I was surprised how quickly dusk had ended. There was still a glow in the west, but the rest of the sky had become night, plum-purple in its majesty.
‘The days before the full of the moon, in the labyrinth,’ he said. ‘They were set aside for the infirm, and those in need. My sister had a women’s condition. They told her it would be fatal if she didn’t have her insides all scraped out, and then it might be fatal anyway. Her stomach had swollen up as if she was carrying a baby, not a tumour, although she must have been pushing fifty. She came up here when the moon was a day from full and she walked the labyrinth. Walked it from the outside in, in the moon’s light, and she walked it from the centre back to the outside, with no false steps or mistakes.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘She lived,’ he said, shortly.
We crested the hill, but I could not see what I was looking at. It was too dark.
‘They delivered her of the thing inside her. It lived as well, for a while.’ He paused. Then he tapped my arm. ‘Look over there.’
I turned and looked. The size of the moon astonished me. I know it’s an optical illusion, that the moon grows no smaller as it rises, but this moon seemed to take up so much of the horizon as it rose that I found myself thinking of the old Frank Frazetta paperback covers, where men with their swords raised would be silhouetted in front of huge moons, and I remembered paintings of wolves howling on hilltops, black cutouts against the circle of snow-white moon that framed them. The enormous moon that was rising was the creamy yellow of freshly churned butter.
‘Is the moon full?’ I asked.
‘That’s a full moon, all right.’ He sounded satisfied. ‘And there’s the labyrinth.’
We walked towards it. I had expected to see ash on the ground, or nothing. Instead, in the buttery moonlight, I saw a maze, complex and elegant, made of circles and whorls inside a huge square. I could not judge distances properly in that light, but I thought that each side of the square must be two hundred feet or more.
The plants that outlined the maze were low to the ground, though. None of them was more than a foot tall. I bent down, picked a needle-like leaf, black in the moonlight, and crushed it between finger and thumb. I inhaled, and thought of raw lamb, carefully dismembered and prepared, and placed in an oven on a bed of branches and needles that smelled just like this.
‘I thought you people burned all this to the ground,’ I said.
‘We did. They aren’t hedges, not any longer. But things grow again, in their season. There’s no killing some things. Rosemary’s tough.’
‘Where’s the entrance?’
‘You’re standing in it,’ he said. He was an old man, who walked with a stick and talked to strangers. Nobody would ever miss him.
‘So what happened up here when the moon was full?’
‘Locals didn’t walk the labyrinth then. That was the one night that paid for all.’
I took a step into the maze. There was nothing difficult about it, not with the bushes that marked it no higher than my shins, no higher than a kitchen garden. If I got lost, I could simply step over the bushes, walk back out. But for now I followed the path into the labyrinth. It was easy to make out in the light of the full moon. I could hear my guide, as he continued to talk.
‘Some folk thought even that price was too high. That was why we came up here, why we burned the lunar labyrinth. We came up that hill when the moon was dark, and we carried burning torches, like in the old black-and-white movies. We all did. Even me. But you can’t kill everything. It don’t work like that.’
‘Why rosemary?’ I asked.
‘Rosemary’s for remembering,’ he told me.
The butter-yellow moon was rising faster than I imagined or expected. Now it was a pale ghost-face in the sky, calm and compassionate, and its colour was white, bone-white.
The man said, ‘There’s always a chance that you could get out safely. Even on the night of the full moon. First you have to get to the centre of the labyrinth. There’s a fountain there. You’ll see. You can’t mistake it. Then you have to make it back from the centre. No missteps, no dead ends, no mistakes on the way in or on the way out. It’s probably easier now than it was when the bushes were high. It’s a chance. Otherwise, the labyrinth gets to cure you of all that ails you. Of course, you’ll have to run.’
I looked back. I could not see my guide. Not any longer. There was something in front of me, beyond the bush-path pattern, a black shadow padding silently along the perimeter of the square. It was the size of a large dog, but it did not move like a dog.
It threw back its head and howled to the moon with amusement and with merriment. The huge flat table at the top of the hill echoed with joyous howls, and, my left knee aching from the long hill-climb, I stumbled forward.
The maze had a pattern; I could trace it. Above me the moon shone, bright as day. She had always accepted my gifts in the past. She would not play me false at the end.
‘Run,’ said a voice that was almost a growl.
I ran like a lamb to his laughter.
The Thing About Cassandra
So there’s Scallie and me wearing Starsky-and-Hutch wigs, complete with sideburns, at five o’clock in the morning by the side of a canal in Amsterdam. There had been ten of us that night, including Rob, the groom, last seen handcuffed to a bed in the red-light district with shaving foam covering his nether regions and his future brother-in-law giggling and patting the hooker holding the straight razor on the arse, which was the point I looked at Scallie and he looked at me, and he said, ‘Maximum deniability?’ and I nodded, because there are some questions you don’t want to be able to answer when a bride starts asking pointed questions about the stag weekend, so we slipped off for a drink, leaving eight men in Starsky-and-Hutch wigs (one of whom was mostly naked, attached to a bed by fluffy pink handcuffs, and seemed to be starting to think that this adventure wasn’t such a good idea after all) behind us, in a room that smelled of disinfectant and cheap incense, and we went and sat by a canal and drank cans of Danish lager and talked about the old days.
Scallie – whose real name is Jeremy Porter, and these days people call him Jeremy, but he had been Scallie when we were eleven – and the groom-to-be, Rob Cunningham, had been at school with me. We had drifted out of touch, more or less, had found each other the lazy way you do these days, through Friends Reunited and Facebook and such, and now Scallie and I were together for the first time since we were nineteen. The Starsky-and-Hutch wigs, which had been Scallie’s idea, made us look like we were playing brothers in some made-for-TV movie – Scallie the short, stocky brother with the thick moustache, me, the tall one. Given that I’ve made a significant part of my income since leaving school modelling, I’d add the tall good-looking one, but nobody looks good in a Starsky-and-Hutch wig complete with sideburns.
Also, the wig itched.
We sat by the canal, and when the lager had all gone we kept talking and we watched the sun come up.
Last time I saw Scallie he was nineteen and filled with big plans. He had just joined the RAF as a cadet. He was going to fly planes, and do double duty using the flights to smuggle drugs, and so get incredibly rich while helping his country. It was the kind of mad idea he used to have all the way through school. Usually the whole thing would fall apart. Sometimes he’d get the rest of us into trouble on the way.
Now, twelve years later, his six months in the RAF ended early because of an unspecified problem with his ankle, he was a senior executive in a firm that manufactured double-glazed windows, he told me, with, since the divorce, a smaller house than he felt that he deserved and only a golden retriever for company.
He was sleeping with a woman in the double-glazing firm, but had no expectations of her leaving her boyfriend for him, seemed to find it easier that way. ‘Of course, I wake up crying sometimes, since the divorce. Well, you do,’ he said at one point. I could not imagine him crying, and anyway he said it with a huge, Scallie grin.
I told him about me: still modelling, helping out in a friend’s antique shop to keep busy, more and more painting. I was lucky; people bought my paintings. Every year I would have a small gallery show at the Little Gallery in Chelsea, and while initially the only people to buy anything had been people I knew – photographers, old girlfriends and the like – these days I have actual collectors. We talked about the days that only Scallie seemed to remember, when he and Rob and I had been a team of three, inviolable, unbreakable. We talked about teenage heartbreak, about Caroline Minton (who was now Caroline Keen, and married to a vicar), about the first time we brazened our way into an 18 film, although neither of us could remember what the film actually was.
Then Scallie said, ‘I heard from Cassandra the other day.’
‘Cassandra?’
‘Your old girlfriend. Cassandra. Remember?’
‘. . . No.’
‘The one from Reigate. You had her name written on all your books.’ I must have looked particularly dense or drunk or sleepy, because he said, ‘You met her on a skiing holiday. Oh, for heaven’s sake. Your first shag. Cassandra.’
‘Oh,’ I said, remembering, remembering everything. ‘Cassandra.’
And I did remember.
‘Yeah,’ said Scallie. ‘She dropped me a line on Facebook. She’s running a community theatre in East London. You should talk to her.’
‘Really?’
‘I think, well, I mean, reading between the lines of her message, she may still have a thing for you. She asked after you.’