CHAPTER 24
With a wave of my hand and an absurdly flippant “I’ll see you around,” I’d left James standing there. He watched me go.
Perhaps he also shook his head at my stupidity as I followed the track around the lake, but I’d never let darkness bother me before. The difference is that North London doesn’t have swarms of mosquitoes or thick jungle.
As the track moved into the trees and the darkness surrounded me like a blanket, so did the insects. They whined in my ears and nipped at my face, arms, and legs, and every step I made sent a throb through a blood vessel in my left temple. But, of course, I’m a physician who specialises in the effects of dehydration as well as a council trash collector.
Don’t worry. Drink plenty of fluids. The road is this way. See the lights ahead? As soon as you’ve had a drink and recharged, you can post messages to friends and family back home. What family? What friends? Well, workmates then. Workmates who enjoy reading humorous texts and descriptive messages like “Mozzies the size of jet fighters” or “Bites on my neck worse than anything Sandra gives.” Don’t worry. You’ll have them in stitches.
The trouble was that, when I eventually looked up, the lights had disappeared because the track had turned the other way. So I stopped walking and wondered if it was a good time to take off my shirt and wring out the sweat.
I couldn’t speak because my throat was too dry. Everything else was sopping wet, and a voice in my ear told me to turn around and go back, but the darkness was complete. Edmonton was never as dark as this even during a power cut in December. And, anyway, I had no idea which way to go. I know every side street and every pothole within walking distance of Coolie’s place, but here I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face. I could feel the ground beneath my feet, but I couldn’t see it. I reached out to touch something, anything, and found branches and leaves. Even the stars had gone hidden by overhanging trees.
Have you ever felt a primeval fear running through your veins? It was like God had turned the lights off, turned the thermostat up to maximum, and walked away.
There was only word left to mutter as I stood there, feeling I’d suddenly gone blind. “Fuck!” I dared to not even sit down because I was unsure what lay amongst the foliage at my feet. So I just stood there, staring into the blackness.
It felt like an hour, though perhaps it was only minutes later that I saw a beam of light coming and going, rising and falling, picking out treetops, and sometimes pointing in my general direction. But I stood petrified, oozing with sweat and wondering if this was the giant scorpion with the megawatt light on its tail, I once saw on one of Coolie’s videos. And it knew my name. “Kurt,” it called amongst the cracking of undergrowth.
No words were spoken when James arrived. He just shone the torch into my sweaty, terrified face. Then I followed his torchlit orange trousers back through the trees and onto the road. Even then, he seemed to find some clever final words.
“We have reached the crossroads, Kurt,” he said. “We can choose to go left, right, or straight on, but whichever way we go, we will always arrive back where we started.”
I didn’t have the energy to match such deeply philosophic observations, so I just looked at him like a badly behaved seven-year-old.
“How long are you staying around here?” he asked, but I couldn’t even give an accurate answer to that.
“A few days, maybe.”
He flicked a dirty thumbnail back the way we’d just come. “Meet me tomorrow afternoon by the lake.”