Donna would understand. If he ever had to explain himself to her, he was sure Donna would understand the need for contact as he stepped from one madness into the next.
12
Cars blocked the street outside in both directions—as if no one had been able to agree on how to escape.
A few of the car doors were open but most had been closed, and Jackson suppressed a shudder at the image of the drivers carefully turning back to shut their car doors before walking away.
There were no police cars. No ambulances.
“Where did they all go?” Susan asked.
Not “what did they do,” Jackson noticed. She understood what they had done, she just couldn’t follow the logic to where the bodies were.
Jackson looked past the row of cars. He could just make out the line of shops on the other side of the river. Too far away for detail but he knew that Café Reynauld was among them and sitting there waiting for him would be Donna. She would have a cappuccino in front of her with a sprinkling of chocolate over the foamed milk. Except he was late, so maybe all she had in front of her was the empty cup, traces of froth still clinging to the side and a shallow pool of coffee resting in the bottom.
“What are you smiling about?” Susan asked.
“I didn’t know I was smiling.”
“You were.” It sounded like an accusation.
The rage came from nowhere. One minute he was thinking about Donna and the next he was screaming with anger. “What is it? What the fuck is wrong with you? Can’t you just let me have one moment of peace?”
He was aware of Susan stepping away from him, but all he could obey was the swell of anger in his chest.
He screamed at her. “Fuck off. I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone. If you’re going to stand there and wallow in your own pity, then you can just fuck off.”
He reached out his hands to push her away. He needed to banish her so that he could spend time looking for Donna. He didn’t need anyone else dragging him down. He didn’t need Susan.
“Why can’t you leave me alone? All of you?” The anger warmed him from within. He could feel it coursing through his body, infecting him. He flexed his fingers and realized he was staring at them—as if they were weapons. As if he could use them to rip and kill.
Susan took another step backward, out of his reach, and he stumbled forward and would have fallen except at the last moment she stepped forward and held him. His nose filled with snot and his eyes burned with tears. He could hardly breathe and all he could smell was Susan’s perfume, so strong he could drown in it.
“I don’t want to die,” he whispered.
He assumed that she had not heard him, but then he felt her hand stroking the back of his head like a mother calming a baby. “You’re not going to die,” she whispered. “Neither of us will.”
How do you know that? He wanted to ask, but instead he allowed her to coddle him, to sit there buried in her bust until the anger fled and left his limbs thin and weak.
She pulled apart from him and then looked down, reaching a hand out to wipe a tear from his cheek. “Better?”
“Not really,” he said, and laughed. It was a brittle sound. Fragile. The anger had dissipated, but it had left a small lump in his chest. He felt it as he looked at Susan and he wondered whether she understood that it was still there, like a piece of coal pressed down to form a rough diamond.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Susan said. “At least you didn’t try to kill me.”
“This time,” Jackson said automatically. It was only a small lie.
“Café Reynauld?” Susan asked into the silence.
Jackson nodded.
“That’s on the other side of the bridge?”
He nodded again.
“She might not be there.”
He felt the lump twitch in his chest. How dare she try and crush his hope. Donna would be there.
“But that doesn’t mean anything’s happened to her,” Susan said. “You understand that? If she isn’t there, it doesn’t mean…”
Jackson nodded. But it was an argument for another time, or for never. Donna would be sitting in the café and then the three of them would…would…but he wasn’t able to think beyond that, beyond meeting up with Donna and knowing she was safe. For now his only aim was to meet Donna in Café Reynauld as they had agreed. He couldn’t remember when it had become so important to him, but now Café Reynauld was the beginning and the end.
He looked down the line of stalled cars and buses and hurried toward the bridge. He was aware of Susan beside him, almost jogging to keep up with him. He forced himself to walk and then realized he was chewing on his bottom lip to stop himself from screaming at her that she was slowing him down because she didn’t want him to find Donna. She never had. Everything she had done—the stairs, stopping to look at the CCTV cameras, everything had been done with the intention of keeping him apart from Donna.
He bit down on his lip, hard enough to break the skin. But he didn’t say anything.
Susan noticed them first. He knew because of the loud hiss she made. “What is it?” he asked, but as soon as he spoke he understood what she was looking at. A line of the dead, lying on the ground with their backs pressed up against the side of the wall on the opposite side of the street.
Susan started to move closer to them, stepping off the pavement onto the road. Jackson reached out and snatched her arm. “Don’t.”
“Why not? We need to understand what they are.”
“Just…don’t,” Jackson said. He didn’t say what he really thought; that approaching the dead was wrong. He didn’t want to know what had happened to them, not now. He didn’t want to learn anything else about what was happening. He just wanted to find Donna and run away.
And part of him thought that if he got too close to the dead bodies, he might catch whatever it was that had infected them. He might want to sit down and join them.
Susan shrugged free of his hand and crossed the road and the only option he had was to follow her or stand and wait for her to return. He trudged behind her heels until she paused at the curb on the far side of the road.
“I don’t think they’re actually dead,” Susan said.
“Then what are they?”
“I don’t know.” She moved to the nearest body—a man in his thirties wearing a black suit and a red tie. She put her hand against the man’s cheek and Jackson shuddered. “He’s still warm.” She moved onto the next one and pressed the back of her hand against his forehead as if she were a mother taking a child’s temperature. “He is too.”
Susan slapped the man across the face, hard enough to leave a red handprint on the man’s cheek, but he didn’t react. Susan slapped him again, but still there was no response.
“He’s not dead,” she said. There was a note of panic in her voice, as if she was trying to convince herself of the fact. She pulled her hand back to slap the man again and this time Jackson reached forward to stop her. Maybe the man was dead, maybe he wasn’t, but whatever the situation, slapping him obviously had no effect.
“You can’t fix it,” he told Susan.
She stared at him. Confused. “Why not?”
Jackson glanced down the line of the dead, or not so dead. He was jealous of them—jealous that they had come to their own end, there was no more struggle for them. He understood why Susan felt the urge to slap them, to wake them up. Maybe part of it was to try and save them, but for Jackson at least, part of the motive would be so they couldn’t opt out of this nightmare.
He turned away from Susan and the men and stepped onto the bridge. Gray tarmac was replaced with a lighter surface. To his right, the wall ran chest high and he kept away, walking on the curbstones that separated the road from the pavement. Because he didn’t trust himself. He was aware of Susan trailing behind him.
“Come away from the edge,” he told her.
She laughed. “I’m nowhere near the edge.” She moved closer to him but a mome
nt later he noticed she was halfway across the pavement once more, almost within touching distance of the black capstones that ran along the wall.
“Come away.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he said. He looked straight ahead. Across the bridge Donna was waiting for him. Across the bridge was sanity and order. Across the bridge the nightmares would end and…and…he turned to share this observation.
Susan had stopped. She was leaning over the balustrade. Staring down at the water below.
13
“What is it?”
Susan said nothing and Jackson moved forward, one eye on the parapet like a vertigo sufferer creeping toward the edge of a precipice. She was looking down into the water and she had a look on her face that he couldn’t read. He didn’t think she was going to jump.
“Come back, Susan.”
He crept closer. Part of him wanted to drop to his hands and knees and crawl over to her. Walking took more effort than it should have. Each step was painful. Hard fought. When he reached the wall, he anchored one hand on the stone. He stared at Susan, as if to look away for a moment might free her to jump over the side.
“Come away.”
“Look,” she told him. She didn’t turn her gaze away from the river.
Jackson eventually looked down. It took him a moment to understand what he was seeing. At first the water looked lumpy, as if the river had congealed, and then he saw a woman’s head break the surface. A man’s arm appeared as he was swept under the bridge. Jackson understood: the river was full of bodies, some of them thrashing as they were carried along, but most lying still, like cords of wood floating in floodwater.
There were thousands of them. The river was clogged with them.
“This isn’t happening.”
“It is.” Jackson felt the hysteria rising within him. He was terrified that if Susan denied what they were seeing, then he would have to deny it too. They couldn’t exist in different realities.
“It’s happening,” he told her, his voice rising in panic. “It is. It is.” He didn’t realize that he’d started to climb onto the parapet until he felt Susan’s hands pulling on his arm. Thick tears rolled down her cheeks and he wanted to ask her, Why are you crying, it will all be over soon?
He stood on the narrow wall, and wobbled, struck with a sharp pang of vertigo. He could still make out the individual bodies turning over in the water below him and he wondered what would happen when he fell. Would he hit water or a floater? And what difference would that make? He hoped it would be quick. He needed it to be quick. He’d heard drowning was a horrible way to die; fighting for a last breath. But hitting the water from this height would be like jumping down onto concrete and he would at least be unconscious by the time he went under. The people who passed under his feet looked calm. Their worries were past. He would be like them soon. He would be…
“No!” Susan shouted at him. “You can’t leave me alone.”
She pulled on his arm, overbalancing him. For a moment the decision was nearly taken from him as Jackson felt his center of balance shift, taking him out over the edge of the bridge so that he was suspended in midair above the broiling water.
At that moment the voices became clear—they were trying to confuse him, to trick him. He grabbed for Susan’s arm and nearly pulled her off the bridge with him, but she was stronger than she looked, and Jackson wanted to live more than he realized. They fell back, away from the river, to land in a crumpled heap on the pavement.
Their bodies were locked together and it reminded Jackson of the bodies he saw joined in the flowing river beneath him. His arm was bent backward and Susan pinned his ankle beneath her hips. He felt bones grind together—hers rather than his.
“I nearly did it that time,” he said. He wasn’t sure how he felt—a mixture of fear and frustration. If Susan hadn’t been with him, it would all be over now, he would have nothing left to worry about. Tiredness crushed him. He wanted to stop fighting, to just lie down on the pavement and give up.
“But you didn’t.” Susan worked to extricate herself from him. She flexed her arm. “Nothing broken.” She grinned at Jackson.
“Except my pride,” he said, and then the pair of them were laughing. It made no sense, it wasn’t even funny, but Jackson felt his chest ache with the emotional release. He was laughing so hard he was crying, his breath coming in thick gluts as if he was sucking in water rather than air. His sides ached and he wanted to stop because now it hurt. He could hear his own breathing coming in short, harsh gasps. Maybe this was it, maybe this was how they would both die.
The hysteria passed. It left him lying on the ground, flapping like a fish out of water.
“Thanks.”
“I didn’t do it for you,” Susan said.
“Thanks anyway.”
She shrugged. “You know she’s not going to be there? I’m just telling you so you won’t go mad when you find out.”
Jackson nodded, believing nothing of the sort. Of course Donna would be there. Because she had to be there. If she wasn’t at Café Reynauld, then he would keep searching until he found her.
Someone screamed. But the sound was far away and cold and tired, as if the screamer made the sound out of a sense of duty rather than any real emotion. Jackson tried to place the noise—somewhere behind him, over on the side of the bridge from which he’d just come. The scream wasn’t important—he wasn’t intending to go back there. He was going to find Donna and then…
And then…
And then the nightmare would end. Donna was the answer. Part of him knew he was constructing an impossible scenario in which Donna sat with an empty cup of cappuccino in front of her and explained to him and Susan exactly what had happened to the world. Somehow Donna would know. And with that knowledge would come the solution.
He didn’t say this to Susan. He didn’t want to show her how important it had become to him that they find Donna. He didn’t want to frighten her.
Up ahead he could read the signs from some of the shops on the far side of the bridge: McDonald’s and Boots; Specsavers and WH Smiths. He could see the red awning of Santander. If he squinted, he thought he could read the sign for Café Reynauld.
14
Jackson had no recollection of walking the final few hundred yards to the door of the café. His last clear memory was standing on the bridge, feeling the weight of the bodies flowing beneath him, and staring at the rouge sign.
And then he was there. Café Reynauld.
The windows of the café were frosted so that it was impossible to see inside. Donna had liked that, she said that the idea of having people staring in at her while she drank her coffee was disconcerting.
The light above the entrance was on, illuminating the faux-Franco sign with its deep red and brilliant gold lettering.
Jackson tried to peer through the frosted glass and pick out movement on the other side. He couldn’t see anything and didn’t know if that was because the frosting on the glass was particularly effective or because there was nothing to see.
“Are we going to wait here all day?” Susan asked. She reached out and put her hand on the door. A gold plate had the word PUSH engraved in faded lettering.
The bell above the door chimed, a slight sound but in the silence the effect was magnified. Jackson wanted to reach out and tell Susan to stop. He wanted to hold on to this last moment of innocence when he knew that Donna was inside.
The smell of old coffee blossomed out through the open door.
Immediately beyond the door was a table with a pair of coffee cups and a plate holding only cake crumbs. Beyond that was the counter and a man in a traditional white and black waiter’s uniform looked up as Jackson entered. His smile was wide and welcoming. “Grab a seat, I’ll be with you in a minute.” He turned his back on them and a moment later the wet whoosh of the steamer swamped the air.
Donna sat in her usual seat, near the back of the café, just below the magazine rack. There was a cup in fro
nt of her and even from the doorway Jackson could see the white froth of steamed milk and the stain of chocolate on top. She’d waited for him.
“Of course I waited,” Donna said. She spoke without looking up from the paper she was reading—a tattered rag she’d plucked from the pile of magazines. She often joked that she learned more about what was happening in the world from the five minutes she spent on a Saturday morning in Café Reynauld than a week spent watching the news each evening.
Jackson carved a path between the other tables. The café was busy. The sound of the steamer was drowned out by the increasing volume of chatter from the surrounding tables where couples sat and talked. A gang of lads in the corner were huddled around an iPad and arguing, all of them trying to stab the screen and then laughing wildly when the boy in the center of the huddle held it protectively against his chest to stop any of them reaching it.
A couple sat, not talking to each other—the woman pecking at a mobile phone while her partner glared at her in sullen silence. Waves of discontent rolled between them like a troubled sea.
“What took you so long?” Donna asked.
He sat down opposite her and reached out his hand to take hers. “I’ve had a hell of a morning.”
“Haven’t we all?”
“No. I mean I’ve had…” But he couldn’t remember what he wanted to tell her.
“How did the interview go?”
“Interview?”
“You did remember?” Donna said and laughed. She smiled, but there was something wrong with her eyes. Jackson stared into them and then stared away because looking into Donna’s eyes made him feel uncomfortable.
“I told Mum we’d be over for dinner on Sunday, that’s all right, isn’t it?”
Jackson nodded, hardly hearing what she had said.
“Dad will be there too.”
Jackson jerked his head up. His knees clattered against the underside of the table, rocking Donna’s coffee, but the perfect peak of froth in the cup wasn’t disturbed.
The Sleeping Dead Page 6