More found words

Dated 6am, 3rd August 1994

Chapter 1

It’s a fact of life that there have always been nameless wars, with heroes forgotten by all except their enemies and a select band of controllers and comrades, hidden from the disapproval of the masses they protect. Each has, each is, a story. Stories come in many forms: some, condensed lives, miniatures with beginnings and ends. Some stories are just continuations, chapters in larger novels, each leading neatly onto the next. Such are these lives.

Rain slithered across her face, snaking its way to stop gingerly at her clothes, the touch of an inexpert lover. She felt the darkness around her, not seeing anything but the lights of the grey stone cottage, not hearing anything but the hum of wet pylons and the ticking of her watch counting away his life second by insistent second. She felt her head swim with the fear, felt the familiar aura take hold, fought against the weakness as she willed, pushed herself towards the cottage and away from the dark taking hold of her, creeping into her soul.

All my life, I’ve been waiting for something to happen. All my life, there’s been a pattern in the background, the subtle electricity of a storm yet to break. I try to break away from the pattern, but whatever I do is part of it, woven into my self as surely as if my destiny had created me. Here, now, as I sit is part of that destiny. Here, as I write, I can feel the threads of my present weave into the spiders’ web of my future, and sat at the centre of that web lies my controller, pulling a thread here, lengthening another there, creating me to its own perfection. There are three constants in my life: an overwhelming sadness, the controller and the trains that I pass through life on, each journey measuring part of my own. At least now I know why I am sad. I cannot explain the trains.
Sometimes in life, you meet someone so heart-wrenchingly special, so wonderful that you’d exchange your own life just to be with them. Sometimes two people feel that way together. And then the trouble starts.
It’s human nature to feel incomplete. It drives us: the all-compelling need to find a part of ourselves that is hidden, that is not quite there but always, tantalising, on the tip of our conciousness- a word, no, the mere sound of a word to describe all that we are not, giving us the self we desire if only we could remember its name. Perhaps that’s why opposites attract - because we have a better chance of finding that missing gene, that missing link: call it what you will, but it’s there, that nagging sense of loss, of the drifting, shapeless part of our being. It is as though we need only one more mental lens to make us see clearly; to understand; to be our own Renoir, Einstein, Da vinci and self at once. But woe betide us when we find that last syllable in our nameless name, because then alone we are dead, for that is the point when need, form and the relentless desire for love become only self and the nullness of truth. We need to have lost that part, need to know our own incomplete humanity, for without this we may join the suburban accountants and collectors of taxes, the dead souls waiting at East Croyden at 7am, for we should have no more passion, no love, no hate - only the tedium of eternal perfection or the mindlessness of ignorance. Pity those who have found their missing self, for their path can only be downwards, and their bliss only temporary. But do not pity me, for I have lost, and can still remember the joy of being whole with the passion of grief, and the conviction of a truth half-known.
At first glance, we were opposites: the extrovert politician, the quiet writer. The mothers’ son, and the girl with no roots, save the temporary stays put out at each new temporary port, each temporary life. Perhaps that was the attraction. But sometimes God in his infinite humour creates doppelganger souls, and sprinkles each with its own little facets, each with its own hidden flaws. There’s a nice theory to expain creation: you can create two identical particles out of nothing, but only for a very short time before they find each other again and remember together that they’re supposed to be a void- but if you lose one of them in that brief period of existence, if by some quirk fate forgets to pair them off again, then reality can’t catch up and you’ve got something big, in fact something universe-sized on your hands. Those occasional special people who are let loose on the world tend to be cancelled out quickly in case fate gets embarrassed, or go mad trying to understand, so I suppose it’s amazing we lasted as long as we did. I blame the trains: British Rail can even make the grim reaper late. It made me too late to save you.

Not that I’ve stopped taking trains: I’m writing this from yet another carriage in yet another landscape. There’s something about travelling up the East Coast that makes you think it’s all a big British Rail joke, that you’re cruising round in a huge circle, past the same wood and the same flat fields (run-down barns optional) and the same bloody great big power station until the music stops and all the trains have to find themselves a station. That’s why some of their super-efficient trains still break down - they can’t admit they’re the odd-train-out, and they’re sulking until the next game of musical stations starts (and Waterloo station plays music in the mornings just to keep the trains running). Aha! a Tesco’s: could this be a stop? No- it’s the same flat redbrick town we passed twenty minutes ago- I recognise the churches. Da-dur-te-ta, Da-dur-te-ta, and the train music goes on, and my search for you across the rail-routes of my world continues.

Medaeval knights had chargers, the Spanish ships, Hannibal was different and used elephants - I have my trains. My quest? To find that part of myself that once had your name, your form, your life, and now does not, except as a memory here, a cutting there. I need to understand you, to understand you by being, to become that part of me that was you, to become you, to risk my own soul if that is what I must do to find you. And I desire- oh, how I desire and love and hate. Loss is measured by what you have loved, and I have lost a world- yours and mine both. Hate is measured by the revenge you are prepared to take, and my hate for the man who took you is equal only to my love. Always just one more train ride, one more piece of you, one more contact, and he too shall die the long slow death that I have these past two years, these long, lonely years. And so it goes on.

Monday
Clean cat-tray
Tidy kitchen
Pay window-cleaner
Meet I.

Warts have very deep roots: deep into the skin, tracing the history of where a blemish came from, forcing the surface to return to being a wart, whatever is done to it alone. Trace the roots and you understand the wart, give or take the odd freckle. Of course, some people call them beauty-spots. Meet I. Another piece of the puzzle. Another piece of your past. Another step closer to you. Child of your father, father of our unborn children, it is not natural that life should be this way. Your father would...but you can explain to him yourself, you’re together now. Just don’t tell him he knows nothing about inheritance - it’s too late for that now.

Train game number 1: reverse blinking. Close your eyes then blink them open 1 2 3 4 5 6 blink: a little red chapel tower, complete with bell 1 2 3 4 5 6 blink: a lilac bush breaking up the green 1 2 3 4 5 6 my god! a station! A real station, with real railings and real clocks: the music must have stopped!

Chapter 2
This story begins a long time before you and I, but I begin with you and I, so that’s where I should start. Another train, another destination, another lifetime ago. A pair of green eyes, green with the ageless knowledge of Jade, sparkling with the cold of Arctic snow. I close my eyes and see them now, not as then, but with the warmth of love, and the colour of summer’s turquoise sea.