A lot of violent opportunists might stand at the sides of the road hiding firearms, luring people into stopping before stealing their cars or worse.
Missed call: Home.
After a sickeningly long time, I called Home back. It rang four times – I wondered if whoever had called might have gone back to bed – but then the line clicked open.
‘Dad?’
The voice was distant, pixellated, but so unmistakably Ryan’s, in this dark and nameless place. I glanced back at the car and Eli was still propped up in the driver’s seat, eyes closed, shoulders a little slumped.
‘Hey, champ, how’s it going?’
My voice sounded alien, talking with any trace of love or familiarity.
‘Oh, just school stuff. Mum said you were on a road trip?’
‘She did, yeah? I am, with an old friend.’
‘That’s so cool. What are you doing?’
‘Mostly pretending to be cowboys.’
‘Literally? That’s so gay.’
‘Yeah, literally.’ I shut my eyes and started pacing. ‘We were staying at this ranch with a friend of ours, and we’ve been riding horses, shooting guns, rounding up livestock and wearing Stetsons. Pretending to be Clint Eastwood, that kinda thing.’
‘How come me and Chantal couldn’t come? That sucks balls!’
‘Hey, hey, language. You can come next time. Gimme a break, when you have kids you’ll know that sometimes you need a holiday with your mates. Plus, your uncle was getting out of prison and I needed to be here for him. That part wasn’t fun. It wouldn’t have been fun for you guys.’
‘Have you shot anything?’
Choked up, for a moment. ‘We shot a few birds, and a squirrel.’
‘Are there Indians where you are any more? Apparently there are still tribes around, but are they, like, proper?’
He sounded so London I almost couldn’t stand it. I wondered if I sounded ridiculous to him, whether I’d gotten my accent back. I’d lived in England for so long that listening to American accents sounded like a piss-take of human speech.
‘Native Americans, Ryan. They’re not Indians. But no, they’re not here.’
‘Why?’
‘Just not that kinda area, I think.’
‘Didn’t the cowboys kill them off? Dad, we did it at school. The settlers hid diseases in the gifts they exchanged, we looked at a poem about it.’
I paused, crushed by unfathomable upset, and said, ‘Really?’
‘Yeah, they pretended to give them Western things, like blankets and stuff, but really they were giving them smallpox. We learnt about it in history. It was one of the first examples of chemical warfare.’
‘Jesus, they teach you about chemical warfare in secondary school now?’
‘Dad, you know I spend, like, all year doing the Holocaust.’
‘Yeah, but in that much detail? When I was your age we used to get exam questions like “Hitler: Why?” and just deal with it.’
‘Yeah but you’re, like, a hundred years old.’
‘Education’s gone downhill from then on, Ryan.’
‘Since the Stone Age.’
I laughed. ‘Yeah, and we had the cane. We had proper discipline, boy. Plus, I was way cooler than you at school, and smarter.’
‘There’s no way you were cooler.’
‘You’re, like, two foot tall.’
‘I’ve got Holocaust and Native American genocide banter.’
‘Bitches love Holocaust banter.’
‘Lolocaust.’
I had to stop, almost keeled over with mirth.
An angry wail split the air either side of my head and I leapt, whirled around and saw Eli jolting himself out of sleep. My heart pounded, we both stared at each other in confusion, and then I realized he must have fallen forwards against the horn.
I wanted to walk over to the car, drag him out onto the ground and kick him in the face. But the moment was already lost.
Ryan said, ‘What was that?’ and the moment was gone.
I couldn’t answer him.
Eli mouthed ‘Sorry’ at me through the windshield and put the window down.
‘Where are you, Dad?’ Ryan asked.
‘We’re at a pit-stop,’ I said, no trace of familiarity left. ‘On the road. Gonna have to go.’
‘Don’t you wanna speak to Mum or Chantal?’
‘I’ll call back.’
At the time, I didn’t know that was a lie. I watched Eli through the windscreen, wiping his face in the sun visor mirror, unrepentant.
‘OK, love you.’
‘I love you too.’
I looked at my phone and then ended the call. Alone again, with Eli, by the side of the freeway. Home wasn’t here any more.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Daisy
I hadn’t planned what I was going to do when I saw her.
It had been fuck-knows-how-many-days of nothing, and then suddenly she was there. She was sat on one of the benches drinking a bottle of something and I didn’t know what to fucking do so I just dropped. One moment I was walking, holding a deli sandwich, and the next I knew I was falling sideways like a tree onto the rain-soaked ground behind some bushes.
A woman who’d been walking behind me had stopped dead. I looked at her with raised eyebrows like Move, bitch! and she hurried past.
Seven hadn’t seen us. Or if she had she was hiding it well.
My elbows were bruised, maybe bleeding. My sandwich was on the ground.
It was her. She was a little way away, but it was her.
Was it?
The girl was definitely sitting like Seven, but then how many different methods of sitting were there? Fuck’s sake. Her clothes were similar, but black jeans and an Aztec-print coat were hardly solid identifying features. Her hair was longer than I remembered, but then it would be.
Shuffling along, rodent-like, I tried to close some of the distance between us.
It occurred to me that I could call Noel or Nic and let one of them deal with this. But this wasn’t about them. It would absolve me, but I didn’t want to be absolved. I wanted… To what? Kill her? Talk to her? Punch her in the face and move on?
There was nowhere I could go; only left or right, not forwards. So I stayed where I was, obscured by foliage, blinded by the million tiny reflections of the sun in fallen rainwater.
Every so often someone walked past but didn’t make any fuss. In London you got used to seeing weirdos. You just avoided eye contact and walked on.
Seven looked up a few times, and I realized she had probably picked that bench precisely because it gave her a view of the rest of the garden. No sneaking up on her from here.
So I waited, until my knees seized up and my shoulders hurt, until the cold permeated the rest of my body and I was shivering, struggling to keep my balance. After fifteen minutes or so I sat cross-legged on the ground.
Seven took out her phone and started texting someone. She shook the empty bottle of something, stood up and left.
I wasn’t ready, had fallen into a kind of trance. Both my knees clicked and my shoulder blades cracked as I limped after her.
‘Fuck, ow, fuck… Fuck.’
Everything hurt. The gunshot had aged my body. I forgot sometimes I must still be recovering. The cells that had bound themselves back together must carry some trace of that impact for ever, like a mute traumatized child. They could go through the motions of living but they were still rigid on the inside.
Skirting the bushes, I sprinted across the clearing.
She’d disappeared.
I took a left, then a right, and she was there again, heading across the Heath. Not directly back towards the tube, where it was crowded, but taking the exit across an open expanse of grass. She was acting like someone who expected to be followed.
The nearest tube from that exit was Golders Green.
I stayed well back, almost out of sight.
As she reached the edge of the Heath and vanished, I started r
unning again.
Only the dogs noticed. A couple of terriers ran with me until the grass ended.
But…
I’d left my handbag behind the bushes.
It didn’t matter. Only Seven mattered.
But it did matter. My fucking Oyster was in there. My wallet and phone.
I stopped – the shittest fucking James Bond ever – then pressed on. I could catch up with her before she reached the tube. Wasn’t sure what the fuck I’d do with her then. But catching up with her was a start.
Breaking into a run, muttering, ‘Fucking leave your fucking bag, stupid fucking bitch, fuck.’ I reached the road, left the Heath, ran for the nearest station… Everyone was in my way, fucking everyone. It was like the very city wanted to hide her.
But then she reappeared, for a moment, and without thinking I shouted, ‘Hey!’
I know she heard me because she didn’t turn around and she walked faster.
‘Hey!’
People started getting out of my way.
‘Hey! Stop!’
She didn’t.
I had this idea that I might just stop her and scream in her face, slap her or something. Now that she was so close I didn’t feel so ambiguous. She’d fucked up everything. She’d lied about everything. I wanted to hurt her.
‘Hey! Fucking look at me…’
I took her by the shoulder, swung her towards me and shook her by the shirt she was wearing. But she was the wrong height – I didn’t notice until she was in front of me – and when I looked into her face, it wasn’t Seven.
It wasn’t Seven.
I should have felt embarrassment, holding this poor girl by the lapels like I was about to knock her teeth out…
She was saying, ‘What? What – get off me!’
… but there was just disappointment.
I didn’t let her go so much as push her backwards, spitting, ‘Urgh. For fuck sake,’ as if this was her fault.
She hurried away.
Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes but I blinked them back, not wanting to make more of a spectacle of myself. I put my hands in my pockets and forced my feet to walk at a stroll-like pace back towards the Heath, as if this had all been totally fucking normal.
I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been her.
From where I’d been watching in the park, it had been her. It couldn’t have not been her.
When I thought I was far enough away from the scene of the incident, I broke into a run again, back across the grass towards where I’d left my bag.
It was still there.
Un-fucking-precedented.
I knelt down behind the hedge to rifle through it, finding my belongings untouched. London hadn’t wanted to fuck me over today after all.
When I picked up my phone I had two missed calls from Noel and a text that read, Seven’s in London, call me, N.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Ronnie
‘Hello? Hello? … I don’t know who this is, or if this is your idea of a joke. But stop contacting me. Eli, if this is you… I expected better of you. Stop it. Bye.’
I looked down and the dust rolled across the road thirty feet below.
Eli had kicked up a fuss about checking in anywhere and insisted on sleeping in the car again. I could see him down in the lot, black mass in the driver’s seat, sitting up and facing straight out. I felt as though we were drifting more and more to the opposite ends of a spectrum; paranoia and confrontation, disassociation and run-of-the-mill sadism. If we drifted any more we’d probably come full circle and meet in the middle again, both equally sick in the soul.
Maybe we were both turning into Trent?
The thought upset me, so I listened to my voicemail again.
I’d been unable to sleep in my motel room so I’d come out and climbed the scaffolding propping up one side of the building. The air was fresh up here. Occupied buildings looked like a switchboard, dots of light in the distance flickering on and off.
Melissa’s voice was higher than I’d expected it to be.
Eli would hate it if he knew about the message, that I had access to something he didn’t.
I looked down at the lot again and called Melissa’s number back. I didn’t expect her to answer, and she didn’t, so I called her again just for the hell of it. Three times and it would freak her out, but twice was acceptable.
The line clicked open and then there was silence.
No greeting, from either of us.
It was I who broke the stand-off, when my fear that she might hang up overpowered my urge to win the virtual staring contest.
‘I’m a friend of Eli’s,’ I said.
She didn’t reply.
‘This is really important. He doesn’t know I’m calling.’
‘If you’re a friend of Eli’s, wouldn’t I know you?’
‘You were a bit before my time. Also, he was more a friend of my dad’s.’
‘And he is?’
‘Surname’s O’Connell.’
‘Was his wife called… Marie?’
‘Yeah, that’s my mum.’
‘I went for dinner at their house with Eli, a few times. Your mum is lovely.’ She paused. She spoke very fluently for someone who must have been uneasy. ‘I remember them saying their son was in prison.’
‘That’s my younger brother. I’ve always lived in London.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Ronnie.’
‘Ronnie O’Connell.’ Another pause. ‘Maybe Eli has mentioned you.’
Not in the past tense, I noticed. She didn’t speak of him as if he was in the past.
My heart was beating with uncomfortable vigour. ‘Has Eli spoken to you recently?’
‘No. We didn’t remain friends.’
‘How much do you know about Eli? His work and—’
‘What’s this about?’
‘Would he hold a grudge against you for any reason?’
‘He holds grudges for longer than anyone I’ve ever met.’
‘He asked me to help him look for a guy called Trent Byrne.’
‘The last I heard of Trent he… wasn’t himself.’
I was amazed I had a signal up here. The line was so clear.
‘From what we can gather, he did go insane at some point,’ I said, figuring that I had nothing to lose by being open with her.
‘Why are you looking for him?’
I hesitated. ‘Eli wants to settle an old business dispute.’
‘He wants to kill him,’ she said, as though she was rolling her eyes.
‘Um…’
Silence.
‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I was married to the man.’
‘Yeah but—’
‘People don’t change. Empathy isn’t something you grow into.’
‘Then why were you married to him if he was such a sociopath?’
‘Well, he had other good qualities.’
She laughed, fleetingly.
This was weird, I thought. Yes, this was definitely weird.
‘This can’t be just about Trent,’ she continued, in the absence of any groundbreaking contribution from me, ‘if you’re contacting me. Am I right?’
‘Yeah. Thomas Love is dead. Cameron Hopper likely is too.’
‘Ah.’
No trace of surprise. Or concern.
‘Did my name appear on some sort of list then?’ she asked.
‘How… How did you know?’
‘Eli loves lists. He loves them more than ticking off any of the things on them. It’s only the creation of the list that matters to him. Whether it’s carried out or not is usually always irrelevant.’ She sighed. ‘He never was good at finishing things. But there were lists all over the house.’
‘Why would you be on the list?’ I asked.
‘Because it would make no sense to leave me off it, I suppose.’
‘You don’t sound worried.’
‘I’m not. I don’t think you have to worry about me. Though if th
is was a gesture of concern, thanks. Ronnie, was it?’
‘Yeah, Ronnie O’Connell.’
‘Your mum was really nice. I’ll probably be seeing you.’
‘Melissa,’ I said, disliking the vague sexual thrill that pulsed through me at the enunciation of her name, ‘do you have any idea what happened to Trent?’
‘It was something to do with his niece, I think.’
‘I didn’t know he had family.’
‘Well, he used to. I only know because he talked to me about personal stuff a bit more than everyone else. Maybe because I actually listened… But when his niece died he changed. She was only twelve.’
‘How…?’
‘Look, I’ve got to go into this meeting quickly. Can I call you back in half an hour?’
I looked around. ‘Um, yeah. Yeah, I haven’t got anything else to do.’
‘OK.’
She hung up, and I rested my chin and arms on the metal bar in front of my face. Physiologically, I felt as though I’d just been in a fight, or fucked someone really hard, or jumped from a moving train onto a grass verge.
Down from me, Eli slept.
His ex-wife was calling me back in half an hour, and I was sitting thirty feet up some scaffolding above the world, arse-end of America, thinking that maybe I’d been lied to across the country and back.
I stood up, enjoying the pleasant clacking of my feet on panelling.
Half an hour. I made a note of the time on my phone and put it on the floor to climb to a higher tier. The more I was a slave to telecommunications, the more I wanted to throw it clean off the scaffolding. I couldn’t promise to myself that it wouldn’t happen if I took it even higher.
My shoes didn’t gain much purchase on the slick rungs, meaning that I had to haul myself up with my arms for most of the climb. When I reached the roof, though, it was worth it. The air was even heavier with silence and darkness.
I sat and let my legs hang over the edge. I couldn’t even see the car any more.
They rush on the city. They run on the wall; They climb into the houses, They enter through the windows like a thief.
I had a dream once that a demon was climbing down the walls of my house with black elongated limbs that stretched and rounded corners, clung to windowsills and dragged a humanoid body down the length of two floors. In my mind, demons looked exactly like humans. They didn’t have horns and pitchforks or tails. They weren’t red or scaled. They were blackened featureless humans with long fingers.
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