We sit at Pen-y-Bont Station in the sun.
There is a patch on the bench where the green paint has peeled and left naked wood. This is what reality feels like, I tell myself: the sensation of these woodgrains against my palm; the throb of a splinter; the wind in my hair. The devil’s advocate whispers that there is little difference, that a bench in Victorian Oxford, in Manchester, in the London of the future, felt just as vivid. But I tune the voice out. I want to luxuriate in Real Life.
My eyes wander to the payphone on the stone wall of the station. Our mobiles sit dead in our rucksacks. There was no wi-fi at Fate’s house; there were no chargers. The thought of reconnecting to the newsreel of life is both frightening and strange. We’ll have to discover the history of the last four months in vignettes and soundbites. I wonder if they got rid of Boris Johnson, if the Tories are still in power. I wonder which male celebrities have been felled by MeToo. I wonder if the gap between rich and poor has widened ever more, if the pavements are an ocean of pleading hands and sad faces and polystyrene cups. For all my pessimism I enjoy a sense of déjà vu: that sensation you get when you’ve been abroad for a long time and you’re on the last flight home, that tired, happy anticipation.
Jaime’s fingers curl around mine. There is fear in his eyes. I know he is thinking about Fate.
There was a moment when we were standing in Fate’s kitchen 522and we’d found some eggs in his fridge. I gazed at them – large size, from Morrisons – and I knew they should be whipped into a golden, syrupy froth, but how did you get the goodness out of the shells? Jaime came to my side and said, ‘Shall I do it?’ As he cracked the egg against the bowl, I let out a scream and Jaime jumped in shock. I apologised and said that my brain-fog was making me feel like a zombie. He kissed me and we could not stop. We kissed in between bites. We kissed over suds and squeaky-clean plates. We fell asleep, lip to lip, in a sleeping bag on the sitting room floor. The bedrooms freaked us out too much and there was a danger of Fate keeping us awake with his banging.
Before we left, we stood by the door of the room we had locked Fate in, listening hard. Jaime knocked gently.
Silence.
‘He has the kettle, the sink and the Nutrifeed in there with him,’ I say out loud, my voice cutting into the fresh air.
‘Yes, but we should call them now,’ says Jaime, rising from the bench.
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘I thought we were going to ring them from London. We wanted to be home, before it all …’
‘We’re the victims, we’ve done nothing wrong …’
But I know he is thinking of the blood seeping from Fate’s arm, the baseball bat he wrestled from him.
‘Maybe we should have looked harder for Gwent,’ I say, even though we agreed it was futile: Fate would have buried him deep.
‘I think he’s probably somewhere in the garden …’ he says, and the thought of his skeleton, nestled in the earth, makes me shiver. ‘We must get in touch with his wife when we get home.’ 523
Jaime goes to the public phone and presses the 9 three times. I hear his voice catching as he says ‘ambulance’. The reflection of my face in the booth makes me start: its thin new shape. Jaime had to steal a belt to hold up his jeans. His coat looks as though he has inherited it from a larger relative. I’ve lost a tooth. Jaime’s hair now curls over his ears, and he has a beard flowing down his chest. When we first stood in front of a mirror, we touched our reflections in a delirium.
‘It’s us,’ Jaime said over and over in wonder, ‘it’s us.’
It seems to take a long time for them to answer Jaime’s call. On the electronic board, the train goes from being due in fifteen minutes to five. Finally Jaime tells them there is an old man lying in a locked room in his cottage, and that he may be bleeding out. We couldn’t call three days ago because he’d cut the telephone wires and we were still too weak to walk to the station.
‘He abducted us,’ he adds, ‘he’s a bastard abusing cunt.’
When he hobbles back to the bench, he looks shattered.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘They say they can’t come, he’s not a priority.’
‘What?’
‘I know. It’s mad,’ he says.
In shock, we stutter theories: that a fresh round of government cuts has done away with public services altogether; that the NHS, long under immense strain, must have died. Should we go back? Should we call a private doctor? The noise of the incoming train steals our speech. We resolve to try calling again when we get to London.
There’s a pause while we wait for the train doors to unlock, and in that interval, a terror starts to build inside me: a conviction that if I look back I will see Fate staggering into the station, 524beard blood-streaked, like a crazed Lear. The doors eventually slide open and I nearly trip in my eagerness to jump on. We sit down on baize seats. I tell myself that there’s no way Fate could get out of that locked room, but I can’t still my trembling. I am convinced that he is going to lurch into our carriage, knife in hand.
The train draws out of the station and we are safe for now. I exhale.
Jaime takes a can of Coke out of his rucksack.
‘Do you mind if we have it now?’
‘Let’s do it, Mr Lancia,’ I say.
We pass it back and forth, our kisses becoming fizzy. Jaime yawns and his head drifts on to my shoulder. In the honesty of sleep, he looks haggard. When we get to his mother’s house, I’d like to see photos of him as a teenager, a little boy, a baby.
My mind surfs between waking and sleep. Images from Jaime’s dream seep into my consciousness. A wolf running over a hill, a cloud frowning over him; the wolf wet under the assault of rain, the cloud chasing him. We’ve been twinned in the wombs of literary imaginations for a long time; it feels natural for us to still be joined by a psychic umbilical cord. As he wakes up, I see his disorientation as he glances round the carriage, realises, remembers. His eyes settle on my face, caressing my cheeks, my lips, my eyes. Then he pulls me in for a hug that crushes me; it almost hurts.
‘It’s OK,’ I whisper in his ear, ‘everything’s going to be OK.’
He breaks the ring pull from the can and holds it by my left finger.
‘I know this is really cheesy, but …’
I start to cry, and he does too. The pull won’t fit on, it’s too tight. I reach up, yank a lock of hair out of my scalp, and he 525knots it around my finger. As we lie back, I can’t stop looking at it.
Trees blur past; sheep; suburbs; cities.
We get closer to London, but our carriage remains empty.
There are posters in the stations showing people separated by arrows. Jaime thinks it’s an advertising campaign hangover from Valentine’s Day. I suspect it’s some art installation project. The thought of my canvases at home is a joyful hunger.
Paddington Station is virtually empty, with more pigeons than humans, strutting about as though they’ve taken ownership of the place. All the shops are closed, just as the buffet was closed on the train. People walk past with white birds covering their faces. No, the birds are masks. There are a lot of masks. A woman comes up to us.
‘Can I help you?’
Her uniform looks reassuring, but the logo says Community Support Officer, which I fear is somewhere between police-woman and busybody. Jaime told me earlier that we needed to get our story straight; that we should just say we were drugged, nothing more. But now I see that Jaime is too numb for words, his eyes flicking over the street beyond, a look of horror on his face.
The woman’s focus narrows on me. I try to speak, but my heart stutters. It’s like the moment when I first woke up in Fate’s cottage. I opened my mouth, but all I could manage were animal whimpers. Shock flooded my vocal cords and emerged in a scream. In the aftermath, my tongue felt strangely heavy as it attempted various shapes. I would look at a thing and wonder what sounds language had attached to it. Jaime called 526the telephone a surfer, the bedroom a prison, the table a chair, the chair a painting.
‘We tried to call,’ I manage, finally, ‘but they said it wasn’t a priority. What I mean is—’
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Wales,’ I say.
Her face darkens. I knew it would be like this; I knew nobody would listen; nobody would believe us.
‘Have you been on holiday?’
‘No …’
‘I was sent to interview Augustus Fate,’ Jaime cuts in. ‘He didn’t let us out for a long time.’
‘I’m glad you were following the rules, but you need to go home now, otherwise I’ll be forced to issue a fine. Remember: exercise once per day, infrequent trips for shopping.’
I open my mouth to protest but Jaime drags me away. We decide to head to my flat first, which is nearer than Jaime’s or his mum’s. On the tube platform, I stand too near to a middle-aged man and he gives me a fierce look. On the walk from Camden tube station to my flat, we see long queues outside Tesco. Empty buses trawl by.
My flat is a basement in a four-storey house on Hawley Crescent. I know there was enough in my account to cover the standing order for my rent, but I’m still worried that I might find I’ve been evicted. I kneel down and lift the japonica pot, relieved to find the key still there. When I unlock the door, the smell hits us: rot, rubbish, stale air. I open the windows and hear barking. In the back garden I call for Tommy and he wriggles through a hole in my neighbour’s fence. I open my arms and he runs into them. I bury my face in his fur. He seems 527healthy and shiny and fed. Warmth fills my heart. I go to show Tommy my lock-of-hair ring, but it’s fallen off somewhere.
Jaime calls his mother. She can’t stop crying and he struggles with tears. His story – about going travelling, losing his mobile, finding himself in a remote part of Asia – is not very convincing. He keeps reassuring her, promising that he’ll be over very soon. I am happy for him but I can’t help but feel a cut of jealousy, wishing I could call my mother. He asks after her health, but all she can speak about is a virus and how the key workers are heroes and that she can’t get any flour. We sit on the sofa, dazed.
A plague. Can it be true? In our modern era? Everything has shut down, Jaime’s mother said. I picture all the buildings sitting empty. The cinemas in perpetual darkness. The libraries, where the sun slants slowly through the windows on to books gathering dust. Boarded-up churches where bats gather and the mice nibble hymn books.
‘We’re still in a book,’ Jaime says slowly. ‘Somehow, somewhere, we passed into another book. This can’t be real.’
‘But – you just spoke to your mum,’ I cry.
‘A projection, created from my memories.’
‘So tomorrow we’ll find a Booksurfer; we’ll get out, we’ll get back.’
‘But how and where? Is this still Fate?’ Jaime glances uneasily at the dusty windows.
‘I don’t know.’ I bite my lip to still the trembling. ‘I just want to be home.’
Jaime curls his arm around me and we sit in silence for a while as the sun fades. Tommy balls up on my lap and I part his fur with my fingers, down to every speckled fibre. I had forgotten how it felt to stroke him. This has to be real. 528Jaime kisses my head and I look up into his sad eyes. Then something shifts in them.
‘Wife,’ he says lightly.
‘Husband.’
He leans forwards, smiling, and gives me a kiss, and we jump, for in the distance is the noise of people bursting into wild applause, up and down the street, the cries and the clapping ringing out like bells across the city.