Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

‘What about the other carriageway?’

‘Ah, well that’s going to be the point of the story. The southern carriageway they leave alone. They’ve allowed a thick barrier of trees and shrubs to grow along the edge of it and down the central reservation, so as to isolate it from its surroundings, and they never walk or ride on it at all except when they have to cross over it to take a turning south. Even then, their practice is to pass over it quickly, with eyes cast firmly down, not looking to the left or the right, and children are sternly warned not to peek.’

‘Presumably they have some reason for this?’

‘They certainly do. What they’ve decided, you see, is that the northern carriageway was intended for human travel and the other was meant for spirits. They call the southern carriageway the spirit road.’

‘And the spirits are what? The dead?’

‘Not just the dead. They use the word “spirits” to refer to things that seem to exist in some way but don’t fit in with their understanding of the world. The people on the human carriageway can’t deny the existence of spirits altogether, however much they might like to, because the world is full of mysteries and contradictions, but they’ve very sensibly given those troublesome spirits their own road to travel on, so they can go about their own spirit business to their hearts’ content, and leave the humans undisturbed.’

‘But really this spirit road is just the westbound carriageway of the A14?’

He beamed at her. ‘That’s right. That’s a nice touch, don’t you think? I’m really quite taken with it.’

‘Yes, I quite like it too. I can see it has possibilities.’

‘Most people don’t have anything to do with the spirit road, except maybe the odd furtive glance when they have to cross over it. And that makes sense. It only unsettles them, and what use is it to them, anyway? They’ve more than enough to do and to think about on the human road, where folk trade and chat and joke and argue, and make friends and all the rest of it. I’m sort of thinking Canterbury Tales in the thirty-fifth century when it comes to the human road: plenty to see, plenty to do, plenty of fun to be had, plenty of drama, plenty of problems to be solved.’

‘But, let me guess, a few folk prefer the spirit road?’

‘You’re way ahead of me, Judy. It’s strictly against all the rules to walk on the spirit road, but some people are drawn to precisely that emptiness and stillness that most are so keen to avoid. They wait for quiet moments on the human road, when no one will see them creep through the trees and shrubs, and then they go and look at it, or even step out onto it and feel the invisible traffic passing all round them. Imagine a whole carriageway with nothing moving on it, screened off from its surroundings by trees! Once in a while a bird alights on it, or a deer wanders across, or perhaps the trees on either side sway a little and sigh in the wind. But most of the time, it’s completely silent. You can still hear all the sounds of the human road, of course, just on the far side of the trees – talk and chatter, shouts and yells, hooves and rumbling wheels – but, from the spirit road, all of that seems like another world.’

‘What do those people call themselves? The ones who like the spirit side?’

‘I’m not sure yet, but let’s say Southroaders for the moment. To them, the stillness and emptiness of the spirit road is pregnant with possibilities. I guess that’s what the spirits are really: possibilities, alternatives, things that are currently excluded from the human consensus on what’s real and what’s worth talking about. Sometimes, when the Southroaders creep out at night onto that empty carriageway, they even catch glimpses of a long-ago time, when there were so many red tail lights heading west that the road became a river of fire.’

Judy laughed. ‘Okay, so now let me have another guess. The Southroaders – who, by the way, sound suspiciously like Gerry the sci-fi man – discover some amazing new thing which the Northroaders would never have come up with. And it helps everyone. And then the Northroaders are forced to admit they’ve been completely wrong to stick so rigidly to their side of the road.’

Gerry smiled and shook his head. ‘No, Judy, the Northroaders aren’t wrong. Not at all. They’re the ones who get stuff done. And what’s more, the Southroaders are only drawn to the empty road because there’s something on the north side they don’t quite get or can’t quite face. All that activity and banter and hurly-burly, I suppose, all those complicated and confusing games which require so much commitment and concentration: it’s all a bit too much for them.’

‘I think you’re being a bit hard on them now, Gerry. After all, you said yourself that most people were scared of the spirit road, and tried not to even think about it. So, at least in some ways, it’s the Northroaders are the ones who are afraid to face things, and the Southroaders who are brave and bold.’

The walk was nearly over and the car park was in sight.

‘Well, I need to work on it,’ Gerry said, as they climbed down the steps at the end of the dyke. ‘These things take time.’

Judy ran to catch up with Gerry as they walked the last few yards to her car and, to Gerry’s pleasure and surprise, she slipped her arm through his.

‘Maybe a couple of them get together,’ she suggested. ‘Someone who’s at home on the north road and someone who’s happier with the spirits. Who knows, they might even complete each other?’

Gerry smiled, and cupped his hand briefly over hers before they got back into the car.

‘It’s a possibility, certainly. But it’s all at a very early stage and it still needs a lot more thought.’

Of course the city has long been famous as a place of wonders. Even in medieval times, visitors enthused about its fountains, colonnades and gilded spires. But every visitor, then and since, seems to agree that the greatest wonder of them all is the Sphere of Truth. Some six metres in diameter and with its entire surface packed tightly with images and hieroglyphs, it is recessed on a vertical axis into the face of the cliff that forms the city’s northern edge, so that one side of the sphere is in full view, while the other is hidden inside the rock.

I spent ten months over there in my youth, but I never learnt to read the inscriptions myself. Many years of study are required to master that uniquely complex ideographic script, developed specifically for the purpose of expressing abstract ideas in a highly compressed form. (So that, for instance, a single hieroglyph can represent ‘The idea that, in principle, human society is capable of improving itself indefinitely’, or ‘The belief that human beings should not necessarily be rescued from the negative consequences of their own actions’, or ‘The proposition that subjectivity, rather than material existence, is at the core of the universe’.) However, the script was beautiful and the images even more so: diagrams, symbols, scenes from stories, all beautifully inlaid with enamel so bright that it almost seemed luminous. In more peaceful circumstances, I could have spent many hours quietly examining those pictures from the tiered galleries provided for that very purpose.

But during my time in the city there was no peace in the vicinity of the Sphere. It was a scene of constant conflict. So much so that, if set down in any part of the Cliff Quarter at any time of the day or night, I could easily have found my way blindfold to the Sphere, simply by listening out for the shouting and the angry screams. Even in the early hours of the morning (when, in those days, the Sphere was only illuminated by the weak flickering glow of nearby street lights) there were people in front of it hurling abuse at one another. During the day, larger numbers gathered, and I saw stones and rotten vegetables being flung, and sometimes full-scale fights between rival groups that might each be twenty or thirty strong.