He ached. Lying on ancient wooden floorboards. The furniture around him was plastic garden and broken Victorian. He felt hollow, yet bloated from the cheap curry – half of it lay on the floor beside him. The polystyrene box with three cavities was leaning against the table. He could taste it in his mouth, yet he couldn’t remember ordering or eating it. His head felt like dirt, his mouth like a toilet, and when he tried to talk, it was a desert whisper. Quiet and meaningless. Like this place: quiet and meaningless. A rat hole.
The floor was strewn with empty bottles and broken glass, but no one was here any more. They had left him, violently drunk, on the floor of the abandoned house… and gone.
He crawled across the floor. The rivets on his leather jacket caught in the cracks in the floor. There was a sheet of paper – it was in her handwriting. He lay pathetically on the floor, letting the convulsive sobs shake him apart.
-
He took the paper with him, and – when he sat, stinking and miserable at the street-corner café with a pint and a paper tray of soft, half cold chips – he read it:
Go down into the jungle. Go and don’t look back. The foggy cave behind you will not be forgotten, but you are not allowed to be traumatised. You are too resilient – too alive. What happened in there is not for you to sing about any more.
The jungle in front of you has scents you have never experienced before. It has fresh water with an odd taste – full of mosquito larvae and lemony leaves. It has fruits whose flavour you will learn to appreciate if you are to survive, and it has a path that will lead you to a golden city with women who taste and smell of sweat and stone and sugar. They will tear you to pieces. Eventually.
When the cave spat you out, it was far from the place where you entered it. You are empty-handed now, naked. But you can sing – sing or go mad. From this the mystery of the year will grow. The mystery of light. The mystery of melody.
The lyre was merely an extension.
