a year and more than a lifetime ago.
Now it is coming on to October once more, and the black jackdaws hang ragged against the washed out white sky. You are left alone in a large house in the small town you came from, watching the last apples rot as the air crystallises in banks of chilly fog. It hurts your shoulder and you rake your fingers across it, memory of all that was and all that will never heal. A wine glass lies on the table where you knocked it over last night, rich, expensive, middle-aged wine drains into the tabletop. On the mantelpiece two still stand unstained. You still occasionally take refuge in the bland mindlessness of being drunk, but it is not the same and all to often you cannot be bothered. It is not the wild white flame of being perfected, the rush to the heavens, the end of all desires that you once knew. It is not the happy descent into the abyss. It is not joy and pleasure beyond words. That has gone out of your life, and will never be again. You are not old, not yet, but you know no one will look at you how they looked at you when you filled with the power of that beyond what is human. The land is flat, the fog rolls over, the empty branches beat against the northern wind. Even Sammy has given up and married some big hipped girl and is busy popping out a brood in denial.
You can deny nothing. You feel like your own tiny battleground where armies of want and repression have fought it out so hard within you the ground will be left barren for years. You have been stabbed and smashed against walls, poisoned and left for dead, bled for a week and didn't die. And still you loved it, kept right on it. That's a terrible big love to loose. You wonder what will become of you with your scars and tracks and chapped lips and emptiness inside. You'd like to find mountains again, for the land not to be flat forever. You think death would be kind sometimes, a slipping into the west where if there would be at least the absence of this terrible dragging feeling of existence after the event.
And you hope that is not the only answer, because battered as you are, you do not wish to die.