Running Girl

by Simon Mason

  He lay there in agony. The pain shot up his legs into his pelvis and further into his chest. He put a hand to his face and it came away bloody. When he tried to stand, his ankle gave way, and he yelled once before forcing himself forward, crawling over the threshold into the caravan. At last he hauled himself to his feet and stood, looking.

  At the far end flames were consuming what had once been the kitchen area. Curtains and furnishings roared. A cloud of black smoke rolled towards him, as solid as surf.

  He wrapped his hands in his sleeves and thrust himself forward into the smoke, choking and blind, feeling about him. Everything was already scalding hot to the touch, the ragged bits of carpet on the floor smoking and shrivelling. Kicking his way past toppled furniture and other debris, he groped in the swirling incendiary murk and felt a narrow bed against the caravan side. There was no one in it. He turned round, lost his bearings and tripped over something lying on the floor. At the same moment he heard a noise, a tiny cry. He fell to his knees and found the girl lying huddled with the baby wrapped in a blanket pressed against her chest. She didn’t respond when he shook her. In desperation he tried to lift them both together, but they were too heavy and awkward. Snatching up the baby, he stumbled away from the leaping flames, lurching in pain and confusion back along the caravan to the door, and fell through it onto the ground outside.

  As he placed the baby on the hot grass, there was a third explosion from inside.

  He knew then that he’d failed. Nevertheless he turned back, bleeding and filthy, and forced himself into the caravan again. Flames were everywhere now, spreading with incredible rapidity. Groping blindly, he went forward until he found Hannah lying on the smoking floor in exactly the same position. Her feet were on fire. He ripped off her shoes with his burning hands and, taking hold of her ankles, began to drag her towards the door. Something cracked overhead and a sharp hail of glass raked his face and he staggered sideways, eyes shut. Fire was all round him now, and he blundered among the flames. He was sure he was on fire too, but it didn’t seem important. More important was the fact that he no longer knew which direction the door was. He stopped moving. He reeled slowly round on himself. In the flames there were noises. The noises themselves seemed to burn his ears. For the last time he opened his mouth, but there was no air left, only fire; his tongue seemed to burst into flames and he reeled again and staggered, and the last thing he heard was the shouting of his own voice in an oddly tangled uproar like the roar of many other voices, all of which were inside his own head.

  Then he toppled forward into blackness and was lost.

  52

  THIS IS WHAT he became. A silence in the noise. A rag of smoke floating, softly torn to shreds in the tops of the trees, a spreading drift of final thoughts. He was glad he’d left his body behind. Watching it dance and crackle, he felt nothing but a bystander’s mild curiosity. Other figures now rose out of the noise to keep him company: a hanged man who slipped his noose of flaming curtain and swam gravely out of the smoke, a red-head in tassels lit up like candles, a girl with chestnut-brown hair and grey eyes who opened her mouth and laughed a jet of orange light, bright as a blow-torch flare. A huge sheet of lined notepaper turned into a flying carpet of smoke, and he lay on it remembering things he’d never seen. Darren Winder breaking open Abdul’s face with a photographer’s tripod. Detective Inspector Raminder Singh sitting naked and cross-legged in a temple. His mother dancing heavily on her own in a tiny room of plain white walls. They were all indices in the same equation, numbers rotating like smoke through the air to lead him to the perfect solution, and he rotated with them, slowly, among the treetops, following the trail of a smoke-filled girl dressed immaculately in heliotrope-coloured running shoes. But something was wrong. This wasn’t what dying should be. For a moment he swam on effortlessly with the others. Then he faltered. He grew heavier. The silence swelled, slowly at first, then faster. He rose with it and fell, leaped and plunged like a fish in water, like a little kid on a roller-coaster, holding on grimly, feeling sicker and sicker, swooping and lurching heavily in and out of the flaming treetops until he reached the end of the ride and fell suddenly downwards, and rolled over on the hard sandy soil, and threw up.

  ‘Is better,’ a voice said quietly. ‘My Garvie man.’

  Then blackness again.

  When he woke, minutes or hours or days later, he was in pain, writhing on the ground while people bothered him with things and noises and flashing blue lights until finally it came clear, and he opened his eyes and looked up at Detective Inspector Singh.

  ‘Don’t talk,’ the policeman said.

  Others were talking. They gave each other low, urgent instructions obscured by the noise of vehicles arriving and leaving. Blue lights swirled over everything. There was pain in his hands and legs, and his face was numb.

  ‘I’m not dead any more,’ he said to Singh woodenly. The pain flared up and he began to think again. ‘Where are they? Hannah? The baby?’

  ‘Don’t talk. It’s bad for you.’

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘The baby’s OK. On its way to hospital now. It’s going to be fine, they think.’

  ‘Hannah?’ he croaked.

  Singh frowned and looked away. ‘They’re doing everything they can.’

  Garvie tried to lift himself and Singh held him back. ‘You’re going to hospital yourself. They’re just coming with the stretcher. There’s nothing you can do now. You’ve done enough. More than enough.’

  Garvie lay there thinking. ‘I couldn’t make them work out,’ he said sadly.

  Singh looked at him, puzzled.

  ‘The numbers.’

  ‘You’re delirious,’ Singh said.

  Garvie blinked painfully and thought about that. ‘I mean, I couldn’t get them out. Hannah and her baby.’

  Singh shook his head and frowned. ‘You got them out. When we got here the three of you were lying on the grass.’

  Garvie lay there trying to remember. A man in a green paramedic uniform came up and loosened his burned shirt sleeve to give him an injection.

  ‘Rest now,’ Singh said.

  Garvie frowned. ‘But I didn’t tell you where I was.’

  ‘No.’ Singh was grim and pale. ‘We didn’t know until we got a call from one of the residents at Tick Hill. Out late walking his dog and saw the flames.’

  Garvie lay there. ‘What resident?’ he said at last.

  ‘Wouldn’t give his name. Foreign, we think. Nervous type. Please, rest now.’

  Garvie lay there, smiling with his numb face. Then he stopped. He felt very sleepy. ‘Singh?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t think my mum’s going to be very pleased.’

  ‘I don’t think so, either. Here she is now.’

  There was the sound of a car drawing up, and a door slammed.

  Singh said, ‘She knows everything. I told her. It’s all over now, Garvie.’

  He heard running footsteps. Then his mother’s face appeared, full of pain and tears.

  ‘Oh Garvie!’

  Everything was slipping away again. ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ he mumbled as he fell asleep. ‘I’m sorry for everything.’

  53

  IT WAS ALL over.

  From the window of his ward on the twelfth floor of City Central Hospital Garvie watched spring give way to summer. The rain showers dried up at last, blue skies opened out behind the tower blocks in the business district, the sun shone and the city sparkled below him like a handful of glass beads. He sat in a chair next to his bed staring at it hour after hour. His body healed quickly. After a few days they took him off the antibiotic drip and stopped giving him daily injections. They removed the dressings from his burned hands and gave him gauze bandage-gloves to wear. His blistered nose peeled, his cracked lips flaked and the raw rims of his ears crusted over. The swelling in his ankle went down, and soon he could get around on an aluminium crutch.

  At the end of his first week Felix and Smudge came to visit
, and slipped him a pack of King Size hidden in a sock, which was immediately found and confiscated by his mother, who came up to see him every hour from the ward below where she was working, and every hour from home when she wasn’t. Abdul came to see him too, standing shyly at the end of the bed. By now everyone knew his part in the drama, and he was embarrassed to find himself briefly the centre of attention. They didn’t say much to each other, but after a few minutes Garvie put his hand to his heart in a gesture both tender and daft, and Abdul went away with shining eyes.

  Every day he asked for a newspaper and they refused to bring him one. Radios and televisions were switched off throughout the ward. Whenever he complained, the nurses just smiled sympathetically and told him they had their instructions from the police and the Child Protection Agency, and he would limp back to his chair and sit in silence, staring out over the city again.

  In the middle of the second week Singh visited him. He came early in the morning on his way to a meeting with the prosecution services, and against hospital regulations put a bunch of tulips in Garvie’s plastic water jug.

  ‘They’re going to let me go home soon,’ Garvie said.

  ‘Good. You can do no more damage. The case is closed at last.’

  Both Winders, father and son, remained in custody after being refused bail. Darren had been charged with the murder of Chloe Dow. From a warehouse out on the ring road police had retrieved computers containing photographic images datable to Thursday the 12th of Chloe standing in the private suite at the top of the shag-pile carpeted stairs wearing a white jacket and blue dress and holding a hand of playing cards. There were emails too from Darren inviting Chloe to trial as Imperium’s new All you got to do to win is play poster girl. But in several of the pictures Chloe was semi-naked and weeping. Something had gone wrong. This was corroborated by witness evidence from the Thursday night and by texts from Friday found on Darren’s phone – a barrage of threats interrupted by a single reply from Chloe: Meet me at Pike Pond at 5. In a drawer of the desk in Darren’s office they had found duplicate keys for both the Porsche and the garage where it was kept while his father was abroad.

  ‘He’s not the brightest,’ Singh said.

  Winder senior had been charged with aiding, abetting, procuring and counselling the assault on Hannah Clark and her baby. The car that Garvie had seen driving away from the Tick Hill trailer park had been traced. Three men from Riga had been charged with assault, arson and attempted murder – but their original instruction had come from Winder senior.

  ‘He had a lot to hide. Gambling isn’t all that goes on at the casino. He knew if we went in on the back of the Dow case we’d start to find things. When he heard what his son had done he went berserk. Darren’s got a broken arm. There’s no doubt they’re both going down.’

  Garvie had listened all the time in silence. Now he said, quietly, ‘Witness evidence? Attempted murder?’

  Singh nodded.

  ‘So she’s alive. Hannah Clark.’

  Singh nodded, more slowly.

  Garvie looked at him. ‘All this time I’ve not known.’

  ‘For your own good. It’s been touch and go, in fact. But she’s pulled through. She’s going to need surgery, quite a lot of it, but she’ll recover.’

  ‘I want to see her.’

  ‘I know. But you can’t. She’s part of the witness protection programme.’ He made an empty gesture with his hands. ‘I couldn’t help you even if I wanted to. I’ve no idea where she is. But she’s safe. And her baby too.’

  Garvie thought. ‘What did she see?’

  ‘A lot more than Darren knew. It was Hannah told us about the photographs and where they might be found. She’d seen the end of the so-called modelling session, after things had got out of hand. And she’d seen Darren chase Chloe at the top of those stairs as she tried to get away.’

  Garvie was silent. ‘I put her in danger.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If I hadn’t gone to Imperium, if Winder hadn’t seen me talking to her—’

  ‘You’re not responsible for what he did. You’re responsible for getting her out of the caravan.’

  ‘Actually, I couldn’t even do that on my own.’

  ‘Abdul’s a hero. But she wouldn’t have got out without you, either. You know it. Enough. No more.’

  Garvie stared at him and nodded at last. ‘I wanted to see the papers but I’m not interested any more.’

  ‘It’s been frenzied. As you can imagine. My only worry is that the coverage they’ve given the Winders will delay the trial.’ He looked at Garvie. ‘There’s been a lot of speculation about Hannah and her baby. What happened to them couldn’t be kept out of the press. But I’m glad to say you hardly feature at all. Abdul, I’m afraid, is having to learn to deal with fame.’

  Singh stood and prepared to leave. ‘They’re letting you out soon, you say?’

  ‘Couple of days.’

  Singh nodded back. ‘I’m glad. I’ve been talking to your mother. If I remember correctly, you’ll just be in time to sit your exams. Life goes on, Garvie.’ He paused. ‘For some of us.’

  54

  AFTER TWO WEEKS away, Flat 12 Eastwick Gardens seemed different. Smaller, stranger, full of things he hadn’t noticed much before, like the not-quite-blue and white stripes of the upholstery on the kitchen chairs which, he saw now, matched the curtains, or the smell of Bajan cooking, so oddly personal after the anti-smell of the hospital.

  He stood on the threshold gazing around. His mother went through to the kitchen and began to carry things about, clearing space at the table. She seemed different too. That was because she’d actually changed. She’d lost weight. Her broad face had a new hollow look and her mouth was pinched. She was quiet now, as if no longer physically capable of her former loudness. Like someone who had suffered and expected to suffer again, her eyes were watchful. Most of the time they watched him.

  She went to and fro across the kitchen as he stood there looking at her. At first she was clear and distinct, a middle-aged woman in a not-very-smart coat, then she was blurred and intermittent, and finally she was a shape without an outline drowning in a melting kitchen.

  He dropped his crutches with a clatter to the floor, and she turned and saw him lift his arms to her, and there was a moment when nothing in the room seemed itself but irrelevant shadows before she went in a rush across the room towards him.

  ‘I know now,’ he whispered, his mouth squashed against her wet shoulder. ‘I know what it means to be a mother. I know what it means for everything to be your fault.’

  It was Garvie who first raised the subject of his exams. It was two days after he came out of hospital, Friday evening.

  ‘Got the first one Monday. Maths.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  She continued to clear the table of their tea things.

  ‘Higher tier, calculator paper. One hour forty-five minutes. Calculators may be used.’

  His mother said nothing, looking at him warily in silence.

  ‘Think I’ll go and brush up on probability,’ he said.

  Still she said nothing.

  ‘Put in a bit of effort,’ he added.

  She just looked at him.

  ‘Course,’ he said, ‘you might not believe me. That’d be normal.’

  They looked at each other for a long time in silence, then he went into his room and worked for an hour on sines and cosines and quadratic equations – from a mathematical point of view a totally unnecessary exercise.

  Numbers worked again, they fell into the old patterns. But he didn’t do the equations in order to see them perform their usual gymnastic tricks, their feats of completion; he did them to stop himself from thinking of other things. He was so unhappy he had to keep reminding himself that the Winders were in custody awaiting trial, that what he’d done had not been without purpose, that Chloe’s murder would not go unpunished. But over and again his thoughts went to a girl in a white toga, a girl with laughing eyes, a girl so unsel
fconsciously pretty she seemed more herself than other people were, and each time he thought of her it was as if he saw the toga burst into flames and could feel her burning feet in his burning hands.

  His appetite failed, he slept badly all night, and the next day was just as miserable and empty.

  At some point on Saturday afternoon, despite his best intentions, his concentration flagged. There was birdsong in the tree outside, and he went to stand at the window, looking down into the communal garden. Garden, so-called. Matted grass full of thistles, flowerbeds choked with brambles and bindweed.

  Chloe’s garden in Fox Walk came into his mind, so neat and precise. Except, of course, for the fence broken where Alex had leaped over. Probably mended by now, he thought.

  Life goes on, for some. Not for Chloe. Some things can’t be mended.

  Other memories came to him before he could stop them. In life, unlike maths, there was nearly always something left over. A feeling not accounted for. A memory which doesn’t add up. Like that brief moment when he’d stood with Felix in Chloe’s room wearing her wet-look grey jeggings and pink T-shirt and short white jacket smelling very clean. Posing, hands in her jacket pockets, turning this way and that, asking Felix if it all matched. He remembered it exactly: the jeggings, the jacket, the T-shirt, the look on Felix’s face. He remembered with absolute clarity that there’d been nothing in the jacket pockets.

  Just one of those things: something that didn’t fit, something left over.

  In the room next door his mother turned on the taps at the sink and began to wash up, and he put all thoughts of Chloe firmly out of his mind and sat again at his table. Opening his revision book, he worked in semi-engaged fashion through half a dozen standard-grade probability questions, trying to keep his mind under control. But his memory went its own way: he couldn’t stop himself remembering the probability question that Chloe had attempted on the sheet of paper she’d used for her running note.