So, yes, the canal just down off Duncan Street. The irony was that this was the day I’d planned to travel to Scotland. Scotland, because therein lay the project’s new direction, this was its new impetus… and in fact I'd come round to the reckoning that, in time, I’d probably realise in hindsight that all I’d done so far was merely the preamble. When I boarded my train at King's Cross I'd be entering into the real deal. A travelogue. By train to Killin. A journey into the heart of… the dark heart of…
Now, though, in an instant, that was thrown over. I was delivered of a dazzling revelation, a moment of glorious inspiration, and it knocked me sideways, the sheer beauty of it, the power and the glory.
I would travel instead to New York, interview Heskeill about his marriage to Madeleine (I was on first name terms now), and discover all I could about the tragic death of their only child, Anne Madeleine.
I could see it all, in a flash, storyboarded…
And then, almost as suddenly, a chill. As I read and reread Madeleine Carroll’s story, or the fragments I’d just been handed by Kate, I realised the enormity of what I’d been thinking. As in the sheer madness of it. What I was becoming? Or had become?
Because I appreciated now that, though hardly a saint, Madeleine Carroll had been a good (if that doesn’t sound horribly bland) person who’d done her best: someone who’d thrown everything up following the death in the Blitz of her sister and who had become a field hospital nurse for the remainder of the Second World War.
I was struck by her capacity for selflessness. And more than anything, I realised I knew exactly the sort of pain (again, this notion is inadequate… sometimes words fail me) she felt at the death of her daughter.
All of a sudden she made me feel small. Tiny. I’m not saying I wept or anything. That would have been insane. But I was shaken. A dizziness, the world swam.
I felt as if I’d come up for air, only to find I was fading.
I said it earlier. I hadn’t been interested in Carroll. Not in the slightest. Now she seemed all too human.
And that, I suppose, if there is one, is the moral of the story. I'd grown weary of rabbit holes. We need to explore them every now and then, of course we do, for we are all built more or less on honeycombed ground; but you can’t, nor should you ever try to, get lost down there.
We’ll go back in, of course we will. But not yet awhile.
For the time being, we’ll cleave to the here and now; try not to lose ourselves. There's always that danger. People drift apart. Lose contact. We’re all in the process of moving on, leaving no forwarding address. These days it’s easier than ever for you to melt into the night, you’re freelance, so you can’t be traced through your place of work, you change your email provider, ditch your old mobile number, delete your social media accounts and in a blink you’re gone. There are all sorts of cracks you can slip through.
Yes, so, anyway, I threw my train ticket into the canal. It floated there, for an age, perfectly flat. Then, almost imperceptibly, it began to sink – it was visible beneath the skin of the water for a good long while before it disappeared.
I sat there for what seemed like hours. I’d never been aware before that canal water moves. Ever so slowly. Like the minute hand of a clock.
In a sense I’m sitting there still.
Come and join me if you’d like. Or don’t. Whatever. It’s entirely up to you.