The Wilful Eye (25 page)

Ivan went up to one of the money machines and fed it his card. It hummed and clicked a little and then money slid out. I'd seen this happen often enough, but at this time of night, at this particular place and in the mood that was overtaking me, I felt that some sort of magic was involved in such obedience and generosity. Those machines seemed more than mere machines, they had become fantastic creatures, mythological beasts under a spell, forced to give up riches when a particular magic password was given, or a secret name uttered. This mood that had been haunting me ever since I came back home to a city alive with memories of my father. There was no actual ghost drifting at my elbow, changing the world as I looked out at it, but for all that I did feel a continual ghostly disturbance deep within myself. Ivan folded the money and put it into a thin brown wallet with his card, then slid the wallet into his jeans pocket.

‘Right, let's get going,' he said. ‘Your old man – I mean Brook – will be waiting for us.'

‘He's
not
my father,' I said. ‘But we'd better hurry. He hates hanging around.' Even so, I couldn't help pausing by a bookshop and checking the bestsellers arranged in the windows.

‘Come on!' said Ivan. ‘There's a second-hand bookshop a street or two down, and it's a lot more interesting than that one. Not that we've got time to look now. We'd better not keep him waiting.'

It seemed to me that Ivan had picked up something odd about Brook, something that was making him anxious.

‘Don't you reckon he had a funny expression on his face when he offered to bring us down here?' I said suddenly.

Ivan looked at me but just shrugged.

We came out of the mall, and at once Woodlands seemed to rush towards us . . . a hungry suburb, eager to swallow us up, eager to digest us. The Woodlands lights and sounds belonged to a different dimension again from those we had just left behind in the mall. I reminded myself sternly that they were simply the usual lights and noises that an impatient city makes, as it works its way into the night. Cars and a couple of buses were on the move, murmuring past. Traffic lights blinked monotonously. Just what one would expect. So why couldn't I shake the feeling that the ordinary city had been transformed into a mythical place, run according to different rules from the rules of daylight? Everyday reality had dissolved into some wild and unreliable state. It was crazy, I know, but I suddenly believed that the street I stood on was haunted – haunted, perhaps, by the forest that had once possessed the land, dormant these days, sealed under concrete and tar but somehow still there. The shadows that bridged the street seemed tangled – the shadows of great trees rather than of buildings. I half-imagined we were setting out into the ominous forest of fairytale.

For some reason this was a sinister impression. Suddenly I longed to be safely home again – home where lights and shapes were dependable, where a car was a car shut up firmly in a garage and not one of a herd of swollen, hump-backed creatures undulating through the night. And none of the cars I could see looked silver, sleek or shining. There was no sign of Brook at all.

‘He must have lost himself. He'll be here in a minute,' said Ivan. I didn't know if he was comforting me or reassuring himself.

Anyhow we stood there waiting, while Woodlands shadows flowed and danced, sometimes curtseying to the lights that brought them into being, sometimes standing rigidly to attention. Brook did not appear.

I thought about him. It was easy to imagine – to suddenly imagine – that he was gambling on me . . . thrusting me into a dangerous world, hoping it would swallow me up. Perhaps seeing me with Ivan had reminded him that some day I might marry . . . that Granny's investments might move completely beyond his reach. Perhaps he was casting me down on a board where the wild forces of the world might sweep me away. I seemed to hear his voice saying, ‘I told them not to go there. I told them it would be dangerous.' Who would contradict him, except Granny and my mother? And somehow I imagined that, though they might weep for me, they would both paper over any secret suspicions and remain silent, Mum because she was so much under the spell of Brook, and Granny because she was no longer the sharp granny she once had been.

The night was emptying out. A darker mood began to settle on us. Somewhere someone howled like a wolf, and then, from down the road, more or less outside a pub, a whole pack howled back. Woodlands was becoming a black fairytale.

‘Where
is
he?' Ivan hissed beside me.

‘He can't have lost himself,' I said uneasily. ‘This street, Forest Road, is just two corners from the car park at the back of the mall, and it's not as if there are any one-way streets or anything to confuse him. Besides, he knows this part of Woodlands pretty well.'

‘I don't get into this part of town very often,' said Ivan, looking around cautiously. ‘I feel a bit lost myself right now. Perhaps he's parked further down the road.'

‘I don't know it very well either,' I said. ‘We sometimes use that supermarket back there because it's the nearest. But we do try to keep clear of it at night, because this part of town can get pretty rough.' I paused. ‘I wish I'd brought my phone but it's in my other coat. I didn't think we'd be gone for long.'

‘Mine needs recharging,' said Ivan gloomily.

By now, the twilight above the Woodlands roofs had deepened . . . had become true darkness. Forest Road, the road we were now standing on, was a luminous, writhing worm, familiar in some ways but not at all reassuring. Doorways and side streets had become black caves, but Forest Road itself held darkness at bay, armed as it was with streetlights, along with the glow of passing cars. And, after all, some shops still had bright windows. The people walking past us looked rather more like ordinary shoppers than the drifters in the mall had done. Some of them were even talking to one another in a perfectly normal fashion. It wasn't as if Forest Road was deserted or that people were frightened and anxious. Far from it! The sound of voices – many voices – flowed across the street. ‘Harry's Drop' said a glowing sign curving over the pub door. There was quite a gang of men standing around that door staring up and down Forest Road. Bottles and glasses clinked, and the pulsing, red tips of cigarettes winked and glowed. In a way all this was ordinary enough . . . just what you might expect. There are lots of pub doorways in a city, and lots of people gathering to smoke and talk and drink. Yet once again that mad feeling pushed in on me – the feeling that we had space or time had twisted and we were in a strange dimension. We had strolled through the tunnel of the mall and out into a place trying to disguise itself as part of the city so that it could trick wandering, uncertain people like us, only to consume them when its appetite grew keen.

And now I began imagining that the old trees and ferns which had once flourished here, but which were clamped down these days under the sealed surfaces of footpaths and streets, were breaking free, disguised perhaps, but still making their presence felt to vulnerable people.
You are lost on the woods, in the bush, in the secret, primordial forest of the world. Only now can those ancient woods begin to reveal themselves, as they grow out of the savage darkness that lurks in the crevices of all towns and cities. Cities, those frail frontiers people build to hold the true wild of the world at bay . . . the wild and the wolves. The wolves and the wild.
I believed (just for a moment) that the busy men and women walking past us were really savage animals, able to conceal their true nature by taking on human shapes. Woodlands had become something far older and far fiercer than it had ever seemed before – a forest, seeded in prehistoric times, obliged to hide during the day, but able, as the night advanced, to reveal its true self.

‘It's really odd,' Ivan said. ‘Hey, night!' he breathed, looking into the air above him as if night were really listening to him. ‘Where's our transport? Have you swallowed it up?' So I was not the only one feeling that Woodlands was a thin veneer over something ancient and implacable, and that the traffic lights were something different from what they seemed to be . . . night witches, clicking their fingers, maybe. Once again Ivan and I were of one mind. ‘Let's see if he's parked further on,' said Ivan.

So we set off strolling down Forest Road, peering at parked cars, squinting at those other cars that lined up impatiently, waiting for wood witches to click their fingers and turn the traffic lights green.

‘Something's happened,' said Ivan at last. ‘Perhaps he got a flat tyre, or broke down. There's room to park along here, and I reckon it should only take about three minutes to drive from the parking lot at the back of the mall around to the front. We must have been waiting for close on fifteen minutes by now. And, come to think of it, why didn't he wait in the parking lot? Why bother to drive round to the front? Okay, shall we go back and look in the parking lot just in case he decided to stay there?'

‘Or we could phone him, if I knew his number, which I don't, and we could find a public phone, which we can't seem to do. I could even ring home and get Mum to come and collect us.'

‘Or will we live a bit extravagantly and get a taxi? I can probably afford one now, though it would use up most of my money,' Ivan suggested.

‘I suppose there's a taxi stop somewhere near here. Let's keep an eye open,' I said, and off we went again, walking slowly though we had no real place to go. I couldn't be sure how Ivan felt, but I know I felt lost, even though Forest Road was a road I recognised. Well, I knew it in the daylight. Night was transforming it. Once I looked back over my shoulder, up out of Forest Road, high up above Woodlands, and saw little spots of light on the hills behind us. One of those stars was quite possibly the front window of my own home, staring down at the city below.

Ahead of us, a particularly bright streetlight beamed down at a corner, marking a crossroads. But, bright though it was, it seemed somehow fragile, set in a fierce forest of shadows. From above, the night flowed obstinately down the corrugations of old roofs, poured over into their spoutings and then overflowed, filtering down onto balconies, all of which seemed to be trying to cage darkness – but this was a darkness that would not be contained. Those shadows overflowed yet again, drifting around us, while the windows directly behind the balconies stared blankly out like strange, lashless eyes monitoring the thinning flow of life in the streets of ‘ Woodlands.

We reached a stretch of stone wall with no doors or windows that shouted commands at us.

‘die!' it commanded, in savage sprawling blue paint. ‘the wolves are running!' it added in urgent scarlet. ‘blood!' said a small, almost shy message that looked as if it were written in mere crayon. A pink arrow pointed up towards the word ‘die!'

‘It's funny to think this place was ever trees,' I said, ‘once upon a time, that is.' I wanted to remind myself that the city was what I knew it must be, and not some mythical forest.

‘Funny that it's still called “Woodlands”,' Ivan said, ‘when it's the dead opposite these days. Mind you, in a funny way it almost feels like . . .' He fell silent.

‘
I
was just thinking that.' I stopped and looked around. ‘Right now, it's all got the feeling of a sort of fierce forest . . . a wild wood . . . hasn't it? Not a tamed forest, all noble trees, but a savage one. And in old fairytales people are scared of forests, they're scared of getting lost. I almost feel we could get lost here. I mean, those people walking past us sometimes seem lost themselves, or sometimes they seem a bit like animals on the prowl.' I tried a casual laugh. ‘We'd better watch out, Babe!'

I was half-joking in the way I said this, turning secret, spooky thoughts into a joke, and yet once I had said it I immediately felt it was true. One woman going past me had a hairstyle that made it seem, for a moment, as if she had horns sprouting out of her forehead. A guy walked along after her, and I thought at first he had four legs, but it was just the swinging sleeves of a jersey round his waist, casting shadows that mixed with the shadows of his legs and gave him the look of a quadruped.

‘Books!' exclaimed Ivan suddenly. ‘Look! It's that bookshop I told you about. Who'd try running bookshops in this neck of the woods?' And he spun off from Forest Road into one of the many side streets to study a lighted window. I looked up at the sign on the corner – ‘Robbins Lane', it said – then followed Ivan, and began peering into the window of that small shop. Sure enough, a second-hand bookshop, though it did seem strange to find any sort of a bookshop in Woodlands. Though the window was still lit, there was a notice on the door that said ‘Closed'.

‘Look,' Ivan was saying. ‘I love old bookshops. You never know what you're going to come across. They're like lucky dips.'