Extract from Chapter One of...
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......Some time around mid-afternoon there came a break in the rain, and Ronan’s spirits lifted. He was speeding westwards where a dove-grey blur of sunlight hovered across the land as tranced and discontinuous as his own vague processes of thought. The old Rover was sweetly tuned; he was making good time. A couple more hours should see him at the coast, breathing sea-air and looking for a place to stay. Until then he was in an agreeable state of free fall between experiences, and everything felt subtly different. Air and space were extending freely round him, the breadth of England wheeling by - green paddocks and rough pasture, flanks of turned earth the colour of iron oxide, and a far blue prospect of misty hangered hills.
......He had almost forgotten how good it was to leave the city, to breathe easily under the enlarging sky, to feel this blessed freedom from constraint. It was as if he’d prised himself free of his outworn life and it had come away clean. Ronan leaned his head out of the open window and took the rush of damp air at his mouth. He gasped at the force of it, feeling his mind turn suddenly nomadic. He saw the finally unownable land spread out before him, unfolding itself, all invitation. Old griefs expired. Decisions had been made and taken, everything put at risk. Again the gamble of it brought his heart to his mouth, but the road gleamed ahead of him like polished slate, and every approaching overpass began to take on disproportionate significance, as though it marked a frontier checkpoint or an entrance on another world.
......Forty-seven now, balding behind the frontal sweep of his hair, Ronan smiled at this last extravagance, and thought, why not? To put one’s foot down hard and go, just go, with no more thought for destination than for consequence. To flex the will so far beyond its ordinary range you simply vanished: no trap-doors, no magic cabinets, just instant transmission into elsewhere - gone! His smile widened with the realization that if things worked out, another world was waiting for him - out there on that marvellous reach of coast which had basked in the day’s only sunshine while he’d fretted through the rainy frenzy of the motorways. So he wasn’t just crossing the country after all - he was transiting between worlds; and this sudden absurd exhilaration was the closest he’d come to a sense of untrammelled liberty since the adventures of his youth. It increased his appetite for speed.
......In the lane ahead a grimy hire-van rattled along at a steady takeable seventy. Ronan checked his rear-view mirror where the Peugeot that had followed him for miles still coasted uncomfortably close. Time it was shaken off!
......Already he was drifting out and reaching for the indicator when the picture in the mirror shifted. Some distance back the hunched figure of a motorcyclist in black leathers and a scarlet helmet had bobbed into the outer lane. An impatient click escaped from Ronan’s lips. He pulled back, and glimpsed a white movement from the corner of his eye - not in the mirror-glass, but to its left, nearer the edge of his vision, up ahead, perhaps two hundred yards away: a swan was winging through the livid air, white against the grey unstable clouds, descending rapidly.
......For a second or two the sight impressed itself on his mind with bright, heraldic clarity. His mood changed again, he felt a familiar yearning flex the muscles of his heart; and he was gone for the moment, returned to the bedroom of her flat where they lay between cool sheets and she was reading aloud, one rainy afternoon, some poem - a love poem - about a swan. He heard the dusky cadences of her voice, the scatter of rain against the window-glass. He saw the soft hollows made by her collar-bones, and the skin gleaming at her shoulders. He saw the sudden brake-lights of the white hire-van ahead - they were glowing red and he was closing in on them with reckless speed. He saw that, senselessly, the van was skidding to a halt. His eyes widened, the heart jumped; but even as he gasped in shock, Ronan understood.
......Deceived perhaps by the sheen of damp asphalt, imagining a river there below, the swan was about to alight on the busy carriageway. The driver of the van had seen what was happening and, in an effort not to collide with the descending bird, had stood on his brakes.
......Instantly Ronan’s own foot shifted too, but by the time his shoe-sole reached the pedal certain things were clear. The Peugeot was too close on his tail and travelling too fast to stop. If Ronan braked, his car would be crushed between the halted van and the oncoming saloon, or tossed like a beer-can into the traffic on the other side. He ran the sequence through his mind. He saw the pictures.
......Yet there might still just be time and room enough to swerve out round the van before the more distant motorcyclist entered the same space. It took the merest fraction of that time to calculate that if an accident was about to happen his own chances would be better swerving than braking; and so, with part of his mind already in court pleading blamelessness, Ronan pulled down on the wheel.
......There came the long protest of a horn.
......Ronan’s drawn breath sought to make his car seem needle-thin. Then the van was slinking intimately past his left-hand wing-mirror as, in another dimension, through a different, blacker wedge of the spectrum, the astounded biker veered towards the rough grass round the central crash-barrier at his right.
......The second-hand on the dashboard clock had advanced almost no distance at all since he’d seen the lights glow red, but there was leisure enough for him to admire in breathless gratitude the diligent, jinking slide with which machine and rider somehow finessed the perils of that inconstant gap before speeding furiously on. After that, there was no space left in Ronan’s mind beyond the patch of road directly in front of his own wheels where, slowed by the curved resistance of its wings, the swan was touching down.
......The great bird stumbled there. It might have been making a flustered curtsey to the traffic passing on the other side as, slowly, in a puzzled beseeching of patience with such untypical disarray, the swan craned its neck towards Ronan’s advancing vehicle, and vanished beneath its hood.
......There was a bump, a dull, lopsided jerk, no more. When he glanced, as he must, in the rear-view mirror, he saw a gaudy shambles on the road. The air was afloat with white down. Someone might have been shaking out an old mattress there.
......Some time later the rain returned. Ronan was speeding along, seeing as little of the road ahead as if his windscreen had been blurred by the backwash from a lorry’s wheels. When he switched on the wipers the focus of his vision barely reached the screen. He felt sick and shaky, dispossessed of all rights.
......Impossible not to imagine the driver of each approaching vehicle staring in horror at his blood-spattered front bumper where he had run down so vivid a creature as a swan and had not stopped. But what good would stopping have done - to stand helplessly over torn webs and smashed wings? A terrible thing had seized its chance to happen. The rainy air was tainted by the news. Nothing could ever be the same again.
......Less than forty minutes earlier he had been driving unexceptionably along the highway. Impulsive perhaps; yes, abstracted; but not overly rash. Now - by way of a transition in which time had distended and his grip on events had slipped beyond retrievable control - he was coasting blindly through an unchancy, half-aquatic world where he was experiencing a still graver discontinuity.
......Now it was like this: he could see his hands out there, holding the wheel; his skin might have been a shadow cast by some distant source of light. He felt himself to be shut inside his body in much the same way that the body itself was shut inside the car; yet it was all a much looser fit than before. He could feel the difference as a sort of mismatch, like an inacccurate adjustment in a printer’s colour register. It was as if he were instantly present to himself as his own ghost.
......The sensation was of sudden decompression, all the oxygen shocked from his air. There was sweat at his neck. He might have forgotten his own name. His head filled with the sound of distant screaming.
......All the certainty with which he had set out that day diminished to a sense of panic. The lies he had told no longer wore the aspect of minor theatrical triumphs; they merely confirmed a giddy sense of irreality. False in its pretexts, as probably also in its premises, this entire westward enterprise began to feel unsafe. In this condition nothing could work out well for him.
......Yet he did not turn back, for that, at this late stage of the game, seemed the one avoidable humiliation.