Decay Inevitable

by Conrad Williams

  “Tim?”

  Tim moved as quickly as he could away from the wall: still a languid movement. “What?” He blinked.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. Wandering around.” His voice was wet, catarrhal. Listening to him breathe was like listening to a sucking wound in casualty.

  “You were touching that wall up like it was your girlfriend.”

  Tim reddened. He pushed the babyfine floss of his hair away from his eyes and made to walk past Sean. It was easy to block his path. A cobweb would have impeded him.

  “What were you doing, Tim?”

  “I. Was. Do-ing. No-thing.” Enunciating every syllable, Tim tried to stare out Sean, summoning as much fury to his puppy face as possible.

  “Okay, Tim,” Sean said at last. “I don’t mean anything. I was just curious.”

  Tim seemed to slump; relief wiped the pitiful attempt at pique from his features. “Do you want anything from the shop? I’m just off to get Salty a packet of fig biscuits.”

  “Bottle of water,” Sean said. “Thanks.”

  “Right. Put the money in the tin, won’t you?”

  “Always do. See you later. We’re going to the pub, aren’t we?”

  Tim nodded. He was waiting for Sean to leave the room with him. Sean didn’t disappoint, heading back up to where Nicky Preece was stationed, but as soon as Tim had pushed through the revolving doors, Sean was back down the stairs. He retraced his steps through the offices to the wall that Tim had been caressing. It was a wall scarred by tiny holes where nails or tacks had fastened charts and plans and diagrams to it. Pale green paint was chipped here and there, revealing a sickly pink undercoat. Feeling somewhat self-conscious, Sean placed his hands against the wall in the same way that Tim had. The plaster was warm to the touch and he could feel a slight vibration: no doubt Jez or Robbie or Lutz working with a power tool down below. Sean moved his hands across the wall, wondering what it was that Tim had been doing. Could he have some kind of demolition fetish?

  He pushed himself away, chuckling to himself and feeling embarrassed that he had allowed Tim to get at him like that. At the threshold of the room he heard the wind getting up outside the building, howling through the brick nets and chutes and scaffolding. The traffic had dwindled on the carriageway. The cloud had infected the entire sky. It was as though the sun didn’t exist any more.

  EMMA ARRIVED JUST as the evening news was beginning on the television. Sean let her into the flat and then returned to the set, where a man with too-pink skin was standing by a curve of motorway. A crater in the road’s surface was the size of a large roundabout, straddling the central reservation. The crash barriers had ruptured and bent like toffee. Days after the explosions on the M6 and M1, forensic teams were combing the area around the detonated bombs, looking for clues.

  “...as yet nobody has claimed responsibility for the explosions and, although it seems unlikely from the sheer scale of the attack, police are not ruling out the possibility that the culprit is a lone terrorist...”

  Sean was wiping his hands on a tea towel. Emma plucked it from his fingers and, stepping into the circle of his arms, kissed him deeply.

  “Hello to you too,” Sean said, smiling, when she eventually pulled away.

  “That was just a message to you, from me,” she said. “Whatever went before... it doesn’t matter to me. I’m here if you want me.”

  Sean had made a stew of tomatoes, bacon, and beans. He served it up with hunks of bread and glasses of merlot. They sat eating on the floor, cross-legged, leaning lightly against each other while sleet spattered the windows and the news played out its awful theatre to them.

  Later, sitting among the dirty dishes and listening to music, Emma asked Sean what he thought about the motorway bombs.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve seen nothing like it before. I mean, look at the number of cameras they’ve got out on the roads these days. And you’re telling me nobody picked up anything on them?”

  “They aren’t all working all the time, are they?”

  “No, but you’d think, if what, over fifty bombs had been planted, that something would have been filmed. It’s all too perfect. Nobody has that kind of luck during an operation. Nobody.”

  “Well, it looks like they have now,” Emma said, absently stroking the soft fuzz on the nape of Sean’s neck.

  Sean thought of the way Tim had moved his hands over the pimpled, scarred surface of the wall. He had treated it almost reverentially.

  “I wish I could open you up sometimes,” Emma said, her voice changed. Nervous. Gentle. “You’re so quiet, really. You’ve always been quiet.”

  She pressed against his ribcage as though, in the bones that patterned his skin, she might read something about him that she didn’t know. “In here is the real you. The you I want to understand and get to know better. I want to get under your skin, Sean. Does that upset you at all? Does that kind of talk scare you?”

  They held each other until it grew too cold to remain on the floor. In bed, they watched the heat of their bodies reach out to the window and slowly draw a grey veil over the freezing railway embankment and the broken sodium lamps. It was a magical time, an immanent time. It felt like Christmas Eve, or a leaden sky at the cusp of emptying itself of snow. Sean felt the hair at the base of his spine lifting with the deliberate grace of a spider’s legs. He wanted to make love to Emma, but something was holding him back. Maybe it was maturity. At the edge of sleep, he thought he understood the secrets of the world and the reason behind too many things that were never considered in life. He stirred, his head woolly, tears in his eyes. Naomi was perched on the edge of the bed, waggling his big toe between her thumb and forefinger. The further out of sleep he came, the more insubstantial she grew, until she was no longer there. She said, as she faded from view, “There doesn’t have to be a door for there to be a doorway.”

  Sean crept from bed to the window and palmed away the condensation. Outside, shadows beneath the trees teased themselves into and out of faces he thought he recognised. Some of the people he saw were long dead. Voices from his past tried to re-establish themselves in his memory but they had been gone too long for them to gain purchase. His grandfather was there somewhere, his face as grave as an eagle’s. The hooded eyes, the jut of the jaw, the thick blade of a nose. But the voice would not come.

  Dwelling on all of this, he failed to remember what it had been that drew him from sleep in the first place. His toe, when he reached to feel it, was warm where the rest of his foot was cold. He trudged back to bed, arrested in his movements as he saw Emma, the bedclothes shrugged off her, the light streaming through the window hitting her arched body and giving Sean the illusion of transparency; he could see everything in her. Everything.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: DODO

  IT WAS A woman. An old woman.

  Elisabeth tried to shy away from the approaching figure dressed in a diaphanous nightgown and a pair of waders that sucked and squelched in the mud surrounding the caravans, but the old woman was making a beeline for her.

  “Don’t bother hiding, sugarsweetie,” she said, in a voice that suggested she was bored by her quarry before she’d even been exposed to it. “I’ve got eyes like you wouldn’t believe. Like a shitehawk’s eyes, my eyes.” She gargled laughter and reached out a hand, hauling Elisabeth from behind the fuel tanks with astonishing strength.

  “Now,” she continued, “if you want to get away from here with the skin on your back in one piece, you’ll close any or all of your holes and come with me. Sharpish.”

  Elisabeth wasted no time. She hurried after the woman as she returned to the caravans. She had no choice. If she didn’t acquiesce, the woman would out her and that would be that.

  “Where’s your man friend?” the old woman asked, shooing her through the door of a tiny caravan that listed so prominently to one side that Elisabeth had to put out her hands to stop herself from toppling into the wall. Candles in ornate glass holders sp
illed nervous light across the cluttered cabin and drenched the air with a hot, animal smell.

  “He went looking for Sadie. We heard her earlier.”

  “Maybe you did. But the silly bastard will get himself killed. We have ourselves sentinels in this little camp of ours. We need to watch ourselves all the time. Not popular our lot. We’ve had attacks before. Caravans burnt down. We have to protect ourselves.”

  “I’m sorry,” Elisabeth said. She was at a loss as to what to say but felt she had to fill the gaps fed to her by the old woman. “What’s your name?”

  “We’ll put our cosy faces on when I get back. I have to look for your hero, don’t I? Stay here. Don’t open the door.”

  The woman wound a scarf around her throat and went outside. Elisabeth closed her eyes and pressed the heels of her hands into them until motes of colour spattered across her inner vision. A ginger cat swerved through the legs of the chair and sat by her feet, lack of interest spreading its features into a yawn. Elisabeth reached for the cat but it batted her hand away and turned its back on her. Around her, the caravan seemed to draw itself in, as though it were expelling breath. The fidgeting shadows started a headache behind her ears. Paintings of sullen men in burnt umber and cobalt absorbed the light. A bookshelf described a faint grin across the wall under the weight of triple-stacked volumes. The furniture was spindly and unwelcoming; it might have been antique for all Elisabeth knew.

  She went to the window and teased apart the curtains, wishing she had been strong enough to repulse the old woman at the fuel drums. Ten minutes had passed since Will left her. That all was silent outside ought to have encouraged her, but it did not. The featureless dark sucked at her eyes.

  Elisabeth, suspicious that the woman might turn her in, grabbed a stubby knife from the kitchen area and hid it under her jumper. The cat rubbed at her ankles now that she was near food but Elisabeth ignored it. She was geeing herself up to leave when the door flew open and Will ducked into the caravan, holding Sadie by the arm. The old woman brought up the rear. Will was smiling. Sadie looked tired and cold. Blue hoops hung beneath her eyes.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  The old woman poured water into a kettle. “I’ll make you tea. I’ll give you sandwiches. But then you must leave.”

  Elisabeth said: “What happened?”

  Sadie had been intent on hiding from them behind the trees until they stopped their bickering, no more, but when she had heard men talking beyond the embankment she had decided to check them out in case they might be looking for Will. One of the strangers had spotted Sadie and was friendly, offering her chocolate. He was around Sadie’s age. The other man was older and was walking a docile-looking dog; he moved away when Sadie approached.

  The boy, whose name was Jacob, was good-looking and Sadie had warmed to him. They talked for a while and Jacob asked if she would like to see a bird’s nest. It was then that she realised she might be missed and explained that she needed to go back. But the boy grabbed her arm and begged her to go with him. The man with the dog returned. The dog was no longer placid and scared her into going with them. They gave her something hot and sour to drink from a bottle without a label that made her feel dizzy. She remembered someone trying to pull her top up and she had struggled with him. He’d had a grope of her breasts and seemed to be satisfied with that. Then she had been being pushed into a caravan where she had fallen asleep on a sofa. Blankets that smelled of tar. Then nothing more until Will and the old woman found her.

  “They’ll notice she’s gone,” the old woman said. “Won’t be long. You should be on your way soon.”

  Elisabeth ignored her. “Are you all right?” she asked Sadie.

  “Fine,” Sadie replied.

  “No,” Elisabeth intoned, more firmly. “I mean, are you all right?”

  The old woman pursed her lips as she handed mugs of tea around. “If you mean, ‘Have they raped you?’, why not say?”

  Elisabeth put her mug down. “We should go to the police about this,” she said. “Sadie was kidnapped. We don’t know what’s happened to her. She was drugged.”

  “Your daughter was not raped.”

  “She isn’t my–”

  The old woman paid no attention. “She was not raped. I know my kind.”

  “We’ll see about that. She was kidnapped, at any rate. There’ll be prison sentences in this, I promise you.”

  The old woman rounded on her. “There’ll be death before there’s prison sentences, I promise you that, if you carry on with this nonsense.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Well what do you think it is? A brace of pheasants?”

  Will moved, breaking the tension that was thickening in the cabin.

  “Eli,” he said gently, “Nula helped us. She helped us. We should be grateful.”

  “And what would have happened to her if we hadn’t come after her, Will? What then?”

  Nula offered Elisabeth a thick slice of bread spread with margarine. Despite her hunger, she spurned it.

  “She’d have come with us,” Nula said, re-directing the bread towards Will, who took it. “She’d have been safe with us.”

  “Safe?” Elisabeth mocked. “Safe?”

  Sadie stood up. Groggily, she said: “I’m okay. They didn’t touch me. I promise.”

  Elisabeth closed her eyes. She felt close to tears. Regardless of her mistrust of the old woman, she didn’t want to go back out into the cold and dark. The cabin, though cluttered and musty, was at least warm. “Let’s get out,” she said.

  THEY WALKED IN silence until they rejoined the railway line. Before dawn, they scattered, hiding in the bushes as three helicopters chattered low overhead, arc lights swooping over the embankment and the tracks.

  “Do you think they’ll come after us, those people?” Will asked. “When they find that Sadie is gone?”

  Elisabeth shook her head. “Not if they’ve any brains between them,” she said. Will’s reluctance to report the incident had refreshed the frost between them that had until that point been gradually thawing. At lunchtime, exhausted, Will conceded that if they weren’t to alert the authorities about the camp, they should at least treat themselves to a decent lunch for a change. It would be worth the risk. And after last night, he privately considered, he wasn’t bothered any more. What happened now didn’t matter.

  Leaving Elisabeth and Sadie on the edge of a car park, Will, conscious of how soiled and grizzled he appeared, tramped along a road to a supermarket where he bought bread and cheese and a bottle of wine without making eye contact with anybody. He wished he had enough money to enable them to take a train or a bus, one of which, cruelly, passed him as he made his way back to the car park, splashing him with some of the road’s surface water. The windows were misty with inner warmth; figures were black, lumpen, huddled into the enervation of their journeys.

  Will could now see Elisabeth and Sadie perched on two small concrete bollards, talking, and the sight lanced him to the quick.

  In the days leading up to Cat’s death, he had been imagining how the shape of his own baby might fill his hands. How the heat of it would travel through his fingers. He had imagined breathing the air that moved across its hot little head, and of what it might have smelled.

  Being with Elisabeth too had re-opened in him a scar he thought long healed. The manner of their separation had always frustrated him. It had been avoidable, he knew, but neither he nor she had lifted a finger to arrest the slide. It was as though they had been fascinated by the speed of their decay, loath to prevent it in favour of observing something spectacular. From aisle to courtroom, their marriage had lasted three months. And for what? An imagined infidelity on her part; a suspicion on his that she had married him because he was the only person in her last-chance saloon at the time.

  After the fallout (there had been much, and it had spread wide), Will had failed to come up with a satisfactory reason for their divorce. It was almost as if they had feared the dedication and co
mmitment marriage demanded of them and had wimped out at the first opportunity. By then he had met Cat and was too involved to consider raking through the ashes to see if any embers remained.

  “A feast,” he said cheerfully, as he rejoined them. Although he hadn’t said as much, he was mightily pleased to have Sadie back with them. Finding her in Fleece’s caravan, he had hugged her and told her how sorry he was. But then Fleece had entered, his arm and chest sodden with wet blood, and, upon seeing Will, had turned and hurried outside, tripping as he did so and winding himself on the ground.

  “Wait here, just a second,” he had told Sadie and ran after Fleece. In the dark, before Fleece had a chance to muster the breath to call for help, Will knelt on his back and caught his chin between his hands. Summoning all of his strength, and thinking of Cat alone with those evil, evil bastards, he wrenched Fleece’s head back, relishing, yes, relishing the tear of muscles, the gullet’s collapse in a sound like that of disintegrating polystyrene, the crack of bone as his throat gave way. At the moment that Fleece went limp in his hands, a strange haze, like some glittering stage curtain, had manifested itself in front of (or was it behind?) his eyes. It threatened to part, but Will recoiled, jamming his hands against his eyes, inexplicably fearful of what he might see. He had dragged the body fully three hundred yards, into a scrim of gorse, and kicked loose dust at the corpse until its shape was sufficiently concealed.

  And then the old woman, scurrying through the dark, her Wellington boots scuffing across the ground. Bringing him out of it.

  Sadie and Elisabeth wolfed their food and traded secretive glances as they ate. At one point they laughed out loud. Will, his gut full of food, picking crumbs from his jumper and in as good a mood as any since leaving the farmhouse, asked them about the joke they were sharing.