Free In the Middle of the Wood by Iain Crichton Smith

silently to himself. Usually he hated Sundays which seemed to last forever. But now he was frightened.
    â€œLook,” he said coldly and aloud to Linda, “I know you for what you are.” She woke up in a startled manner and stared at him.
    â€œSir,” said the taxi driver, politely and protectively.
    â€œYou keep out of it,” said Ralph fiercely.
    â€œIt doesn’t matter,” said Linda. “Let him carry on.”
    â€œI know you for what you are,” said Ralph savagely. “I remember the time you danced with that small bald man at the party and you created when I danced with the blonde girl.”
    â€œThat was a long time ago,” said Linda. “And anyway I can’t remember.”
    The large hands of the taxi driver rested on the wheel but he didn’t speak, though Ralph could tell that he was listening intently. That bloody pseudo-Catholic from some nameless Glasgow housing scheme.
    The landscape outside the window shimmered. He remembered an incident that had happened not so long before he had run away. Linda had been working in the kitchen and he himself had been typing in his room. Suddenly he had seen a girl in a leather coat, carrying a carton of milk, walk across the gravel in the direction of the kitchen door. She hadn’t looked in through the window where he himself was typing and after a while he had seen her returning and going out by the gate. Later, when he and Linda were having coffee, he had asked her who the girl was.
    â€œWhat girl?” Linda had said.
    â€œA girl in a leather coat. She was carrying a carton of milk.”
    â€œThat’s odd,” Linda had said. “I never saw such a girl.” And then she had tried to pass the incident off lightly by saying, “You must have been thinking of one of your girl friends.” And indeed she had looked like Irma. He had dismissed the incident from his mind but now and again it would return to him and he would shake his head in a puzzled manner. Was it true that he had imagined the girl or had Linda simply denied her existence for some deep reason of her own? Had she asked the girl to call and then deliberately insisted that she didn’t exist? How much, he thought, we rely for our sanity on witnesses without prejudice. Without them we would be gnashing our teeth in the outer darkness.
    Another twenty miles or so and then he would be home. The house would appear out of its familiar space with its garden and its cherry tree. The taxi would stop and he and Linda would get out and then the taxi driver would drive away, still pretending that he was a real taxi driver. And then he might phone Linda and they would both have a good laugh about an affair which had been so elegantly executed.
    He should never have allowed himself to become so solitary, he should not have withdrawn into the world of words, so that now he had to rely on corrupt witnesses for his sanity. That was the mistake he had made. What reason would his enemies have to tell the truth? None at all. He had despised the ordinary and it had turned round and bitten him. It had turned its aloof mocking face on him, it had played esoteric games with him: he who had thought he was the élitist of the study. Like the far side of the moon with its mysterious hollows and shadows it was blindly turning its cruel face towards him.
    The ordinary witnesses whom he had despised were taking their revenge on him, and what a subtle revenge it was, far more subtle than any of his plots. Who would have foreseen it, that ordinary people would be so clever, that after all they recognized that he depended on them for the true colour of an orange, an apple. On them depended his reality. From their dull ponderous hands hung the real world as on a golden chain. An exile, he returned, blinded now and again to that ordinary world from his own world, and it had seemed to be waiting for him harmlessly. But like the corrupt evil fairies they had