Metro Winds

THE MAN WHO LOST HIS SHADOW



I gaze through the windscreen at the unbroken, ornate facade of building after building, art nouveau and baroque details picked out delicately by the buttery gold of the streetlamps. It occurs to me that the thousands of tourists who travel to this city would feel they are stepping into the past, yet when this street was new, it would have looked very different. Night would have been an all-consuming darkness. The brash electric light that denotes the modern world and appears to have defeated and driven off that ancient darkness – from the streets, from corners, from the hearts of men and women – is an illusion.

Darkness is eternal and it will find its way, its crack, its vein.

The castle appears as the taxi driver promised, seeming to be lifted above the snarl of old town streets surrounding it on beams of light, to float in greenish illumination. He glances at me in the rear-view mirror and tells me in brutish English that the lights are switched off at the castle just before midnight. I imagine sitting somewhere, in a café perhaps, and waiting to see it swallowed up by the night.

‘You have business?’ he asks with a touch of irony that suggests he has some inkling of my affliction, though it is virtually unnoticeable at night. I consider telling him that the turbulent history of his country, the stony eroded beauty of this city that is its heart, fascinated me. But in the end I say only, ‘Yes, business’.

Thinking: a strange business.



I do not know how I lost my shadow. After the first shock wore off, I told myself it was freak chance. My shadow might not even have known what it was doing when it severed itself from me. I could easily envisage myself walking and hesitating at some slight fork in the street, my shadow going on, sunk in its own thoughts, failing to notice that it did so without me. Seconds later, I would choose the other way. Maybe after a time it realised what had happened and retraced its path, but by then I was long gone.

That was one of my earliest theories – hopes, you might as well say. One does not like to admit the possibility that one’s shadow has left on purpose. I consoled myself with a vision of my shadow, slipping frantically along walls and paths searching for me, wailing as forlornly as a lost child, occasionally plunging into pools of shadow and emerging with difficulty because it lacked a form to pull it from the larger shadow.

Now, I can more readily imagine its relief at being cut loose. It may have been a fortuitous accident that freed it, or maybe it saw its chance to be free, and took it. Either way, I blame my passivity for our estrangement. As a child, caught within the roaring machinery of the relationship between my parents, I had learned to defend myself with stillness. But having gained the habit of passivity, I could not rid myself of it, and so as an adult I found it almost impossible to engage with life. I was a fringe dweller of the most meek and timid ilk, and if someone had accused me of being a shadow in the world, I would have admitted it.

But that was before my shadow was lost, and I understood by the gaping void its absence left that it is we who need our shadows, not they us. Without it to anchor me to the earth, I became dangerously detached. I dreamed of the reassurance of its company, its small tug at my heels, its soft movement before me, feeling out my path like a blind man’s cane. Without it to bind me to the earth, I was like one of those astronauts whose each step on the moon is so buoyant it seems they might at any second step into infinity. I feared that without my shadow I would soon make just such a step into oblivion. I had understood at last that I was diminishing without its darkness to balance me, and knew that something must be done.



The taxi swerves violently to avoid another taxi that has tried to pull out from a side street and the driver mutters what sounds like a curse.

I note indifferently that I had not felt the slightest fear at our near collision.



That numbing of emotions was as unexpected a side effect of my affliction as my detachment from linear time, and as easily as my grandmother slipped one stitch over another with her delicate, sharp needles, I slip.

I am sitting in a café booth beside floor-to-ceiling windows. Blinding light floods the table and presses against the frozen transparency that divides it from the darkness beyond. Somehow, the glass keeps them separate. Time is like this, I think, but for me there is no wall of glass. The light and dark are converging, consuming one another.

There is a young couple in the booth opposite sitting in such a way that, although they appear to be independent of each other, their bodies touch all along one side from shoulder down through the hip and thigh to the heels, their connection far more intimate than if they had been wound together explicitly. They are not foreign as I am, although even in a no-man’s land like this establishment, where success depends upon its rejecting utterly any trace of the culture within which it exists, they belong in a way that I do not. Part of it may be because they are casually dressed, whereas I am wearing my formal but now somewhat crushed travelling clothes. Or maybe it is that they are young and I am not.

The girl is very tall and slender, as all of the women I have seen here seem to be – young women, anyway. The older women are as bulky as bears in their winter coats, their expressions forbidding and surly. The Asian stewardesses on the airline I flew with for the first part of the trip here were as small and fragile as blown-glass blossoms, while the German stewardesses on my second flight were young matrons with thick, competent arms and no-nonsense expressions. Here the faces of the young women are still and remote. One can see it is a general type and the girl opposite fits it. The waiter brings them two drinks – orangeade, perhaps – and a plate with two chocolate-coated cakes. A waiter is an anomaly in a place like this, a sign of the hybridisation of two cultures, perhaps, each trying to consume and subdue the other.

The girl takes up the plate and cuts into the cake, her expression unchanged. Inside the coating of chocolate is a pale, soft sponge or maybe some sort of creamy filling. She offers the laden fork to the boy, and my stomach spasms dully in what might be hunger. He is sitting very erect, although her spine is bent into a delicate bow and curled around the long, flat belly. She eats the remainder of the first cake and all of the second, licking her lips and talking, but never smiling, never showing any emotion. Her companion nods, and watches her with ravenous attention.

The waiter brings them a tall glass of fruit salad topped with a fat, loose whorl of impossibly white cream. The boy’s turn, I think, but he gestures at the glass and the girl pushes aside the empty plate and again offers a spoonful of fruit and cream to the young man, who shakes his head. As before, the girl eats the whole parfait with the same dreamy absorption. When she sets the glass down, the boy runs his hand over her belly possessively, and then slides it around to pull her to him to be kissed. When he releases her, I see that her hands have not moved throughout the embrace and her body retracts automatically to its former languid bow.

The boy has become aware of my regard, and gives me a curious look. I do not glance away, embarrassed. I feel almost no self-consciousness. The affliction that brought me to this strange outpost has advanced to the point where I hardly feel any need to pretend to be normal. The boy calls the waiter and pays the bill and, as they leave, the young woman settles her limp, expressionless gaze on me. There is no way of knowing what is going on in her mind. Perhaps nothing. When they have gone, my exhaustion returns and I begin to think of leaving.

Beyond the windows is a utilitarian rank of spotlit petrol bowsers, and beyond the asphalt surrounding them a narrow road curves back to join the highway bounded on either side by a dense pine forest, passing into shadow.



I did not know what it meant to lose my shadow.

After my initial blank disbelief upon discovering it, I sought help. Ironically, I went to a doctor first, a general practitioner more accustomed to removing warts and administering antibiotics and tranquillisers than to treating a man with an ailment as rare and arcane as mine. She offered me a calmative and, seeing her disdain, I told her somewhat haughtily that she need not suppose that anything was wrong with my mind. Could she not accept the evidence of her eyes as I had done? I lacked a shadow. What could be more empirical, more concrete? Yet she simply pretended to be confused by my symptoms.

‘What exactly do you want?’ she demanded finally.

I asked her coldly to refer me to a specialist in shadows, since her own training seemed to have left her ill-equipped for such exotic conditions. Somewhat maliciously, I suspect, she sent me to a radiologist, whose view of shadows was shaped entirely by his daily quest for the shadows that signified cancers and tumours on his X-rays. I can only say that his mind had been seriously warped by his profession.

When I told him of my problem, his eyes blazed and he clutched my arm hard enough to leave a bruise, proclaiming that I was the first human to have escaped the curse of shadows. He confided his belief that they were not bestowed by God, as was generally supposed, but had been visited upon us by some force which he refused to name. His mania was apparent when I questioned him about the purpose of shadows. He gave me an affronted look and asked what sort of man I thought he was, to ask him such a question, exactly as if I had asked the shade of his pubic hair. He had insisted on taking and developing an X-ray plate, which he examined suspiciously, finally announcing in a slightly resentful tone that he saw no shadow.

After that, I gave up on the medical profession. I was not really ill, I reasoned. Having lost a shadow I was more like a man whose wife leaves him, clearing out their apartment with mysterious speed and efficiency. With this in mind, I consulted a private investigating firm. The man who ran the agency gave his name as Andrews, which might as well be his surname as his first name. It occurred to me that a normal person would immediately be able to tell, but the nuance was too subtle for me so I contrived not to call him anything.

‘I’ve never been asked to shadow a shadow before,’ he said when I had laid the matter before him. I can only suppose he meant it as a joke, but I did not laugh. I am not good at humour, and I told him this. He squinted at me, seeming suddenly sobered.

‘Perhaps that’s the whole point,’ he said. ‘Your lack of humour. Think of it from the point of view of a shadow having to endure being dragged about, never having a chance to exert its own mind or will or taste. And on top of that, to be forced to live with someone who has no sense of humour. It must be unendurable.’ He seemed very sincere, but a certain reticence in my own character prevented me breaking down and confessing my fear of precisely this eventuality – that some profound lack in me had driven away my shadow. That was a matter to be resolved between my shadow and me. ‘They’re worse than slaves,’ he went on, ‘because they can only emulate. Nothing they do is original. There must be millions of them constantly plotting a coup, fed by dreams of freedom . . .’

‘Can you find it?’ I asked him flatly.

He looked through a leather ledger before consulting with his secretary, and after some negotiating, we agreed that he should have a modest retainer for a week. If after that time his enquiries had produced no promising clues, our contract would end. If he did find a lead, I would pay him a hundred dollars a day there-after, including expenses, until he found my shadow or my money was gone.

I gulped a little at the size of his daily fee, but a modest, hard-working life has enabled me to put aside a very good sum, and to comfort myself, I reckoned that ten thousand dollars spent on finding my shadow would still leave ample for my old age, and perhaps would even run to a restorative trip to the Greek Islands in the off-season after it was all over, so that my shadow and I could re-evaluate our relationship.

Perhaps it seems absurd to go to such lengths, but I was desperate.

Unfortunately, after a week, the investigator could report nothing. He confessed that my inability to remember when I had lost my shadow was a stumbling block. I blushed when he spoke of this, for his words seemed to me to suggest that I had been negligent. Though I continued to argue that the loss could only have happened a little before I noticed it, he clearly doubted me, and made me doubt myself. Brooding over what he’d said, it struck me that I could not remember the last time I had noticed my shadow. I ran my mind over the days before my retirement, and then the weeks and months leading up to it. Finally, frantically, I began to run my mind over the preceding years, but still I could not recall seeing my shadow on any specific occasion. I envisaged all the bright sunny days I had lived through, from forest walks in the autumn to a dip in the blazing summer heat, to no avail.

I could recall seeing my reflection many times, but not my shadow. I told myself at one point that, after all, it was only a shadow, and then was chilled, for perhaps it was just such carelessness that had driven it off. If that were so, I vowed remorsefully, I would show how much I valued it by the fervour of my search.

Fortunately my retirement meant I had no appointments or ties to hold me back. In fact, the investigator had the gall to suggest a link between my retirement and the day I noticed my shadow missing. Ridiculous, especially since he could not substantiate his notion with anything aside from the most simplistic chronological link. Was he suggesting my retirement had provoked the departure of my shadow, I demanded? He bridled at my tone, and though we parted politely, I did not go back to him.

‘Behind there, gardens,’ the taxi driver said, nodding at a high wall slashed with graffiti. I wondered why the garden was walled. Perhaps it was a zoological garden and some sort of wildlife dwelt in it. I saw the driver watching me.

‘Gardens,’ I said. But I was thinking of my shadow, the hunt for which had brought me across the world. In my own country the search had come to seem farcical, yet my sense of loss and desperation had grown. Finally it came to me that there was little tolerance for or interest in shadows in my country, with its excess of sunlight and brightness. Even the violent abuses committed upon its shores were like the violence of a depraved toddler, mindless acts motivated by primitive fears and incomprehension; they were devoid of true darkness. My shadow would never have remained there. It would have sought out an older, deeper place with crannies and corners where darkness fermented and ripened.

One evening not long after my last encounter with the detective, I was sitting in the communal television room of my boarding house and the person with the remote control changed channels. I found myself watching the end of a documentary in which the camera showed a series of views of an ancient city. The last shot was of a cracked wall, where a child’s shadow walked along the shadow of another wall, beneath a scrolling list of names. The documentary ended abruptly and I gave a cry of disappointment.

‘What is that place? Do you know where it is?’ I asked the other residents seated about in the mismatched chairs. A flat-faced, sombre-eyed man grunted that he ought to know, since he had been a child there before the occupation, before his parents had escaped and emigrated. I asked if they understood shadows in that place. It was a risky question, but there was a surreal quality to the light in the room which allowed it.

‘There was a time when people had to be shadows there,’ the man said.



My landlady reproached me for my selfishness when I told her of my intended journey. ‘What would your grandmother think?’ She had known my grandmother and had taken me in on her account. Now she was affronted by my decision to leave, as only a woman like her can be, a woman whose masochism was so convoluted that she regarded everything that occurred in the world as somehow directed at her. Nothing that happened, not a car crash in another city in which a stranger died, nor the razing of a park to build a racecourse, nor the swearing of a drunk weaving from a pub, was exempt from being gathered into her aggrieved personal worldview. Of course it was a stunningly self-centred, even socio-pathic way to regard the world.

I answered mildly that, if anything, my grandmother would understand best what I was doing, for she had been a woman of incredible wisdom. Spitefully, my landlady observed that it must have been the weight of all that wisdom that cracked her mind open like an egg. She meant to abash me, for it was true that my grandmother had been quite insane at the end of her life, but instead I remembered with sudden wonder how, not long before the end, she had appeared to become disorientated. She was always imagining she was in the house of her father, no matter where she was; that my home, or the hotel or mental institution or public toilet, were somehow connected to it, if she could just find the right door. She frequently exclaimed over a picture or vase, insisting that it had been moved from the mantelpiece in her father’s study, or from the hall table, and worrying that it would trouble him.

‘It is very vexing when things are moved around,’ she would sigh and scrub at her forehead fretfully with a tiny clenched fist.

Only now, in this moment, did I understand that her apparent confusion was an awareness of links that had been buried under life, hidden from reason. Children see these links between things very clearly, I believe. It is why they weep at one stranger and smile at another. So do the elderly, some of whom slough off reason with the same gusto with which many of them throw off their clothes, welcoming back the Eden-like simplicity and clarity of childhood. My grandmother’s confusion had been nothing less than a deeper seeing of the world, and the documentary had suggested to me that finding my shadow might require such vision. That frightened me, because such a manner of seeing cannot be learned or simulated, for that which allows one to see such links of necessity blinds one to other things. Nevertheless, I vowed that at least I would follow this one strange clue without question.



The airport was very crowded, or so it seemed to me, but perhaps it is always like that in the international terminal. I presented my ticket and little bag to the departure desk, feeling unexpectedly exhilarated. I thought of a quote I had read on my desk calendar the day I left work. What does not kill you makes you stronger. It can only have been a warning, for it had been little more than an hour later, walking to the tram stop in bright afternoon sunlight, when I had noticed the absence of my shadow.



I stared down at the ground in front of me, feeling the sun pouring on the back of my head and shoulders. I turned and looked up, intrigued and puzzled, to find out what other light sources could have erased my shadow. Then I noticed that the shadow of the light pole alongside me fell on the ground and up the wall. With a feeling of unreality, I held up a hand to the wall, but it cast no shadow.

I rushed home, staggering with terror, clutching my briefcase loaded with the paraphernalia from my emptied desk.



Another taxi swerves across in front of us, forcing the driver to run over the tramlines. The cobbles make the wheels drum under the seat, and I close my eyes, remembering intimately the way I was pressed into my seat as the plane left the earth and launched itself into a long, drawn-out, vibrating dusk in which the sun seemed to hang for hours half submerged by the horizon.



I decline the proffered tray of food, despite my hunger, and resolve to treat the long flight as a period of fasting and mental preparation for my search. I accept only water, as if I were on a religious pilgrimage. Night falls, and twelve hours later it is still night. I feel, disembarking into a day so darkly overcast and befogged, as if I have entered an endless night that will not be broken until I am reunited with my shadow.

Inside the terminal all is chaos because of the fog. People exclaim and speculate and there is talk of long delays for connecting flights. When a man from my flight complains, the woman at the transfer desk explains reproachfully that we were lucky to have been permitted to land at all. I step forward and name my destination and there is a flicker of interest in her weary eyes.

‘That’s becoming very popular. Some say it is the Paris of the 1920s all over again.’ Her vowels are so plump they are like fruit waiting to be picked.

Day passes imperceptibly into night and still there is no call to board. I resist suggestions to leave the airport and stay a night or two in a hotel, not wishing to be diverted from my purpose. The smell of food makes me feel faint and I decide to break my fast with a leisurely meal in one of the better restaurants the airport has to offer. The last meal I ate was a dinner of cabbage and boiled potatoes prepared by my tight-lipped landlady the night before I left. I am suddenly so hungry that the thought of even that grudging meal makes my stomach rumble. Nevertheless, I am grimy and sweaty after the long hours of travel and decide to bathe before eating. I exchange my last banknotes for a few English pounds, and manage to locate an attendant to unlock the shower and give me soap and a towel.

In the booth, I undress slowly and take a hot shower, enjoying the water on my tired skin. Another effect of the loss of my shadow has been to render my skin dreadfully dry and itchy. After what seems a very short interlude, the shower attendant hammers on the door and in an indescribable argot gives what can only be a command to make haste. I obey, surrendering the soiled towel and giving her a pound tip to demonstrate both my disapproval and my high-mindedness.

This transaction reminds me that I will need to change a traveller’s cheque if I want to eat. Coming out of the shower, I pat my pockets, searching for my wallet. Unable to find it, I decide I must have left it in the shower cubicle. Then it comes to me. I removed my jacket in the plane so it could be hung up, taking out both the wallet and the travel agency pouch containing my passport and travel documents, and sliding both into the seat pocket. On arrival, I had taken out the pouch, but I have no recollection of retrieving the wallet.

I go to the information desk, noting my lack of apprehension. I put the curious deadening of my feelings down to jet lag, but wonder if the atrophy of lesser emotions is a further symptom of my affliction.

‘If only you had realised immediately,’ the man tells me regretfully, a touch of Jamaica in his tone. Nevertheless he will make some calls. Can I come back in an hour. Not a question. I sit down for a while near his desk, then decide I can simply report the cheques stolen and arrange to have them replaced. My cards and other papers can be dealt with at another time.

I speak to the young woman at the Thomas Cook counter who assures me the cheques can be replaced quickly so long as I have their numbers, which are supposed to be kept separately. I explain that I have inadvertently packed the list in my baggage, which is checked through to my final destination and might even have gone on ahead.

‘That is against regulations,’ she tells me primly. ‘The bags must travel with the clients. Always.’

I say nothing, knowing as she does that bags sometimes travel without their people, just as shadows sometimes travel alone. It isn’t meant to happen, but it can. The announcement for my flight to board comes over the air.

‘I will get the cheques once I arrive,’ I tell her.

‘You can’t mean to go there without money,’ she exclaims. The genuine concern in her tone reminds me of the mysterious nature of my trip, and it comes to me that this mishap is a sign that I am failing to understand.

The young woman mistakes the confusion in my eyes and leans over her smooth counter to explain. ‘In a country like that, you must have money. Everything is for sale. Everything costs and you are safe as long as you can afford the price. Safety has a price, just like comfort or food or coffee.’

I sense that under these words she is telling me something important, but I cannot seem to understand. My mind feels numb. I insist that I have decided to go on. Surely this is the most unreasoned response to what has happened, and therefore the most apposite. Maybe it is even a kind of test. At my request, she writes the address of their office, saying there is a cheap bus to the centre. Upon arrival, I can walk to the office from the stop. Alternatively, I could take a courtesy bus to one of the bigger hotels – the Hilton, for instance – where they would quite likely sort out the lost cheques for me.

She is kind, but I have no desire to stay in a hotel like the Hilton. I will get a bus to the centre of the city after changing the little remaining cash I have, and walk about until daybreak. Then I will get the cheques replaced and find some suitable accommodation.

I check back with the airline attendant who reiterates that no one has handed in the wallet, then give him my landlady’s number in case it should appear. I dislike doing this, but I have no forwarding address to give and no one else’s name to offer other than my previous employer’s, and he is not the sort to maintain warm connections. Indeed, he made it abundantly clear that the severance payment was generous to ensure that I would not expect anything more from him.

Boarding the small plane that will carry me on the last leg of my journey, I wonder what my boss would think if he knew I was on my way, without money, to a city full of shadows and danger, where everything has a price.

On the plane I eat the small club sandwich offered, and drink as many cups of coffee as I can manage during the short flight, for I am beginning to feel very empty and it will be some hours before I can eat. The coffee makes my head spin and the sense of disorientation assailing me increases.

The face of the customs official at the airport is flat and severe, but his eyes are the same soulful brown as the man in the television room of my apartment house. As he takes my passport, I wonder absurdly if they could be related.

‘Reason for visit?’ he asks. His thick finger taps a blank space in the form I filled out. He slides a pen through the small window separating his official niche from me. I take it up and notice my fingers are trembling. I try to focus my thoughts. It is incredibly difficult, for even though I have understood the question I cannot seem to think how to answer it. I look at the official and find him staring hard at me, as if he is cataloguing my features for a report to be added to a file of suspicious foreigners.

I can feel sweat crawling from my armpits. I force myself to write.

‘Research,’ he reads. ‘What kind of research?’

I feel I might be about to faint or have some sort of convulsion. All of my glassy calmness seems to rupture. My heart beats in jerky, arrhythmic spasms. Then suddenly, with a feeling of delirious clarity, I understand that my reaction is a premonition connected to my ailment, and to my arrival in this country. I simply tell him why I am here. I feel as if I have peeled my skin off in front of him. I feel that, having told him my secret, I cannot draw breath without him permitting it. I feel a drowning, tremulous gratitude, as if I have put my life in his hands. I have a powerful urge to kiss his hands.

‘Your shadow,’ he says, and I realise he has not understood the word. His English must be regulation minimum and solely connected to his job. He stamps the passport and slides it back to me with the visa folded on top. As I take it up, I feel as if I have shown myself naked to a blind man.

By the time I walk out into the night carrying my bag, I understand that this has been a necessary encounter, an emotional procedure to be endured, perhaps no less vital for entry to this country as acquiring a visa. I feel stronger, though more detached than ever.

From the timetable, it seems as if I have missed the last bus to the city. A short, swarthy man sidles over and asks if I want a taxi.

‘Special taxi. Very cheap for you.’ He has grasped the handle of my bag and is trying to wrest it from me. I hold on and he ceases pulling at it. Perhaps he is surprised at my strength.

‘It’s impossible,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t want to take a taxi.’

He looks around furtively, and I have a memory of the Thomas Cook woman warning me about taxis in this city before we parted. She claimed the majority were run by a vicious local mafia and that many of the drivers pimp for gypsy prostitutes. She had told me of a taxi driver leaping out of his cab and beating two American tourists with a truncheon because they had crossed the street too slowly in front of him. Such fearless brutality suggested a level of lawlessness that ought to have made me wary, but the man holding onto my bag does not exude any air of power or malignancy. He looks more desperate than anything else. His clothes are ill-fitting and grubby, the cuffs of his jacket and trousers badly frayed. In fact, I wonder if he really has a taxi, or merely seeks to lure me to a discreet corner of the car park to mug me.

‘I don’t have the money for a taxi,’ I tell him. He stares at me in sullen bewilderment and so I make a dumb show of the day’s events, reaching for my wallet and discovering its loss.

He releases the bag. ‘No crown? You no want taxi?’ This possibility appears to confound him.

‘Later,’ I say, pointing away from myself as if to some distant future. Then it occurs to me that the best way out of my dilemma might simply be to ride about in a taxi until morning, when I can visit a Thomas Cook office, then pay him.

‘I would like to make a tour of the city,’ I tell him.

‘Tour? Now?’ He gapes at me.

I nod firmly. ‘An all-night tour. Fixed price. No meter.’

‘Tour,’ he says, sucking the word to decide if he likes the taste of it. He nods judicially. ‘Fixed-price tour. Cheap. You come.’

I make him name a price, then let him take my bag. He runs ahead into the misty darkness, and I try to calculate the hours since I last slept, but am defeated by the time difference between my country and this one, and by daylight saving on top of that. Did they bother saving daylight here, or did they save night instead? I realise at some level that I am becoming dangerously light-headed. My nostril hairs seem to be on the verge of freezing and the air is so cold it hurts to breathe it in.

He is standing by a beaten-up blue Skoda. ‘No taxi,’ he says earnestly. ‘Tour car.’

I take off my jacket and climb into the car.

He drives quickly and it seems to me it is uncannily dark outside. There are no lights along the highway, and no moon or stars. I tell myself it is overcast, yet I cannot help but feel the darkness is thicker here than back home, congealing at the edges. He does not slow as we reach the outskirts of the city. I stare out at the streets that flicker by like a jerky old black-and-white movie. Everything looks grimy, as if the night is slowly rubbing off onto the city.



‘Metronome,’ the driver comments, nodding at a set of dark steps leading up from the roadside and pointing up. ‘Up,’ he says.

‘A metronome?’ I ask doubtfully. We have circled the city several times now, and it is very late. We move swiftly because there are few cars on the road, mostly taxis or delivery trucks or great dark multi-country transit buses full of sleeping passengers. The castle is ahead of us again but I can no longer see it, and a vaporous mist is rising along the course of the river. No doubt the driver is weary and beginning to make up sights. I do not blame him.

‘Doesn’t work,’ he says. ‘Stops and starts.’

Another car roars past us. It is yellow and a lit sign on its roof proclaims it a taxi. Its red tail-lights burn like coals in the misty air. ‘Taxis very bad here,’ the driver mutters. ‘All criminals.’

All at once we round a sharp bend only to find our way blocked by the taxi that passed us. Or perhaps it is another taxi. It is blocking the road completely. My driver stands on his brakes and tries to turn, but he is going too fast. The car slews around and mounts the pavement with a great thump that at first makes me think we have struck someone. Before I can speak, there is the sound of running footsteps and the front door is wrenched open.

The driver utters a thin scream as two huge men drag him out of the seat and begin punching him savagely. He does not fight back. He merely holds his hands over his face, and when he falls, he curls into a foetal ball. I cannot see what happens next, because another of the assailants is blocking my view. I grope for the door but the lock button has been removed. There is a lot of shouting outside, then an ominous silence filled with heavy breathing.

The big man whose back has blocked my view climbs into the front passenger seat of the Skoda and turns to look at me. His hair is bleached white, but his eyebrows are dark and almost join over the bridge of his nose. A thin man with dark, greasy-looking hair slides into the driver’s seat and turns the key. As the car moves off, carefully backing to avoid colliding with the abandoned taxi, the big man continues to stare at me expressionlessly. Then he points solemnly through the window. As I turn to look I catch a glimpse of my old driver lying on the ground, before a blow to the head, and a second, deeper night, consumes me.

I wake to find myself lying full-length along the back seat of the Skoda. My jacket has been thrown over me. From that position, I can see nothing except that it is still night. Gathering my strength, I sit up. Outside the car windows the darkness speeds by. There is no sign of the city or of any buildings. We are on a straight, open highway, driving very fast.

The driver says something and the big man turns and lifts a truncheon. I shake my head.

‘There is no need for that,’ I tell him.

I do not know if he understands me, but he lowers his arm and studies me as if my calmness interests him, then he says something in his own language to the driver. The other man shakes his head and begins to shout. The big man says nothing until his companion falls silent, then he turns back to me and points through the front windscreen.

‘Káva. Coff-ee,’ he says.

Looking down the road, I see he is indicating a faint illumination on the horizon. The brightness grows until I see it is an all-night petrol station attached to a fast-food café. The car pulls off into an access road and curves round to come to a grinding halt in the gravel car park. There are only two other cars parked alongside the restaurant. One is very new and red.

‘You come,’ the big man says. He says something else in his own language that sounds like a warning, and I nod.

They walk either side of me as we approach the door. The driver points at the bowsers and the big man shrugs, steering me deftly through the shining glass doors. The brightness of the light hurts my eyes and I am glad of the thick paw on my shoulder, steering me. He pushes me into a booth, takes out a phone and moves away to make a call.

‘I just wish you wouldn’t bring up the war,’ one of the men in the booth opposite says with an American accent. ‘It’s a sore point with these guys. They think we betrayed them.’

‘You did,’ the other man snorts in laconic German-accented English.

The thin driver sits down, and gives the other men a dangerous look, but they are too much involved in their conversation to notice. The big man shakes his head at the thin man.

‘All of that is ancient history. It’s in the past.’ The American’s tone is irritated.

‘Nothing is past here. Haven’t you learned enough to know that?’

Silence falls between them, and I wonder what happened to my original driver. Had he been killed? The driver squints at me and I sense that he is wondering why I do not make an attempt to escape or call for help.

‘We could have got coffee closer to the border,’ the German says.

‘Coffee, sure.’ The American’s voice is ironic. ‘We’ve got a deadline, Klaus. Why don’t you wait until we get somewhere civilised to buy a woman?’

‘You don’t understand,’ the German says with friendly contempt. ‘You don’t understand anything but disinfectant and prophylactics. You’re afraid of everything, including your own shadow.’

The word shadow galvanises me. The thin man opposite notices and narrows his eyes, then he smiles and a gold tooth winks at me. I have the mad desire to laugh, for it seems I have exchanged one sort of farce for another.

‘Aren’t you afraid of getting a disease?’ the American asks, fastidious but curious too. They do not imagine anyone can understand their words. They have not even looked at me, and what would they see if they did?

The German laughs. ‘The danger makes the pleasure more intense. Darker. In fact, you might say that darkness is the specialty of this place.’

‘This place is no place,’ says the American almost plaintively. ‘A stretch of godforsaken highway where the snow looks like dirty sperm. And those women. The way they just loom up suddenly in the headlights with their black leather skirts and fishnet tights and fake fur coats, their eyes like petrol bombs about to blow up in your face. They scare the hell out of me. How can anyone stop? How can you get aroused by that?’

‘They wouldn’t be there if no one stopped,’ the German observes almost coyly. ‘I’ve stopped every time I pass this way, and every time I do, I am afraid. Nothing is more terrifying than to stop and invite one of these women into the car. They take me down into the dark so deep I don’t know if I’ll ever come up, if there is enough light in me to come back.’

‘But they’re just whores, terrible rough whores with scars and thick thighs. I read in Time Magazine that they’re the worst, most dangerous prostitutes in the world.’ The American’s voice is lace-edged with hysteria.

‘It is true,’ the German murmurs.

‘It’s the disease that scares me . . .’ the American says.

The German calls for the bill. As he pays, the big white-haired man returns, dropping the phone into his pocket. He nods at the two men as they pass, then slides into the booth beside me. It occurs to me that the phone call was about me. Will they now kill me or beat me up and leave me for dead? Will they try to ransom me? Or use me as a hostage? These thoughts flutter distantly though my mind, like leaves blown along a tunnel.

The waiter brings us three espressos. The white-haired man must have ordered them. I drink, enjoying the cruel strength of the dark liquid. I have never tasted such bitter coffee before, like the dregs of the world. The caffeine hits me like a punch to the heart.

An hour passes and the phone rings. The waiter glances at our table in such a way that I see he has recognised my assailants. Or perhaps he has recognised their type. Perhaps he guesses that I have been abducted, but he will do nothing. The big man moves away with the shrilling phone to take the call. He nods. He shakes his head. He shrugs and says a few words. He nods again, then puts the phone away and comes back to the table with an air of purpose. He says two words to the driver, who lights a cigarette. Neither of them speaks to me. Neither of them looks at me.

A strange tension devoid of emotion fills me. ‘What do we do now?’ I ask.

The big man tilts his head. ‘We? There is no we.’

I hear the sound of an engine approaching. Both men look away through the glass towards the approaching vehicle. The noise increases until the headlights loom and fuse with the light from the petrol station. The car has tinted windows so it is impossible to see who is inside. The horn sounds and the big man rises from the seat beside me and nods to the driver, who reaches into his pocket and withdraws the keys to the Skoda. He throws them down on the shining formica in front of me.

‘You have your own business to complete now, eh?’ the big white-haired man says, nodding away into the darkness, and he goes up to the counter and pays the bill. The two men saunter out the glass door and climb into the waiting car, which sends up a spume of gravel in its wake as it departs.

Another car pulls in. Two young people emerge and stretch. They enter and I watch them slide into the booth where the American and German sat. Their bodies touch all along one side from shoulder down through the hip and thigh to the heels, their connection far more intimate than if they had been wound together explicitly.



I slip and now I am walking into the freezing night. I glance back at the blazing block of cement and glass. It looks like some outstation at the end of the world. It begins to snow lightly, white flakes swirling against the blackness. Climbing into the driver’s seat of the Skoda, I insert the key. The strangeness of sitting on the wrong side of the car strikes me dimly. The engine fires the first time, despite the rapidly dropping temperature. I let the engine idle a moment, then put the car smoothly into gear. I feel no impatience or confusion. No fear. My hands are steady as I drive out onto the verge of the highway, remembering to keep to the correct side of the road. I have no idea which way is the way back to the city. Then I realise I am beyond choosing. I drive in the direction the white-haired man nodded, gliding into the unknown with the sudden inexplicable certainty that I am getting closer to my shadow. I shiver, though the heater has warmed up the interior of the car quickly. The snow is still falling, yet blackness presses against the car so hard I fancy it is slowing me down. After several kilometres, I realise that the car is slowing. The petrol gauge shows the tank is empty.

The car coasts and I steer to the verge, my mind a blank. I feel nothing. I have come too far to pretend to have control over my life now. Enormous snowflakes fly past the windows like huge moths. I can no longer discern white from black.

The car stops, and at the same time, the snow ceases to fall.

I see her then, a woman standing beside the road against the vast rising mass of the forested hill behind her. She wears a slick black jacket and long black boots. As far as I can tell, she wears neither skirt nor stockings. The blue-tinged white of her bare skin shines. Her hair is so blonde it seems to give off its own radiance.

She turns slowly and looks at me. My heartbeat slows. I tell myself she cannot see me, that it would be impossible to see anything in all the light streaming towards her.

She comes towards the car, approaching the passenger door in a sturdy undulating stride. She taps at the window with nails as long and curved and transparent as a dragonfly’s wings.

Aside from her hand splayed against the window, I can see only her torso, the patent leather, a liquescent black, outlining her hips and breasts. The passenger door opens and she enters the car as smoothly as a dancer, letting in an icy blast of air that vanquishes the warmth. She is older than she looked from a distance and more stocky. Her hair glows with a silvery pallor that might be strands of grey. I cannot tell her age. Her skin is like fine velvet, but there are intricate webs of wrinkles at the edges of her eyes. Her mouth is purple-black, as if she has just sucked some dark fruit whose juice has stained her lips, but her eyes are the bright miraculous blue of the skies above my own land, and nothing is more pure or relentless than that.

‘You are tired?’ she asks in heavily accented English.

‘I have not slept for a long time,’ I say.

‘It is long. The road.’

She reaches out and switches off the headlights. We are plunged into the intimate ghastly green of the dashboard light. The colour makes her look as if she is a corpse, and her eyes seem transparent. Her hair now looks black, as if it has become saturated with the night, or with something seeping out from the heart of all her whiteness. ‘What do you want?’ She speaks English as if through a mouthful of liquid.

‘I am looking for my shadow,’ I whisper. My own voice sounds foreign. I have never been so close to a woman before.

‘I have what you are seeking,’ she says. Then she leans away from me, and draws aside the slick black edges of the coat like the lips of a wound, to reveal the full, smooth curve of her breasts where they are pressed together into a voluptuous cleavage. They are white as milk and downed like a peach. She reaches a pale hand between them and scoops one breast out. It is so soft that her fingers sink into it. She gestures at it in a businesslike way and I recoil.

I shake my head. I want to tell her that I am a man, not a child to be suckled. Not some doddering senile fool returned to infancy. But she reaches out her free hand to grip my neck, and pulls me towards her. Only then, with her hair swept back to bare her throat and bosom fully, do I notice a dark vein snaking from her neck to her breast. It writhes under her skin as if it has its own life and moves towards the tip of her breast.

She is strong as a peasant and a ripe odour flows over me as she lifts the breast and pulls me to it. To drink the shadow in her, to be drunk by it.



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Erica Wagner and Allen & Unwin for their graceful and almost mythic patience with me throughout the long, slow creation of this book. Thanks also to my editor, Nan McNab, for being unfailingly graceful under fire, and brave enough never to let me get away with less than my best. And finally, thanks to Zoë Sadokierski for her lovely, lovely design.


These four stories were previously published, two in a significantly different form:

‘The Man Who Lost His Shadow’ in Dreaming Down-Under Book 1, edited by Jack Dann, Voyager/HarperCollins, 1999

‘The Dove Game’ (dedicated to Danny) in Gathering the Bones, edited by Jack Dann, Voyager/HarperCollins, 2003

‘The Stranger’ (dedicated to Danel O) in Exotic Gothic 3: Strange Visitations, edited by Danel Olson, Ash-Tree Press, 2009

‘Metro Winds’ (dedicated to Fernanda) in Exotic Gothic 4: A Postscripts Anthology, edited by Danel Olson, PS Publishing, 2012



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I sobelle Carmody is one of Australia’s most loved fantasy writers.

She is best known for her brilliant Obernewtyn Chronicles and for her novel The Gathering (joint winner of the 1993 Children’s Literature Peace Prize and the 1994 CBC Book of the Year Award). She has written many short stories for both children and adults and was co-editor with Nan McNab of the fairytale anthologies, The Wilful Eye and The Wicked Wood.

With her partner and daughter, Isobelle divides her time between Prague in the Czech Republic and her home on the Great Ocean Road in Australia.