CHAPTER THIRTY: IN COUNTRY

 

 

“HE’S DEAD. LEAVE him.”

“But Sean, we can’t just–”

“We can. We’re going to. Now.”

Sean was moving as best he could, collecting his clothes under one arm and shooing Emma towards the door with the other. He caught sight of a slender woman in a black cocktail dress moving through the front door with all the padded stealth of a panther.

“Who’s there?” he asked. For his pains, he got an eyeful of timber as the doorway flew apart. Emma yelped and scrambled into the kitchen, trying to pull on her skirt.

“Fire escape,” Sean said, grabbing the Walther from Marshall’s fist. He was moving backwards slowly into the kitchen, dressed only in a pair of boxer shorts, when she leaned her head around the doorway. The eyes were shifting around the flat, taking it in, the body constantly moving, like the seep of oil. Sean squeezed off a round and watched the bullet pass straight through the flesh of the woman’s forehead. The wound rippled and closed itself up. The woman might have frowned. That’s all.

“Right,” he said. “Fine.”

Emma was on the fire escape by now, clanking down it as fast as she could. Sean followed close behind, again moving backwards, his gun cocked and ready, for all the good it would do them. They struck off across the wasteland at the back of the tower block, aiming for the canal and the numerous neighbouring streets, which they hoped were gloomy and narrow enough to allow them to lose their pursuer.

Sean kept checking back and was rewarded with the sight of a black figure, moving impossibly fast on the other side of the wasteland, seemingly intent on blocking off their progress. They got to the canal, where Sean lost sight of their attacker among the long reeds that fringed the bank.

“Come on,” he cajoled. “Across the bridge.”

They scuttled over the wooden walkway, Sean peering into the distance but seeing nothing. He eased up on the opposite bank and, keeping his gaze fastened on the only access point across the canal, pulled on his trousers and shoes.

“Who is it?” Emma demanded, breathlessly.

“I don’t know, but Will, remember Will told us about that crippled thing that was chasing him? I think that’s her. I think. Maybe.”

“Fuck,” Emma said. She seemed impressed. “She, she...” Emma waggled her hands, trying to put it into words. “...she moved.”

“I know. Come on.”

The thick nest of terraces were formed like a maze. Darkness helped them move through it, sucking them into the core of green at the centre of confused streets and pathways. Few of the streetlamps were functional. Around half of those that did work spat and fizzled chancy orange light, a poor man’s disco. It did strange things to colour, this sodium pulse. It turned the skin into a dappled, beaten armoury of greys. Twenty minutes of rat-runs saw them hunkering down behind a squad of wheelie bins by a creosoted fence. The house at their rear was still awake. The sounds of laughter and glasses chinking. A smell of curried food. Beyond that, the night was silent but pregnant with something that felt like anticipation. It prickled the skin.

“How long do you think we’ve been waiting?” Emma asked after another twenty minutes had expired. “I’m cold.”

“Oh, not long enough,” he replied, drawing her under his arm.

“How long before we can go? How much longer do we have to wait?”

“Bit longer,” he said, and turned to smile at her. “Helpful, aren’t I?”

“Marshall’s dead, isn’t he? We couldn’t have saved him?”

“I don’t think so. He had lost a lot of blood. He was coming to warn us, remember that. He wasn’t coming to us for help. He saved our lives.”

“What do we do now?”

Sean squeezed her arm. He felt better. The wounds were knitting together quickly now. He could feel the fizz of repair coursing through his body.

He remembered something from his childhood. His mother leaning over him with a wad of cotton wool dipped in TCP.

“Where does it hurt, love?” she had asked him. “Show Mummy.” And he remembered laughing and trying to pull the cotton wool out of her hand. What had he done? Tripped on the road and grazed his knee? But in the time she had pulled his trousers down to sterilise his cuts, the wound had healed. A quick healer, they had said about him. It’s because he’s got good blood. He’s a strong lad, that one. On the football pitch, hoofed into the air by reckless defenders, he had picked himself up and plodded on. Tin legs, they had nicknamed him. Sean had believed it all. If you weren’t used to injuring yourself every time you fell over, you didn’t question your lack of bumps, bruises, breaks.

“When Marshall came in,” Sean said, “what was it he was covered in? I mean, what was it in the doorway? The colours.”

“While we were fucking?”

“Yeah. The colours. The light.”

Emma kissed his cheek. “Maybe you were dizzy. I was that good.” She kissed him again. “It was that good. Had to be we were disturbed on our first time, though, hey? I was ready to knock Marshall’s block off, before I saw what had happened to him.”

Sean returned his attention to the opposite edge of the lawn, where the pale narrow houses huddled together as if mirroring or mocking them. “I think, maybe, it was a way through. Being, I don’t know, born.”

He felt Emma drop away from him, an infinitesimal collapse. “Because we were fucking?”

Sean shrugged. “Jesus, why not? It was our first time. Remember what Pardoe said about ripples happening when we met up. Well, having sex... maybe it’s intensified the ripples. It’s triggered off something else. Something new.”

Emma digested this for a moment and then giggled, drawing herself into his protective warmth again. “You shouldn’t be throwing such big stones in,” she said.

Emma was having trouble trying to stop laughing now, but it was bitter, edgy laughter that threatened to spill over into madness or tears. Sean stopped it by kissing her hard. He wished he could pass something on via the kiss, as if in his saliva he possessed some balm that could help Emma make this transformation and help her cope with the immensity of the changes in her life.

Sean

He whipped his head up.

Emma, sobered now, said, “What is it?”

“Shhh.”

Sean

“Someone’s here,” he said. “Can you hear?”

Emma stiffened. Her hand rose out of the shadows between them and a finger pointed. Out of a black cumulus of hedges, Marshall stumbled. Now they both heard him, his voice weak, almost childish.

“Sean?” He sounded unsure, as if the mind controlling the utterance could not fully appreciate the awful prospect that he was still alive. “Sean. Help. Me. Emma. Emma. Save. Me. Oh. God.”

Emma began to rise, her breath coming in stitches, her eyes filled with tears.

Sean held her back and put a hand over her mouth. He drew her face close to his and slowly, deliberately, shook his head. Emma’s eyes widened and grew angry. He leaned into her and whispered, as quietly as he possibly could, “Marshall is dead. That is not Marshall.”

Marshall was standing at the centre of the green, cocking his head, as if he had somehow caught a sliver of what Sean had passed on to Emma and was trying to pinpoint where the fragments of sound had come from.

Watching Marshall, Sean could see little things, little tell-tale signs that suggested it was not the man. Marshall would not wear his hat so far back on his head, like Sinatra. His belt buckle was tied across his coat, something Marshall never did because it made him feel restricted and didn’t allow him access to his gun. This Marshall had thrust his destroyed hand into his pocket. Sean guessed that was because, dead, it would have stopped bleeding. This Marshall could not replicate the flow that was needed. This Marshall had to hide the lack of bloodshed.

Sean saw the only way they could escape. “Here,” he mouthed to Emma. She gaped at him uncomprehendingly. “Love me. Fuck me.”

Already his hands were moving under her skirt, touching her, trying to coax some heat and wetness from her. She protested, trying to wriggle back, her eyes on Marshall as he staggered across the green. But maybe something in Marshall’s gait, the way his drunken stumble had arrested itself and was becoming, by the second, more controlled, caused her to give pause.

“Trust me,” Sean said, rubbing his fingers against and into the soft, moist yield of her sex. He guided her hand to his trousers and she unzipped him, drawing him out into the cold. He risked, “I love you,” because he needed to say the words and he needed her to be reassured. She nodded and leaned over him, quickly stiffening his cock with her mouth. She drew away and shuffled over him, apeing the position they had been in earlier. When she sank on to him, she had to stifle a moan by stuffing a fistful of jumper into her mouth. They moved against each other as slowly as they dared, and instantly rainbow motes began to tremble in the air, six feet away. It was like white noise on a television screen. Emma’s thighs trembled at the end of every upstroke, Sean’s when he rose to meet her coming back down, the price they had to pay for stealth: every shred of them wanted to speed up, to sprint for that delicious moment.

Emma watched Marshall, or what had once been Marshall. He seemed to have shed every aspect of the pretence, but for his shell. He knew they were there. He could read it in the warmth that had impinged upon the cold air of the park. He could smell the animal in them as they rutted. But he couldn’t see them. Yet. She recalled the pathetic, determined figure that had pressed through the bars of the hospital gates, like an unpopular child desperately trying to keep up with the would-be friends who were attempting to lose her. This person had evolved. This was real danger. It possessed knowledge and guile and strength. Will would have been dead by now, were he in the same situation from which they had rescued him. She wondered, as she felt herself grow giddy from the soft, impossible rhythms that her body was being sucked into, if the creature’s evolution had reached its ceiling yet. She wondered if, in a short while, it would be able to see them in the dark, if its eyes might develop some kind of thermal recognition now that it realised such a thing would be useful to it.

Pondering this, she felt the moment upon her. She knew she was going to come soon and could not stop herself from upping the ante. Sean tried to respond by reining in her new energy but she would not be denied. The colours sparkled and pulsed, as if catalysed by this development.

And Marshall saw.

The colours coalesced, forming a vertical palette. Smears of fresh hues as the colours merged ran up and down the palette as it twisted, creating a column. The air around it seemed to distort, as if unsure what side of the column to be on.

Emma bucked against Sean, beginning to make soft, yelping noises. Sean gave himself to the feeling too, and within a few strokes was there with her. They lurched apart at the moment of climax. Cheke was rushing them now, the glamour that was Marshall already reabsorbed. She shot twice, but the curtain of colour between them distracted her aim and the bullets were wayward. Dogs had started barking all around them. Lights were coming on in bedrooms. The third bullet caught Emma in the throat and she went down, clutching her neck with both hands. Somehow Sean managed to drag Emma into the maelstrom before Cheke laid her hands upon them. He had the final impression of her gun rising, level with his head, but he threw his arm across his eyes and toppled forwards into the cold fire. This time there were no faces in the flames, no incitement or enticement. None was needed.

Now, as with the first time in Myddleton Lane, Sean rewarded his courage, or recklessness, with a scream that he believed would never end.

 

 

A LOCK-UP GARAGE in the south of the city that he had broken into. A bottle of cheap wine. The remains of a bad chicken sandwich from a petrol station’s shop. Was this all he had left? Everyone with whom he came into contact had left him or died. Everything he owned had been reduced to rubble.

Will spread the tabloid on top of the crate and shifted his position on the cold, uncomfortable stone floor. There hadn’t been a car in this garage for years, although a black oil-stain proved that it had once been used for that purpose. Now it seemed the garage was used primarily by tramps, or crack-smokers. Someone had tried to set fire to the garage and succeeded only in blackening the walls and leaving behind a permanent sour-scorched smell. There was a sleeping bag in the corner, but it looked too ragged and stained to offer any comfort. Inexplicably, a garden rake and a broken hockey stick leant against the wall. The only other object in the garage was a cardboard box filled with swollen, mouldy paperback books.

The death toll from the previous day’s accident had reached a thousand. Of those, around six hundred had died on the ground. The number of victims was apparently increasing by the minute. Emergency crews weren’t rising to the questions asked of them by grisly reporters as to the likely final total. The newspapers had gone ahead with their guesstimates anyway. There were a lot of noughts.

Had Parliament been in session... they fantasised, lustily. If the crash had taken place at rush hour...

Will’s thoughts turned to that beautiful rippling mass at the centre of the inferno. It had resembled a wall of water, or of molten steel. He wanted it so badly. He could almost feel what it would be like to immerse himself in that thing. He might displace the surface without breaking it for some time, like the dimpling that a waterboatman’s legs create on the surface tension of a pond. He might suddenly burst through its pellicle in a sudden implosion of silver bubbles. He could taste a bright, fresh flavour – what an apple might taste of if it were a hybrid of fruit and steel – feel the gush, a slight astringent sting, through his nostrils. Brilliant shivers against the skin. What might there be to see on the reverse? He had to have it.

But there were no more dates from Christopher. The Graham Greene novel’s dark itinerary ended with this crash. He rubbed at the inked appointments as if believing that some final secret date might reveal itself from the smudges he was creating. He sat for a long time, trying to remember what Catriona’s laughter was like or how her lips felt on his body. He couldn’t do it. His memory wasn’t up to the task. Or was it that, as he shed the people who connected to his life, they became intrinsically, essentially unimportant? They didn’t have immediacy any more. They were memory. And memory faded. When Will died, he thought, Catriona would cease to exist for anybody anywhere. It would be as though she had never set foot on the planet.

Will pushed himself away from the crate, suddenly aware of the panic in his breath and the restive knock of his heart. Had Catriona existed at all? What proof had he that she had been there? If he met a stranger and tried to convince him of the reality of a woman that he had loved, that stranger might be as unmoved as the garden rake by the wall. He wouldn’t have to believe in her because he didn’t care. Whether she had existed meant nothing to anybody who had never met her.

Will jammed the heels of his hands against his eyes. She means something to me. But how could that be true, when remembering the colour of her eyes, or which of her breasts bore a pair of freckles, defeated him? He spent more time now thinking of the perfect stillpoint that announced itself in the midst of chaos than he did the thousands of seconds he had spent with Catriona.

He flung the Greene at the cardboard box and grabbed the rake. If Catriona did not matter to him, then how could anybody else expect to?

 

 

“IT’S DIFFERENT,” SHE said.

“How?” he challenged. “I can’t see any change.”

“Look.” She took his hand and led him along the path. The black sun burned fiercely in a white sky scratched with black chalk clouds. “The last time we were here, just for those few seconds, these buildings here were fine.”

Sean looked at the buildings, then looked at Emma. He didn’t get it. Patiently, she described how the windows of the building, the last time they were there, were clean and whole. Now some of them bore cobwebs and greasy smears. Some of them were cracked or missing. Others had been boarded up.

“So?”

“So nothing. So something. So what?”

They walked on. It was too new an experience and too much of a relief to have cheated death to allow a coldness to develop between them. Sean apologised.

“It’s okay,” Emma said. “It’s been a bad day.”

Had he been disappointed to find a humdrum city through such a magical, awe-inspiring door? It had not been high on his list of expectations. He found himself wondering if they had passed through into a different place at all, when he saw the people on street corners chatting while they toted carrier bags rammed with food, or dogs crouching in the gutter, emptying their bowels. It didn’t appear to possess anything to mark it out from the place they had departed. No angels. No dragons. No Cheshire cat.

“What’s this place called, do you think?” he asked. “The Zoo, as Pardoe said?”

“We could invent a name for it, if you like.”

“I’m sure it already has a name.”

“Why? It might not. Just because it seems familiar to you, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it will be called something like Stoke or Liverpool or Hull.”

Sometimes he thought he caught a glimpse of the nuances to which she alluded. It was a little bit like playing spot the difference. A police car might flash past and it would be a full minute before he suspected, the image catching up with him, that the C in POLICE painted on the bonnet was actually a K. POLIKE. But it was after the fact that he had these intuitions. He couldn’t check them out. The next time he saw a police car, the letters were spelled correctly, but after the car was long gone, he started doubting there had been anybody sitting inside it. A bird flitting from the branch of a rare tree was gone before he could ascertain whether or not it owned a beak. They turned a corner just as the corner of his eye insisted that a woman walking down some steps to a wine bar was shedding little pieces of her body. A bus roared by, belching clouds of black smoke from the exhaust, which blinded him to his initial sighting of a man in the window taking bites out of a badger.

By the time they reached the end of the long, busy street, his head was pounding.

“I need to slow down a bit,” he said. “Can we have a rest?”

In the rear of a coffee shop, well clear of the entrance, Sean rubbed his head and sipped hot chocolate from a large mug. Whatever else was out of whack about this place, his drink was real, almost life-affirmingly hot and sweet. He warmed his hands on the mug and looked around him, catching his reflection in a mirror that eclipsed one entire wall. His eye had recovered well and a surreptitious peeling back of his cuff revealed a completeness about the flesh, where it had been riven. Only a slight discoloration remained, the razor’s route outlined in white.

Emma was resting her head in her hands, regarding him across the table through the steam from her green tea. The bullet’s path through her throat had left scarring but already the wound was sealing itself. Being here seemed to have changed her, slightly. Her eyes seemed to contain less white; the iris was fatter here. When she spoke or breathed, tiny, almost imperceptible vibrations spoilt the air around her lips. Sudden movement caused a similar disruption. He saw it as he stirred his drink with a spoon. He saw it too blur a woman’s head behind the counter as she sneezed. Watching for too long made him feel nauseous.

“I can’t believe that the hill we dreamed about will be a part of this place,” he said. “It all seems too busy.”

“I don’t know,” Emma said. “It’s busy, but it seems manageable. Best we don’t give up on it before we’ve started. We’ll get there in the end.”

Sean nodded and drained his mug. He had noticed another subtle upheaval: the change in their dynamic. Before arriving here, Sean had definitely driven their progress and felt, sometimes, that he was shielding Emma. Now the balance of power had shifted. He felt good about that. He felt comfortable. She reassured him as much, he hoped, as he reassured her.

“It doesn’t seem so noisy, outside, does it?”

Emma picked out her tea bag and discarded it on the saucer. “Well, we’re underground.”

“I know, but still. The din up there was awful.”

The din, when they returned to street level, was still awful, but Sean couldn’t shake the belief that it had been reintroduced as they came back to it. As if it was all for their benefit. Something about these people too, so vital, so vocal, hinted of only recent animation. When he voiced his concerns to Emma, she seemed uninterested. “You might be right,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be sinister. It’s just different.”

They continued down the street, happy for now just to absorb the newness of this experience. It was nice to not have a direction in mind. To not have immediate purpose. “Do you think she can come through too?” Sean asked. He didn’t feel he needed to qualify the “she”.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe if she does, she’s different too.”

Sean fell into step beside Emma. He held her hand and tried to accept the differences around him. He couldn’t accept that there might come a time when they would never seem alien to him. He turned his head, too late, as a door snicked shut. He looked at Emma but she hadn’t seen. Or if she had, she happily accepted that a man could reach into his own chest, pull out his beating heart, put it to his ear and return it, seemingly satisfied, back inside.

 

 

THEY CORNERED WILL in a school.

He had been shot in the leg and he could feel blood still seeping out of the wound, even though he had tied his belt around the calf, just above the bullet’s point of entry. How had it come to this? He didn’t understand. It was frightening, really, to consider how far, how rapidly, one could fall from what had been, on the face of it, an unassailable position.

It had all gone wrong so quickly. He had stalked up the high street with his rake, but all his intentions had been spirited away the moment he started trying to choose victims. Should he take the lives of the old or the sick? Might he get the same result if he killed a dog? The beggar sitting outside the bank? Who would miss him?

In the end, his choice was taken from him. He accidentally tripped up a man of about twenty with the handle of the rake that he was dragging along behind him. The man’s mouth was full of the anaemic pie he clutched in one hand. The other was stretched around the shoulders of his girlfriend, an older woman on the heavy side, with features that seemed to be concentrated too much at the centre of a large face. It was as if someone had fed a hook through the back of her head and was trying to pull the face inside. She wore a large, billowing white T-shirt and leggings that emphasised podgy, orange-peel thighs.

“Ot the uckinell jaffink...” the youth began. A blue tattoo teardrop clung to a cheekbone. Across the knuckles of the pie-wielding hand, more blue: LUVV.

“Paste him, Teddy. Go on.” The pinched singularity of the woman’s face made little tremors as she spoke. A rouged pinhole at the centre was plugged with a cigarette that she sucked violently.

The man looked at his girlfriend, looked at his pie, and looked at Will. Then he dropped the pie and extravagantly slapped invisible crumbs from his fingers. Then he swaggered forwards, rotating his shoulders, lifting his arms, and waggling his hands. “Kincomonden! Come on!”

Will raised the rake and slashed it across the youth’s face. He saw the tines bite into the flesh and lift it clear of the boss of his skull before the tissue tore and the rake came free. The youth screamed and dropped to his knees, clasping his face to stop it from dribbling clean off the bone. Blood made red gloves for his hands. The pinched face on the girl relaxed and the cigarette dangled from her mouth, threatening to ignite the fuzz on her chin. She looked suddenly vulnerable, but then she breathed deeply and screamed for the police.

Will hit the youth on the back of the head, but had to stop to be sick when the teeth were hindered on their way out by the grinding of bone that he felt work its way through the handle of the rake. The youth was squealing, his face ashen. His eyes were closed.

Wiping his mouth, Will yanked again on the rake, which came free with a sucking noise. Something was spitting and bubbling out of the back of the youth’s head. He didn’t wait to see what it was, but swung the rake a final time, forcing the tines through the youth’s throat. He might well have been dead before that moment, but now Will was certain of it. He looked wildly around him. The street had filled up quickly, to rubberneck.

“Come on,” Will beseeched the sky. “Come on!” Blood from the rake, held aloft, splashed on his forehead.

The spectators drew back, thinking he was addressing them. A siren came to them through the streets and all heads turned in its direction. Will ran. Where was it?

In the playground of the school he had grabbed a girl and dragged her into a classroom. He sat on the floor with her while the evacuation went on around him. He heard lots of sirens wailing in the distance and cars pulling up on the road outside the school. There was a helicopter too. Someone said something he couldn’t understand through a loudhailer. He ignored it and soon they stopped trying.

They played Snap. She told him her name was Fiona and described what she had received for Christmas. On the way back from a visit to the toilet, he was shot in the leg by a police marksman. Now Will and the girl were sitting in the corridor, with their backs to the wall, beneath the window through which he had been fired at.

“Does it hurt?” Fiona asked him. Her brown hair was in bunches. On her finger there was a plaster that she was now picking at.

“Only when I go jogging,” he said. She laughed.

He wondered if Catriona might have given birth to a girl. They both had hoped for a daughter. Cat had said it felt like a girl even though it was her first child and she wouldn’t have known if a boy felt any different.

“Do you want to do some colouring in?” he asked her. He was so tired.

She brightened at this idea and nodded her head. She said, “You can help. I’ve got a farmyard to do. Can you colour in the chickens?”

He nodded. “Go on. I’ll catch you up.”

She ran back to the classroom. He heard the static of radios going mad as the snipers reported this. A minute later, he heard a door clicking open and footsteps in the corridor. He didn’t look up.

“I have a gun,” he said. “In my pocket.”

A calm voice, surprisingly young, told him to lie on the floor, face down, with his hands on his head.

“I don’t think so,” Will said. “I don’t think I’ll do that.”

“It would be more helpful to us if you did,” came the voice.

“I’m tired of being helpful. I didn’t kill my wife, you know. Everyone reckons I did. But I didn’t. I didn’t do quite as much as I might have done to help her, but I didn’t kill her.” Now he looked up into the face of a young man, a ridiculously young man, holding a Heckler and Koch submachine gun. Will remembered running around a playground like the one outside when he was little, pretending to be a British soldier, or, if he drew the short straw, a German. Pretending to hold a Tommy gun. Pretending to spray the enemy with bullets while you made that noise with your tongue and your teeth: Ddddrrrrrrrrraaa! Ddddrrrrrrra!

The armed policeman said, “It doesn’t bother me what you did or didn’t do. We can sort all that out later. You need some rest.”

Will nodded. “Lots of it,” he said, and reached into his pocket.