Two days later. Three. Four. He did what he should have done the first night had he not been so groggy. He slipped down to the chapel, to which, being in one of the inner rooms, he could enjoy access day or night, and used a teaspoon he had slipped up his sleeve at supper to jemmy open the little offerings box. Notes in there were no use to him and he left them, but he scrabbled up the one tenpence piece and thrust it safely to the bottom of his jeans pocket. Perhaps there was a God after all. Then he padded swiftly back to his room, knotted together his sheets and the ugly orange curtains as tightly as he could, tied one end to the bracket that supported the sink in the landing loo, dropped the rest through the window, squeezed through the gap, scraping and cutting his belly in the process and lowered himself as far down as he could before taking a deep breath and letting himself drop to the field below.
There was only a sliver of moon still up but the cold night was cloudless. There were sheep down there and he dreaded they’d start bleating at his sudden arrival among them but happily they were huddling at the far end beneath some old apple trees. He ran as fast as he could across one field, across another then on to the lane and back up the side of the valley down which he remembered his mother driving. He ran until a stitch and breathlessness stopped him then walked, breath whistling out of him, terrified he was making far too much noise, ready to leap into the hedge and hide if there were shouts or torches behind him, or headlamps. He had no coat – that had been taken from him with his shoes – but he could not have said if he was shivering from cold or adrenalin. It was more sport than he felt he had performed in his life to date. By the time he finally saw the yellowed light in a distant call box his slippers and socks were wet through from dew.
He raised the receiver and rang the only possible person. It was the dead of night, of course, and a forty-minute drive, so it was a good hour or so before they could be with him. Before the pips went, Vernon was marvellously calm and controlled.
‘I seem to remember there’s a little sign in there for emergency calls,’ he said. ‘It gives your Ordnance Survey grid reference or something. Just read it all out to me, then we can use our brains and find you.’
There was a big old barn across the way. Nervous of being far too visible if he stayed in the light of the phone box, Eustace walked in there and groped around in the dark until he found what smelled like clean enough straw, lay down and bedded himself in, curling himself up for warmth. Somehow – an effect of shock perhaps – he fell asleep. He woke with a start, and was instantly afraid as he heard an engine running. Then he heard Suzanne’s distinctive voice, not remotely sotto voce, asking,
‘So where the fuck is he? It’s two a.m. and I’m getting nipples like fucking Spangles here.’
They were all far too young to drive, of course, but he knew from tales of their wild nights out in Bristol that at least one of her tribe of older brothers would be up for a spontaneous mercy dash. When he stumbled out of the barn, Suzanne gave a little scream and ran to envelop him in herself and a very smelly blanket from her big brother’s minibus. It was the middle of the night but both girls had come along as well as Vernon and the cousins. They were all a bit drunk, including the driver who, Eustace remembered, made money since doing time by ferrying holidaymakers to and fro from various campsites and beaches. He also remembered the brother had a record for GBH so was probably proof against a few charismatic Christians wielding a syringe. Vernon was up front with Suzanne, because he had been map-reading with his big black torch. Tyler and Sasha were canoodling on the back seat, so Eustace sat in the middle with Jez.
‘All right?’ said Jez and he welcomed him on board with a lazy grin, as though midnight rescue missions were nothing out of the ordinary.
The brother dropped them at Vernon’s then melted away. It was too late for anyone to go home and risk waking their families so they all piled in. Vernon and Suzanne went to his room – Eustace suddenly realizing they’d been sleeping in there for a while – Tyler and Sasha began a whispered argument about something and took it off with them to the spare room, so Eustace drifted into the kitchen where Jez took a long, expressive piss in the sink with a tap running while Eustace carried on through to the studio at the back. Being nearly all window and as it was long past the hour when the central heating switched off, it was cold but there was a pile of blankets and pillows and an old patchwork quilt on the daybed. He made himself a sort of nest there, tugged off his soaking slippers, socks and jeans, switched off the light and bedded down. He could tell it was going to be a very short night, with no curtains or blinds to stop the light searing through once the sun was up. Even now the sodium wash from a nearby streetlamp lay across everything.
He had assumed Jez would fall asleep on a sofa in the purple room but he came into the studio as well. Eustace had been facing the wall in an effort to shade his eyes for sleep but heard his heavy tread and half-turned to see him standing there beside the bed, noisily kicking off his boots.
‘Hi,’ he whispered.
‘Your teeth are chattering,’ Jez said, incapable of whispering. ‘You’re still frozen. Budge up.’
He slid under the quilt behind Eustace and, without a moment’s hesitation, flung a meaty arm around him and pressed tightly into him, belly to back, thigh to thigh, foot tucked under foot.
‘Commandos do this,’ he mumbled sleepily, ‘when one of them’s got exposure. You smell of straw.’
‘Sorry,’ Eustace whispered.
‘No. It’s nice,’ Jez said and fell heavily asleep against him.
Just then, Brut, beer and sweat were the best and safest smells in the world.