The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  She looked back at Jacob, whose head hung so low she could see a tiny star of white skin in the springing black hair on his crown. He had no elasticity in his ankles or his knees. Taryn understood then how badly he had damaged his back. That he had probably ruptured several discs and that the inflammation was already pressing on his nerves and making his gait leaden.

  She turned to follow the progress of the yellow. She saw bobbing heads in black sunhats. She saw the three taller figures, also in yellow. The yellow was windbreakers, a uniform, and the ribbon was a crowd of schoolchildren trooping up the boardwalk towards the car park and their coach, at the end of a day visiting in the sanctuary. The children had backpacks and water bottles. Some were stumbling along with their heads down and hands out, engrossed in their phones.

  Taryn grabbed Jacob. She reined in the tyre and it stopped, rocking and making waves against their thighs.

  Jacob looked too, then they both began to yell and wave, one-handed, because they couldn’t risk the tyre falling over. With rescue in sight it still seemed too soon to trust their fortunes to anything other than themselves.

  The inlet and encroaching waves swallowed their voices, but they kept calling and, after a little while, several children paused and looked their way.

  Taryn picked up her chain and waved it. Surely someone would notice the chain and divine something of their predicament.

  One of the teachers began jumping up and down to get a better look. Then he rushed to catch up with another of the adults. They both gazed Taryn’s way, then hurried on towards the car park, which was slightly elevated and would give them a better view.

  The children streamed excitedly after them. The group reached the car park and looked down at them. Then, after a short consultation, one of the teachers climbed over the barrier and picked his way through the reeds and tangle of driftwood, to the shore.

  Taryn rattled the chain once more. She tried to make it clear their trouble wasn’t accidental. Surely the school party could see that she and Jacob were chained to the tyre?

  Some of the children drifted down to the shore after the teacher heading their way—though the two other teachers were clearly warning them not to even think of going wading.

  The school party was joined by a couple of grey-haired women in leggings and clutching Nordic walking poles.

  The teacher took his phone out and dialled, talking as he walked through the reeds. He was gazing at them, no doubt describing what he saw.

  Another man joined the group on the shore and listened as one of the teachers explained what they were looking at. He hurried back to his car and got out some tool. Taryn watched them nodding. All in agreement that, yes, that was a good idea. Yes, that might do the job. The man threw his backpack in the car, shut the door and, tool in hand, strode decisively towards the shore. He jumped the fence, trampled the sea pinks and hurried to catch up with the teacher.

  Taryn looked from him to his car. It was her car. He had removed Jacob’s jacket and hat and was carrying his own knife. He had no doubt told the teacher and pupils and hikers he might be able to cut those two people free from that tyre.

  Jacob had recognised the Muleskinner too. He started to shout, ‘It’s him! He did this!’ His voice was hoarse and scarcely rose above the sound of the incoming tide.

  Taryn began to yell too—and not just yell, but stoop defensively and back away to the length of her chain. The tyre subsided with a splash, and went under, spouting trapped air.

  Taryn thrust her arms under the water and her fingers into the sand, trying to scoop up something solid—a shellfish, a stone, something to throw at the Muleskinner. The shells were tiny, only fragments. The sand inches under them was mixed with black organic silt. Taryn retained her handfuls of this. Perhaps she could throw it in his eyes. She should straighten to throw, but instead she stayed stooped over her soft parts, face forward, gesturing at the Muleskinner with one clenched, oil-black fist.

  Jacob had given up shouting. He climbed on top of the submerged tyre and gathered his chain into a loop. He began twirling this doubled length, crouched, and made ready.

  The nearest teacher had caught on—but well after the Muleskinner had overtaken him. He was in pursuit now, running in the Muleskinner’s muddy wake and yelling over his shoulder for someone to call the police. Again. Get them to hurry.

  Another teacher and the two grey-haired hikers were in the water too, on their way, but not moving fast enough.

  A black, late-model SUV pulled up right by the barrier and two people jumped out, leaving its doors open. They scrambled down the bank. One of them took a tumble into the reeds and vanished from sight. This seemed to go unobserved by everyone but Taryn.

  She saw the Muleskinner alter his course. He veered towards her, not Jacob.

  She dropped her globs of mud and fumbled underwater for her chain, to arm herself as Jacob had. But her hands were too small to get a secure grip on the chain once it was doubled up.

  Why hadn’t the Muleskinner just stabbed her before if he meant to stab her now? Why had she had to go through all the last hours’ fears and privations?

  Jacob was moving to her side—white-faced, the water around him pink with his blood. He’d reopened his wound. He was clumsy, staggering. In his hurry to reach her he turned his back on the Muleskinner.

  ‘Jacob! No!’ she yelled.

  The Muleskinner was a scant fifty yards off and closing as fast as wading permitted. Jacob had relinquished his looped chain, had nothing in his hands, but he did turn, helpless, to put himself between Taryn and the Muleskinner.

  Someone farther off was roaring, ‘Out of the way!’

  Taryn located the voice. The man from the SUV who hadn’t fallen was pelting through the trail of schoolchildren, past the second teacher and the two hikers, who were running too, waving their poles, silent, determined, comical and brave. The first teacher was beyond them, pushing through the sea, but still too far off.

  The man passed the hikers. He was running flat out, a gun up by one shoulder, the sea white around him, hampered only slightly by his elegant coat.

  The Muleskinner went by Jacob with scarcely a pause. He took a quick step closer and slashed upwards with his knife. He didn’t even look at Jacob. His eyes were locked on Taryn’s.

  Jacob lost his footing and fell back from the knife, but it still opened his sweater and the skin under it. The Muleskinner’s stroke continued up and hit Jacob below his jaw, knocking his head back and opening a great red gash. Jacob fell, and the muddied water closed over him. Taryn saw him struggle to the surface, his face coming up in a halo of blood.

  There was a flat retort and the Muleskinner—who was almost at Taryn—lurched sideways as if his hip had locked. Then he recovered, crossed the last bit of distance between them with a quick lunge. He seized her, and put his bloodied knife against her throat. He turned her body between him and the gun.

  Raymond Price came to a stop, his gun pointed and steady. His beautiful camel-hair coat was sopping up seawater. He didn’t take his eyes off the Muleskinner. Taryn could see he was looking for a shot. The Muleskinner knew it—with his different and equivalent capabilities. He had pulled Taryn up against his body so that she was on tiptoe and her body shielded a greater area of his. She could feel his hot breath puffing against the back of her neck.

  One of the grey-haired women was still edging forward, towards Jacob. ‘Let me help him, please,’ she said.

  The Muleskinner’s answer was to move the rippled edge of his blade very slightly against Taryn’s skin. She gasped. A thread of warm blood joined the water dripping from her, and was cold too by the time it reached her collarbone.

  The hiker stopped moving, but stayed in her semi-crouched stance, arms out, as if there were a balance beam underwater which her feet must keep to.

  Jacob had got his feet under him. He stood, one hand cupping his jaw, blood dripping through his fingers. He looked at the hiker and told her he was all right. ‘Thank you, but don
’t get any more involved.’

  ‘Good advice,’ said the Muleskinner. ‘Involvement isn’t nearly as nice as it looks.’

  Taryn shifted her gaze from Jacob to Price, looking to him for some sign about what she might do—how to move, where to turn, what to say. His expression was icy, his eyes calculating, measuring.

  ‘Ray,’ Jacob said. ‘Careful.’

  ‘Always,’ said Price.

  The Muleskinner’s breathing had calmed. That frightened Taryn. She wondered whether he had been waiting for an audience. Because here they were: the adults, all close at hand; the children, farther off, a scattered mob close behind the second teacher, who kept gesturing at them to get back, and a dribble of the more timid or less rapacious children, extending all the way back to the car park. They were a sight. All those bright yellow jackets and astonished, frightened, rapt young faces.

  The second teacher turned to her pupils and began to herd them. And Taryn thought, She’s making sure none of them sees a woman get her throat cut.

  ‘Please, Ray,’ Jacob said. ‘Take the shot.’

  Price ignored him, his whole being concentrated into alertness.

  Many of the children obeyed their teacher, others drifted left or right of her and, while continuing to shore, went very slowly. Some stayed put. One got out her phone and held it up, gazing into its display, at the video she was making and might already be planning to share on YouTube. Only her classmates and Taryn noticed what she was doing.

  ‘Please,’ Jacob said, to the Muleskinner. ‘You don’t need to hurt her.’ There was blood all down the front of his sweater.

  Taryn’s gaze travelled from person to person. She wasn’t looking for help—just company. But not Jacob’s company. His condition and his distress were breaking her heart.

  Time had dilated, but was now shrinking again. Most of the Muleskinner’s audience was being marshalled back towards the shore. The sea was up to Taryn’s breasts. The tide was coming in fast; the few people left standing had themselves diminished by half.

  And then everything changed.

  Or not everything. A change happened, and kept on happening, but Jacob kept behaving naturally, as if nothing could alter his current state of mind.

  It started with the girl making the video. Something she saw in the faithfully focussed image on her screen caused her to stiffen in shock, snatch the phone to her chest, and bolt.

  The other children reacted a fraction of a second later, and then the nearest grey-haired hiker, quickly followed by the other. They all turned to flee, pushing through the water and craning back over their shoulders.

  They made sounds too, sharp cries of horror, so primal they might be described as chimp-like.

  Price’s eyes flicked sideways, and widened. A moment later he too began to back away, but with his eyes and aim still locked on the Muleskinner. ‘Jacob,’ he said. It wasn’t a question, an appeal, a heads-up, but all of those things at once, and profoundly uncertain.

  Jacob began to back away then. His chain tightened and he slipped over, then struggled up, wrestling with the chain. The wound on his jaw was gaping, his mouth also.

  Price stopped again and stood his ground. He’d finished flinching. He kept his eyes on his target through the ruckus of splashing and cries of terror. He stayed rock steady until the children, teachers and hikers variously decided they’d retreated far enough and all came to a pause, wary and ready to run again. The teacher who had been so careful of what the children might see seemed to have completely forgotten her pastoral duty. She, and all the people who’d fled, seemed to have lost their individuality. They were like a herd, eyes on something very dangerous, watching without intelligent interest, only wanting to see which direction it might be safest to run.

  ‘I don’t know how you organised them all into that, but I’m not going to fall for it,’ the Muleskinner said to Price.

  Even with the blade against her throat—a very direct source of danger—Taryn could feel something, a perilous pressure of attention, coming from behind her, in the estuary. She looked again at Jacob. He was standing on the tyre, bleeding, staring at a point behind Taryn, and not distant. His gaze was moving, as if whatever he was watching was in motion, and coming nearer.

  There was a slight slackening in the Muleskinner’s grip as he carefully turned his head to glance behind him.

  While the Muleskinner was turned away Price let go his two-handed grip on his gun and made a quick gesture, tilting his head and sliding the flat blade of his hand upwards against his own neck. Taryn saw what he meant. Get your hand behind his arm.

  Taryn slipped her fingers behind the wrist of the hand that held the knife.

  And then suddenly and involuntarily she was toppling forward, the Muleskinner’s weight fully on her as her face hit the water. A second later he jerked abruptly backwards and his knife jittered across Taryn’s collarbone. His free hand grappled at her and seized hold of the waistband of her pants.

  Taryn tried to get her face up, but she was moving rapidly backwards through the water. She opened her eyes and saw billows of mud in cloudy seawater, bubbles, a feathered thread of blood. She saw the chain, and grabbed it before it went taut. She kicked at the Muleskinner, but he held on, not to retain her, but because she was his last handhold.

  There were huge noises in the sea; there was scraping and thrashing and one long, closed-mouthed squeal of pain and fear from the man who held her.

  Then Taryn was spinning at the end of the chain, holding on desperately with both hands to keep it from breaking her neck. Her left shoulder popped out of its joint. She screamed, swallowed water, but kept hold.

  Suddenly she was free of the Muleskinner. She surfaced, still fettered. The water she stood in was now chest high. Her left arm dangled useless. She was coughing violently. Price reached her, put a supportive arm around her waist and began to check her over.

  Taryn’s eyes cleared. She watched the patch of churning water a little farther out in the inlet. The Muleskinner’s head and arm broke the surface. He flexed forward to stab at the mud-studded sea, the rough hummocks of waves where there were no waves, the yellow foam, the white teeth, the pale, plate-armoured belly and thick ridged tail. The crocodile went into a death roll. The Muleskinner’s wide-eyed face, rigid arm and knife went under, then came up and around once more, like a sped-up clock hand. The last time the arm came up it was flopping loosely at the elbow joint, and the knife had gone.

  The crocodile curled in on itself to swim away, one of the Muleskinner’s legs clamped in its huge jaws, his other leg stuck out at an odd angle, dislocated at the hip. The crocodile flicked its head until the Muleskinner’s body was lying along its back; then, perhaps detecting a slight movement, it rolled again. The thoroughness of its violence nearly stopped Taryn’s heart. Its terrible thick body, its armoured tail, its mud-filmed black and olive eyes—all were terrible. It came out of its roll with a sack of clothing filled with disjointed flesh and, dragging it, serenely swam off towards the open water.

  Taryn felt the sea around her turn warmish as she emptied her bladder.

  The children were screaming, loud and repetitive, until their screams lost all human expression and became as robotic as car alarms.

  Price was beside Jacob now. He made a loop of Jacob’s chain, pressed the muzzle of his pistol into the top of the loop, and fired. The chain parted. He stooped and picked Jacob up in a fireman’s hold, leaving Taryn to free the rest of the chain from the cuts in the top of the tractor tyre. It was difficult; she could work with only one hand. As she struggled everyone receded. The teachers, hikers, children had all bolted and were standing at some distance, where the water came to just above the adults’ knees. Their heads were in constant motion, scanning the sea. They looked like meerkats in the Serengeti, coordinated and hyper-alert.

  Price was the only one with his back to the estuary. He was plodding shorewards, burdened, apparently indifferent to danger.

  Taryn had been shivering o
n and off but wasn’t anymore. She knew the water was cold but it was as if her body had come to some accommodation with that. It was strange that no one was rushing to help her, that she was left to gather up the slippery length of chain and carry it herself, one-handed, in Price’s wake. He was the only person with his back to her, but no one else moved to help. As if the object had never been her rescue, but Jacob’s. As if they all somehow understood it was she who was to blame for everything, and she was all at once the pariah she’d imagined being—if only momentarily—all those years ago, as she stood under Beatrice’s oak and didn’t say no to the Muleskinner.

  The crowd backed away as she came on, then turned and streamed from her, the water turning into a muddy froth around their rushing legs.

  From far off the thready sound of sirens announced that officialdom was on its way, travelling as fast as possible along the coast road.

  22

  Basil Cornick’s Screen Test

  While Taryn was waiting for Jacob to come out of surgery, her father arrived. He minutely examined the sling on her arm, her bandaged cuts and salved bruises. He tried to get her to come with him to a hotel. ‘Somewhere nearby. It might be hours yet.’ Finally he convinced her at least to come down to the café for something to eat.

  He escorted her from the ward, leaving a wake of electrified excitement as he went. Even the ambulant convalescents pushing their IVs along the corridors straightened their spines and turned to follow the progress of the famous actor. Taryn spotted DS Hemms, in a cast and on crutches, lurking near the main lifts with a group of constables from Norwich.

  She grabbed her father’s arm. ‘Let’s take another route.’

  Her father was quick to catch on, and they glided back the way they’d come and took the stairs.

  The café’s location was a little too visible for Taryn’s liking, but she and her father found a table in a group of four separated from the others by a living wall. There was only one other person there, an elderly woman with her head down over an empty teapot and nest of wet tissues.