Meadowsweet (XF)
An XF story which I never posted to Ephemeral or Gossamer, because I never really liked it that much
This was written in, I think, 1999 or so. It was the first time I had ever attempted a proper first person main character narrative, and I don't think it's successful. There's snark in there but it's not authentic. Accordingly only about three people have ever read it and it's not on Gossamer. I think I was in thrall to "write what you know" and also the machete beta thing had sort of killed my confidence. I knew this wasn't up to scratch and I didn't send it for machete, but not sending it for machete felt like an admission of failure. Rinse and repeat.
I didn't want to admit even to myself at the time how much of a high-wire act writing felt like to me and when my friends came in with all kinds of corrections and opinions -- even though they were solicited and almost always correct in what they said, particularly about structure and inauthenticity -- it started to interfere with my enjoyment of the process.
There's a place for that kind of beta and it's a good thing, but I think maybe I am too thin-skinned for it to be helpful in terms of me carrying on writing. I don't have enough faith in my own judgment to (a) reject criticism that is based more on a misunderstanding of what I am trying to achieve and, far more usually (b) take structural criticism and apply it well. I just get dispirited and write shite. I think I need to write until I get my feet under me. And read more David Mitchell.
However, it was fun to take Mulder back to England and imagine a past for him. Another reason I didn't post it was because I knew it was exasperating to do that. I roll my eyes when the American Harry Potter fans take Harry over to Arkansas to fall in love with a mysterious violet-eyed slinky-boots auror who fulfils his deepest needs and takes him to the high school prom, and this is just a little too close to that for comfort.
Anyway... notes:
• meadowsweet is a summer flower. Grows in hedgerows, near woods and by roadsides and smells divine. Not to be confused with the similar, more crass-looking old man's oatmeal, which smells awful. One of them is poisonous. Can't remember which, so I tell you what: don't eat either of em
• I'd been to Avebury recently. A magical place
• The football match is Newcastle versus someone or other. Nolberto Solano now plays for West Ham, which is near where I live. True and yet not interesting!
• Written before the ubiquity of the (graffiti) artist Banksy.
• Jamie Brookmyre is named after Christopher Brookmyre, the Scottish Carl Hiaasen, whose books are wildly inventive, less funny than he thinks they are and in need of an editor. I wholeheartedly recommend "Quite Ugly One Morning", the first and best, but if you run into the TV adaptation RUN AWAY. It's shite, they needlessly changed the plot, straightened the fabulous gay copper until she was in love with the hero and wasted the awesome Daniella Nardini.
MEADOWSWEET
7am, and I'm tapping out an impatient tattoo with a pound coin on the desk of the rental counter at Gatwick. It echoes through the sabbath quiet of the terminal. The clerk -- his badge says he is 'Andy, Happy 2 Help' -- searches the world's slowest computer for my reservation.
"We don't appear to have it," Andy Happy-2-Help says in sing-song sales-speak; the voice that says 'screw you but have a nice day anyhow'. "Are you sure you booked for today, Mr Fox-Muller?"
After a boring overnight flight, I'm so irritated I'd happily twist his head off but I grit my teeth instead.
"Yes. And it's Mulder. M-U-L-D-E-R. Fox is my first name."
Pimply, eager Andy looks too young to be capable of much more than trig homework and collecting Pokemon cards. "Fox?" he asks with practised cheer, "really?
"Yes. Really." One glare and Andy Happy-2-Help bends over his keyboard, haphazardly-shaved Adam's apple yo-yoing. He calls me 'Muller' two more times before I scrawl my signature, grab the keys and escape to the concrete canyons of the parking garage.
"If nature really abhorred a vacuum, that boy's head would have imploded," you whisper in my ear.
My lips twitch into a smile. It only fades when I remember you're not there.
* * *
The car is a Japanese micromachine, toytown, Scully-sized. I almost feel your slap at my arm for that thought. I push the seat back as far as it will go and climb in, sink back, and close my eyes.
I think I know why you refused to come with me. It's been a tough year and you're bone-deep weary, lost in doubts. I know what that's like, when thoughts rush and collide in endless Brownian motion and all you long for is rest. As long as it's not rest from me.
Selfish asshole that I am, I almost long for the old days when we were first partnered, when I only noticed something was wrong if you bled onto my shirt. It wasn't that I didn't care, more that I was consumed by the mystery, the chase, and certain you were speeding in my slipstream, ready to make the pace in your turn.
That's the deal Scully, I'll dig up the answers, you make them make sense.
I'm not an idiot -- although I wouldn't care to debate the point for too long -- so I started small, trying to kid you out of it.
"The Ferraro house is haunted by the ghost of Mickey's dead Uncle Vito" (It's a scam to get Vito's wife out of there so the nephews can sell it, Scully. Tell me I'm an idiot for even considering spectral phenomena.)
"Szczesny drowned in ectoplasm" (Even if I think she did, Scully, you can hit that sucker right out of the ball park.)
Perhaps that was my error. I should have told you to come with me because I wanted you there. But then what if you'd said no?
We're lovers but I guess we don't speak the language yet. We still communicate via casefiles and conundrums. We maintain boundaries. Sublimate a passion for years, pretend that it's tethered and tamed, and it's hard to adjust.
I'm still getting used to glimpsing behind the professional image. Usually, you're titanium. Your lightness beguiles people into thinking you're not strong -- until they realize you'll outlast all of us. Or so I thought before Pfaster.
Guilt is weird, alchemical; it transmutes everything it touches into something baser. It can corrode happiness until it's brittle and shatters at a tap. I should know. That wasn't going to happen to us: hence the card-maxing trip.
Langly once said crop circles were the landing patterns of alien saucers, but I think he was just watching for your reaction. Some people believe they're plasma-created messages of peace from discorporeal entities or trails left by the faerie folk.
You think they're amusement for bored teens in the boondocks, the product of localized wind currents or even a crowd-puller for farmers who don't mind losing a quarter of their crop.
I don't think it matters. The circles exist on the cusp where art meets artifice, where hoax runs head-on into belief: complex, baffling, beautiful. I've always wanted to meet the people who create them.
But this trip wasn't about crop circles any more than Casablanca is about the French resistance. I wanted you to come with me because the last time I felt this way I was 23 years old; it was England and it was springtime. I wanted to share that memory with you. To better it, maybe.
But I couldn't possibly tell you that, now could I? Us being open with each other? That's one of your signs of the apocalypse, right there.
* * *
There were four of us in the battered brown Austin Allegro that day, all trying to forget that we would be facing exams in a couple of weeks. The roads twisted like snakes and the engine howled and rattled at any speed faster than 50mph. We solved that by turning up the radio until the sound almost blurred into white noise, sometimes singing along, sometimes talking over it.
John Banks drove. He was a good friend until I lost sight of everything but the work. He's an economist now -- works in the City, has a wife in the country, daughters in high school and he might as well be a yak herder in Mongolia for all we have in common.
Back then he was just Banksy, another wild-haired postgraduate misfit in a tie-dyed T-shirt. He had a first in PPE from Jesus College and no idea what to do with his life. Next to him was Andrea, his fiancee -- all short haircut and sensible shoes. She was determined that no matter what John did with his life, he was going to make money at it. I guess she got her wish.
I was in the back, crushed up against a huge wicker picnic hamper with my arm slung across Penny Mackie's shoulder, my hand creeping through her long, blonde hair towards her left breast. Her hand was on my knee and I was making bets with myself about how long it would take me to get into her pants.
I loved Penny but I was too careless with her. I remember that she was very smart, Scottish and wore little round glasses. I remember that she had a funny gurgle of a laugh and she liked my stupid jokes. That she had beautiful, long legs that she'd wind round me in bed. That, like you, she was what my mother would have called "a nice girl".
What I most remember most is that she was the one I left for Phoebe four months later. She never spoke to me again.
But that perfect April day, Phoebe wasn't even a storm cloud on the horizon. The sky was a smooth blue bowl, with flotillas of wispy cloud scudding around its rim. Sunlight filled the car as if it was July, like warm honey on my skin. I remembered summer afternoons and melting ice cream, days before Samantha was gone.
I was only meant to be at Oxford for a year's exchange but I stayed for three. I loved its atmosphere, I loved the work and in England, I was weird because I was supposed to be; a resident alien, a stranger in a strange land. In Oxford, hanging out with the eccentrics, I felt at home for a while. I even acquired a taste for hot milky tea.
All that crystallized into one perfect moment as we crawled over the crest of the hill and looked down into the village at the valley bottom. A church tower clawed at the sky, the ribbon of the river rippled into the distance.
John stopped the car for a second and wound down the window. The radio suddenly seemed tinny and inane and Andrea flicked it off. I expected silence but instead there was the rush of wind through the leaves of the hedgerows, the sound of running water somewhere close. Penny squeezed my hand as we climbed out of the car. A breeze ruffled her hair, carried smells of warm earth, wild garlic and meadowsweet.
There in the blue, blue sky, above the emerald fields was a bird. It was a speck hovering overhead, and its song was a high, joyful music.
I found out later that the skylark nests on the ground and only sings to distract predators but then, hearing it felt like a gift.
Seconds later a motorbike roared past and broke the spell. We climbed back into the car, embarrassed at the joint epiphany. John twisted the radio back on and a horn section blared out over a joyful 4/4 beat. Motown, something by The Supremes. The car rolled down the hill and we smiled like we all shared some big secret.
It was one of those brief moments where you realize that you are exactly where you're supposed to be and you're with the person you're meant to be with. I think that was what I had in mind when I planned this trip; maybe I hoped that you would experience the same thing.
* * *
2pm and I passed the rock sentries that guard Avebury village on my way back to a big empty double room in Marlborough. Avebury is only 90 miles from London but a world away; stone cottages lodged at the centre of the world's biggest stone circle, avenues leading off to long barrows built 4,000 years ago for the bones of warrior kings.
The weak spring sun has not managed to burn away all of the morning mist; it slides along the hedgerows and coils in ditch bottoms. There's a mystic calm though, just as there was when I first came here 15 years ago.
I called the number you collected from Colleen and a man agreed to meet me by the Devil's Chair, a giant misshapen rock. According to legend, you can summon up the devil by running round its base 100 times.
I wondered whether there'd be the faint scent of cigarette smoke if I tried that.
My secret contact's name is Nigel. He looked like a scruffy student, but didn't have the excuse of youth. He was late forties, but was wearing sandals and a cycle helmet which he never once took off -- probably lined with tinfoil.
He told me he works in a local book shop where he holds evenings of psychic healing and maintains the occult collection. He said I had a peculiar aubergine-colored streak in my aura.
"Mulder -- that should have been your first clue right there. Leguminous auras."
He also told me he had to be careful because someone was following him. Looking at the battered state of his bike, I thought they'd have to move pretty slow or they might catch him. I asked him about the circles.
He began speaking about the ley lines that link Avebury, St Michael's Mount and the crop circles; about how the Hopi, the Druids and the ancient Egyptians all copied the patterns of their earthworks from benevolent alien visitors who were later immortalized as gods, like Thoth and Mercury.
When he moved onto the caduceus -- the ancient symbol of healing -- as a repeating image, the serpent power of the kundalini rising through the chakras, nodal points of earth energy and visualization techniques I guessed I was wasting my time. He had no more idea than I did where the circles would be appearing.
Chakras. I could see you rolling your eyes at the mention of the word.
So it is just me, ordnance survey map 173 and your voice in my ear, telling me this is all ridiculous and I should just get out of the car...
I decide to go back to Marlborough early. It's 10am back home so I try to call you from one of the red boxes on the way but all I get is your answerphone.
I spend the rest of the drive wondering what I'm missing.
* * *
There's a cruel trick the senses play when you want to see something very badly. It flashes in front of your eyes for a second, you hear a snatch of a much-loved voice or you catch a familiar scent and, in that split second before your brain informs you that it's impossible, there's a flashflood of happiness.
I used to see Sam like that. In the crowds of tourists milling and wheeling in the mall like flocks of birds; in the flickering half-light of a passing subway train, through dusty diner windows. I still do, although I wouldn't want to admit it to you. I told you that I found her. I chose to think that. I chose to let her go. Doesn't mean I can always believe it.
But today I see you.
Once, an hour ago, wandering around the near-empty streets of Marlborough, I saw a flash of red hair and my breath caught in my throat, even though I knew, *knew*, it wasn't you. I turned a corner and the figure had gone but I figured I may as well kill time walking that way.
And then ten seconds ago I saw someone who moves with exactly the same precise purpose as you, little legs moving like pistons, past black iron railings and into a stone building set a little back from the narrow street.
It's only when I get a little closer that I look up and see a sign swinging in the breeze. The Black Swan. Above the door a sign saying: 'George and Millie Brookmyre, licensed to sell alcohol...'
At least I can get out of the cold. I push open the heavy oak door.
It is like walking into a warm, open mouth. Everything, from the carpet to the furnishings is pinkish-red. Lazy wreaths of smoke lurk below oak beams. It looks just like the pubs I remember from way back. The only concessions to the modern world appear to be a quiz machine bleeping in the corner and a large TV showing a soccer match: black stripes versus blue shirts.
It's near empty. An old gnarled man sits before the TV, a pint of some murky brown liquid half-drunk in front of him, his cigarette drooping into a curl of ash as he huffs his displeasure at the teams.
Behind the bar a slab of a man, Stone Cold Steve Austin's uglier twin, polishes the pumps with a towel, more out of habit than cleanliness. His forearms are like hams. He nods in my direction.
The small woman I saw a moment ago doesn't look a bit like you -- but I knew she wouldn't. She strips off her coat, stands on her tiptoes and gives the man a peck on the cheek. "'Ello love," he says. George and Millie I presume.
A player in stripes lofts the ball into the stands to ironic cheers. The old man flushes beetroot and shouts: "You are woeful, Solana! You are bloody *useless*"
"Barney! Ladies present!" shouts George. "Not to mention my wife."
Millie swipes at him with a towel and he grins and dodges out of her way as I walk up to the bar.
"Don't mind him," she says, nodding her head towards the old man. "He just gets a bit involved."
When the barman hears my accent he asks who I am, what I'm doing here, as he pours a pint of bitter. I tell him about the search for the circles. It's starting to sound like a crazy reason to fly 3,000 miles even to me.
"So, you believe little green aliens are buzzing round Wiltshire in spaceships, making crop circles then?" His face suddenly becomes guarded -- an expression I've been used to for years. You would think believing in extreme phenomena was a bug you could catch. Flu. Or maybe herpes.
"God, no." I shake my head. "As if aliens don't have better things to do."
My vehemence pleases him. "Voice of reason, eh?" he says with a smile.
No. She's not here right now.
My voice of reason is contralto, she slurs her Ss when she's calling me a sucker. She tells me the truth.
"I'd still like to see them, though," I say.
He looks at me, puzzled. "Aliens?"
"No. Meet the people who make the crop circles. But I'm not having much luck."
George's eyebrows draw together and his lips curve. "I think I can help out with that one," he says and then turns and bellows out of the door behind the bar.
"Oi. Lord of the bloody rings!"
"What?" a reedy male voice shouts from upstairs. George smiles at me and says nothing. "What?" It squawks again. There's a muffled thumping, muttered swearing and a tall, scruffy black-clad boy stalks in from the back. "What is it now, dad?"
"You, oh fruit of my loins, are about to explain to this nice American gentleman why he has wasted Christ knows how much money on coming over here because you can't stop buggering about in fields."
* * *
9pm and it's actually turning into an interesting discussion. Jamie Brookmyre is smart and funny. In the fall, he's going to Oxford to study physics, to my old college, as a matter of fact.
I can't ignore the strange trail of coincidences that led here but I can't make sense of it either.
"We were just following the program we downloaded from the net," says Jamie. "We started by hiding and staking out where they said the circles would be but we never saw anyone or anything. So we decided to go DIY."
"DIY?"
"Do It Yourself. You know, put a pattern where it's supposed to be."
"How did you decide on the pattern?"
"Man, that was the easy part. The first one we copied off the cover of the Led Zeppelin Remasters album."
"And after that?"
"We started inventing them on the computer. Then you just go out mob-handed with a double of planks of wood and Bob's your uncle. Our next one was going to be fantastic. It was all based on the number seven. The magic number." His spindly hands slice through the smoke in enthusiastic looping patterns. "I reckon it would've driven the fucking space cadets ... sorry, enthusiasts... up the wall trying to figure out its deep, *mystical* significance."
His head drops and his long, dark-brown hair falls across his face. "But now we'll never know."
"So no circles tomorrow?" I ask, hopes fading finally.
Jamie shakes his head. "Nah, sorry, mate. We got busted by some farmer last week. Mum said she wouldn't lend me the money to go on holiday with Catherine if I got caught doing it again."
"Catherine?"
His face softens. "My fiancee," he says with pride.
Jesus. He has a fiancee. My face must have given it away, because he grins and his voice twists up the register; I think he's imitating his mother. "You're too young. You're 18. You've got your whole life ahead of you, why do you want to go making a commitment you're not ready for?"
I look across and Millie is glaring at him.
"She has a point. I wasn't ready at 28," I say.
In my head, you add: "Or 38". Scully, that's a little harsh.
"Maybe. But being young isn't a good reason not to do it. I feel ready." His certainty is absolute and disconcerting
"But what if she isn't? What if it all goes wrong?"
"What if it does? Better to have loved and lost. It only has to go right once."
We talk a little longer about his girlfriend, his plans, but my mind is elsewhere. I know what I need to do. It only takes me another 15 minutes to convince myself I need to do it.
"Excuse me,'" I say. "I have to make a phone call."
* * *
By 3am I was on the M4, heading back to London, knowing I had a seat on the 9am flight to Washington.
All the while I was running through what I could tell you to explain why I was back so early. How could I explain how I found the circlemakers when I can't explain the bizarre trail myself? How could I spin the tale to stop you from finding out how much I need you these days?
But hours later, when I'm back home and track you down to the hospital, you begin to tell me a stranger tale still.
* * *
6.07am and a hand is cool on my face; a finger grazes the stubble like a match, scorching the skin. I fix on the glowing red numbers as I rise out of sleep and then roll onto my back.
You loom above me, dishevelled and solemn. Charcoal smuts under your eyes. Ah, we're getting old together, you and I. There are faint lines straying from where your eyelids meet; framing your mouth like parentheses; scoring your brow: intriguing fine details on the map of your face. I want to plan a leisurely route around them, explore a little.
I lift a corner of the blanket in invitation but you shake your head. "I have to go, Mulder."
Of course you do. You always do.
"I'll see you in the office," I say. My voice is a worn, dull monotone.
"Not today, Mulder. I'm teaching at Quantico today, favor for Skinner. He said that since I wasn't using the vacation days I apparently arranged to take..." you pause.
Your eyebrows draw towards your nose and your eyes ice over -- I shouldn't like that expression because it means I'm in deep shit, but it's so very you.
"And I say 'apparently' because I can't remember doing that. Am I perhaps suffering from amnesia, Mulder?"
"Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit." It's a little early in the morning for originality.
"Must be why it suits you," you retort sternly and then spoil the effect with a smile, your hand moving through my hair now. You opens your mouth to say something, close it again. I look into your eyes and send out a psychic command; speak to me.
You draw in a breath. "Mulder. Why didn't you just *ask* me to come with you?"
"I did ask you." My reply is an undignified squawk.
"You asked me to come see crop circles. Which in fact never appeared."
"Only because I wanted you to go."
"I'd have gone if you told me the real reason."
I'm tired of this moebius strip argument.
"Would you?" You swallow and tell me yes and the pleasure of hearing the admission makes me feel generous.
I add: "But then you would have missed seeing Daniel and I think you needed to see him." Hah. That asshole. I don't even like to say his name.
The silence lasts a year or two.
"I have to go," you repeat finally. I drop the corner of the blanket I have been holding and flop back onto the pillows. My hair slips through your fingers like water, leaving your hand clutching at air. A Nile-length crack running across my bedroom ceiling suddenly fascinates me.
Warm fingers turn my face away from my new object of interest to my usual one. Your face is serious, professional. "I'll be back tonight, Mulder." I'm just savoring that when I notice the first flicker of uncertainty cross your face. "If that's okay," you say.
"Well, I was planning to wash my hair, but since it's you." I attempt nonchalance but I can feel a tree-frog grin begin to split my face.
"7pm at the latest." You plant a kiss on my forehead.
"Seven. Magic number."
"Fool. You're jetlagged. Go back to sleep."
I shut my eyes to the sound of you splashing in the bathroom, and as I fall asleep I think I catch the scent of warm earth, wild garlic and meadowsweet.
MEADOWSWEET
7am, and I'm tapping out an impatient tattoo with a pound coin on the desk of the rental counter at Gatwick. It echoes through the sabbath quiet of the terminal. The clerk -- his badge says he is 'Andy, Happy 2 Help' -- searches the world's slowest computer for my reservation.
"We don't appear to have it," Andy Happy-2-Help says in sing-song sales-speak; the voice that says 'screw you but have a nice day anyhow'. "Are you sure you booked for today, Mr Fox-Muller?"
After a boring overnight flight, I'm so irritated I'd happily twist his head off but I grit my teeth instead.
"Yes. And it's Mulder. M-U-L-D-E-R. Fox is my first name."
Pimply, eager Andy looks too young to be capable of much more than trig homework and collecting Pokemon cards. "Fox?" he asks with practised cheer, "really?
"Yes. Really." One glare and Andy Happy-2-Help bends over his keyboard, haphazardly-shaved Adam's apple yo-yoing. He calls me 'Muller' two more times before I scrawl my signature, grab the keys and escape to the concrete canyons of the parking garage.
"If nature really abhorred a vacuum, that boy's head would have imploded," you whisper in my ear.
My lips twitch into a smile. It only fades when I remember you're not there.
* * *
The car is a Japanese micromachine, toytown, Scully-sized. I almost feel your slap at my arm for that thought. I push the seat back as far as it will go and climb in, sink back, and close my eyes.
I think I know why you refused to come with me. It's been a tough year and you're bone-deep weary, lost in doubts. I know what that's like, when thoughts rush and collide in endless Brownian motion and all you long for is rest. As long as it's not rest from me.
Selfish asshole that I am, I almost long for the old days when we were first partnered, when I only noticed something was wrong if you bled onto my shirt. It wasn't that I didn't care, more that I was consumed by the mystery, the chase, and certain you were speeding in my slipstream, ready to make the pace in your turn.
That's the deal Scully, I'll dig up the answers, you make them make sense.
I'm not an idiot -- although I wouldn't care to debate the point for too long -- so I started small, trying to kid you out of it.
"The Ferraro house is haunted by the ghost of Mickey's dead Uncle Vito" (It's a scam to get Vito's wife out of there so the nephews can sell it, Scully. Tell me I'm an idiot for even considering spectral phenomena.)
"Szczesny drowned in ectoplasm" (Even if I think she did, Scully, you can hit that sucker right out of the ball park.)
Perhaps that was my error. I should have told you to come with me because I wanted you there. But then what if you'd said no?
We're lovers but I guess we don't speak the language yet. We still communicate via casefiles and conundrums. We maintain boundaries. Sublimate a passion for years, pretend that it's tethered and tamed, and it's hard to adjust.
I'm still getting used to glimpsing behind the professional image. Usually, you're titanium. Your lightness beguiles people into thinking you're not strong -- until they realize you'll outlast all of us. Or so I thought before Pfaster.
Guilt is weird, alchemical; it transmutes everything it touches into something baser. It can corrode happiness until it's brittle and shatters at a tap. I should know. That wasn't going to happen to us: hence the card-maxing trip.
Langly once said crop circles were the landing patterns of alien saucers, but I think he was just watching for your reaction. Some people believe they're plasma-created messages of peace from discorporeal entities or trails left by the faerie folk.
You think they're amusement for bored teens in the boondocks, the product of localized wind currents or even a crowd-puller for farmers who don't mind losing a quarter of their crop.
I don't think it matters. The circles exist on the cusp where art meets artifice, where hoax runs head-on into belief: complex, baffling, beautiful. I've always wanted to meet the people who create them.
But this trip wasn't about crop circles any more than Casablanca is about the French resistance. I wanted you to come with me because the last time I felt this way I was 23 years old; it was England and it was springtime. I wanted to share that memory with you. To better it, maybe.
But I couldn't possibly tell you that, now could I? Us being open with each other? That's one of your signs of the apocalypse, right there.
* * *
There were four of us in the battered brown Austin Allegro that day, all trying to forget that we would be facing exams in a couple of weeks. The roads twisted like snakes and the engine howled and rattled at any speed faster than 50mph. We solved that by turning up the radio until the sound almost blurred into white noise, sometimes singing along, sometimes talking over it.
John Banks drove. He was a good friend until I lost sight of everything but the work. He's an economist now -- works in the City, has a wife in the country, daughters in high school and he might as well be a yak herder in Mongolia for all we have in common.
Back then he was just Banksy, another wild-haired postgraduate misfit in a tie-dyed T-shirt. He had a first in PPE from Jesus College and no idea what to do with his life. Next to him was Andrea, his fiancee -- all short haircut and sensible shoes. She was determined that no matter what John did with his life, he was going to make money at it. I guess she got her wish.
I was in the back, crushed up against a huge wicker picnic hamper with my arm slung across Penny Mackie's shoulder, my hand creeping through her long, blonde hair towards her left breast. Her hand was on my knee and I was making bets with myself about how long it would take me to get into her pants.
I loved Penny but I was too careless with her. I remember that she was very smart, Scottish and wore little round glasses. I remember that she had a funny gurgle of a laugh and she liked my stupid jokes. That she had beautiful, long legs that she'd wind round me in bed. That, like you, she was what my mother would have called "a nice girl".
What I most remember most is that she was the one I left for Phoebe four months later. She never spoke to me again.
But that perfect April day, Phoebe wasn't even a storm cloud on the horizon. The sky was a smooth blue bowl, with flotillas of wispy cloud scudding around its rim. Sunlight filled the car as if it was July, like warm honey on my skin. I remembered summer afternoons and melting ice cream, days before Samantha was gone.
I was only meant to be at Oxford for a year's exchange but I stayed for three. I loved its atmosphere, I loved the work and in England, I was weird because I was supposed to be; a resident alien, a stranger in a strange land. In Oxford, hanging out with the eccentrics, I felt at home for a while. I even acquired a taste for hot milky tea.
All that crystallized into one perfect moment as we crawled over the crest of the hill and looked down into the village at the valley bottom. A church tower clawed at the sky, the ribbon of the river rippled into the distance.
John stopped the car for a second and wound down the window. The radio suddenly seemed tinny and inane and Andrea flicked it off. I expected silence but instead there was the rush of wind through the leaves of the hedgerows, the sound of running water somewhere close. Penny squeezed my hand as we climbed out of the car. A breeze ruffled her hair, carried smells of warm earth, wild garlic and meadowsweet.
There in the blue, blue sky, above the emerald fields was a bird. It was a speck hovering overhead, and its song was a high, joyful music.
I found out later that the skylark nests on the ground and only sings to distract predators but then, hearing it felt like a gift.
Seconds later a motorbike roared past and broke the spell. We climbed back into the car, embarrassed at the joint epiphany. John twisted the radio back on and a horn section blared out over a joyful 4/4 beat. Motown, something by The Supremes. The car rolled down the hill and we smiled like we all shared some big secret.
It was one of those brief moments where you realize that you are exactly where you're supposed to be and you're with the person you're meant to be with. I think that was what I had in mind when I planned this trip; maybe I hoped that you would experience the same thing.
* * *
2pm and I passed the rock sentries that guard Avebury village on my way back to a big empty double room in Marlborough. Avebury is only 90 miles from London but a world away; stone cottages lodged at the centre of the world's biggest stone circle, avenues leading off to long barrows built 4,000 years ago for the bones of warrior kings.
The weak spring sun has not managed to burn away all of the morning mist; it slides along the hedgerows and coils in ditch bottoms. There's a mystic calm though, just as there was when I first came here 15 years ago.
I called the number you collected from Colleen and a man agreed to meet me by the Devil's Chair, a giant misshapen rock. According to legend, you can summon up the devil by running round its base 100 times.
I wondered whether there'd be the faint scent of cigarette smoke if I tried that.
My secret contact's name is Nigel. He looked like a scruffy student, but didn't have the excuse of youth. He was late forties, but was wearing sandals and a cycle helmet which he never once took off -- probably lined with tinfoil.
He told me he works in a local book shop where he holds evenings of psychic healing and maintains the occult collection. He said I had a peculiar aubergine-colored streak in my aura.
"Mulder -- that should have been your first clue right there. Leguminous auras."
He also told me he had to be careful because someone was following him. Looking at the battered state of his bike, I thought they'd have to move pretty slow or they might catch him. I asked him about the circles.
He began speaking about the ley lines that link Avebury, St Michael's Mount and the crop circles; about how the Hopi, the Druids and the ancient Egyptians all copied the patterns of their earthworks from benevolent alien visitors who were later immortalized as gods, like Thoth and Mercury.
When he moved onto the caduceus -- the ancient symbol of healing -- as a repeating image, the serpent power of the kundalini rising through the chakras, nodal points of earth energy and visualization techniques I guessed I was wasting my time. He had no more idea than I did where the circles would be appearing.
Chakras. I could see you rolling your eyes at the mention of the word.
So it is just me, ordnance survey map 173 and your voice in my ear, telling me this is all ridiculous and I should just get out of the car...
I decide to go back to Marlborough early. It's 10am back home so I try to call you from one of the red boxes on the way but all I get is your answerphone.
I spend the rest of the drive wondering what I'm missing.
* * *
There's a cruel trick the senses play when you want to see something very badly. It flashes in front of your eyes for a second, you hear a snatch of a much-loved voice or you catch a familiar scent and, in that split second before your brain informs you that it's impossible, there's a flashflood of happiness.
I used to see Sam like that. In the crowds of tourists milling and wheeling in the mall like flocks of birds; in the flickering half-light of a passing subway train, through dusty diner windows. I still do, although I wouldn't want to admit it to you. I told you that I found her. I chose to think that. I chose to let her go. Doesn't mean I can always believe it.
But today I see you.
Once, an hour ago, wandering around the near-empty streets of Marlborough, I saw a flash of red hair and my breath caught in my throat, even though I knew, *knew*, it wasn't you. I turned a corner and the figure had gone but I figured I may as well kill time walking that way.
And then ten seconds ago I saw someone who moves with exactly the same precise purpose as you, little legs moving like pistons, past black iron railings and into a stone building set a little back from the narrow street.
It's only when I get a little closer that I look up and see a sign swinging in the breeze. The Black Swan. Above the door a sign saying: 'George and Millie Brookmyre, licensed to sell alcohol...'
At least I can get out of the cold. I push open the heavy oak door.
It is like walking into a warm, open mouth. Everything, from the carpet to the furnishings is pinkish-red. Lazy wreaths of smoke lurk below oak beams. It looks just like the pubs I remember from way back. The only concessions to the modern world appear to be a quiz machine bleeping in the corner and a large TV showing a soccer match: black stripes versus blue shirts.
It's near empty. An old gnarled man sits before the TV, a pint of some murky brown liquid half-drunk in front of him, his cigarette drooping into a curl of ash as he huffs his displeasure at the teams.
Behind the bar a slab of a man, Stone Cold Steve Austin's uglier twin, polishes the pumps with a towel, more out of habit than cleanliness. His forearms are like hams. He nods in my direction.
The small woman I saw a moment ago doesn't look a bit like you -- but I knew she wouldn't. She strips off her coat, stands on her tiptoes and gives the man a peck on the cheek. "'Ello love," he says. George and Millie I presume.
A player in stripes lofts the ball into the stands to ironic cheers. The old man flushes beetroot and shouts: "You are woeful, Solana! You are bloody *useless*"
"Barney! Ladies present!" shouts George. "Not to mention my wife."
Millie swipes at him with a towel and he grins and dodges out of her way as I walk up to the bar.
"Don't mind him," she says, nodding her head towards the old man. "He just gets a bit involved."
When the barman hears my accent he asks who I am, what I'm doing here, as he pours a pint of bitter. I tell him about the search for the circles. It's starting to sound like a crazy reason to fly 3,000 miles even to me.
"So, you believe little green aliens are buzzing round Wiltshire in spaceships, making crop circles then?" His face suddenly becomes guarded -- an expression I've been used to for years. You would think believing in extreme phenomena was a bug you could catch. Flu. Or maybe herpes.
"God, no." I shake my head. "As if aliens don't have better things to do."
My vehemence pleases him. "Voice of reason, eh?" he says with a smile.
No. She's not here right now.
My voice of reason is contralto, she slurs her Ss when she's calling me a sucker. She tells me the truth.
"I'd still like to see them, though," I say.
He looks at me, puzzled. "Aliens?"
"No. Meet the people who make the crop circles. But I'm not having much luck."
George's eyebrows draw together and his lips curve. "I think I can help out with that one," he says and then turns and bellows out of the door behind the bar.
"Oi. Lord of the bloody rings!"
"What?" a reedy male voice shouts from upstairs. George smiles at me and says nothing. "What?" It squawks again. There's a muffled thumping, muttered swearing and a tall, scruffy black-clad boy stalks in from the back. "What is it now, dad?"
"You, oh fruit of my loins, are about to explain to this nice American gentleman why he has wasted Christ knows how much money on coming over here because you can't stop buggering about in fields."
* * *
9pm and it's actually turning into an interesting discussion. Jamie Brookmyre is smart and funny. In the fall, he's going to Oxford to study physics, to my old college, as a matter of fact.
I can't ignore the strange trail of coincidences that led here but I can't make sense of it either.
"We were just following the program we downloaded from the net," says Jamie. "We started by hiding and staking out where they said the circles would be but we never saw anyone or anything. So we decided to go DIY."
"DIY?"
"Do It Yourself. You know, put a pattern where it's supposed to be."
"How did you decide on the pattern?"
"Man, that was the easy part. The first one we copied off the cover of the Led Zeppelin Remasters album."
"And after that?"
"We started inventing them on the computer. Then you just go out mob-handed with a double of planks of wood and Bob's your uncle. Our next one was going to be fantastic. It was all based on the number seven. The magic number." His spindly hands slice through the smoke in enthusiastic looping patterns. "I reckon it would've driven the fucking space cadets ... sorry, enthusiasts... up the wall trying to figure out its deep, *mystical* significance."
His head drops and his long, dark-brown hair falls across his face. "But now we'll never know."
"So no circles tomorrow?" I ask, hopes fading finally.
Jamie shakes his head. "Nah, sorry, mate. We got busted by some farmer last week. Mum said she wouldn't lend me the money to go on holiday with Catherine if I got caught doing it again."
"Catherine?"
His face softens. "My fiancee," he says with pride.
Jesus. He has a fiancee. My face must have given it away, because he grins and his voice twists up the register; I think he's imitating his mother. "You're too young. You're 18. You've got your whole life ahead of you, why do you want to go making a commitment you're not ready for?"
I look across and Millie is glaring at him.
"She has a point. I wasn't ready at 28," I say.
In my head, you add: "Or 38". Scully, that's a little harsh.
"Maybe. But being young isn't a good reason not to do it. I feel ready." His certainty is absolute and disconcerting
"But what if she isn't? What if it all goes wrong?"
"What if it does? Better to have loved and lost. It only has to go right once."
We talk a little longer about his girlfriend, his plans, but my mind is elsewhere. I know what I need to do. It only takes me another 15 minutes to convince myself I need to do it.
"Excuse me,'" I say. "I have to make a phone call."
* * *
By 3am I was on the M4, heading back to London, knowing I had a seat on the 9am flight to Washington.
All the while I was running through what I could tell you to explain why I was back so early. How could I explain how I found the circlemakers when I can't explain the bizarre trail myself? How could I spin the tale to stop you from finding out how much I need you these days?
But hours later, when I'm back home and track you down to the hospital, you begin to tell me a stranger tale still.
* * *
6.07am and a hand is cool on my face; a finger grazes the stubble like a match, scorching the skin. I fix on the glowing red numbers as I rise out of sleep and then roll onto my back.
You loom above me, dishevelled and solemn. Charcoal smuts under your eyes. Ah, we're getting old together, you and I. There are faint lines straying from where your eyelids meet; framing your mouth like parentheses; scoring your brow: intriguing fine details on the map of your face. I want to plan a leisurely route around them, explore a little.
I lift a corner of the blanket in invitation but you shake your head. "I have to go, Mulder."
Of course you do. You always do.
"I'll see you in the office," I say. My voice is a worn, dull monotone.
"Not today, Mulder. I'm teaching at Quantico today, favor for Skinner. He said that since I wasn't using the vacation days I apparently arranged to take..." you pause.
Your eyebrows draw towards your nose and your eyes ice over -- I shouldn't like that expression because it means I'm in deep shit, but it's so very you.
"And I say 'apparently' because I can't remember doing that. Am I perhaps suffering from amnesia, Mulder?"
"Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit." It's a little early in the morning for originality.
"Must be why it suits you," you retort sternly and then spoil the effect with a smile, your hand moving through my hair now. You opens your mouth to say something, close it again. I look into your eyes and send out a psychic command; speak to me.
You draw in a breath. "Mulder. Why didn't you just *ask* me to come with you?"
"I did ask you." My reply is an undignified squawk.
"You asked me to come see crop circles. Which in fact never appeared."
"Only because I wanted you to go."
"I'd have gone if you told me the real reason."
I'm tired of this moebius strip argument.
"Would you?" You swallow and tell me yes and the pleasure of hearing the admission makes me feel generous.
I add: "But then you would have missed seeing Daniel and I think you needed to see him." Hah. That asshole. I don't even like to say his name.
The silence lasts a year or two.
"I have to go," you repeat finally. I drop the corner of the blanket I have been holding and flop back onto the pillows. My hair slips through your fingers like water, leaving your hand clutching at air. A Nile-length crack running across my bedroom ceiling suddenly fascinates me.
Warm fingers turn my face away from my new object of interest to my usual one. Your face is serious, professional. "I'll be back tonight, Mulder." I'm just savoring that when I notice the first flicker of uncertainty cross your face. "If that's okay," you say.
"Well, I was planning to wash my hair, but since it's you." I attempt nonchalance but I can feel a tree-frog grin begin to split my face.
"7pm at the latest." You plant a kiss on my forehead.
"Seven. Magic number."
"Fool. You're jetlagged. Go back to sleep."
I shut my eyes to the sound of you splashing in the bathroom, and as I fall asleep I think I catch the scent of warm earth, wild garlic and meadowsweet.
______________
Mailing address: endoftheworldnews AT googlemail DOT com
This was written in, I think, 1999 or so. It was the first time I had ever attempted a proper first person main character narrative, and I don't think it's successful. There's snark in there but it's not authentic. Accordingly only about three people have ever read it and it's not on Gossamer. I think I was in thrall to "write what you know" and also the machete beta thing had sort of killed my confidence. I knew this wasn't up to scratch and I didn't send it for machete, but not sending it for machete felt like an admission of failure. Rinse and repeat.
I didn't want to admit even to myself at the time how much of a high-wire act writing felt like to me and when my friends came in with all kinds of corrections and opinions -- even though they were solicited and almost always correct in what they said, particularly about structure and inauthenticity -- it started to interfere with my enjoyment of the process.
There's a place for that kind of beta and it's a good thing, but I think maybe I am too thin-skinned for it to be helpful in terms of me carrying on writing. I don't have enough faith in my own judgment to (a) reject criticism that is based more on a misunderstanding of what I am trying to achieve and, far more usually (b) take structural criticism and apply it well. I just get dispirited and write shite. I think I need to write until I get my feet under me. And read more David Mitchell.
However, it was fun to take Mulder back to England and imagine a past for him. Another reason I didn't post it was because I knew it was exasperating to do that. I roll my eyes when the American Harry Potter fans take Harry over to Arkansas to fall in love with a mysterious violet-eyed slinky-boots auror who fulfils his deepest needs and takes him to the high school prom, and this is just a little too close to that for comfort.
Anyway... notes:
• meadowsweet is a summer flower. Grows in hedgerows, near woods and by roadsides and smells divine. Not to be confused with the similar, more crass-looking old man's oatmeal, which smells awful. One of them is poisonous. Can't remember which, so I tell you what: don't eat either of em
• I'd been to Avebury recently. A magical place
• The football match is Newcastle versus someone or other. Nolberto Solano now plays for West Ham, which is near where I live. True and yet not interesting!
• Written before the ubiquity of the (graffiti) artist Banksy.
• Jamie Brookmyre is named after Christopher Brookmyre, the Scottish Carl Hiaasen, whose books are wildly inventive, less funny than he thinks they are and in need of an editor. I wholeheartedly recommend "Quite Ugly One Morning", the first and best, but if you run into the TV adaptation RUN AWAY. It's shite, they needlessly changed the plot, straightened the fabulous gay copper until she was in love with the hero and wasted the awesome Daniella Nardini.
MEADOWSWEET
7am, and I'm tapping out an impatient tattoo with a pound coin on the desk of the rental counter at Gatwick. It echoes through the sabbath quiet of the terminal. The clerk -- his badge says he is 'Andy, Happy 2 Help' -- searches the world's slowest computer for my reservation.
"We don't appear to have it," Andy Happy-2-Help says in sing-song sales-speak; the voice that says 'screw you but have a nice day anyhow'. "Are you sure you booked for today, Mr Fox-Muller?"
After a boring overnight flight, I'm so irritated I'd happily twist his head off but I grit my teeth instead.
"Yes. And it's Mulder. M-U-L-D-E-R. Fox is my first name."
Pimply, eager Andy looks too young to be capable of much more than trig homework and collecting Pokemon cards. "Fox?" he asks with practised cheer, "really?
"Yes. Really." One glare and Andy Happy-2-Help bends over his keyboard, haphazardly-shaved Adam's apple yo-yoing. He calls me 'Muller' two more times before I scrawl my signature, grab the keys and escape to the concrete canyons of the parking garage.
"If nature really abhorred a vacuum, that boy's head would have imploded," you whisper in my ear.
My lips twitch into a smile. It only fades when I remember you're not there.
* * *
The car is a Japanese micromachine, toytown, Scully-sized. I almost feel your slap at my arm for that thought. I push the seat back as far as it will go and climb in, sink back, and close my eyes.
I think I know why you refused to come with me. It's been a tough year and you're bone-deep weary, lost in doubts. I know what that's like, when thoughts rush and collide in endless Brownian motion and all you long for is rest. As long as it's not rest from me.
Selfish asshole that I am, I almost long for the old days when we were first partnered, when I only noticed something was wrong if you bled onto my shirt. It wasn't that I didn't care, more that I was consumed by the mystery, the chase, and certain you were speeding in my slipstream, ready to make the pace in your turn.
That's the deal Scully, I'll dig up the answers, you make them make sense.
I'm not an idiot -- although I wouldn't care to debate the point for too long -- so I started small, trying to kid you out of it.
"The Ferraro house is haunted by the ghost of Mickey's dead Uncle Vito" (It's a scam to get Vito's wife out of there so the nephews can sell it, Scully. Tell me I'm an idiot for even considering spectral phenomena.)
"Szczesny drowned in ectoplasm" (Even if I think she did, Scully, you can hit that sucker right out of the ball park.)
Perhaps that was my error. I should have told you to come with me because I wanted you there. But then what if you'd said no?
We're lovers but I guess we don't speak the language yet. We still communicate via casefiles and conundrums. We maintain boundaries. Sublimate a passion for years, pretend that it's tethered and tamed, and it's hard to adjust.
I'm still getting used to glimpsing behind the professional image. Usually, you're titanium. Your lightness beguiles people into thinking you're not strong -- until they realize you'll outlast all of us. Or so I thought before Pfaster.
Guilt is weird, alchemical; it transmutes everything it touches into something baser. It can corrode happiness until it's brittle and shatters at a tap. I should know. That wasn't going to happen to us: hence the card-maxing trip.
Langly once said crop circles were the landing patterns of alien saucers, but I think he was just watching for your reaction. Some people believe they're plasma-created messages of peace from discorporeal entities or trails left by the faerie folk.
You think they're amusement for bored teens in the boondocks, the product of localized wind currents or even a crowd-puller for farmers who don't mind losing a quarter of their crop.
I don't think it matters. The circles exist on the cusp where art meets artifice, where hoax runs head-on into belief: complex, baffling, beautiful. I've always wanted to meet the people who create them.
But this trip wasn't about crop circles any more than Casablanca is about the French resistance. I wanted you to come with me because the last time I felt this way I was 23 years old; it was England and it was springtime. I wanted to share that memory with you. To better it, maybe.
But I couldn't possibly tell you that, now could I? Us being open with each other? That's one of your signs of the apocalypse, right there.
* * *
There were four of us in the battered brown Austin Allegro that day, all trying to forget that we would be facing exams in a couple of weeks. The roads twisted like snakes and the engine howled and rattled at any speed faster than 50mph. We solved that by turning up the radio until the sound almost blurred into white noise, sometimes singing along, sometimes talking over it.
John Banks drove. He was a good friend until I lost sight of everything but the work. He's an economist now -- works in the City, has a wife in the country, daughters in high school and he might as well be a yak herder in Mongolia for all we have in common.
Back then he was just Banksy, another wild-haired postgraduate misfit in a tie-dyed T-shirt. He had a first in PPE from Jesus College and no idea what to do with his life. Next to him was Andrea, his fiancee -- all short haircut and sensible shoes. She was determined that no matter what John did with his life, he was going to make money at it. I guess she got her wish.
I was in the back, crushed up against a huge wicker picnic hamper with my arm slung across Penny Mackie's shoulder, my hand creeping through her long, blonde hair towards her left breast. Her hand was on my knee and I was making bets with myself about how long it would take me to get into her pants.
I loved Penny but I was too careless with her. I remember that she was very smart, Scottish and wore little round glasses. I remember that she had a funny gurgle of a laugh and she liked my stupid jokes. That she had beautiful, long legs that she'd wind round me in bed. That, like you, she was what my mother would have called "a nice girl".
What I most remember most is that she was the one I left for Phoebe four months later. She never spoke to me again.
But that perfect April day, Phoebe wasn't even a storm cloud on the horizon. The sky was a smooth blue bowl, with flotillas of wispy cloud scudding around its rim. Sunlight filled the car as if it was July, like warm honey on my skin. I remembered summer afternoons and melting ice cream, days before Samantha was gone.
I was only meant to be at Oxford for a year's exchange but I stayed for three. I loved its atmosphere, I loved the work and in England, I was weird because I was supposed to be; a resident alien, a stranger in a strange land. In Oxford, hanging out with the eccentrics, I felt at home for a while. I even acquired a taste for hot milky tea.
All that crystallized into one perfect moment as we crawled over the crest of the hill and looked down into the village at the valley bottom. A church tower clawed at the sky, the ribbon of the river rippled into the distance.
John stopped the car for a second and wound down the window. The radio suddenly seemed tinny and inane and Andrea flicked it off. I expected silence but instead there was the rush of wind through the leaves of the hedgerows, the sound of running water somewhere close. Penny squeezed my hand as we climbed out of the car. A breeze ruffled her hair, carried smells of warm earth, wild garlic and meadowsweet.
There in the blue, blue sky, above the emerald fields was a bird. It was a speck hovering overhead, and its song was a high, joyful music.
I found out later that the skylark nests on the ground and only sings to distract predators but then, hearing it felt like a gift.
Seconds later a motorbike roared past and broke the spell. We climbed back into the car, embarrassed at the joint epiphany. John twisted the radio back on and a horn section blared out over a joyful 4/4 beat. Motown, something by The Supremes. The car rolled down the hill and we smiled like we all shared some big secret.
It was one of those brief moments where you realize that you are exactly where you're supposed to be and you're with the person you're meant to be with. I think that was what I had in mind when I planned this trip; maybe I hoped that you would experience the same thing.
* * *
2pm and I passed the rock sentries that guard Avebury village on my way back to a big empty double room in Marlborough. Avebury is only 90 miles from London but a world away; stone cottages lodged at the centre of the world's biggest stone circle, avenues leading off to long barrows built 4,000 years ago for the bones of warrior kings.
The weak spring sun has not managed to burn away all of the morning mist; it slides along the hedgerows and coils in ditch bottoms. There's a mystic calm though, just as there was when I first came here 15 years ago.
I called the number you collected from Colleen and a man agreed to meet me by the Devil's Chair, a giant misshapen rock. According to legend, you can summon up the devil by running round its base 100 times.
I wondered whether there'd be the faint scent of cigarette smoke if I tried that.
My secret contact's name is Nigel. He looked like a scruffy student, but didn't have the excuse of youth. He was late forties, but was wearing sandals and a cycle helmet which he never once took off -- probably lined with tinfoil.
He told me he works in a local book shop where he holds evenings of psychic healing and maintains the occult collection. He said I had a peculiar aubergine-colored streak in my aura.
"Mulder -- that should have been your first clue right there. Leguminous auras."
He also told me he had to be careful because someone was following him. Looking at the battered state of his bike, I thought they'd have to move pretty slow or they might catch him. I asked him about the circles.
He began speaking about the ley lines that link Avebury, St Michael's Mount and the crop circles; about how the Hopi, the Druids and the ancient Egyptians all copied the patterns of their earthworks from benevolent alien visitors who were later immortalized as gods, like Thoth and Mercury.
When he moved onto the caduceus -- the ancient symbol of healing -- as a repeating image, the serpent power of the kundalini rising through the chakras, nodal points of earth energy and visualization techniques I guessed I was wasting my time. He had no more idea than I did where the circles would be appearing.
Chakras. I could see you rolling your eyes at the mention of the word.
So it is just me, ordnance survey map 173 and your voice in my ear, telling me this is all ridiculous and I should just get out of the car...
I decide to go back to Marlborough early. It's 10am back home so I try to call you from one of the red boxes on the way but all I get is your answerphone.
I spend the rest of the drive wondering what I'm missing.
* * *
There's a cruel trick the senses play when you want to see something very badly. It flashes in front of your eyes for a second, you hear a snatch of a much-loved voice or you catch a familiar scent and, in that split second before your brain informs you that it's impossible, there's a flashflood of happiness.
I used to see Sam like that. In the crowds of tourists milling and wheeling in the mall like flocks of birds; in the flickering half-light of a passing subway train, through dusty diner windows. I still do, although I wouldn't want to admit it to you. I told you that I found her. I chose to think that. I chose to let her go. Doesn't mean I can always believe it.
But today I see you.
Once, an hour ago, wandering around the near-empty streets of Marlborough, I saw a flash of red hair and my breath caught in my throat, even though I knew, *knew*, it wasn't you. I turned a corner and the figure had gone but I figured I may as well kill time walking that way.
And then ten seconds ago I saw someone who moves with exactly the same precise purpose as you, little legs moving like pistons, past black iron railings and into a stone building set a little back from the narrow street.
It's only when I get a little closer that I look up and see a sign swinging in the breeze. The Black Swan. Above the door a sign saying: 'George and Millie Brookmyre, licensed to sell alcohol...'
At least I can get out of the cold. I push open the heavy oak door.
It is like walking into a warm, open mouth. Everything, from the carpet to the furnishings is pinkish-red. Lazy wreaths of smoke lurk below oak beams. It looks just like the pubs I remember from way back. The only concessions to the modern world appear to be a quiz machine bleeping in the corner and a large TV showing a soccer match: black stripes versus blue shirts.
It's near empty. An old gnarled man sits before the TV, a pint of some murky brown liquid half-drunk in front of him, his cigarette drooping into a curl of ash as he huffs his displeasure at the teams.
Behind the bar a slab of a man, Stone Cold Steve Austin's uglier twin, polishes the pumps with a towel, more out of habit than cleanliness. His forearms are like hams. He nods in my direction.
The small woman I saw a moment ago doesn't look a bit like you -- but I knew she wouldn't. She strips off her coat, stands on her tiptoes and gives the man a peck on the cheek. "'Ello love," he says. George and Millie I presume.
A player in stripes lofts the ball into the stands to ironic cheers. The old man flushes beetroot and shouts: "You are woeful, Solana! You are bloody *useless*"
"Barney! Ladies present!" shouts George. "Not to mention my wife."
Millie swipes at him with a towel and he grins and dodges out of her way as I walk up to the bar.
"Don't mind him," she says, nodding her head towards the old man. "He just gets a bit involved."
When the barman hears my accent he asks who I am, what I'm doing here, as he pours a pint of bitter. I tell him about the search for the circles. It's starting to sound like a crazy reason to fly 3,000 miles even to me.
"So, you believe little green aliens are buzzing round Wiltshire in spaceships, making crop circles then?" His face suddenly becomes guarded -- an expression I've been used to for years. You would think believing in extreme phenomena was a bug you could catch. Flu. Or maybe herpes.
"God, no." I shake my head. "As if aliens don't have better things to do."
My vehemence pleases him. "Voice of reason, eh?" he says with a smile.
No. She's not here right now.
My voice of reason is contralto, she slurs her Ss when she's calling me a sucker. She tells me the truth.
"I'd still like to see them, though," I say.
He looks at me, puzzled. "Aliens?"
"No. Meet the people who make the crop circles. But I'm not having much luck."
George's eyebrows draw together and his lips curve. "I think I can help out with that one," he says and then turns and bellows out of the door behind the bar.
"Oi. Lord of the bloody rings!"
"What?" a reedy male voice shouts from upstairs. George smiles at me and says nothing. "What?" It squawks again. There's a muffled thumping, muttered swearing and a tall, scruffy black-clad boy stalks in from the back. "What is it now, dad?"
"You, oh fruit of my loins, are about to explain to this nice American gentleman why he has wasted Christ knows how much money on coming over here because you can't stop buggering about in fields."
* * *
9pm and it's actually turning into an interesting discussion. Jamie Brookmyre is smart and funny. In the fall, he's going to Oxford to study physics, to my old college, as a matter of fact.
I can't ignore the strange trail of coincidences that led here but I can't make sense of it either.
"We were just following the program we downloaded from the net," says Jamie. "We started by hiding and staking out where they said the circles would be but we never saw anyone or anything. So we decided to go DIY."
"DIY?"
"Do It Yourself. You know, put a pattern where it's supposed to be."
"How did you decide on the pattern?"
"Man, that was the easy part. The first one we copied off the cover of the Led Zeppelin Remasters album."
"And after that?"
"We started inventing them on the computer. Then you just go out mob-handed with a double of planks of wood and Bob's your uncle. Our next one was going to be fantastic. It was all based on the number seven. The magic number." His spindly hands slice through the smoke in enthusiastic looping patterns. "I reckon it would've driven the fucking space cadets ... sorry, enthusiasts... up the wall trying to figure out its deep, *mystical* significance."
His head drops and his long, dark-brown hair falls across his face. "But now we'll never know."
"So no circles tomorrow?" I ask, hopes fading finally.
Jamie shakes his head. "Nah, sorry, mate. We got busted by some farmer last week. Mum said she wouldn't lend me the money to go on holiday with Catherine if I got caught doing it again."
"Catherine?"
His face softens. "My fiancee," he says with pride.
Jesus. He has a fiancee. My face must have given it away, because he grins and his voice twists up the register; I think he's imitating his mother. "You're too young. You're 18. You've got your whole life ahead of you, why do you want to go making a commitment you're not ready for?"
I look across and Millie is glaring at him.
"She has a point. I wasn't ready at 28," I say.
In my head, you add: "Or 38". Scully, that's a little harsh.
"Maybe. But being young isn't a good reason not to do it. I feel ready." His certainty is absolute and disconcerting
"But what if she isn't? What if it all goes wrong?"
"What if it does? Better to have loved and lost. It only has to go right once."
We talk a little longer about his girlfriend, his plans, but my mind is elsewhere. I know what I need to do. It only takes me another 15 minutes to convince myself I need to do it.
"Excuse me,'" I say. "I have to make a phone call."
* * *
By 3am I was on the M4, heading back to London, knowing I had a seat on the 9am flight to Washington.
All the while I was running through what I could tell you to explain why I was back so early. How could I explain how I found the circlemakers when I can't explain the bizarre trail myself? How could I spin the tale to stop you from finding out how much I need you these days?
But hours later, when I'm back home and track you down to the hospital, you begin to tell me a stranger tale still.
* * *
6.07am and a hand is cool on my face; a finger grazes the stubble like a match, scorching the skin. I fix on the glowing red numbers as I rise out of sleep and then roll onto my back.
You loom above me, dishevelled and solemn. Charcoal smuts under your eyes. Ah, we're getting old together, you and I. There are faint lines straying from where your eyelids meet; framing your mouth like parentheses; scoring your brow: intriguing fine details on the map of your face. I want to plan a leisurely route around them, explore a little.
I lift a corner of the blanket in invitation but you shake your head. "I have to go, Mulder."
Of course you do. You always do.
"I'll see you in the office," I say. My voice is a worn, dull monotone.
"Not today, Mulder. I'm teaching at Quantico today, favor for Skinner. He said that since I wasn't using the vacation days I apparently arranged to take..." you pause.
Your eyebrows draw towards your nose and your eyes ice over -- I shouldn't like that expression because it means I'm in deep shit, but it's so very you.
"And I say 'apparently' because I can't remember doing that. Am I perhaps suffering from amnesia, Mulder?"
"Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit." It's a little early in the morning for originality.
"Must be why it suits you," you retort sternly and then spoil the effect with a smile, your hand moving through my hair now. You opens your mouth to say something, close it again. I look into your eyes and send out a psychic command; speak to me.
You draw in a breath. "Mulder. Why didn't you just *ask* me to come with you?"
"I did ask you." My reply is an undignified squawk.
"You asked me to come see crop circles. Which in fact never appeared."
"Only because I wanted you to go."
"I'd have gone if you told me the real reason."
I'm tired of this moebius strip argument.
"Would you?" You swallow and tell me yes and the pleasure of hearing the admission makes me feel generous.
I add: "But then you would have missed seeing Daniel and I think you needed to see him." Hah. That asshole. I don't even like to say his name.
The silence lasts a year or two.
"I have to go," you repeat finally. I drop the corner of the blanket I have been holding and flop back onto the pillows. My hair slips through your fingers like water, leaving your hand clutching at air. A Nile-length crack running across my bedroom ceiling suddenly fascinates me.
Warm fingers turn my face away from my new object of interest to my usual one. Your face is serious, professional. "I'll be back tonight, Mulder." I'm just savoring that when I notice the first flicker of uncertainty cross your face. "If that's okay," you say.
"Well, I was planning to wash my hair, but since it's you." I attempt nonchalance but I can feel a tree-frog grin begin to split my face.
"7pm at the latest." You plant a kiss on my forehead.
"Seven. Magic number."
"Fool. You're jetlagged. Go back to sleep."
I shut my eyes to the sound of you splashing in the bathroom, and as I fall asleep I think I catch the scent of warm earth, wild garlic and meadowsweet.
MEADOWSWEET
7am, and I'm tapping out an impatient tattoo with a pound coin on the desk of the rental counter at Gatwick. It echoes through the sabbath quiet of the terminal. The clerk -- his badge says he is 'Andy, Happy 2 Help' -- searches the world's slowest computer for my reservation.
"We don't appear to have it," Andy Happy-2-Help says in sing-song sales-speak; the voice that says 'screw you but have a nice day anyhow'. "Are you sure you booked for today, Mr Fox-Muller?"
After a boring overnight flight, I'm so irritated I'd happily twist his head off but I grit my teeth instead.
"Yes. And it's Mulder. M-U-L-D-E-R. Fox is my first name."
Pimply, eager Andy looks too young to be capable of much more than trig homework and collecting Pokemon cards. "Fox?" he asks with practised cheer, "really?
"Yes. Really." One glare and Andy Happy-2-Help bends over his keyboard, haphazardly-shaved Adam's apple yo-yoing. He calls me 'Muller' two more times before I scrawl my signature, grab the keys and escape to the concrete canyons of the parking garage.
"If nature really abhorred a vacuum, that boy's head would have imploded," you whisper in my ear.
My lips twitch into a smile. It only fades when I remember you're not there.
* * *
The car is a Japanese micromachine, toytown, Scully-sized. I almost feel your slap at my arm for that thought. I push the seat back as far as it will go and climb in, sink back, and close my eyes.
I think I know why you refused to come with me. It's been a tough year and you're bone-deep weary, lost in doubts. I know what that's like, when thoughts rush and collide in endless Brownian motion and all you long for is rest. As long as it's not rest from me.
Selfish asshole that I am, I almost long for the old days when we were first partnered, when I only noticed something was wrong if you bled onto my shirt. It wasn't that I didn't care, more that I was consumed by the mystery, the chase, and certain you were speeding in my slipstream, ready to make the pace in your turn.
That's the deal Scully, I'll dig up the answers, you make them make sense.
I'm not an idiot -- although I wouldn't care to debate the point for too long -- so I started small, trying to kid you out of it.
"The Ferraro house is haunted by the ghost of Mickey's dead Uncle Vito" (It's a scam to get Vito's wife out of there so the nephews can sell it, Scully. Tell me I'm an idiot for even considering spectral phenomena.)
"Szczesny drowned in ectoplasm" (Even if I think she did, Scully, you can hit that sucker right out of the ball park.)
Perhaps that was my error. I should have told you to come with me because I wanted you there. But then what if you'd said no?
We're lovers but I guess we don't speak the language yet. We still communicate via casefiles and conundrums. We maintain boundaries. Sublimate a passion for years, pretend that it's tethered and tamed, and it's hard to adjust.
I'm still getting used to glimpsing behind the professional image. Usually, you're titanium. Your lightness beguiles people into thinking you're not strong -- until they realize you'll outlast all of us. Or so I thought before Pfaster.
Guilt is weird, alchemical; it transmutes everything it touches into something baser. It can corrode happiness until it's brittle and shatters at a tap. I should know. That wasn't going to happen to us: hence the card-maxing trip.
Langly once said crop circles were the landing patterns of alien saucers, but I think he was just watching for your reaction. Some people believe they're plasma-created messages of peace from discorporeal entities or trails left by the faerie folk.
You think they're amusement for bored teens in the boondocks, the product of localized wind currents or even a crowd-puller for farmers who don't mind losing a quarter of their crop.
I don't think it matters. The circles exist on the cusp where art meets artifice, where hoax runs head-on into belief: complex, baffling, beautiful. I've always wanted to meet the people who create them.
But this trip wasn't about crop circles any more than Casablanca is about the French resistance. I wanted you to come with me because the last time I felt this way I was 23 years old; it was England and it was springtime. I wanted to share that memory with you. To better it, maybe.
But I couldn't possibly tell you that, now could I? Us being open with each other? That's one of your signs of the apocalypse, right there.
* * *
There were four of us in the battered brown Austin Allegro that day, all trying to forget that we would be facing exams in a couple of weeks. The roads twisted like snakes and the engine howled and rattled at any speed faster than 50mph. We solved that by turning up the radio until the sound almost blurred into white noise, sometimes singing along, sometimes talking over it.
John Banks drove. He was a good friend until I lost sight of everything but the work. He's an economist now -- works in the City, has a wife in the country, daughters in high school and he might as well be a yak herder in Mongolia for all we have in common.
Back then he was just Banksy, another wild-haired postgraduate misfit in a tie-dyed T-shirt. He had a first in PPE from Jesus College and no idea what to do with his life. Next to him was Andrea, his fiancee -- all short haircut and sensible shoes. She was determined that no matter what John did with his life, he was going to make money at it. I guess she got her wish.
I was in the back, crushed up against a huge wicker picnic hamper with my arm slung across Penny Mackie's shoulder, my hand creeping through her long, blonde hair towards her left breast. Her hand was on my knee and I was making bets with myself about how long it would take me to get into her pants.
I loved Penny but I was too careless with her. I remember that she was very smart, Scottish and wore little round glasses. I remember that she had a funny gurgle of a laugh and she liked my stupid jokes. That she had beautiful, long legs that she'd wind round me in bed. That, like you, she was what my mother would have called "a nice girl".
What I most remember most is that she was the one I left for Phoebe four months later. She never spoke to me again.
But that perfect April day, Phoebe wasn't even a storm cloud on the horizon. The sky was a smooth blue bowl, with flotillas of wispy cloud scudding around its rim. Sunlight filled the car as if it was July, like warm honey on my skin. I remembered summer afternoons and melting ice cream, days before Samantha was gone.
I was only meant to be at Oxford for a year's exchange but I stayed for three. I loved its atmosphere, I loved the work and in England, I was weird because I was supposed to be; a resident alien, a stranger in a strange land. In Oxford, hanging out with the eccentrics, I felt at home for a while. I even acquired a taste for hot milky tea.
All that crystallized into one perfect moment as we crawled over the crest of the hill and looked down into the village at the valley bottom. A church tower clawed at the sky, the ribbon of the river rippled into the distance.
John stopped the car for a second and wound down the window. The radio suddenly seemed tinny and inane and Andrea flicked it off. I expected silence but instead there was the rush of wind through the leaves of the hedgerows, the sound of running water somewhere close. Penny squeezed my hand as we climbed out of the car. A breeze ruffled her hair, carried smells of warm earth, wild garlic and meadowsweet.
There in the blue, blue sky, above the emerald fields was a bird. It was a speck hovering overhead, and its song was a high, joyful music.
I found out later that the skylark nests on the ground and only sings to distract predators but then, hearing it felt like a gift.
Seconds later a motorbike roared past and broke the spell. We climbed back into the car, embarrassed at the joint epiphany. John twisted the radio back on and a horn section blared out over a joyful 4/4 beat. Motown, something by The Supremes. The car rolled down the hill and we smiled like we all shared some big secret.
It was one of those brief moments where you realize that you are exactly where you're supposed to be and you're with the person you're meant to be with. I think that was what I had in mind when I planned this trip; maybe I hoped that you would experience the same thing.
* * *
2pm and I passed the rock sentries that guard Avebury village on my way back to a big empty double room in Marlborough. Avebury is only 90 miles from London but a world away; stone cottages lodged at the centre of the world's biggest stone circle, avenues leading off to long barrows built 4,000 years ago for the bones of warrior kings.
The weak spring sun has not managed to burn away all of the morning mist; it slides along the hedgerows and coils in ditch bottoms. There's a mystic calm though, just as there was when I first came here 15 years ago.
I called the number you collected from Colleen and a man agreed to meet me by the Devil's Chair, a giant misshapen rock. According to legend, you can summon up the devil by running round its base 100 times.
I wondered whether there'd be the faint scent of cigarette smoke if I tried that.
My secret contact's name is Nigel. He looked like a scruffy student, but didn't have the excuse of youth. He was late forties, but was wearing sandals and a cycle helmet which he never once took off -- probably lined with tinfoil.
He told me he works in a local book shop where he holds evenings of psychic healing and maintains the occult collection. He said I had a peculiar aubergine-colored streak in my aura.
"Mulder -- that should have been your first clue right there. Leguminous auras."
He also told me he had to be careful because someone was following him. Looking at the battered state of his bike, I thought they'd have to move pretty slow or they might catch him. I asked him about the circles.
He began speaking about the ley lines that link Avebury, St Michael's Mount and the crop circles; about how the Hopi, the Druids and the ancient Egyptians all copied the patterns of their earthworks from benevolent alien visitors who were later immortalized as gods, like Thoth and Mercury.
When he moved onto the caduceus -- the ancient symbol of healing -- as a repeating image, the serpent power of the kundalini rising through the chakras, nodal points of earth energy and visualization techniques I guessed I was wasting my time. He had no more idea than I did where the circles would be appearing.
Chakras. I could see you rolling your eyes at the mention of the word.
So it is just me, ordnance survey map 173 and your voice in my ear, telling me this is all ridiculous and I should just get out of the car...
I decide to go back to Marlborough early. It's 10am back home so I try to call you from one of the red boxes on the way but all I get is your answerphone.
I spend the rest of the drive wondering what I'm missing.
* * *
There's a cruel trick the senses play when you want to see something very badly. It flashes in front of your eyes for a second, you hear a snatch of a much-loved voice or you catch a familiar scent and, in that split second before your brain informs you that it's impossible, there's a flashflood of happiness.
I used to see Sam like that. In the crowds of tourists milling and wheeling in the mall like flocks of birds; in the flickering half-light of a passing subway train, through dusty diner windows. I still do, although I wouldn't want to admit it to you. I told you that I found her. I chose to think that. I chose to let her go. Doesn't mean I can always believe it.
But today I see you.
Once, an hour ago, wandering around the near-empty streets of Marlborough, I saw a flash of red hair and my breath caught in my throat, even though I knew, *knew*, it wasn't you. I turned a corner and the figure had gone but I figured I may as well kill time walking that way.
And then ten seconds ago I saw someone who moves with exactly the same precise purpose as you, little legs moving like pistons, past black iron railings and into a stone building set a little back from the narrow street.
It's only when I get a little closer that I look up and see a sign swinging in the breeze. The Black Swan. Above the door a sign saying: 'George and Millie Brookmyre, licensed to sell alcohol...'
At least I can get out of the cold. I push open the heavy oak door.
It is like walking into a warm, open mouth. Everything, from the carpet to the furnishings is pinkish-red. Lazy wreaths of smoke lurk below oak beams. It looks just like the pubs I remember from way back. The only concessions to the modern world appear to be a quiz machine bleeping in the corner and a large TV showing a soccer match: black stripes versus blue shirts.
It's near empty. An old gnarled man sits before the TV, a pint of some murky brown liquid half-drunk in front of him, his cigarette drooping into a curl of ash as he huffs his displeasure at the teams.
Behind the bar a slab of a man, Stone Cold Steve Austin's uglier twin, polishes the pumps with a towel, more out of habit than cleanliness. His forearms are like hams. He nods in my direction.
The small woman I saw a moment ago doesn't look a bit like you -- but I knew she wouldn't. She strips off her coat, stands on her tiptoes and gives the man a peck on the cheek. "'Ello love," he says. George and Millie I presume.
A player in stripes lofts the ball into the stands to ironic cheers. The old man flushes beetroot and shouts: "You are woeful, Solana! You are bloody *useless*"
"Barney! Ladies present!" shouts George. "Not to mention my wife."
Millie swipes at him with a towel and he grins and dodges out of her way as I walk up to the bar.
"Don't mind him," she says, nodding her head towards the old man. "He just gets a bit involved."
When the barman hears my accent he asks who I am, what I'm doing here, as he pours a pint of bitter. I tell him about the search for the circles. It's starting to sound like a crazy reason to fly 3,000 miles even to me.
"So, you believe little green aliens are buzzing round Wiltshire in spaceships, making crop circles then?" His face suddenly becomes guarded -- an expression I've been used to for years. You would think believing in extreme phenomena was a bug you could catch. Flu. Or maybe herpes.
"God, no." I shake my head. "As if aliens don't have better things to do."
My vehemence pleases him. "Voice of reason, eh?" he says with a smile.
No. She's not here right now.
My voice of reason is contralto, she slurs her Ss when she's calling me a sucker. She tells me the truth.
"I'd still like to see them, though," I say.
He looks at me, puzzled. "Aliens?"
"No. Meet the people who make the crop circles. But I'm not having much luck."
George's eyebrows draw together and his lips curve. "I think I can help out with that one," he says and then turns and bellows out of the door behind the bar.
"Oi. Lord of the bloody rings!"
"What?" a reedy male voice shouts from upstairs. George smiles at me and says nothing. "What?" It squawks again. There's a muffled thumping, muttered swearing and a tall, scruffy black-clad boy stalks in from the back. "What is it now, dad?"
"You, oh fruit of my loins, are about to explain to this nice American gentleman why he has wasted Christ knows how much money on coming over here because you can't stop buggering about in fields."
* * *
9pm and it's actually turning into an interesting discussion. Jamie Brookmyre is smart and funny. In the fall, he's going to Oxford to study physics, to my old college, as a matter of fact.
I can't ignore the strange trail of coincidences that led here but I can't make sense of it either.
"We were just following the program we downloaded from the net," says Jamie. "We started by hiding and staking out where they said the circles would be but we never saw anyone or anything. So we decided to go DIY."
"DIY?"
"Do It Yourself. You know, put a pattern where it's supposed to be."
"How did you decide on the pattern?"
"Man, that was the easy part. The first one we copied off the cover of the Led Zeppelin Remasters album."
"And after that?"
"We started inventing them on the computer. Then you just go out mob-handed with a double of planks of wood and Bob's your uncle. Our next one was going to be fantastic. It was all based on the number seven. The magic number." His spindly hands slice through the smoke in enthusiastic looping patterns. "I reckon it would've driven the fucking space cadets ... sorry, enthusiasts... up the wall trying to figure out its deep, *mystical* significance."
His head drops and his long, dark-brown hair falls across his face. "But now we'll never know."
"So no circles tomorrow?" I ask, hopes fading finally.
Jamie shakes his head. "Nah, sorry, mate. We got busted by some farmer last week. Mum said she wouldn't lend me the money to go on holiday with Catherine if I got caught doing it again."
"Catherine?"
His face softens. "My fiancee," he says with pride.
Jesus. He has a fiancee. My face must have given it away, because he grins and his voice twists up the register; I think he's imitating his mother. "You're too young. You're 18. You've got your whole life ahead of you, why do you want to go making a commitment you're not ready for?"
I look across and Millie is glaring at him.
"She has a point. I wasn't ready at 28," I say.
In my head, you add: "Or 38". Scully, that's a little harsh.
"Maybe. But being young isn't a good reason not to do it. I feel ready." His certainty is absolute and disconcerting
"But what if she isn't? What if it all goes wrong?"
"What if it does? Better to have loved and lost. It only has to go right once."
We talk a little longer about his girlfriend, his plans, but my mind is elsewhere. I know what I need to do. It only takes me another 15 minutes to convince myself I need to do it.
"Excuse me,'" I say. "I have to make a phone call."
* * *
By 3am I was on the M4, heading back to London, knowing I had a seat on the 9am flight to Washington.
All the while I was running through what I could tell you to explain why I was back so early. How could I explain how I found the circlemakers when I can't explain the bizarre trail myself? How could I spin the tale to stop you from finding out how much I need you these days?
But hours later, when I'm back home and track you down to the hospital, you begin to tell me a stranger tale still.
* * *
6.07am and a hand is cool on my face; a finger grazes the stubble like a match, scorching the skin. I fix on the glowing red numbers as I rise out of sleep and then roll onto my back.
You loom above me, dishevelled and solemn. Charcoal smuts under your eyes. Ah, we're getting old together, you and I. There are faint lines straying from where your eyelids meet; framing your mouth like parentheses; scoring your brow: intriguing fine details on the map of your face. I want to plan a leisurely route around them, explore a little.
I lift a corner of the blanket in invitation but you shake your head. "I have to go, Mulder."
Of course you do. You always do.
"I'll see you in the office," I say. My voice is a worn, dull monotone.
"Not today, Mulder. I'm teaching at Quantico today, favor for Skinner. He said that since I wasn't using the vacation days I apparently arranged to take..." you pause.
Your eyebrows draw towards your nose and your eyes ice over -- I shouldn't like that expression because it means I'm in deep shit, but it's so very you.
"And I say 'apparently' because I can't remember doing that. Am I perhaps suffering from amnesia, Mulder?"
"Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit." It's a little early in the morning for originality.
"Must be why it suits you," you retort sternly and then spoil the effect with a smile, your hand moving through my hair now. You opens your mouth to say something, close it again. I look into your eyes and send out a psychic command; speak to me.
You draw in a breath. "Mulder. Why didn't you just *ask* me to come with you?"
"I did ask you." My reply is an undignified squawk.
"You asked me to come see crop circles. Which in fact never appeared."
"Only because I wanted you to go."
"I'd have gone if you told me the real reason."
I'm tired of this moebius strip argument.
"Would you?" You swallow and tell me yes and the pleasure of hearing the admission makes me feel generous.
I add: "But then you would have missed seeing Daniel and I think you needed to see him." Hah. That asshole. I don't even like to say his name.
The silence lasts a year or two.
"I have to go," you repeat finally. I drop the corner of the blanket I have been holding and flop back onto the pillows. My hair slips through your fingers like water, leaving your hand clutching at air. A Nile-length crack running across my bedroom ceiling suddenly fascinates me.
Warm fingers turn my face away from my new object of interest to my usual one. Your face is serious, professional. "I'll be back tonight, Mulder." I'm just savoring that when I notice the first flicker of uncertainty cross your face. "If that's okay," you say.
"Well, I was planning to wash my hair, but since it's you." I attempt nonchalance but I can feel a tree-frog grin begin to split my face.
"7pm at the latest." You plant a kiss on my forehead.
"Seven. Magic number."
"Fool. You're jetlagged. Go back to sleep."
I shut my eyes to the sound of you splashing in the bathroom, and as I fall asleep I think I catch the scent of warm earth, wild garlic and meadowsweet.
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