Chapter 40: The River of Milk
He walked and walked, his mind ablaze; his mouth set firm and his eyes fixed ahead, shedding lines of tears that he never stopped to wipe away.
Inside he was in conflict, a sickening spiralling of anger and fear – half of him wanting to go back and apologise and for Shen to look on him kindly, the other wanting to go back and pummel Hayden’s smug face into a bloody mess. But what would that achieve? He had already bloody won; Shen was his, not Con’s. A great tug of war was taking place in his soul; and he swung from one extreme to the other.
He had crossed the Silbury road before he realised why he was heading for the river, the deed he had gone there to do: the same deed he had failed that day the previous April on the night Melissa had died. But he did not know if he sought rebirth or dissolution. And in the moment of that realisation, with nothing left to lose or fight for, he felt as if the earth had crumbled beneath him and that he were falling further into the abyss... caring no more to protect himself from his own grief and anger a deeper darkness took him than any he had ever known and engulfed him, save for one small ember of anger that glowed deep down; so standing on the edge of the road, looking up at the stars he shouted, venting his rage….
'Am I to be judged by THAT?!!' he shouted at the sky. 'Christ I am GLAD I’m not like that! I’m glad I’m a fucking dreamer! I’d rather be poor and free every day of my life than, than THAT!’ he spat.
He tasted salt; and then in the blurry darkness beyond he thought he saw the shape of something dark against the lesser darkness of the fields; something coal-black sloping away towards the river; and he followed, no longer afraid; willing the dark hound to take him. And he followed where it had seemed to lead, towards the stream.
A faint breeze ruffled the surface of the river…
‘I am what I fucking am!’ He repeated. And in the void that punctuated this angry cry, which was nothing less than an affirmation of his true character and the taking of responsibility for every single one of his past actions, in the twinkling of an eye, all was changed… a realisation he had passed a point of no return; that he would no longer return to how he had been, scared to be who he was…
…and in the swirling, stinging veil of his tears he saw on the opposite bank not the dark crouched apparition he had glimpsed moments before, but, below the white of the moon, a smudge, a white phantom, a dream; a dark-haired girl on the banks of the river of Paradise; her hand waving, not beckoning, but sending him back; warning him…
Then it was gone, and a silent cry welled up from his throat, gasping.
‘Mel..?’ he whispered. There was no reply save the wind in the grasses; hissing like snakes; they seemed to say he could not join her, only by entering the river, and to enter the river, was to die.
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand; salty wetness smeared with red-ochre…
He took off his shoes and began to strip, walking resolutely into the gurgling cold waters; until shaking uncontrollably, he knelt in the holy water, he did not lay down and drink deep as his sister had done, no – he remained upright and splashed three great handfuls of the chill water over his face and shoulders, gasping.
‘Release me, Mother… May all that was hindering me, begone!’ he shouted. ‘I am what I am; no man nor woman will ever change that. Fuck them all. Because you know what? I choose me! I choose me! I admire the person I am; I’ve fucked up in the past, but only as I worried what others thought. I don’t act for them anymore… I stand naked before you!’ he addressed the crescent moon, floating above the brows of Pegasus, near the gushing waters of Aquarius…; ‘see me for who I am!!!’ and he stood up in the water, his arms outstretched, his eyes seemed to roll up into his head… as it seemed wave upon wave of grace flowed up through his entire body…
‘I. AM. PUCK!!!’
And then he slipped; the slimy rock under his foot seemed to shift in the water and he twisted and fell, his foot caught between the rock and the roots of a strong Elder sapling on the bankside; and he teetered and fell to the side, catching his side on a half-submerged branch that tore a hole in his shirt and scraped at the skin; he felt his side hit the water and then all was black and freezing cold and muffled; he kicked out but his foot was held fast; he shouted and it burst out of him as bubbles; his ankle and side screaming with pain, he was encased in a shroud of black ice and he pushed out with his arms, ineffectually, trying to lift himself out of the water, but only managed to scrape great clouds of chalky debris up from the floor of the stream.
No thoughts came – just a wave of terror like he had never felt before; he was going to drown here; and then a surge of energy burst through him as he struggled for his life, a berserker rage that saw his limbs flailing in all directions – not knowing which way was up – and he involuntarily drew in a breath – a mouthful of the brackish blackness; his eyes wide in horror seeing nothing but flashing stars… his neck seeming to snap back, the bones feeling like they were breaking, and then a silence deeper than he had ever known, a void on the edge of eternity…
Then suddenly something was around him – pulling him backwards – arms around his chest, wrenching him backwards from the watery abyss back into time - turning him, dragging him half up the reed covered bank.
‘Fookin breathe man!’
With a rasping inrush of slimy water and air Con’s lungs which had closed off to protect themselves finally opened – a great glut of choking stuff lodged halfway down his throat and then was expelled.
Con lent forward, eyes streaming as he coughed and retched violently; mud, water, then sickly sour beer ejected with a splash into the water below; twice again he heaved and emptied his throat and stomach; he was nothing but a void, emptying, emptying, until he lay shaking violently, tears streaming from his eyes, on the bank, and wiped the snot and puke from his mouth.
Wolf was speaking, but Con understood nothing, he was weeping uncontrollably; Wolf was there directly before him;
‘Get up, come on – just get onto the grass – you’re in shock.’
Numb and vacant he took Wolf’s proffered arm and dragged himself on legs made of jelly onto the grass; a wave of nausea hit him and he retched again, and then he lay on the grass, on his side, eyes now wide open and his body shaking, uncontrollably weeping.
‘What were you doing, man?’ Wolf was asking.
‘I slipped. Accident… thank you.’ Con managed between deep breaths.
He looked skywards and felt a shaking deep inside, and then a sensed light; for that ember of anger, that tiny pin-prick of light in the dark of the abyss, had in the moment it was vocalised relit in his being a fire long smothered; Conall was free, as free as the moment he had emerged from his mother’s womb – naked, shivering, wet with the waters of the Kennet – he had crossed from one state to another; the old him - what had really been but a shell of phobias, an armoured mask defending itself from the threat of change, of death, of his own reality that so sacred him, had itself died, drowned in those waters of despair, and as he had crumbled he had been reconstituted, and he cried out with joy like a newborn, hearing the sound for the first time.
His mind was a blossoming of new emotions – unfettered; joy and deep, deep sorrow. Understanding.
‘I’m not afraid anymore, Mel! I’m not afraid!!!’ he shouted, and the tears that mixed with the river water on his cheeks were tears of joy. He looked up at the stars and saw them for what they were, not thermonuclear furnaces creating matter but great beings of immeasurable age, singing the cosmos into being… and at that moment he knew, just knew, that he had existed in one form or another since the beginning of time and that he and they would always exist; he had stepped out of time and the scales had fallen from his eyes; what was time? It had ceased to have meaning - he felt in an instant the genetic history of his entire being… from man to ape to mammal back to the first fish swimming in the primal oceans, whose origins were still remembered in the sea-like saltiness of his blood; millions upon millions of years and millions upon millions of lives rising into being and annihilation; and they were not separate from him, they were him and in that transformative moment he did not know whether Conall Astor was a creature of flesh or fish… or where the stars ended and where he began, for there was no difference - all was one; all had always been one; and all would always be one.
A few minutes later they were walking back from the river, Wolf’s arm supporting Con, who was walking in a kind of trance.
‘There’s something you should know about Melissa,’ he said. ‘She killed herself, Wolf. We told everyone that she’d drowned by accident – but she didn’t.’
‘Shit, man. Shit. I’m so sorry.’
‘We didn’t want any copycat deaths – fans apeing what she did; so we said it was an accident; but the death certificate and the coroner ruled she had killed herself. She had three times the legal limit of alcohol in her blood; she’d written a short note – in her book, the one I showed you the other morning – and she’d left it open on the riverbank on that page.
I’m going to the river to die; to die, Wolf – that’s what she’d said:
No more to drink the milk of paradise ’
‘I was here, Wolf. I got a phone-call from her husband to say that she’d gone missing and I just assumed she’d run away with someone else. Tony was a wanker – and she’d gone and so I was happy, I didn’t think twice. I didn’t know she was in this state. I was here – I didn’t go and look for her. I was too besotted with Shen; I should have gone but I didn’t – I was here laughing and kissing and happy and my twin sister was already dead…the night before Tony’s text...’
Oh my poor Melissa. Poor Titania.
‘She’d put stones in her bag to weigh her down.’
‘It’s not your fault, Con. What could you have done?’
‘I could have listened. She seemed happy but maybe she had just become resolute at what she wanted to do. She told me she’d been writing lyrics about death, for fuck’s sake and I didn’t see what she was trying to say.
‘The day I kissed Shen on West Kennet was the day I got the message. I ignored it, Wolf – I thought deal with it Anthony, she’s left you. And by then she was already dead. And I didn’t know.’ His breath had calmed slightly. He paused then turned to look Wolf in the eyes.
‘Aren’t twins supposed to know? Shouldn’t I have felt it? But that night, the night before his text, I had come here, I’d had a dream, years before – of submerging myself in a river, and that night I just had this urge to come here and enact it; but when I was standing on that bank there, deciding not to wade in, she was actually doing it. I didn’t put the two together until a few days later when my Mum rang to tell me they’d found her body. When she rang I just left. I didn’t tell Shen why I had gone. I didn’t say goodbye I just left.’
‘Even if you’d gone after you got Anthony’s message it would have been too late, Con.’ Wolf said.
Con shrugged. ‘But I still ignored it – I can’t believe I stayed and just dismissed it. I can’t believe I ignored the warning signs from her; she must have been trying to tell me those last few times we met. I was selfish.’
‘You can’t save her Con, you couldn’t have saved her then, either. In this shitty world you can only save yourself.’
Con stared at the sky.
‘And you know what?’ Wolf said.
‘Hmm?’
‘It’s not Shen’s fault either.’
‘I never said it was.’
‘You were happy here and you think you should have been fucking miserable or you should have been there and stopped it; but you carried on. I think you think your intoxication with Shen blinded you to something you should have been feeling. That somehow being here with her was wrong; and so for you Shen somehow represents that wrong. But it’s not her fault.’
‘I know it’s not’
‘But you act like it is. You keep her at arm’s length. You’re distant – she says you’re distant; that you’re not who you were. You need to do two things: forgive yourself and forgive her; you were happy, you deserve that. You can’t change what happened; all you can do is change how you react to it.’
‘Have I fucked it up?’ Con asked, shaken.
‘No mate; not at all. Life goes on. You have to go on. Start again.’
He walked and walked, his mind ablaze; his mouth set firm and his eyes fixed ahead, shedding lines of tears that he never stopped to wipe away.
Inside he was in conflict, a sickening spiralling of anger and fear – half of him wanting to go back and apologise and for Shen to look on him kindly, the other wanting to go back and pummel Hayden’s smug face into a bloody mess. But what would that achieve? He had already bloody won; Shen was his, not Con’s. A great tug of war was taking place in his soul; and he swung from one extreme to the other.
He had crossed the Silbury road before he realised why he was heading for the river, the deed he had gone there to do: the same deed he had failed that day the previous April on the night Melissa had died. But he did not know if he sought rebirth or dissolution. And in the moment of that realisation, with nothing left to lose or fight for, he felt as if the earth had crumbled beneath him and that he were falling further into the abyss... caring no more to protect himself from his own grief and anger a deeper darkness took him than any he had ever known and engulfed him, save for one small ember of anger that glowed deep down; so standing on the edge of the road, looking up at the stars he shouted, venting his rage….
'Am I to be judged by THAT?!!' he shouted at the sky. 'Christ I am GLAD I’m not like that! I’m glad I’m a fucking dreamer! I’d rather be poor and free every day of my life than, than THAT!’ he spat.
He tasted salt; and then in the blurry darkness beyond he thought he saw the shape of something dark against the lesser darkness of the fields; something coal-black sloping away towards the river; and he followed, no longer afraid; willing the dark hound to take him. And he followed where it had seemed to lead, towards the stream.
A faint breeze ruffled the surface of the river…
‘I am what I fucking am!’ He repeated. And in the void that punctuated this angry cry, which was nothing less than an affirmation of his true character and the taking of responsibility for every single one of his past actions, in the twinkling of an eye, all was changed… a realisation he had passed a point of no return; that he would no longer return to how he had been, scared to be who he was…
…and in the swirling, stinging veil of his tears he saw on the opposite bank not the dark crouched apparition he had glimpsed moments before, but, below the white of the moon, a smudge, a white phantom, a dream; a dark-haired girl on the banks of the river of Paradise; her hand waving, not beckoning, but sending him back; warning him…
Then it was gone, and a silent cry welled up from his throat, gasping.
‘Mel..?’ he whispered. There was no reply save the wind in the grasses; hissing like snakes; they seemed to say he could not join her, only by entering the river, and to enter the river, was to die.
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand; salty wetness smeared with red-ochre…
He took off his shoes and began to strip, walking resolutely into the gurgling cold waters; until shaking uncontrollably, he knelt in the holy water, he did not lay down and drink deep as his sister had done, no – he remained upright and splashed three great handfuls of the chill water over his face and shoulders, gasping.
‘Release me, Mother… May all that was hindering me, begone!’ he shouted. ‘I am what I am; no man nor woman will ever change that. Fuck them all. Because you know what? I choose me! I choose me! I admire the person I am; I’ve fucked up in the past, but only as I worried what others thought. I don’t act for them anymore… I stand naked before you!’ he addressed the crescent moon, floating above the brows of Pegasus, near the gushing waters of Aquarius…; ‘see me for who I am!!!’ and he stood up in the water, his arms outstretched, his eyes seemed to roll up into his head… as it seemed wave upon wave of grace flowed up through his entire body…
‘I. AM. PUCK!!!’
And then he slipped; the slimy rock under his foot seemed to shift in the water and he twisted and fell, his foot caught between the rock and the roots of a strong Elder sapling on the bankside; and he teetered and fell to the side, catching his side on a half-submerged branch that tore a hole in his shirt and scraped at the skin; he felt his side hit the water and then all was black and freezing cold and muffled; he kicked out but his foot was held fast; he shouted and it burst out of him as bubbles; his ankle and side screaming with pain, he was encased in a shroud of black ice and he pushed out with his arms, ineffectually, trying to lift himself out of the water, but only managed to scrape great clouds of chalky debris up from the floor of the stream.
No thoughts came – just a wave of terror like he had never felt before; he was going to drown here; and then a surge of energy burst through him as he struggled for his life, a berserker rage that saw his limbs flailing in all directions – not knowing which way was up – and he involuntarily drew in a breath – a mouthful of the brackish blackness; his eyes wide in horror seeing nothing but flashing stars… his neck seeming to snap back, the bones feeling like they were breaking, and then a silence deeper than he had ever known, a void on the edge of eternity…
Then suddenly something was around him – pulling him backwards – arms around his chest, wrenching him backwards from the watery abyss back into time - turning him, dragging him half up the reed covered bank.
‘Fookin breathe man!’
With a rasping inrush of slimy water and air Con’s lungs which had closed off to protect themselves finally opened – a great glut of choking stuff lodged halfway down his throat and then was expelled.
Con lent forward, eyes streaming as he coughed and retched violently; mud, water, then sickly sour beer ejected with a splash into the water below; twice again he heaved and emptied his throat and stomach; he was nothing but a void, emptying, emptying, until he lay shaking violently, tears streaming from his eyes, on the bank, and wiped the snot and puke from his mouth.
Wolf was speaking, but Con understood nothing, he was weeping uncontrollably; Wolf was there directly before him;
‘Get up, come on – just get onto the grass – you’re in shock.’
Numb and vacant he took Wolf’s proffered arm and dragged himself on legs made of jelly onto the grass; a wave of nausea hit him and he retched again, and then he lay on the grass, on his side, eyes now wide open and his body shaking, uncontrollably weeping.
‘What were you doing, man?’ Wolf was asking.
‘I slipped. Accident… thank you.’ Con managed between deep breaths.
He looked skywards and felt a shaking deep inside, and then a sensed light; for that ember of anger, that tiny pin-prick of light in the dark of the abyss, had in the moment it was vocalised relit in his being a fire long smothered; Conall was free, as free as the moment he had emerged from his mother’s womb – naked, shivering, wet with the waters of the Kennet – he had crossed from one state to another; the old him - what had really been but a shell of phobias, an armoured mask defending itself from the threat of change, of death, of his own reality that so sacred him, had itself died, drowned in those waters of despair, and as he had crumbled he had been reconstituted, and he cried out with joy like a newborn, hearing the sound for the first time.
His mind was a blossoming of new emotions – unfettered; joy and deep, deep sorrow. Understanding.
‘I’m not afraid anymore, Mel! I’m not afraid!!!’ he shouted, and the tears that mixed with the river water on his cheeks were tears of joy. He looked up at the stars and saw them for what they were, not thermonuclear furnaces creating matter but great beings of immeasurable age, singing the cosmos into being… and at that moment he knew, just knew, that he had existed in one form or another since the beginning of time and that he and they would always exist; he had stepped out of time and the scales had fallen from his eyes; what was time? It had ceased to have meaning - he felt in an instant the genetic history of his entire being… from man to ape to mammal back to the first fish swimming in the primal oceans, whose origins were still remembered in the sea-like saltiness of his blood; millions upon millions of years and millions upon millions of lives rising into being and annihilation; and they were not separate from him, they were him and in that transformative moment he did not know whether Conall Astor was a creature of flesh or fish… or where the stars ended and where he began, for there was no difference - all was one; all had always been one; and all would always be one.
A few minutes later they were walking back from the river, Wolf’s arm supporting Con, who was walking in a kind of trance.
‘There’s something you should know about Melissa,’ he said. ‘She killed herself, Wolf. We told everyone that she’d drowned by accident – but she didn’t.’
‘Shit, man. Shit. I’m so sorry.’
‘We didn’t want any copycat deaths – fans apeing what she did; so we said it was an accident; but the death certificate and the coroner ruled she had killed herself. She had three times the legal limit of alcohol in her blood; she’d written a short note – in her book, the one I showed you the other morning – and she’d left it open on the riverbank on that page.
I’m going to the river to die; to die, Wolf – that’s what she’d said:
No more to drink the milk of paradise ’
‘I was here, Wolf. I got a phone-call from her husband to say that she’d gone missing and I just assumed she’d run away with someone else. Tony was a wanker – and she’d gone and so I was happy, I didn’t think twice. I didn’t know she was in this state. I was here – I didn’t go and look for her. I was too besotted with Shen; I should have gone but I didn’t – I was here laughing and kissing and happy and my twin sister was already dead…the night before Tony’s text...’
Oh my poor Melissa. Poor Titania.
‘She’d put stones in her bag to weigh her down.’
‘It’s not your fault, Con. What could you have done?’
‘I could have listened. She seemed happy but maybe she had just become resolute at what she wanted to do. She told me she’d been writing lyrics about death, for fuck’s sake and I didn’t see what she was trying to say.
‘The day I kissed Shen on West Kennet was the day I got the message. I ignored it, Wolf – I thought deal with it Anthony, she’s left you. And by then she was already dead. And I didn’t know.’ His breath had calmed slightly. He paused then turned to look Wolf in the eyes.
‘Aren’t twins supposed to know? Shouldn’t I have felt it? But that night, the night before his text, I had come here, I’d had a dream, years before – of submerging myself in a river, and that night I just had this urge to come here and enact it; but when I was standing on that bank there, deciding not to wade in, she was actually doing it. I didn’t put the two together until a few days later when my Mum rang to tell me they’d found her body. When she rang I just left. I didn’t tell Shen why I had gone. I didn’t say goodbye I just left.’
‘Even if you’d gone after you got Anthony’s message it would have been too late, Con.’ Wolf said.
Con shrugged. ‘But I still ignored it – I can’t believe I stayed and just dismissed it. I can’t believe I ignored the warning signs from her; she must have been trying to tell me those last few times we met. I was selfish.’
‘You can’t save her Con, you couldn’t have saved her then, either. In this shitty world you can only save yourself.’
Con stared at the sky.
‘And you know what?’ Wolf said.
‘Hmm?’
‘It’s not Shen’s fault either.’
‘I never said it was.’
‘You were happy here and you think you should have been fucking miserable or you should have been there and stopped it; but you carried on. I think you think your intoxication with Shen blinded you to something you should have been feeling. That somehow being here with her was wrong; and so for you Shen somehow represents that wrong. But it’s not her fault.’
‘I know it’s not’
‘But you act like it is. You keep her at arm’s length. You’re distant – she says you’re distant; that you’re not who you were. You need to do two things: forgive yourself and forgive her; you were happy, you deserve that. You can’t change what happened; all you can do is change how you react to it.’
‘Have I fucked it up?’ Con asked, shaken.
‘No mate; not at all. Life goes on. You have to go on. Start again.’