She seemed to grow taller, to expand, and then as quickly collapse. She dropped to the ground and curled into a ball, her head tucked into her chest. She sat in the middle of the road and wept, and Jackson wanted to fall down beside her and do the same.
“Come on,” he said, pulling at her arm. It was like trying to move a child. She batted him away with an open hand and continued crying.
“You can’t just stay there.”
“Why not?” Susan’s words were muffled, but he understood them well enough. He didn’t have an answer. If she stayed here, he’d have to stay with her too. And if they stayed too long… He could feel the voices battering against him. He clenched his teeth and grabbed Susan. They had to keep moving.
He dragged her down the center of the street. It occurred to him that the same scene played out five hours earlier would have attracted an audience of hundreds and no doubt someone would have intervened to save the little lady from the brute. Not now. Now he could grab her by the hair and drag her from London to Edinburgh and no one would notice.
“I can’t do it, Jackson.”
“You have to.”
“I can’t.”
Jackson looked around him. There was no help.
He sat down on the pavement beside her.
“What are you doing?”
“Waiting for you.”
He could feel Susan’s body pressed against his arm. She was cold. No, warm. Hot. No… She put her hands on him and tried to push him away.
“No. If you’re staying, so am I.”
“That’s not right. You can’t do that.”
Jackson shrugged. His own opinion was that right and wrong had stopped being an issue somewhere around eleven o’ clock that morning, right around the time Laine bashed his way through the window with his forehead.
“You can’t make me responsible for your death,” Susan said.
Jackson shrugged. It worked with Donna sometimes when they were arguing. Don’t try to find the right words. Don’t try to explain. Just…shrug. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it made Donna so irate that the spat would descend into all-out war. But he didn’t have anything else to offer Susan at the moment. He shrugged, held his tongue, and waited for her response.
“I didn’t ask you to save me,” Susan said.
Jackson held back on the sense of outrage. The desperate urge to point out to Susan how she had treated him when they had first met in the stairwell.
“I don’t need you to look after me.”
Jackson shrugged and looked away from her. The car closest to them was a black Mercedes. The smoked glass windows prevented him from seeing inside and his imagination provided a diorama of the passengers within, staring out at him with blank eyes.
He didn’t know Susan. Not really. He waited for the silence to wash over her.
She lurched forward, struggled to her feet and started walking down the road. “Bastard,” she called to him over her shoulder without looking back.
18
There was something disturbing about walking these streets. Maybe because he had been in town when it happened, as if it was happening somewhere else, to someone else. Now he was almost home and everything was familiar, it was harder to pretend he wasn’t affected.
On this side of the park the roads were tree-lined. Large Victorian houses dotted the path, half-hidden behind tall fences or black stone walls. Curtains were discreetly drawn on the secrets they contained inside. They passed one garage and Jackson was sure he heard the low hum of an engine behind the closed door. He said nothing, and Susan didn’t mention it.
“It’s on the other side,” he told Susan, feeling the need to distance himself from these large houses. From the corner of his eye he could see her nod in response. She’d been quiet for most of the journey and when he tried to engage her in conversation, it had fallen flat. The words had sounded loud and too large in the silence and after a while he had given up.
They turned right. In the middle of a row of houses was an ugly square block of red brick. Jackson was shocked, and then embarrassed by his own stupidity—he had forgotten how close they were to the office. It had never occurred to him that he would have to pass it on his way home.
“I work there,” he said. “I mean, I used to work there. I suppose…” But he shut up because he felt the meaning of his words twisting and he no longer had control over what he was saying. He crossed the street to get closer—checking right and left before he stepped off the pavement and then laughing at himself at the unnecessary caution. There was an almost morbid fascination with seeing the building and knowing what it must be like inside. He tried not to think of the people he had worked with, or what had happened to them.
He looked up at the second floor of the building. God, it was ugly. It had no redeeming features at all. It was as if the architect had realized what an impossible job he had taken on and simply thrown up his hands in horror and declared, “I give up.”
“Second floor. Three windows in.”
He wondered what it would be like inside. Would he find Jimmy and Peter swinging from the ceiling? Would they all be there, one last communal act that he had missed. He thought about Fiona sitting in reception. He’d worked there nearly two years and yet every day she still acted like she’d never seen him before. There were some things about the building he wouldn’t miss.
“Come on,” he said, almost to himself, as if he realized he was the one that needed encouraging.
Jackson walked with his head bowed, staring at the pavement in front of his toes. He didn’t want to see any more. He wanted to get home, see if Donna was there, and then… But he wasn’t sure about the and then… yet. He assumed the problem was global. Maybe he would be proven wrong. Maybe it was local. Or national. But that didn’t feel right. It felt more honest to believe that if he and Susan were not the last two people in the world, then they were among the last few. How many? A hundred? A thousand? A million, spread across the world?
He saw the gates to Westdale Park. A small child hung from them, strung up on a length of twine that was wrapped around her neck and Jackson knew in one glance that the child would not have been able to complete the act on her own. Her accomplice must have been a parent or a stranger, and he wasn’t sure which was worse.
He wondered what he would find in the park. Lovers, hand in hand, facedown in the paddling pool? There was enough broken glass in the corners of the old BMX track to drag across thousands of fragile wrists. With imagination, the park offered any number of different ways to kill oneself.
He had come here with Donna last summer. They had packed a bag for an impromptu picnic. Donna had been wearing the blue dress she had bought for her sister’s wedding. Jackson remembered the feel of her skin under his hand as his fingers trailed up her bare thigh, higher and higher until Donna had laughed. “Not now. Not here.”
Jackson hesitated on the threshold of the park. Maybe he should take the main road and protect the memory of that summer day. Every memory of Donna was now precious.
“Are you okay?” Susan asked.
He shook his head. No, he wasn’t okay. He couldn’t be okay. Just inside the gates he could see the tarmac path that wound through the park. Farther inside was the brooding outline of the cricket pavilion—all broken glass and cigarette stubs around the entrance. In the shadows he saw a figure sitting on the ground. He wanted to believe it was a drunk sleeping off a Tungsten-powered binge, but even from this distance he understood he was looking at another of the sleeping dead.
“We can go round,” Susan said.
Jackson shook his head again. He recognized his stubborn streak. Taking the road wouldn’t add more than a few minutes to the journey; and there was no reason to rush. Time was irrelevant—either Donna was at the house or she wasn’t.
“No, this way is quicker.”
He noticed Susan looking at him and he wondered what she had picked up on. He didn’t wait to find out. He bustled ahead of her, shoulders hunched up, gla
ring at the gray tarmac as he hurried across the park.
He tried not to look into the children’s play area as he passed. From the corner of his vision he noticed feet protruding through the gate. Small feet. Shiny pink plastic shoes.
He passed the bandstand and was relieved to discover it was empty—no one hanging from the rotunda.
He found them in the stream. Facedown. The water was no more than a few inches deep and it had taken a determined effort to drown in such shallow depths, but they had managed. Corpses clogged the narrow channel, but at least he couldn’t see their faces. He saw an elderly couple—the man in a gray overcoat had his hand gently pressed into his wife’s back.
He saw parents with their children. He saw young couples and singletons, businessmen and women. He saw everyone who had been in the park at the moment when the horror had struck.
“Let’s go.” He felt Susan’s hand on his arm, pulling him away from the stream. He snatched his arm free of her and whirled, filled in an instant with fury.
“Don’t you see them?” he shouted at her. “Don’t you feel?”
“You can’t help them. Not now.” Susan’s voice was soft, calm. Sad.
The rage blew out as quickly as it had arisen, replaced with a hollow emptiness. The sense that nothing mattered anymore. Jackson turned his back on the dead bodies and trudged through the park.
19
It was only five minutes. No longer. He’d made the journey with Donna hundreds of times. Five minutes from the house to the park. And yet on this occasion it felt like the distance had tripled. The quality of daylight fluctuated, the sun dimming and then growing brighter. At one point Jackson was sure he heard voices, but he looked across at Susan and she didn’t seem to notice, so he said nothing.
He noticed the smoke before they left the park. It clung to the back of his throat so that he could also taste it. Thick, greasy smoke. As they neared the gates, he could see dark clouds rising up over the row of houses that backed onto the park. Whatever was burning was not far away.
As he got closer to the gate, he realized the direction the fire was coming from and yet he still tried to tell himself it didn’t mean anything.
He increased his pace. He stared at the park gates and, once he was through them, he picked another target to focus on. He had to get to the end of the street. He had to reach the post-box or the lamppost or the house with the black door. Small victories that stopped him thinking about the cloud of smoke that hung over all the streets around him.
Even from a couple of streets away he could hear the crackling sound of the fire. And maybe he could feel the heat of the flames, although he thought it was probably his imagination. The smell was stronger now. His pace increased in direct response to the presence of the fire.
By the time he reached his own road he knew he was not imagining the heat. It brushed against his cheeks.
Most of the houses were already burning. Flames licked from the windows of the properties closest to him while those farther away, in the middle of the street, had soot-stained brickwork and black-eyed window frames. He wondered how long they had been burning and guessed that even when he was sitting in the offices of MedWay Associates his house had been aflame.
Ash fell from the sky like dry rain. It coated the pavement and the parked cars. Jackson breathed it in. He walked along the center of the road and felt the intense heat emanating from the burning buildings. He could feel it drying up his eyes, evaporating the tears before they had a chance to form. The hairs on the back of his hands shrank into wired curls.
He stopped outside number 79, although it was almost impossible to tell whether he was really looking at the right house. There was nothing left to distinguish the building from its neighbors. The paint had bubbled and peeled from the door. The plastic window frames had melted and dribbled down the brickwork. But he thought this was the right house.
He wondered if this was where the fire had started. If not at number 79, then one of the houses close by. Donna was inside. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he was confident he was right. If he waited for the heat to die, he could go inside and find the charred remains of the woman he had loved.
Jackson put his hands over his face to hide the image from his eyes, but there was no use because it was there, it would always be there; a memory stronger than the recollection of his hand on Donna’s thigh on a bright summer day.
He understood the sleeping dead. He understood that eventually the despair was too great. Nothing could take this back, nothing could make this right. There was before and there was after. And after was too hopeless to consider.
He sat down on the tarmac in the middle of the road. Because what other option did he have?
20
It should have been possible to die there. Jackson didn’t understand the mechanics of the process, he didn’t understand how a person could simply sit down and stop living, but it should have been possible. It had to be possible.
But it didn’t happen. Jackson didn’t know why. He waited for the moment. He willed it to arrive. He closed his eyes and listened to each breath that passed through his lungs and he waited for each to be his last and for oblivion to sweep in and free him.
Maybe he didn’t want it enough, and the idea felt like a betrayal of Donna. If he had loved her more, then he would have been able to die. It didn’t matter if there was no afterlife. He wasn’t hoping to join Donna, he just wanted to be away from the churning sense of loss that burrowed through his chest.
He started to think about all the ways it was possible to kill himself. He thought about the bodies hanging from the stairwell in the office block and the trees in the park. He thought of the people facedown in the stream or swept away in bliss by the river. He thought about John Fairls and the bloody scissors and Malcolm Laine and the tuft of hair adhered to the window where he had smashed his head against the glass. There were many, many ways. All he had to do was choose.
Surely it was that easy…
He closed his eyes against the black husk of the house. Looking at the remains made it harder to think.
Donna was gone. Everyone was gone. There was no life to live. There was just…this. The constant battle to survive. Why? What for?
That’s right.
Jackson shook his head as if he were trying to dislodge a fly. The voice was a young woman’s, soft and persuasive. It could have been Donna’s, except he knew that it wasn’t because Donna…
Donna’s dead.
No, that wasn’t it. He almost snapped at the voice, told it that it was wrong. He knew it wasn’t Donna because…
She left you.
“No.”
Donna’s dead and she’s never coming back.
“I know that. I know that.” But that wasn’t why the voice had got it wrong, that wasn’t why he knew it wasn’t Donna. It was someone pretending to be her, because…
“Because Donna would never tell me to give up.”
He felt the voices redouble. They were inside him. Chattering. They had a manic urgency, no more of the pretense and the gentle persuasion, now they were hammering him.
Do it. Do it now. Why wait any longer? There is nothing left.
And they were right, Jackson knew they were right, except…
Except Donna would never have told him to give up. And whatever had happened to her, it had not been her own mind that had made the decision to strike the match that started the fire, any more than it had really been Malcolm Laine’s decision to jump through the window. They had been forced to do it. The voices had pushed them and pushed them until they had felt there was no alternative. But it had never been their choice. Not really.
He tried to stand up, but all the muscles in his body were still in thrall to the voices.
Give up. Why struggle?
“No.”
It’s easier this way.
Jackson reached out his hand. It was like trying to push away an ocean liner—an immovable object against a not-so-irresistib
le force. He laughed at the image, at the idea that Jackson Smith was able to change anything. In his head he heard the voices agreeing with this assessment. He could almost see them now—a crowd of people, pallid faces and blank eyes. No emotion, but nodding in agreement at the belief that Jackson Smith was no one, could do nothing.
True. A schoolgirl with her black and red tie against her white blouse.
True. A fat woman in her forties, her skin stretched to a tight sheen across her features.
True. A businessman—it could easily have been Malcolm Laine or John Fairls or any number of men that Jackson had worked with—an ink stain blotting the bottom of his shirt pocket.
True. True. True. Toneless voices piled one upon the other. Gray faces nodding.
Jackson’s hand moved. Just a fraction. He could hardly tell by looking at it, but he felt the rasp of the hard road surface under his palm that told him he was not imagining it.
He pushed again, and this time he could see the movement. The voices didn’t own him. Not yet.
“Are you okay?”
It took him a moment to recognize that this voice was different, that it didn’t come from inside him.
“Are you okay?” Susan asked again.
He tried to turn to look to her, but he couldn’t move.
“No,” he whispered. The word came out soundlessly, a slight breath. He opened his eyes and stared at the burned-out house. Susan was somewhere off to his right, he couldn’t see her but he could sense her presence beyond the edge of his vision. “No,” he tried again, but still his voice was too quiet.
He tried to move his hand again. Nothing. Frustration rose within him, bright and red and pure. And he welcomed it. It pushed back the gray.
He tried again. His whole body shivered with the effort, although Jackson was sure that from outside none of the fight would be visible; to Susan he was just sitting there staring at the house, no more alive than one of the sleeping dead.
The Sleeping Dead Page 8