He had no idea where he was going, only that he needed to get out of the flat right then. Another hour like the last eight would break him. He could feel that well enough. Feel the pressure tearing everything apart. The misery of his thoughts, a jagged edge, cutting its way to the core.

He guessed there was a core because he was still standing and what was happening to him wasn't just the last eight hours but the last six months. Something had held him together, given him moments of peace. But now, just before seven on a Sunday morning, that something was exposed. The rock that had stood firm in the storm was breaking up. And if it went, so would he.

Six months before, none of that would have seemed possible. While things weren't perfect they were as good as they'd been in a long while. A promotion at work and a new car, had helped put a smile back on his face after the divorce two years before. His relationship with his son was entering a new phase. Long talks after playing tennis. Weekends hiking. Everything had just started falling into place again.

But that was before the accident.

The weather had cleared that afternoon after a morning of showers. Stephen Archer was on his way to the park for a game of soccer with his mates. He'd just rung his father and arranged to stay over that night. They'd talked about playing chess after dinner. "But only if you do your homework." His father had protested. "Otherwise I´ll be in the bad books again with your mother".

They never did play that game and the next phone call was way different to the last.

When his ex-wife rang, Archer knew in the first seconds that something had gone terribly wrong. She couldn't speak. Her breathing heavy over the phone.

"What's wrong?" he demanded to know.

After what seemed the longest minute of his life, she'd gasped, "Stephen's dead".

Only two words to explain the end of a life. Two words! A lump formed in his throat in the silence. She couldn't say anything else. Just burst into tears. Couldn't tell him that a freak accident on the corner of Townsend Road and Llandaff Street had ended their son's short life and changed theirs forever.

During the first twenty-four hours shock played its hand. It couldn't be true. Death didn't happen to him or his kind. The report of Stephen's death was a mistake. It had to be? This sort of thing happened to others. Not to Stephen. Not to him.

He continued denying it for the next few days until the funeral insisted that truth take over from shock. And as he drove home alone, reality started turning the knife, whispering coldly in his ear that he would never see his son again. Never see him smile or hear him laugh. Never walk anywhere with him again.Never play chess

Someone, a week later said "you'll only remember him as young". He didn't bother to thank the speaker, because he was just beginning to learn what memories now meant.

He'd been to the park the day before,where he'd been so many times with Stephen. There, they talked the big things over. Exams,the first stirrings of sex, the impossibility of explaining why Archer and Stephen's mother had divorced. It all came back with frightening speed when Archer took his first steps again on that carpet of green.He could hear Stephen's voice, see him laugh.For a few moments it was beautiful, to remember. But then the knife turned, and by the time he'd made the bridge that they'd crossed so many times together, he wanted out of that park as fast as he could.

He ran past Cardiff Castle back to the city. Back to a world that he was only just beginning to fear.
The memories didn't let up that afternoon, or during the night,or the next day. They never stopped, rolling out and on. Relentlessly appearing and reappearing,letting him know that now they stood for something else.

They were razors, poison darts,cameleons: cutting through happy recollection, flying through the vacuum that Archer's life now was, transforming themselves to be the very opposite of what they once were, swirling around the father, thundering out of places, out of words, music ,touch, taste and scent.
It was clear enough, even in the whirlpool that his mind now was, that he needed defenses. Those beautiful memories had to be avoided at all costs or they were going to cut him in two. They had to be put on hold until somewhere deep in the future when the good that was stored in his head, ceased to provoke the deepest pain that he'd ever known. Ceased to stand for bad.

This was a terrible new game and learning its rules meant courting madness. He went back to believing that it hadn't happened. There'd been no accident. Stephen had just gone away for a while. He'd be back one day. In a year,or two. As crazy as that was,it helped.Believing he was out there somewhere, made pain step back.

He started talking to Stephen. Imagined telephone calls. He'd ask him what he was doing, wherever he was. He did that lying down on the bed or the sofa with his eyes closed. He could hear Stephen's voice, the other end of the line. Clear as a bell. Heard him laugh.

It was an art, this fantasy. One Archer, imagined telephone in hand, talking to his dead son, while a second Archer, trembling in the dark, scared of his own power of recall, lay wondering when it would all end.

The good times as he'd known them had disappeared in a flash and what lay ahead now bore no resemblance to any life that he could ever have imagined. No track wound its way through the future, only the shifting sands of a desert lay ahead, the bones of beaten creatures marking the way.

He started meeting his ex-wife once a week, in cafes or at his or her flat. Like two soldiers in a trench, bound together in misery, they'd drink coffee and tell each other how they were coping. She said she was undergoing counselling. Told him as grim as it was, it was helping. He held back the truth of his internal chatting until she asked him one day why he seemed to be less depressed than before."I've got to tell you, Paula, it's strange. But I talk to Stephen."

She seemed to understand. "But you're not resolving it doing that. Sooner or later you'll have to face it."
They sounded like the counseller's words, not hers.

Face it? How was that possible, when it was as unrelenting as it was? There was no end to it. Pain was everywhere, memories storming in, like pillaging soldiers, charging across a mind that had once been happy to receive them but now shuddered at their very presence.

As the days and months passed the more afraid of the workings of his own mind he became. Life had become a living nightmare,and pushed him all the more into the world of desperate fantasy. Whipped, by an elite and indifferent squadron of neurons that were more active than ever,he was forced, time and time again, to scramble back to the chat.

"Sorry, Steve. Made a mistake, need to talk to you now."

"It's okay, dad. I know what you're going through."

"Do you?"

"You know I do."

"Yes" he whispered, feeling his heart resume its old beat.

Not long after that, two months after the event, he started thinking of his own death, with a new blend of pleasure and regret. And thinking that, new dreams had started; a bullet in his head, a knife in his throat, falling from a great height onto switchblade rocks. It began to please him to think that he was only one of those away from forgetting everything. There seemed no other way to get over his son's death. No other solution. At least none that he could see. It wasn´t like a divorce or the death of a parent. His son was his blood. He was him. And the memory of all their time together would remain inside, as long as Archer was capable of thought.

He threw himself into work, read books, ran ten miles a day, but nothing helped. And now, six months after Stephen's death,he came to see that sadness feeds on itself. The shock was long gone, but pain wouldn't let up. What did that mean? Was it alive in his blood?

He was thinking that now as he sprinted down the stairs into the early morning drizzle, thinking what a perfect fit for his mood it made as he slid into the car and drove down Clare Street. He had no idea where he was going, but turned right just the same, and five minutes later knew he was heading for Barry Island. He hadn't been there for years, had forgotten it even existed.

He drove across the causeway and pulled into the carpark behind the tidal beach, zapped the locks to his car, and trudged up onto a deserted promenade. No one to be seen, just a ginger cat stepping out of the shadows a hundred yards away. The ferris wheel idle, no kid playing in the penny arcade, the tide out. And in the exposed mud, crabs squirming their way in and out of life's jaws.

The cat and the crabs calmed him.

He pulled a pack of Winfield out of his coat pocket and lit one. It had stopped raining five minutes before he'd got to the beach. There was even a hint of sun behind the light grey clouds. He leaned on the railing and looked across the wet brown mud. He felt better than he had in a long while. For some reason he'd stepped outside of himself. Or the self that he now inhabited.

He started walking along the promenade in the direction of where the cat had been. How many times in the last six months had he felt like this? Only one that he could remember. A strange morning staring through the kitchen window at daybreak.He tried to remember when that was? Three months before? It was like there'd been no horizon that morning. No difference between here and there. Between life and death. They'd simply merged in that beautiful moment, and in the great union of nothing and something he was reunited with Stephen.

As desperately as he had tried to bring that feeling back again, it wouldn't come. The rational part of his mind wouldn't allow it. He was still alive and Stephen was dead. It was as simple as that, whether he liked it or not.

But something was happening this morning. He'd felt a great load lift off his shoulders not long after pulling into the carpark. Why was that, he asked himself? What was it here that was doing this to him ? Was it the beach ? The hint of water? Water had always been important to him. But along the riverbank back in the city was one of the worst places to be now. So it couldn't be that.

The last six months had forged a new awareness of his inner world. The tragedy, and its affect on him, had made him hyper-sensitive to the mere hint of a change in his mood. An observer had been released in some remote corner of his mind who whispered or shouted warnings to the rest of him. And right now on the Barry Island promenade there was a constant murmur that something here was good for him.

He walked to the penny arcade and stared through its salty window, another three hours and the machines would be eating pennies in a world of cheap illusion. The god of little money, going rat-a-tat-tat on a hundred steel trays. But that wasn´t happening now. Nothing was. Just him looking through the window.

He flicked the cigarette butt into a garbage bin that hadn't been emptied the day before and walked along the promenade to the track that winds its way to the point of the hill overlooking the beach.What was it? The question repeated itself to the rhythm of his strides,and as an answer stormed into his mind he spun around,staring back.He'd never been here with Stephen, had he?

He nodded slowly. For one reason or the other he hadn't brought his son here. Goose bumps raced up the nape of his neck. He looked back along the promenade.Across the beach. Trying to find Stephen somewhere,bucket in hand, laughing,or splashing in yesteryear's water. But he wasn't to be found. The past was as devoid of his son here as the beach was empty of water. There was nothing to be found in the maze of his mind.No skeletons.No gems. Nothing. Simply nothing.

After six months of dodging and weaving, the thought of nothing seemed beautiful and this place more wonderful than it had ever seemed to the child, kid and teenager that Archer had been. He wanted in to that penny arcade now. Wanted to blow a pocketful of coins on those indifferent machines. This was about him here. About his own memory of himself. It is the only me zone, he thought.

He looked at his watch. The only thing he knew for certain now was that he was going into that penny arcade. He felt that desperate to get in that he even thought of breaking the window. If the Police came surely they'd understand. Or would they just conclude that he was a common thief, desperate for cash,not a mourning father desperate for peace?

He sat down on a bench seat at the end of the promontory and started thinking about coming to Barry as a kid. Everything was in front of him then. There were no big questions to hinder him. Nothing weighed him down, tortured him. One day tumbled into the next in the euphoria of living. Everything was new. He nodded again. Yes, new.

He put colour into the machines that were locked for now,remembered playing them,their names. They brought a smile to his face. Almost a laugh. But he was too fixed on the power of this old memory to laugh. Part of him wanted to cry. He fell asleep.

When he awoke, the ferris wheel was turning.

He took a deep breath and walked back to the arcade.The owner looked af him strangely as he walked past him into yesteryear". Long time since you've been here, son." he said as Archer walked along the row of machines.

"That's true enough." he agreed,running his hand over a Space Invaders game.The machines were different.New and flashy and the more he studied them,more complicated." Big change since the last time. " he called out to the owner who was still looking at him.

"When was that?"

"Must be twenty years ago."

"You'd have to go to an antique auction to find those machines these days."

Archer walked back along the line of the new world.He felt peaceful looking at these new machines, and the thought of tracking down the old ones at an auction intrigued him.

He lost two pounds and walked back out into a day that had changed. The sun had broken through the clouds and the water was on its way back. Daytrippers were appearing on the promenade. Archer was smiling. He felt like he had come here to Barry for the first time. The only him zone had shown him a way out, reminded him what life had been like once in the past, when he'd taken each day as it came.
And the one within whispered, if you want,it can be that way again.

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