All the years later…

All the years later, in bed watching the spring light come up round the light fitting in the ceiling of my rented bedroom, all I could remember, when I tried, of that time, was:

that once a long time ago I’d helped the virtual stranger who’d phoned me earlier that day analyse a poem we’d both been set as an exercise at college,

that the stranger had been freaking out about not being able to understand it,

that it was a poem by the American writer e.e. cummings. I’d liked him back then.

Now, though, I knew he’d supported McCarthy and the US witch-hunts.

Now it was clear, too, that he was also a penner of a scatter of outright sexist and racist little verses in there with all the luminous and sensually disruptive love poems and all the recalibrations of words, punctuation, grammar, possibility, meaning.

Sigh.

That was life. Everything suspect. Nothing uncorrupt.

Which of the poems was it, again, they’d set us back then for that exercise?

It had something like the letters of the word death falling through it.

Death in reverse.

All I remembered about Martina Inglis was that after that visit she’d made to my room to brainpick me we’d not exchanged a single word again, not once, the whole rest of the time we were at college.

I’d occasionally seen her in the distance, across a lecture room, in the refectory, walking past in the library.

When I did, if she saw me, she ignored me.

Fine by me. I ignored her right back.

But now, so far in the future, I felt better than I’d felt for a while. For half an hour at least I’d been not-thinking about how much I didn’t care about anything.

Instead I was thinking of the turn in an ordinary stairwell in a library and how the window above it let light fall on it.

I was thinking of a day, a sunny afternoon when I’d been a student and I’d driven out of the city to an old ruined castle which nobody else ever seemed to visit, not whenever I visited it anyway. It had no attendant. It was just several stone walls and staircases with no roof, surrounded in lawn. Its insides were also all lawn.

Usually when I went there I went with friends. That day I’d gone alone. I’d climbed its spiral stone steps all the way up to its top and found a sunspot in the sheltered corner of one of its open walls.

Look, that’s me, sitting on stone thirty feet up in the air, my back against more stone, reading a novel for pleasure, it’s called Loitering with Intent, in the ruins of some long-gone rich person’s castle, someone who would never have imagined possible a day that the roof would be off his house – definitely his house rather than her house here given history’s predilections – and never have dreamed that one day the sun would hit this stony corner so uninterruptedly let alone that someone who, given history’s predilections, would in other times have been skivvying up and down the stairs, would be sitting in it that sunny day reading a book for pleasure.

The ghost of a past possible me runs down the stairs at five in the cold morning to clean a fireplace and prepare a fire before the master gets up.

The ghost of a future-past me sits against the stone wall, with the book open and a view beyond it across the countryside for miles.

Here in the future-future, shortly I’d fall asleep. I’d sleep properly and deeply that night with no difficulties. I’d dream a great dream, the kind dreamers recognize as a dream so good that they instruct themselves, even though they know they’re asleep and dreaming, that they’ve to be sure to remember this dream when they’re awake again.

In it I’d be wearing a kind of wolfskin over my whole self, the wolf’s head on my head so that if I’d looked in a mirror I’d have had two heads, one on top of the other. But the wolfskin, I’d realize in the dream, wasn’t an empty skin. It was a living wolf which had draped itself round my shoulders, not at all heavy, but warm, relaxed, as if happily hitching a ride.

I’d know when I woke up that I hadn’t travelled with a wolf in any form since before my mother died. That’s a long time.

Hello wolf, I’d say in the dream. Where’ve you been, old friend?

Look at its wolf-eyes exchanging a look in the mirror with me, its inner sheep.