Careless In Red by George, Elizabeth
To the memory of Stephen Lawrence
and 22 April 1993, when he was murdered
in Eltham, Southeast London,
by five men who have gone unpunished
by the British judicial system to this day
If thou art indeed my father,
then thou hast stained thy sword
in the lifeblood of thy son.
And thou didst it of thine own obstinacy.
For I sought to turn thee into love…
?from the Shahnameh
Chapter One
HE FOUND THE BODY ON THE FORTY-THIRD DAY OF HIS WALK. By then, the end of April had arrived, although he had only the vaguest idea of that. Had he been capable of noticing his surroundings, the condition of the flora along the coast might have given him a broad hint as to the time of year. He’d started out when the only sign of life renewed was the promise of yellow buds on the gorse that grew sporadically along the cliff tops, but by April, the gorse was wild with color, and yellow archangel climbed in tight whorls along upright stems in hedgerows on the rare occasions when he wandered into a village. Soon foxglove would be nodding on roadside verges, and lamb’s foot would expose fiery heads from the hedgerows and the drystone walls that defined individual fields in this part of the world. But those bits of burgeoning life were in the future, and he’d been walking these days that had blended into weeks in an effort to avoid both the thought of the future and the memory of the past.
He carried virtually nothing with him. An ancient sleeping bag. A rucksack with a bit of food that he replenished when the thought occurred to him. A bottle within that rucksack that he filled with water in the morning if water was to be had near the site where he’d slept. Everything else, he wore. One waxed jacket. One hat. One tattersall shirt. One pair of trousers. Boots. Socks. Underclothes. He’d come out for this walk unprepared and uncaring that he was unprepared. He’d known only that he had to walk or he had to remain at home and sleep, and if he remained at home and slept, he’d come to realise that eventually he would will himself not to awaken again.
So he walked. There had seemed no alternative. Steep ascents to cliff tops, the wind striking his face, the sharp salt air desiccating his skin, scrambling across beaches where reefs erupted from sand and stone when the tide was low, his breath coming short, rain soaking his legs, stones pressing insistently against his soles…These things would remind him that he was alive and that he was intended to remain so.
He was thus engaged in a wager with fate. If he survived the walk, so be it. If he did not, his ending was in the hands of the gods. In the plural, he decided. He could not think that there might be a single Supreme Being out there, pressing fingers into the keyboard of a divine computer, inserting this or forever deleting that.
His family had asked him not to go, for they’d seen his state, although like so many families of his class, they’d not made any direct mention of it. Just his mother saying, “Please don’t do this, darling,” and his brother suggesting, with his face gone pale and always the threat of another relapse hanging over him and over them all, “Let me go with you,” and his sister murmuring with her arm round his waist, “You’ll get past it. One does,” but none of them mentioning her name or the word itself, that terrible, eternal, definitive word.