With a Zero at its Heart. Charles Lambert

      1

      They’re driving home from the Isle of Wight. He’s never crossed the sea before and, although he knows the Isle of Wight is part of England, it’s as though he’s been abroad. His father has the radio on. Today’s the World Cup final and England is playing, but, maybe because he still feels foreign, he’s secretly siding with Germany. His father is getting excited, his sister is playing with crayons and paper, his mother is talking about finding somewhere to eat. He closes his eyes. They stayed in the Hotel Metropole and had a room with a balcony overlooking the sea. He made friends with a boy from London. When England wins, he shrugs. He knows he’ll go abroad again.

      2

      His first time in London his father takes him because he has work to do there. They go by train, the longest journey he’s made that isn’t in a car. He sits by the window and stares at the world, wondering what London will be like. When they arrive, his father takes him to Madame Tussaud’s. Years later, he remembers nothing of this, nothing of the waxworks or the chamber of horrors, only the train ride, which never seemed to end, and then the long wait outside the Planetarium, because his father had said he wouldn’t be long. But he is, and when he finally arrives there’s no time left to see anything, and his father keeps saying, I’m sorry.

      3

      They borrow a car and drive until early light, then sleep for half-an-hour in a Cornish lay-by. They have an ounce of dope and a two-man tent in the boot. They’re turned away from an empty campsite, but find an abandoned field and pitch their tent, then smoke large quantities of dope. Each night two of them take the tent and the third sleeps in the car. Neither option is less uncomfortable than the other. On the last night, in a pub, he has a friendship-shaking argument with one of the other two about the value of risk. Later, he walks to the edge of the cliff and sees a harp embedded in the rock. He climbs down towards it.

      4

      They sit on their rucksacks in a lay-by in Harris. It is Sunday and all the cars are driving into the town they are trying to leave, for church. They have used trains, coaches, other people’s cars, a ferry and their feet to get here and the only book he still has left to read is Don Juan. They stand up and start to walk across a wilderness that reminds him of that canvas by Holman Hunt, of the scapegoat crowned in red. Last night the wind blew fat from their chip-shop haggis in horizontal ribbons. This morning they have eaten nothing because there can be no cooked breakfast on the day of rest. It is probably about to rain.

      5

      The first flight he ever takes is to Milan. It is a charter flight; some of the seats face backwards, like a train, an arrangement he will never see again. The food is dreadful but exciting; the drink is free and plentiful. He has a sick bag, which he folds and slides into his pocket when no one is looking. He stands in the bathroom, too cramped to turn, and flushes the lavatory experimentally to see what will happen, if some bright hole will open up in the plane itself. He stares through the window and wonders if what he sees are the Alps or some artful film projected onto the walls of a hangar as big as the world.

      6

      A friend tells him a story about a train journey she made with her boyfriend. It’s a compartment train, with seats that pull out into beds. They’re sharing the compartment with a Greek man, on holiday in Italy. They pull the seats out and settle to sleep, his friend in the middle. She can’t sleep; she can feel the heat of the two men’s bodies each side of her. When her boyfriend starts to snore, the Greek man turns and touches her breast. She lies there, silent, willing him on. He rolls on top of her and they fuck as the train heads south. It was wonderful, she says. I’ll never forget the smell of him, like honey and thyme.

      7

      The taxi picks them up in a square so full of cicadas they can barely hear each other speak. The taxi driver thinks they’re both Italian, and they don’t correct him. In heavily-accented but fluent English, he talks to them about women, how Scandinavian women have cleaner private parts than women in Greece. He wants to know what women in Italy are like ‘down there’. They’re vague. He has a Swedish mistress he tells them, she comes each summer. She is very clean ‘down there’. The following day they see him with a woman who is clearly his wife. He spots them, turns away. There are cicadas here too. They are tired of pretending. They’d like to be at home.

      8

      They stop for the night on Route 66, in a motel that claims to be the oldest motel in Williams. That morning they’d brunched in T-shirts outside a place near Phoenix. Now they are sitting inside a run-down room with snow banked up outside the door. They have eaten rib-eye steak and baked potatoes in a restaurant with a life-sized plaster cow outside the door. The bathroom has rusty water and the bed dips in the middle. They lie there, breathing slowly in the high thin freezing air, thinking of their lives and what has brought them here. Three rooms down, their dear friend and companion on the trip, a single woman, sits fully dressed all night, facing the door.

      9

      He is in a bar with a blind made of faded plastic strips at the door to keep out flies. The blind’s knotted back on itself, so that one or two flies penetrate the semi-darkness to buzz around the scuffed plastic dome protecting the last third of a crumbling sponge cake. There is no other food; it’s far too hot to eat. The light outside the bar is intense. A dog of indeterminate breed is lying halfway beneath one of the three zinc-topped tables squeezed under the shelter of the station eaves, each with its plastic ashtray advertising Crodino. The barman, a middle-aged man in pressed black trousers and a vest, has all the information he will ever need.

      10

      They have planned a fortnight in Paris, but his mother falls ill and they come back to England to be with her. They are in Cologne when his father’s health fails, and they find a flight home. They are sitting in the bar of their hotel in Madrid when his partner’s father is taken to hospital. They are holidaying in the valley of the shadow of death. They cancel everything to be with his mother and travel becomes what it once had been, when he was a child and there was nothing beyond the walls of the house, and within it everything, a weight and a lightness, miraculous as the weight of metal in the infinite lightness of the air.