by Potter, John
Brian appeared, followed by the smell of gas. He leaned in to look at the image on the screen as Adam looked up at him. The smell of gas was stronger than it had been.
‘What’ve you done Brian?’
‘I haven’t done anything that wasn’t already set in motion. But we have about a minute before this whole place gets busy burning.’
The doorbell rang, the sound joining the cacophony of the ringing phone. They both looked to the living room and the beam of a torch shining through the window. It pulled away as a shadow tried to peer through the curtains.
Brian’s voice was now urgent. ‘You need to pack your stuff and we need to go.’ He released the catch on the patio and slid it open by an inch. Adam disconnected the old man’s drive and left it on the table, closing the lid of his laptop as he slid it into the bag.
‘Follow me out,’ Brian said. ‘Then run for the back fence, get over it and track back around to the car. I’ll be right behind you.’ Brian opened the door and Adam, without a thought, ran across the grass, ducking beneath an empty washing line he saw at the last second, high stepping through wet mud to a low mass of thick branches that backed on to the tall fence. He reached up and dropped the bag over and tried to get leverage. His foot found purchase as he heard a shout from the house that was not Brian and then footsteps right behind. Then Brian was beside him and over the fence. Another shout from behind but closer as Adam tried hoisting himself up, the beam of a torch jumping across the fence. He could hear laboured breathing getting closer, then a contained whump and shattering glass and a brief flare of orange that filled the night. Then he felt a hand on his jacket as Brian lifted and dragged him over and bundled him to the other side.
FORTY-SEVEN
Simon closed his eyes although it was dark already, the whiskey in his mouth a moment’s distraction from the conflict of his mind. The images of flesh flickered fast, the dark within slithering wetly, whispering its sweet nothings as it squeezed free the need that washed through his veins.
He was conflicted of course. Some part of him fought. A part that clung to what he used to be. It was a wistful fight though. A fight lost before it started, this need was too much of what he had become, this dark that writhed inside.
There was no great mystery to why. He could place a pin on the key markers of his life, the catalogue of decisions and bad choices made over time that had gradually shaped his mind and his need, the genesis for this journey a schism in a happy childhood. He had no complaints, not really. Parents have their own agendas, their own frailties to be kept hidden. They had paid their price.
He could not recall what she looked like any more. Not the finer detail. Just her short dark hair, her dark eyes that turned him marshmallow inside. Her smile, that turned him inside out. Even then she had possessed some grace, tempting him with her bare child limbs as she peered shyly around his bedroom door, wearing one of his T-shirts, too big for her and reaching down to her knees.
‘Can I come in?’ she would ask. He could still hear her voice.
‘Sure,’ he would say. She would glide around the periphery of his room, plucking at comics and examining the plastic figures adorning his shelves.
‘What does this one do?’
And he would tell her. ‘He has vision that is like the sun. He has to use glasses to stop from burning everyone.’
She would move around the room, eventually gravitating to him, dropping restlessly onto the foot of his bed and sitting cross-legged, pulling the shirt down over her knees with a self-conscious smile.
‘What do you want to do?’ she would say.
He would look down at the book or comic he was reading and close it. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘It is up to you.’ Her accent was almost too English to be English.
He knew her for just under two years from the first day she arrived to the day she had not been there anymore. So quiet at first, busily watching. There was something different about her. Skin that always looked like summer and eyes that stretched wider, seemed bigger. Those eyes had cost Jimmy Sanders his life, although nobody knew. She had been there only two weeks when she crashed through the door and disappeared upstairs. She had cried a lot, but not like that. Eventually his mother pulled the truth from her. Jimmy Sanders had spent every day at school from the first calling her a Chink.
Simon could not explain what he subsequently did, not then. Nothing had really mattered to him before, especially not girls. She had been explained away by his mother as the daughter of his father’s friend, over from Singapore. She would be staying for a while. After two weeks they had barely exchanged more than soft grins, but for some reason an attack on her seemed like an attack on him. An invasion of his world, an encroachment on something he was responsible for. It was an instinctive reaction. He knew now why that was. But not then. Everything is instinctive when you are twelve.
So he warned off Jimmy. Most kids paid attention when Simon gave warnings. But not Jimmy. He was untouchable with a supporting cast of the disaffected. He kept up his chants and took to pushing her around. One afternoon she came home with the buttons ripped from her shirt and that night Jimmy said goodbye to his friends, walking between pools of street light with smoke trailing behind.
Simon confronted Jimmy but he would not listen. Maybe he just saw Simon for the age he was and not for what he was physically. In Jimmy’s mind Simon’s twelve years were no match for fifteen. Physically there was no match. Jimmy was Simon’s first, silent and mouth gaping. His eyes wide with disbelieving horror right until they lost focus. The remains of Jimmy Sanders washed up on Hunstanton beach three years later. Very few missed him and nobody called her a Chink any more.
Nights in those days were about the music downstairs, the distant jukebox thump and the chime of slot machines, the endless voices merging to each other. Living above a pub was all Simon knew, these were the sounds of his every day. When sleep reached out for him it did so with gentle hands, but it was a foreign world to her.
The first time she appeared in his doorway, she was shivering and naked, although all he saw was an inquisitive face and an elbow, a fleeting glimpse of a shoulder and a bare hip. ‘Do you have a spare T-shirt?’ she asked.
‘Sure,’ he said, knowing full well she had some of her own. He stepped across and pulled one from his drawer and threw it to her. She scooped it up with a fleeting flash of flesh and disappeared. The next night she reappeared with the shirt hanging large over her slight frame. The three fish hovering just where he imagined her legs joined her body.
‘Can I come in?’ she asked. She always asked, each and every time.
That winter they played checkers and cards and read books to the accompanying groans of the radiator and the distant cacophony of the pub. Sometimes they would sit side by side on the bed watching TV or just looking out at the night sky. These were his favourite times. She would tell him about her world which seemed so alien to him and now so far away to her. A world of sun and warm rain that fell so hard it was like standing in a shower. And heat that she said was like a hundred hair dryers. Where all the people looked different, not like this new world where almost everyone was white and a few were blacker than the night. Her world, she said, was everything between.
Winter became spring and then a summer that stood out in his mind, especially for three weeks in which she said the daytime sun and the midday rain reminded her of home. He took to sitting on the bed in just his shorts, at first from the heat and then because she was fascinated by the stretch of muscle across his body. He liked that and the touch of her fingers as she traced the contours, although he had no clue why it should feel so good.
In those hottest weeks she did the same, wriggling out of the shirt and sitting there in just her knickers. Although he had not dared trace the shape of her body as they played cards and sat looking out of the window, every accidental touch of their legs and arms full of charge and unfathomable meaning.
Simon turned thirteen and she stayed t
welve, still flat and lean save for the emerging shape of hips and legs, despite it taking the rest of the summer for him to actually notice. And then one day she pulled free her top, despite the sun being a distant memory and the radiators groaning their discord. And the dots connected. Simon reached across and gently held her arm and pulled her towards him. She whispered, At last. And they wriggled down and held each other close, getting warm with hands on bare skin. A wealth and land unknown. Both feeling within that something else must happen but not knowing what.
They discovered what the following spring and she was gone before the summer was over, taken from him one morning amid a heavy air after they fell asleep with limbs entangled.
The irony, the irony pinched Simon inside. His kindred spirit, two beating parts of a whole. The irony, he drank to the irony. The daughter of his father’s friend! She was the dirty secret whisked away amid parental horror. Like they as children were the ones to feel guilty. What did his parents expect? Telling neither child the fragile secret lest it escape, for fear a family might be seen for what it was.
The genesis. He found her as soon as he could, when he was nineteen. His father begged and pleaded in his final moments, directing him to the sprawl of Malaysia’s gateway city. Simon found her there, possessed only of a woman’s charm and by a man and a child of her own. His life then shaped by choices and their consequences, a life of searching for a ghost as his needs evolved.
He submitted now to his need and drained the last of the glass, padding across the landing into the spare room. He checked the bed was neatly made and crease free, then to the bathroom. He double checked the window was secure, rinsed the glass and stepped out of his shorts and naked into the shower, his body pitted by shadow amid the weave of muscle, a body that drew endless female eyes but had never known the caress of a woman.
He washed and rinsed and towelled himself dry, pulling chinos over his nakedness, a clean T-shirt down over his wide shoulders, tight and white. He checked the bathroom window a final time then padded down the stairs, through the dining room and living room to the hallway, into the garage, the concrete cold under his bare feet, the need raging through his veins, the dark inside dancing the light fandango.
FORTY-EIGHT
A row of chimneys spewed smoke to a sky made pink by the glow of city lights beneath it, gradually growing in the horizon as they approached Cleethorpes. Adam pulled into a floodlit forecourt and refuelled while Brian hunted down a local streetmap. Then they both hunched over a small table eating sandwiches and drinking coffee, the map open between them. The address Simon Thompson had left in Peterborough was real. At least the road existed. Brian outlined his plan. He would check the house at the address while Adam searched the internet for everything he could about Simon Thompson.
Twenty minutes later they were driving towards a brightly lit pub jutting proud from the promenade. Two roads ran parallel, one rising high above the other, separated by a steep bank of grass that was home to seats, steps and a dormant crazy golf course.
Adam turned at a roundabout and descended to the lower road and the seafront, pulling into a vacant space. They both looked out at the dark void, the light picking out shallow valleys of wet sand, the distant waves crested white in the horizon. Adam wound his window down and was instantly assaulted by the buffeting air and ocean roar, the smell of the sea. He wound it back up again.
Brian buttoned his jacket. ‘This is as good a place as any. Sit tight and compile as much data as you can. Make sure you keep the doors locked and if anyone gives you reason, get out of here and call Boer. He’ll know what to do. Same goes if I’m not back in a couple of hours.’
He climbed out and Adam followed. Brian pulled open the boot and reached inside for his kit bag, producing a dark rubber torch that he slid between his belt and jeans. Then a pitted rounders bat that he pushed up his jacket sleeve. Adam watched, wide-eyed, but said nothing. Brian cast him a sideways glance. ‘I’m only going to look. This is just in case anybody looks back. Don’t worry about me.’
Adam was not worried, not for Brian. He watched him pull a small leather pouch from the bag, which was pushed into the chest pocket of his jacket. Then Brian winked, slapped him hard on the shoulder and jogged off along the promenade and up the grass rise. A small figure chased by his own shadow.
For a time Adam stood still, the buffeting breeze comforting, letting his thoughts run free. The horror of the last few hours was slowly giving way to a barely suppressed anticipation. Was this the place? He checked his expectation, trying not to hope yet that he might actually see Sarah again, that this might end with smiles.
He climbed back into the car and locked the doors. His face bathed in green light as his laptop booted. He waited for a connection to the internet but it failed. He tried moving the laptop around in the car, onto the passenger seat and dashboard, but still no signal. He looked out at the promenade and late night dog walkers struggling with flapping coats, realising there was probably little call for wireless internet in the North Sea. He deliberated while staring at the ocean, then set the laptop back on the passenger seat and reversed, starting back along the promenade.
FORTY-NINE
Simon dropped a mat onto the floor beneath the workbench and sat on it, his arms out behind for support and the soles of his feet against the wall, his legs bent. He braced himself and channelled his strength through his hips, pushing through his thighs. The door weighed 150 kilograms and sat on a metal plate and four rollers, set in two shallow gutters cut into the floor. It took over 200 kilograms of force to roll the door out and start it into the room. It was designed specifically so only he or machinery could open it. Only he, Hakan and the brothers even knew it was there.
His breath quickened and his face reddened as he pushed through his legs. The door shifted, then gradually rolled into the room. When there was a sufficient gap he pivoted around and braced his shoulder against the opening, extending his arm and jacking the concrete sideways. When it was fully open he shuffled back into the garage and squatted, regaining his breath while peering beneath the workbench into the dark of the room.
The moonlight from the garage window helped his eyes adjust, slowly defining the shapes inside. The woman was sitting on the floor, facing him with her back against the wall. On the mattress lay the sleeping girl, a small outlined shape, her hair splayed. Now he could make out the woman’s features, could see she was staring sentinel right back at him.
‘Go away,’ she said from the dark.
‘Turn the light on,’ he said.
‘I can’t,’ she replied. ‘You turned off the power, you know that.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
A brief pause. ‘Well it doesn’t work now.’
He deliberated and then backed out from under the bench, pulled closed the garage curtains and went back to the hall. He switched on the garage light and squatted down again. The small room was still shadowed by the bench, so he swung it around to one side. Now he could see.
The woman had moved, was now much nearer the opening with one knee on the floor. Like a sprinter waiting, her arms loose at her sides. The garage light cut a harsh contrast with the shadow across her body.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘You’re not taking her.’ Her voice was quiet and calm.
‘Who says I’m here for her?’
‘What else would you be here for? To apologise for the stale food, or that she even has to be here? “I’m sorry I kidnapped you but it’s all your daddy’s fault.” You’re sick.’
‘It’s true,’ he replied.
‘No it’s not, Simon. It’s bullshit.’
‘And you know this?’
‘I know enough of your sort. The lies you justify everything with, the consuming need.’
He shuffled closer.
‘Get away,’ she said. Her back arched as if under starter’s orders.
Intrigued, he moved again. ‘I don’t want to hurt you, Sarah. I will not hurt the girl
. I just need to talk to her. Don’t make me hurt you.’ His voice was edged with a genuine sadness that lost her, delaying her reaction for a fraction of a second. He was almost through the opening before she realised and launched herself forward, sweeping with her right hand towards his throat and stabbing at his ribs with the left.
The suddenness and the speed of her attack threw him, her lips drawn back from her teeth and a cold determination in her eyes. He did not see the glass in her hands until it passed through the shards of light. The glass bowl. He barely had time enough to reflex his left arm in defence, protecting his throat, the glass slicing a deep tear across his forearm, another sharp pain across his right side and again into his ribs as her momentum brought her crashing with a snarl into him.
He tried grabbing both her wrists as she repeatedly stabbed the glass at him, finally grasping them and pushing her hard back against the wall, dropping his shoulders to protect himself from the immediate jabs of her knees and feet as she screamed and fought. He squeezed her wrists until she dropped the jagged glass, now smeared with blood, both her palms supine, bloody and cut deeply. She seemed so fragile, so full of venom, shouting as she kicked and kneed him, her teeth biting into his shoulder as he moved in too close. She was no match for his strength but it was like wrestling three people at once. He filtered it, damped out the noise, the fury and the pin pricks of pain as he fought for control. Every ounce of her was invested in the fight and then he realised why.