I stared until my hands tingled, and then I realised they were tingling because the metal had sucked in the heat from the fire and I was burning too. I sucked at the swift blisters that had risen on my palm, relishing the pain, glad that my nerve endings weren't part of just so much fossilised tissue. I was still breathing. I was still alive in this blackened, death-filled crucible.
On behalf of the crew I'd like to thank you for dying with us this evening. We hope to see you again soon.
Chapter Eighteen
Descent
The rain had stopped. The wind was still gusting in. Halyards spanked against black masts. A real din. I opened that shack door. I stepped inside. One bare 100-watt bulb. Shelves of hooks, ledgers, lead shot. Buckets of fish-heads. Buckets of guts. A dried-up lemon air freshener. Calendar on the wall. Ornamental anchor. Off-cuts of carpets. A table. A large coffee tin. Tightly rolled scrolls. Knives for scaling. Filleting. Gutting. Waxy paper. A huge bobbin of string. Tailor's scissors. A chalkboard of prices. I stood there. I sucked it in. Blood poured from my abdomen. Pooled on the floor. I stared at it. That was me. I felt like scooping it up. Packing it back in. I was light-headed. Not long now. How many pints before black-out? How many pints before arrest? Every breath was an effort. Every exhalation threatened to spill me. I walked forward. I don't know why. My foot caught in the carpet. I went down. I hit my head. I thought about the sound. Not a flat knock. Echo in this. Empty head? I ransacked my coat for pills. Nothing. I needed a drink. I needed to sleep. I sat up. Rapped knuckles against the floor. This bit solid. This bit not. I pulled back the carpet. A hinged hatch. Water drained through the cracks. I fumbled it open. Stairs fell away. Black as the hobs of hell. Water chuckled down there. Hello? I sank. Splashing through mud. Close down here. The walls pressing in on me. Another door. Soft music playing. Hello? I felt for a lightswitch. Rivers of water. I flicked it on. Tensed against electrocution. Shadows scattered. Signs of life. A bed. Manacles on the bed. Chains bolted to the wall. A table and dishes. Congealed food. Medical items. A first aid kit. Bandages. Steel knives on a steel tray. Shower curtain. A moan. I turned around. In the shadowed corner. Ruth in and out of blankets. Blood-stained and mewling. Cradling something red. Cradling someone red. I went to her. Ruth, what are you doing here? I held out my hand. Shush. It's okay. Everything's fine. Her eyes on me. Lightshine. Animal in her. Gripping the baby like a weapon. Blood on her cheeks. Blood on her forehead. Like tribal warpaint. Her eyes on me. Her eyes flashing around the room. Ruth?
She draws her lips back. We have to go. Charlie...
Charlie... Charlie's dead, Ruth.
Charlie? Dead? Charlie?
He tried to kill me.
Her eyes. Red and wet. Unfocused. Another wild scan of the room. We have to go. Now.
How's the baby? How are you?
She ignores me. Heads for the door. The water's ankle-deep. I switch out the light. Switch it on again.
Paul?
Now I ignore her. She had to go to hospital. Charlie's body. Keble would have to be informed. But. Something else.
Paul? We have to go. We have to go now, Paul.
Why?
Because. The baby. Charlie. Isn't it obvious?
What happened down here, Ruth?
It's over. I've just given birth. Can't you see? I delivered early. Come on. We need to get to hospital.
Blood moving through the water. Red ribbons in a current. The shower curtain darkening.
I wade towards it. What's behind here?
Leave it, Paul. We're going to drown down here. Think about the future.
Frozen in time. The moment before everything changes. In that moment there is potential. I could recover. Tamara is a splinter. I could tease her out. In time. I could fall in love again. Ruth would take care of me. I would take care of her. And the baby. We'd move away. Charlie would be forgotten. In time. I don't want the slow heal. The easy path. I can't not look. I'm a rubbernecker on the motorway. I disable the safe search. The not knowing is impossible. I'm there. I'm right there. In the horror film. With the guy in the bathroom. Who pulls back the shower curtain. Every time. Every time. What black, blasted secrets lie behind?
The truth. What's the truth? Don't believe the truth. Don't believe that Ruth.
Paul!
I got my hand around it. Tight fist. White knuckles. Pulled that fucker off the rails. And Tamara was there. And I screamed at her. How stupid she was. How fucking stupid I was. I'd been here before. Baiting Charlie's hooks. I could have saved her. I COULD HAVE FUCKING SAVED YOU. Where had she been? And all the while I was looking for something that wasn't soaking wet with filthy seawater, something I could tuck inside the gaping hole in her, something to staunch the blood and pack her up with hope, with a chance. And I heard Ruth splashing through the water as she came to drag me away and she had the baby by the hand and she was jerking it around like some sock puppet, but at least it was screeching, at least it was alive. Unlike Tamara. Unlike me. But she didn't want to drag me away, she wanted to put me under, and I felt the burn in my abdomen matched with another in the back of my head and I keeled over, trying to turn to see what it was she'd hit me with, to see if it was survivable. Can't not look. See how much of my brains were dangling off whatever she'd clouted me with. But it wasn't a gaffe or a meathook. It was only an aluminium table leg. The screw-in end of it was black with blood and hair. But that was kids' stuff. I'd come back from a ton and a half of four-wheel drive collapsing around my puny bones. I was more than this.
Her hands had been soft on me, pressing cool dressings into the freshly knitted creases of my injuries. Shushing. Soothing. A brand new mother.
She came for me again, and for a moment I thought she was going to try to hit me with the baby. She had it tight in her fist around the ankles and her balance suggested that was what she was going to do, but she seemed to think better of it and, instead, backhanded me across the temple with the table leg. It wasn't so hard this time, but she cut me and blood fell into my eyes, blinding me. I couldn't lash out because of the baby, so I held my arm across my chest as a barrier and kept myself between Ruth and Tamara. When she came again, I heard rather than saw her and was able to block the blow. I grabbed for the leg and got hold of it. We pushed and pulled each other across the room. I got my hand around the blanket on the bed and pulled it clear, sending boxes and trays clattering across the floor. I checked I hadn't hit Tamara with anything, and I was horrified and exhilarated to see her groping around in the water, her face millimetres away from it. She was alive. She was scooped clean like a child's ice cream bowl. She was going to drown.
Ruth caught me again in the chest, and I felt, I heard, the flesh tear like tissue paper. She drove under my arms, punching me in the stomach with the grisly end of the table leg. I felt something give in my back, felt the woeful separation of metal and bone and thought, this is it, this is me gone. And I must have fainted, but only for a second or two. The cold water revived me as I hit it. She was standing in front of me, blocking my view of my Tamara, her eyes blazing, her clothing hanging open on her flat, flat stomach, the baby jouncing in her bloody fist.
There was no rapist, I said. And now what? Bryning's Pit? The next level? Newborns, Ruth? Is that it?
Ruth said: You had to keep at it, you stupid bastard. You couldn't let things go. You're a wreck. And wrecks don't get fixed, Paul. Wrecks know their place. You stay quiet, you stay deep. You're a wreck. The pair of you.
I heard Tamara. I heard her, and Ruth did not. That voice was mine, and mine alone. I'd heard it whisper in sleep. I'd heard it sing for me, and call out as it was lifted and changed during her climax. I'd heard it through laughter and tears. Weak as it was, now, and as long as it had been since I heard her speak, I did hear her, through all the stormwater and the ragged breathing. And it was a beautiful voice. And she said: I am not fucking wreck.
I saw the victory go out of Ruth's eyes in a shot. Shock dragged her features south. I saw her try to step forward, but she began to to
pple and she was unable to do anything about it. Tamara was revealed as Ruth fell. She was holding up a scalpel. I scrabbled over to the baby and plucked it free of Ruth's hand as she struggled in the water beneath my boot. Her heels were grinning red where Tamara had slashed through the Achilles tendons. I clutched the child - a boy, my boy! - to my chest. The poor thing was freezing. I shushed him and kept him warm inside my coat, talked to him over the awful sound of choking and gurgling. I kept my boot down hard and long against the screaming of my muscles and the long, lazy spasms that rolled through Ruth. I talked to him for as long as it took for her to stop moving. Then I took the baby to his mother and held them both and, straight away, I felt the horses' hooves again - one strong and steady, the other fast and distant, catching up - and I understood and I loved them both beyond words, and I knew... I hoped, but no, I knew everything was going to be all right.
Chapter Nineteen
Wake Turbulence
I used to soar.
Much of my life was about charts and checks and mathematics and budgets. Fuel estimates. Weight distribution. Pre-calculated decision speeds. Sign this, sign that, duplicate, triplicate.
But nobody becomes a pilot for the paperwork.
Above it all was this gleeful, childish impulse. The playground game of spreading your arms and running so fast you could believe, almost, that the wind charging into you was going to lift you into the sky. Being a pilot was all I wanted. And then it was all I knew. And all I ever wanted to know. The thrill of the engines powering up as you squint down that runway. One hundred thousand thrust horsepower paid out beneath the fingertips.
All these cars and houses and factories, the so-called skyscrapers. The billions of people shuffling and scuffling around in the dirt and smoke and chemicals. Goodbye to that. I'd power up that bird, so ungainly and helpless on the tarmac, and drag it out of the arguments and ill will and those dangerous, blood-spattered roads, through acres of dark cloud, into a blue so fresh and free and clear you might reach out and snap some off, suck it like a mint.
Up here it is safe and bright and you can see for miles. You can see the softly rounded horizon of the Earth, and the darkening blue above, and you know that there exists no living being between you and the curve at the end of the universe.
I miss all that. I miss that everyday miracle of flight. But there are others...
I don't know how I did it, but somehow I got Tamara and the baby (we'll call him Andriy, after your father... our little man, our little warrior) out on to the cindered path. I covered them with my coat and hobbled down to the pub and battered the door until the landlord came to see what was wrong. I managed to tell him what and where and then I promptly fell unconscious.
I underwent an operation that night, as did my wife. She nearly didn't make it, they told me, but I shook my head at them. Nearly doesn't count. After what she had been through, an operation was but a minor obstacle for her to bat aside. Physically she is a good healer, Tamara. Good and fast. But I could tell that there was a place now, inside her mind, where I would never be allowed to go. I hope she stays away too.
I was told I was lucky I could still walk. The brace had split clear of my spine and a jagged edge was one centimetre from cutting my spinal cord. The harpoon wound was clean, but I'd lost a lot of blood.
I wasn't bothered. Physical pain was something I could cope with now. What mattered was lying in a ward nearby. The baby had suffered mild hypothermia but was making good progress despite being born... despite being taken a month earlier than planned. My life had been kickstarted again. I couldn't have been happier.
Keble came to visit me. He said he was spending more time with me than he was with his wife.
'I hope she's prettier than me,' I said.
'Oh yes,' he said, peering up at me from beneath the brim of his hat. 'But she doesn't stare at me with quite the same degree of naked sexual longing.'
He asked me how he was, but I could tell he was itching to be away. 'I just came to tell you...' he said, and then he faltered. Now he didn't meet my gaze. All of his little gimmicks and affectations had vanished. 'Amy killed herself yesterday.'
'She jumped?'
He nodded. 'The water tower.' Now he stood up. I saw him to the door. He apologised. 'I think I might leave this place,' he said. 'And policing. I've had a bellyfull. Things are getting... nastier. I don't know if I can hack it any more.' Then he said goodbye.
I saw him pause as he stepped away, peering along the street in both directions to see if he could spot who had left the letter outside the door. My name was not on the envelope. burn this, if you want was all it said on the outside. All lower case letters, unjoined, slanting left. You didn't need a graphologist to see the depression in those words. Keble gave me a look, as if he wanted to share with me what was on that paper, but then he left.
Amy had been in a rush. I imagined the page making a fluttering noise as she spread her arms and pushed off into the blue. For a brief second, she would have been flying. I knew that when they found her she would have been wearing a smile.
dear paul i cant do this i'm not going there with you if you want to go and check then thats your lookout honest i think youd have been better off just burning this note rather than opening it god knows why i wrote it in the fucking first place. so its up to you and if you think this is just me sending you on a wild chicken hunt then fair dos and i'm so sorry if thats how you feel. but anyway theres dead people on cold acre marsh. the sacrificial lambs. the poor babes. shallow graves most probably if you want to go prodding around. i've been distracted by the old bodies that fell at the battle of winter bay. i've been stupid. slow. i reckon these poor loves were buried under its disguise, to keep people like me off the scent maybe. i don't know. i might be wrong. i'm probably wrong about all of this and it doesnt matter any more. the bodies are there, or they are not there. whatever - i hope i've been of some help to you. i know you were to me. dont feel bad. dont feel as though you are to blame. i hope you find your woman. i hope you are happy. i hope you can live with your scars. i cant live with mine. i've tried. last night i had a wonderful dream paul. i dreamed i was made of light and i had no scars, no metal pins or braces. no clumsy limbs. no heartbeat to fret over in the middle of these insomnia nights. i was pure and weightless and innocent and fast. i could move, i mean really move. i was everywhere. i was brilliant. and it is in us all, paul, i think. don't you? we're all of us got this ancient carbon in us. old and unknowable and magic. billions of years old. we're all born of light. whos to say that when we die we dont become it again? be well. love, amy
We live in Scotland now. Oban. Land of my grandfather, on my mother's side. It's quiet. The air is clean. The people are good; friendly and open, without wanting to stick their noses in your business all the time. And it's miles and miles away from everything.
I help Tamara; she helps me. The fact that I can see her again, every day, is more of a salve to me than all the pills and creams and physiotherapy. Andriy is strong, and getting stronger by the day. We pay for some help, because neither of us can properly pick him up, even though we're both improving. I stare at Andriy for many, many hours at a time, when he is asleep, and I think about how I almost missed him, lost him - through one set of circumstances or another - and how I will never allow anything to come between us again. I love him. And I think of my childless self for the past forty years and I think, what a waste. This is what it's about. Children are what it is all about.
I've had children on my mind a lot since Southwick.
I read the newspapers in the little one-storey stone library in Albany Street. Tamara won't have them in the house. Sometimes I'll switch on News 24 when she's out in the garden with Andriy. Breaking news. We'll keep you up to date with events as they unfold. I began to hoard pages and pasted them into a scrapbook. Amy was right. The corpses are being dug up on a daily basis from Cold Acre Marsh, not three hundred metres from Bryning's Pit, like treats snatched from a bran tub. They all bear the sa
me injuries. Forensic evidence suggests that their hearts had been removed before they were burned. Many children gone over many years. Files on missing children were re-opened. Residents are being questioned. People are moving away from the area. Older graveyards are being dug up for clues. In one newspaper photograph I saw Jake being led away by police officers to a waiting car. He was wearing handcuffs. Police had seized many documents from the museum, and a harddrive belonging to his computer. There was talk of ancient curses. Of burned offerings. Of Jake's photograph collection.
I followed the story for weeks. I washed my hands often. Whenever I smelled burning I felt as if I might vomit. I thought of Ruth, despite what she had done. Ruth had always meant to be one of the 'lambs', but Charlie had smuggled her to safety. He believed her inability to carry a child to term was punishment for his actions. Ruth resented him for that. When Tamara confided to Ruth, it was a temptation too great to ignore. None of this would have happened if I had been approachable, if Tamara hadn't feared my reaction at being told I was to be a dad. Had Andriy been meant for Bryning's Pit? Or did Ruth want to keep him, raise him with me? Did he see my survival as some kind of sign? She probably thought it was poetry. Destiny. It was almost sad.
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