May 2000 The Heath
THE HEATH
The Heath has changed by gradations since the nineteenth century, when it was uninterrupted swathes of green countryside where sheep grazed and poets mused, and Hampstead was a fashionable village with the City of London just about visible from the hilltops.
It’s still used for after-dark liaisons and teenage mischief, but by day it’s the domain of dog-walkers, joggers, swimmers, and kite-fliers.
Kenwood House remains the poshest corner; the staff in the tea rooms get to know me very well after two weeks.
I turn up every day, sometimes alone, sometimes with my friends, at different hours: late morning, early afternoon, mid-afternoon, late afternoon, even at closing time, when the sun winds down and a little patrol car herds stragglers to the nearest exit.
We watch the sky between the treetops for barn owls, but beyond that, it’s difficult to articulate exactly what we’re hoping to find.
A secret door? A fairy circle of glowing toadstools?
A key hiding in the well of an oak? Something otherworldly.
The memory of Sander has tuned us to a different frequency, but that doesn’t mean we can see the waves.
‘What if this is another dead end?’ I hold my jaw in my hands and stare at the trees. Jamie and I are resting on a picnic blanket in the approximate place where the stage was for our Kenwood Festival performance of La Sylphide. ‘I’ll never forgive myself if I fail him again. Or if I forget again.’
We divided the photos from my shoebox between us, promising to go to sleep with them in our hands, in case some shadowy thing tries to steal away our memories in the night.
Two weeks on, and we’re managing to recall his face, his name, even his voice, without having to rely on the photos.
Our memories of him are paths rediscovered, our feet treading them a little deeper into the ground each time.
‘If you do forget again, you won’t know you need forgiving.
’ Jamie picks up my hand and holds on to it until I look him in the eye.
‘I’ve got to ask, for all our sakes… even if we do find out what happened to him, have you considered – I mean really sat with the thought – that you might not want to find out? ’
Romeo, dead before he got to see Juliet breathe again. Aurora, suspended in a dream.
‘I have sat with it.’ Thoughts of every possible outcome have kept me from falling asleep. ‘It’s the hope that fuels me, even if it hurts. I can’t stand it, but it gives me strength.’
Jamie nods, inhaling deeply as he surveys the park.
‘I know that feeling. That’s why I ask. Being back here makes me think of them: the friends of friends I used to pass around here.
The boys I met in bookshops and bars, in cinemas.
I’d see them all around the city. A few of them even came to the Dance Hall to watch… ’
‘Ooh.’
‘I know, eye candy in tights, that was me.’ Jamie pinches grass blades and shreds them in his fingers, watches them disappear on the breeze.
‘But then I stopped seeing them, as if they’d upped and moved overnight.
A few weeks, months, even years later, I’d ask someone, “Whatever happened to so-and-so? I miss him.” And the news was the same, every time. ’
I push myself up and sit back. Without his glasses, Jamie looks more like his thirty-year-old self.
‘Honestly, Trix? I can’t blame you for following this new-found hope, surreal as it is. If I could reach through the ether and rescue everyone who got pulled away too soon… well, wouldn’t we all?’
‘Please don’t tell me you feel guilty. For being here when they’re not.’
Jamie slides his glasses back on. Takes another breath. Turns his face to the sun, still late-spring gentle.
‘Guilt doesn’t help anyone. Memory does.’
* * *
On the last Friday of May, just to be sure I’ve tried everything, I arrange for a taxi to drop me off by Kenwood House at half past four in the morning, before sunrise.
Apart from one stranger and his golden Labrador in the distance, I’m the only person around.
An amateur birdwatcher, binoculars around my neck, scanning the trees for barn owls.
Nothing jumps out at me except the occasional grey squirrel.
I ascend Parliament Hill, taking what little consolation I can from the orange-pink glow slicing its way through Stratford via Battersea.
‘I’m sorry, Sander. I’m sorry I was too slow for you. No change there.’
I turn my back on the horizon and walk down the middle of the hill, following the shortcut through the grove of trees.
The dawn mist lies close to the ground, but it’s so thick I can almost picture my ankles leaving eddies and swirls in my wake.
I’m debating whether to wait for the first bus or first tube of the day when a bald man approaches the grove from Lime Avenue with quick, practised strides.
It takes a moment before I realise why he looks familiar. The magic of reclaimed memories, an impact that knocks the breath out of me.
Without drawing attention, I pick up my pace. I follow his pale head into the trees.
I come out on the other side of the grove. He doesn’t. He is nowhere, in any direction.
I double back and check either side of me. He’s vanished.
But his name hasn’t.
* * *
‘Glen?!’ Down the phone, I hear the thump of Fiona’s palm against the shop counter. ‘He’s been mixed up in this all along? He’s… one of them?’
‘We still don’t know who or what we mean by “them” but, yes, I think that’s safe to assume.’
‘His own flatmate. His oldest friend.’
‘And one of the two men who followed him into the Dance Hall that day.’ I walk my phone to the coffee table where the photograph from Sander’s birthday party now lives in a frame.
Different pictures in every room, creating a web of memory.
Now that I’ve seen Glen with my present-day eyes, some of the haze surrounding Sander’s disappearance has cleared.
I thought I hadn’t got a good enough look at the men across the road, but I had.
The sight was never the problem, it was – had always been – the memory in someone else’s grasp.
It bothers me that the other man remains a stranger – was he always, or is he another person erased from my mind?
‘I don’t know if Glen has anything to do with Sander now, but he’s the only lead we have.
I’m going to do another stakeout tomorrow.
This is going to sound odd,’ I add, the thought only just occurring.
‘But I think he used the mist to his advantage. I think it was… helping him.’
Fiona parses this. I wait for her to tell me not to speculate about too many things at once, to take a breath and slow down the obsessive spiral on which my brain operates. ‘I’ll come with you.’
‘Before dawn? Really?’
Fiona winces. ‘Oh, that’s hideous. But yes, I’m coming, so I can throttle him.’
* * *
We discover the hard way that Glen has no fixed routine when it comes to his Heath visits.
The only consistency is his route: always up the avenue of trees.
After a fruitless dawn watch, Fiona and I walk to Kentish Town to find their old flat.
This, too, proves unsuccessful. We loop three times around the same road, swearing on our mothers’ lives that the blue door and silver gate should be on a corner.
Perhaps Glen doesn’t own it anymore. Perhaps the new residents painted over the door and replaced the gate long ago.
‘Or perhaps they only allowed humans to see it when they wanted us to,’ Fiona says, with a little shiver at the way in which we have to refer to things now.
Refer to ourselves as “humans”, in opposition to some sinister, shadowy beings that can bend the laws of time and space like yarn through a knitting needle.
* * *
I keep coming back to the Heath, never more grateful to be free from the nine-to-five workweek.
Charlie, Jamie, and Carolyn take turns waiting with me on the other side of the grove, further down the hill, on one of the memorial benches that circle pillar-high trees.
We share my binoculars and sip from Thermoses of tea.
Finally, on the last evening of May, just after seven o’clock, Charlie spots him. He fumbles to cap the Thermos as I cut through the uneven slope of long grasses, cursing the stamina I’ve lost over the years.
I’m close enough to see the curve of his elbows, the face that doesn’t appear to have changed in a decade… before he passes and is gone again.
I groan so loudly that I startle a flock of parakeets out of their tree. Charlie turns in a rapid circle around the grove, open-mouthed.
‘Bastard.’ He sounds impressed. ‘But hey, at least now he’s shown us it’s here.’
‘It?’
Charlie narrows his eyes at the ground, tracing a long line with his arms. There’s nothing to see, but it’s as if Glen’s presence has kicked up a different sort of dust – our voices land softly, and the evening sun warms nothing.
‘I’m going about this all wrong. Again.’ I take out Sander’s folded list from my pocket and hold it to my chest. ‘Of course we can’t just follow him like humans, in a straight line, one foot before the other.’
‘Then how do you follow… whatever Glen really is?’
I arch my left foot, the weathered canvas of my shoe allowing it to point in a tendu and tap the earth.
‘We stop thinking like humans, and start thinking like dancers.’