Chapter One

“Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum…
velut anteacto nil tempore semsimus aegri…”
“Therefore death is nothing to us, meaning not even a trifle…
Just as in time before our births we felt nothing of distress…”
Lucretius De Rerum Natura 3.830/910

The park didn’t seem to have ever had a name. In fact though everyone called it a park it was more like a heath. It tumbled down the slope from the church, stretching on and out around at the base of the hill, a huge puddle of greens and browns flowing out across the flatter ground. A tranquil, sporadically tended and often very muddy puddle; to whose age the clusters of immense oaks bore testament.

A slender key hung there. He almost walked past it, though it was hanging at head height. It was rusty and it had a small yellow fob dangling with it from the tree. Stopping, he left the path and took it in his hand admiring silently the artifice by which it had come there. The yellow fob sheathed a scrap of paper on which was drawn a fish in outline, like a keyhole on its side. He looped the ring from the new grown shoots and brought it down. He turned it over in his hand, wondering silently.
‘Should I take it?’ The question occurred to him.
After a moment he pushed it back carefully onto the branch, let it take the weight again and smiling at the world, he left it hanging.
‘I must remember that,’ he kept on walking, and in two strides it was forgotten.

The grassy expanse was cut through by lightly trodden and gravelled paths that met at its centre. A river also trickled across the subtle gradient. Its water was wide and shallow but its banks had always been inexplicably deep as if it once contained some raging spring water. Across the grass at the southern end it ran like a pebbled gorge beneath the High Street, which vaulted it with a wizened but sturdy stone bridge. Here it was, in the crisp air of a spring weekend morning, that one might find the upturned cage of a supermarket trolley protruding from the water, like the bars of a chrome-plated lobster pot.

He walked on. It was a glorious late autumn day, a warm sun tempered by the touch of soft breeze. The wide lanes wound away from the park, the undulations of the ground and the light splashing through the canopy on his face. He walked downhill then up again towards town, here and there were hints of its past pressing against him. Down to his left a huge flint gateway presided over the traditional entrance to the town.

Ahead, full of smiles two young boys on bikes faced each other in the deserted park lane. One was raising dust behind him dramatically pawing at the ground like a bull, the other was twisting his handlebar making sounds like an engine.
“...eady? GO!”
Together they set off. He stopped to watch them as they began to cycle towards each other. Faster and faster they raced, their little legs pumping up and down, up and down.
They were playing chicken.
‘This is not going to end well,’ but he couldn’t look away.
“Chicken!”
Sure enough, as calamity seemed inevitable they shouted out together and, as if in slow motion, they both turned their handlebars to avoid each other. In a brief moment of indecision they turned exactly the same way and ran straight into each other, clattering wheel to wheel. There were several nasty scraping sounds as the metal frames conjoined.
He winced, then calling out “are you alright?” he jogged over to the wreckage.
There was a long pause.
“Yes... yup” the one on top was flinching at the stinging cuts on his knees. The other still looked a little unsure.
He lifted the bikes up, but there was no more damage than a couple of grazed knees and elbows, and a buckled front wheel.
“Both of you?”
“Yeah!” Of course.
“Good.”
He couldn’t help a smile and he stood their bikes up as they wiped the dusty mess from their sides. They both thanked him sullenly as they took their bikes and walked off, trying to disguise their limping.

The smile turned to an inward chuckle as they grew more distant, and he thought back to that key he had found just ten minutes earlier. Who could have left it there? It must have been there for a while, it was rusty after all. Just how long had it hung there, ready to open something, through seasons and storms and leaves growing, and shedding waiting for someone to show its purpose?

In the streets he now passed along he felt that he could almost turn a corner and run straight into the past. These were a haggard maze of lanes, back turns and dead ends, a brooding part of this ancient town. Much was signed, the old balneae, the public baths, a temple or an arch, but much was not; there was far, far more than the celebrated Roman remains. There were old churches, wells, the low walls of canal skimming inns and cemeteries in these backwater streets with their peculiar, capillary layout.

He slowed. He could feel it here, organic, haphazard; grown not planned. He loved it. It was everything in between the stories, between the lines, the tarmac boiling, bubbling into cobbles and the buildings sloping their black beams and white walls like a melted barcode. A community influencing and being influenced by its surroundings for more than two thousand years; arguments, reconciliations, cock ups, ecstasies, disappointments and ten thousand tragedies; these and more made up this beautiful mess. In these streets he learned what he was, what he wasn’t, and what he was a part of.

The flint walls were bound into shop frontage, streets took crooked and inexplicably awkward paths, bending to round a long defunct well or suddenly breathing in, becoming just too slim for cars’ progress. The town was like that.

Then there was the high street running plumb straight down the same gentle hill on which the town flowed; it was a shiny new zipper joining the twin breasts of antiquity on either side. He walked on, faster now. A glib gilding, not even gilding, a whitewashing of the place’s patina, witnessing its annual influx of tourists, travellers and schoolchildren with pocket money each summer drawn to the curios, the exactingly preserved Roman centre and its tiny, dry, drab museum. The same one he used to visit as a school child.

Tourists, ice cream vans, stalls selling badges, hats, lighters, coloured hairspray and knocked off ciggies as well as musicians, mime artists, amateur dramatists, stand up comedians and an astonishing number of vagrants all invaded and retreated with each summer like the welling of a tide. But for most of the seasons in the year and almost all the weekdays in the week it was as it was now, keeping itself to itself; quaint, misunderstood and something of an anachronism in 90’s England.

Beyond this was the newer part of town, just like any other and his bus stop. A neat, straight road led into it from London, passing the hospital. Here he stopped. He did not have a long wait.

In the breeze at the back of the bus, three kids were milling about him. The tremulous sounds of their chattering voices filled the space. As he waited to get off, he wondered how it was they got that accent.

The doors opened. One of the kids pushed past him onto the pavement and began to run off down the street. Ethan stepped off the bus after him. A moment later he heard one of his companions behind him as he shouted from the door.
“Oi! Mad Dog!”
‘Were they calling down the road at Mad Dog, or Mad Dogg? One ‘G’ or two?’
But Dog was running off, he hadn’t heard them.
“Mad Dogg, Oi!”
‘Definitely double ‘G’’ mused Ethan.
The boys called out again, together this time, but Mad Dogg kept just on kept running. He was nearly out of earshot.

There was silence, a delicious moment of quiet indecision, until one shouted
“Hey Ed!”
The kid stopped dead in his tracks and turned round. All the eleven year old machismo faded from him, his eyes widened inquisitively.
“Yeah?”
Ethan bit his lip and hid his smile as he walked past. It was then that the little yellow fob of the key popped into his mind again.

‘The things I see’ he thought as he turned into the hospital entrance, ‘and I forget all the time’ the thought reminded him that he had for some time wanted to buy himself a pocket notebook.