The Wire Man

My father was a military man who placed a tremendous importance on physical fitness. He abhorred technology and the perils of the modern world. “Little of merit has occurred this century”, he would proclaim, “man is weak in the eyes of his creations”. I would dutifully listen to these oracular pronouncements, watching his frenetic and clichéd moustache by the light of a paraffin lamp. He was flawed. I believed in him strongly.

As part of my training, father would make me walk the full length of a Saxon earthwork five times a week. The earthwork had been built 1400 years ago using only hand tools. It was 8km long: “as long as Everest is tall”, my father would say, before invariably continuing “10 meters high, carved from the land by proud English men and women”. My father had been known to fight men in pubs if they repeated the oft-quoted myth that the earthwork’s ditch had been created by the tail of the Devil. He hated their glib and facile attitudes towards the Wonder. Each time I walked it he would escort me to the starting point in the village of Reach, have an ale, and then ride his horse to the woods near Little Ditton, where he would meet me at dusk.

It was during one of these walks that I first encountered the Wire Man. Snow had fallen and the glare from the bouncing sun was piercing. I stopped to catch my breath after ascending a steep crest of the earthwork. Through the silence and wet branches I saw a man. He stood in an adjacent field, echoing my stance, but quite alien to my senses. Black and metallic; amorphous, he would at one moment be made from fine chicken wire and the next from wrought steel beams as wide as railway girders. I did not panic. His presence seemed benign. I continued to walk, intrigued to see if he would follow. The Wire Man obliged.

Over the next few years the Wire Man was seldom absent from my walks. He would trek alongside me quietly, clambering over hedges as he passed across field after field. From my vantage point on the earthworks I could examine him, though I sensed he did not like this, as whenever I stared for too long he would develop bright fires in his empty head that would rage and grow until I looked away. The Wire Man did not conform to physical laws. He could be many sizes at once and did not always walk on the ground. I began to spot him everywhere. In towns he would dart behind walls to avoid people seeing him. On the train I would notice him running alongside; sometimes jumping up at the windows, sometimes a busy speck on the horizon.

The first person I spoke to about the Wire Man was a woman called Jane who I met at University. We had just had sex for the first time and I felt an overwhelming urge to build something concrete between us in place of the bodies we had recently cast aside. She suggested that I might like to talk to some of my friends about the Wire Man instead. My friends seemed interested, but they soon grew bored with the topic and began to exchange sinister looks with one another when it was raised. Dave was the exception. He was training to be a psychiatrist and took many notes. Years later, in a provincial library, I found a paper he had written about the Wire Man buried in the palsied pages of a defunct journal. Apparently, the Wire Man was my father. This did not feel right and I decided Dave was insane. Besides, my father died of pneumonia years earlier.

I stopped talking about the Wire Man soon after university. Jane was now my wife and we had begun trying for children. I took a job at a local paper. The Wire Man was often a distraction. I would see him every day in the corner of the office, contorting into horrible shapes, eyes ablaze. Alcohol helped make his presence bearable. When I was drunk the Wire Man would shrink with the groaning clank of steel in winter. Years passed, I gained promotions and accolades, achieved goals and took up hobbies.

Then one day I realized that the Wire Man no longer followed me. It had been a gradual realization, a growing awareness that flits around the margins of consciousness, yet when it finally landed I felt an incredible sense of loss. I did not understand my pain. It should have been a relief. Life carried on with all its myriad tribulations: the children were fed and grew, dogs arrived and left us for the vet’s needle, we bought and sold houses. I stood amidst this swirling activity and did my best to appear affected and engaged. My family believed in me, especially the children. They soon left home and had their own offspring. Over the years, Jane conducted several affairs to test if I could still be brought to agony. I dutifully wept. Eventually the act seemed unnecessary. I saw the other old people staring listlessly from windows and decided to drift along in the cover of their shadows. The margins grew thicker and darker. When the Wire Man did return I was long gone. He may have looked for me, I cannot say.