The Race

by Nina Allan

  Em answered on the second ring.

  “Jen,” he said. I could tell from the tone of his voice that he already knew – most likely he’d seen the whole thing on TV.

  “Hi, Em,” I said, just that, and then I started to cry, in great gutsy sobs too, like my heart was breaking. I hadn’t cried like that since Ali Kuzman told me it was over between us. All I can remember thinking was that I hoped my tears wouldn’t leak into the phone and fuck with the workings. It’s funny, the things that come into your head at a time like that. Em didn’t say a word – just let me cry until I was out of tears. We were able to talk after that. I was feeling a lot better, the way you always do after a good howling fit. I started telling Em he would need to get the money to Del the moment he could because the people who were holding Lumey would more than likely insist on being paid in cash. Del would have to draw it out of the bank in several chunks or it would look suspicious.

  Em brought me up short.

  “Everything’s in hand, Jen,” he said. “The money, I mean. Can you get Del to call me?”

  “He’ll call you,” I said. I promised I’d ring him back later. I ended the call and went back into the cafe. Del was on the phone. As I approached the table he flung down his handset. It collided with his coffee cup with a dense little thud. A dark dribble of coffee began to trickle down from the rim towards the surface of the table.

  “Who was that?” I said.

  Del glared at me as if I’d said something obscene.

  “Crace,” he said.

  “Who’s Crace?”

  “He’s the guy who’s arranging the handover, who do you think?”

  “Did you tell him we’ve got the money?”

  “Yes, Jen, I told him we’ve got the money. But it’s no fucking good.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “What I mean is they’ve reneged on the deal. Lumey’s gone.”

  He stood up from the table, shoving it forward and scraping his chair loudly against the tiles. The coffee cup tipped over. Brown liquid coursed across the Formica and cascaded on to the floor in a frothy stream. Del looked at me as if I were vermin then pushed past me and headed for the door. The coffee cup rolled in a slow arc then fell off the table and smashed. I stood still where I was, only dimly aware that people were staring at me. I saw Del walk past along the pavement outside and then out of sight.

  As I turned to go after him I noticed he’d left his mobile behind on the table. I picked it up, and after a moment’s consideration I pressed the redial key. There was the familiar hum and click as it tried to connect, then an automated voice told me that the number I was calling was no longer available.

  ~*~

  It was difficult to know what to do. I stood outside on the street, trying to make sense of what had happened. People swept by in their dozens, finally leaving the area of the race ground in search of food, or friends, or the quickest way home. Del’s words rang in my head, that Lumey was gone. I still didn’t understand what he meant, and now he was gone, too. In the end I did the only thing I could think of, and rang Em again. He picked up at once. It was almost as if he’d been waiting for my call.

  I told him what I knew, which wasn’t much.

  “Go home, Jen,” he said, when I’d finished. “Leave Del to me. I’ll call him right now.”

  I suddenly felt as if I might start crying again. “But I can’t just leave him,” I said. “I should do something.”

  “We can’t do anything until we know what’s going on. I’ll call him and try to find out. I’ll ring you back as soon as I know what the situation is.”

  “You can’t call him, though. He left his phone behind. I’ve got it here.”

  “Then I’ll try his work mobile, or the house number. I’ll find him, Jen, don’t worry.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “Yes, I promise. Please go home. I’ll feel easier in my mind if I know where you are.”

  In the end I agreed, not because I thought it was the right thing to do necessarily, but because I was exhausted and upset and at the end of my rope. I kept going over everything in my mind, wondering how many other details Del had neglected to tell me, how much of his original story had even been true. Nothing felt real any more. All I knew was that I’d been a fool to go along with my crazy brother’s so-called plan.

  If I’d said no at the start, perhaps we wouldn’t be in this mess now. I couldn’t help thinking that it – whatever it was – was somehow my fault.

  Finally I was home. I made myself some supper and slumped in front of the television, watching an idiotic sitcom and waiting for something to happen. I was pleased to be inside my own apartment, relieved and comforted by the sight of familiar objects, the smell of food, the locked front door. My relief made me feel guilty but I could not let go of it.

  Del’s mobile wouldn’t stop ringing. Each time it went off I jumped, thinking it might be a call from the mysterious Crace, but the display screen told me the various callers were all people I knew. Gra Rayner must have phoned a dozen times at least. There were also calls from Del’s deputy Lars Andersen, Lars’s wife Leah, Hellin Tresow. I didn’t pick up. It was Del’s job to talk to them, not mine. What was I supposed to tell them, anyway? I had no idea.

  At around eleven o’clock Em called me on the landline. He told me he’d been trying to get hold of Del all evening but with no success.

  ~*~

  I went to bed soon after that. I stayed fully clothed, partly because I couldn’t be bothered to undress but also because I kept expecting Del to turn up, or the police, and I didn’t want to be caught half naked when they did. Nobody came, though. I dozed on and off for a couple of hours then showered and changed. It was beginning to get light again. I thought of calling Em, but I didn’t want to wake him, and the idea of ringing Del made me feel afraid. It sounds stupid now I know, but I kept having this terrible fear that they were both dead, Del and Claudia I mean, that Del had murdered Claudia and then killed himself.

  In the end the only choice left to me was to get myself over to Del’s place and find out. I was in a right state by then, and I reckoned that whatever I found when I got there, nothing could be as bad as the things I was imagining.

  ~*~

  Claudia answered the bell.

  “Jennafer,” she said. “Derrick’s not here.” She peered out at me through the gap, warily, as if she couldn’t quite believe it was really me standing there. She was wearing a light blue smock dress, freshly ironed, and blue rattan sandals. There was a large, fresh bruise on one cheek. I knew immediately that she was different, that she’d changed somehow. She’d never called me Jennafer before in her life.

  “You’d better come in, I suppose,” she said eventually. She stepped away from the door and I went inside. I went to hug her and then drew back. She didn’t want me near her, I could tell. It was weird. It was like she’d become someone else, someone who didn’t like me all that much.

  “Derrick’s out looking for Lumey,” she said. “That’s what he says, anyway.” We were in the kitchen by then. I glanced about me, searching I suppose for signs of disorder in the house and not finding any. Claudia paced brusquely back and forth, fixing coffee. Every now and then she raised a hand to touch the bruise on her cheek. She didn’t look at me once the entire time.

  “Has there been any news yet?” I asked. “Do you know where she is?”

  My questions sounded stupid and tactless, even to me. Claudia appeared to ignore them and I didn’t blame her.

  “I had a phone call last night,” she said eventually. She handed me a mug of coffee. “It was a woman. She advised me not to try looking for my daughter, because she was already far away and I would never find her. She said she was being well looked after and wouldn’t be harmed. As a mother herself, she thought I at least had the right to know that my child was alive and would remain alive. She said she was sorry for what I was going through, but it couldn’t be helped. Then she put the phone down. I keep
hoping she’ll call back, but I know she won’t.”

  She looked at me then, bang in the eye. I stared down at the floor.

  “Derrick tried to snatch the phone off me,” Claudia said. “That’s how I got this.” She fingered her bruised cheek again. “I told him to go fuck himself. I know you’ll find that hard to believe – your brother’s mousy little wife using the ‘f’ word on him, but it’s true. I told him he could go fuck himself. The phone didn’t matter by then, anyway. The line was dead.”

  “Claudia, I am so sorry.” It was all I could think of to say and once again she ignored me.

  “I’m not going to ask you any questions, because I know you don’t know anything other than what your brother told you in the first place, and a fat lot of good that’s turned out to be. Neither of you even know why Lumey was taken.”

  “It was the glass suppliers,” I said. “They were keeping her until Del paid them.”

  “The glass bust was a put up job,” Claudia said. “Derrick found that out a week ago. The criminals who sold him the drug bribed the police to bust him because it gave them a perfect cover. They knew he’d never dare get the police involved when Lumey was taken – he was in too deep with the glass people. They also knew it would take time to raise the ransom money. All the time they needed to get Lumey away.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. I felt stunned. Not just by what she was telling me but that she knew – that she knew, in fact, a hell of a lot more than I did. I realised that my hands were shaking.

  “Lumey can communicate with the dogs without an implant,” Claudia said. “Something like that, anyway. I’ve seen her doing it. I’m assuming that makes her valuable and that’s why she was stolen.”

  I gaped at her.

  “You think I’m so stupid,” she said. “You and Derrick, so busy trying to nursemaid me you didn’t even see what was under your noses. I’ve known for a long time, what Lumey can do. You only have to watch her for five minutes. I know it’s real. I think that’s why it took her so long to start speaking normally. She thinks the way she speaks with the dogs is normal, that it’s us who can’t talk. You and Del were so wrapped up in your own lives you never noticed. Someone else did, though. Too bad. Still, at least they did me the courtesy of letting me know my daughter hasn’t been raped and murdered.”

  “Scallion.” The word burst from me, like a curse.

  “What?”

  “Scallion – Carson Stringer’s dog. Lumey said her first ever word to Scallion. I know because I was there.” It seemed important, somehow, to stress that. It was all coming back to me, that day at the yard, Lumey lifting up her arms to that massive red dog and saying ‘run’. Something had passed between them, something extraordinary – I felt it happen, but I chose to ignore it. Most likely Del had felt it too, and done the same. Only Claudia had come anywhere close to guessing the truth.

  I was beginning to see myself as she must see me – the person who had pretended to be her friend but who instead had patronized and betrayed her.

  She was right – I had thought she was stupid, or if not stupid then weak. I had misjudged her, because she was different from me, mainly – because she had a gentler and more accepting way of being.

  I longed to apologise, to say sorry, but I had the feeling it was already too late. Claudia had closed her mind to me forever.

  “I want you to go now, Jenna,” she was saying. “I don’t mean forever, and I’m not blaming you for what’s happened, not really. I know you only did what you thought was right. Just leave us alone for a bit, okay? I’m sick of being lied to.”

  I nodded and put down my cup. “What are you going to do?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Right now I can’t even think without it hurting.” She paused. “You and Del, you’re bad for each other. I know it was tough on you growing up, with your mum leaving and everything, but that’s all in the past now. You should let it go.”

  Just for a moment I felt the purest, brightest anger flare up inside me. What could she know of the two of us, how dare she presume? Then I did what she said and let it go.

  “You’re probably right,” I said. I went soon after that. I walked away up the drive then took the tramway down to the Bulvard and had breakfast in one of the cafes there. It was Sunday, and hot. The entire place seemed to be swarming with out-of-towners.

  ~*~

  The Romney Marshes are not all the same. To the north of Sapphire they’re pretty much what you might expect – stony scrublands now rather than actual marshes, bleak, grey wastelands punctuated by the rusting, pylon-like structures that are all that remain of the shale gas industry. Once you get as far as Tonbridge it’s not so bad. The land is less polluted, and when you travel through on the tramway you see things – stone-built cottages and cart tracks, a bicycle leaning against a gate, a tiny granite church with a square tower – that make you realise there really are still people living out there, still living their lives as normal, in spite of what the newspapers try to tell you.

  Still, I wasn’t used to seeing empty space in such large quantities.

  Tonbridge itself is a dump, a quarry town with only one main shopping street and made up mostly of those gigantic ten-storey apartment blocks that were built to house the gas workers – gas workers who, in the case of Tonbridge, never materialised. The quarry workers live in them now. The quarry pays well – which is why a large number of Sapphire’s illegal immigrants migrate to Tonbridge. That’s where most of the passengers left the tramway.

  After Tonbridge the landscape changed again. As we drew closer to London, the wide, wild expanse of open marsh began to give way once more to stony scrub and then to a semi-industrial wasteland of derelict office blocks and overgrown factory yards that appeared similar to the polluted barrens that formed the immediate hinterland of Sapphire. I was shocked to see that the southern outskirts of the city still showed signs of bomb damage – vast craters full of oil-scummed water, acres of burned-out warehouses. Off to one side I spotted one of the old furnace chimneys. It stood alone amidst the ruins of several others, their broken uprights jutting out between the rusting girders and twisted stanchions like pointing fingers.

  Look what you did, they seemed to say. This is your fault.

  An old tramway carriage, ripped almost in half, lay on its back in a field of nettles. It looked about as insubstantial as a cardboard food carton, torn open by monster hands and then rudely discarded.

  This made the war seem horribly close still. The things that happened then, the stuff you read about in books and see in films, seem so awful you can hardly believe any of it was ever real. The broken tramway carriage and the burned-out factories forced me to accept that these events happened, that people had died.

  Over a million of them, that’s what Del said. It made me feel sick.

  At Croydon the edgelands started to be replaced by the suburbs proper. Large tenement houses stood to either side of the tramway tracks, their rear verandas flapping with drying laundry, their overgrown back gardens choked with weeds and broken refrigerators and breeze block barbecues. Here and there on patches of waste ground I spotted shack-like, temporary dwellings constructed from plasterboard and corrugated iron, the kind of miniature shanty towns that spring up one week and are torn down the next. It was only then that I began to see how vast London was, and how chaotic. A great whale of a city that could gulp you down without noticing and swallow you whole. I felt lost inside it already. I hoped that Em would be there to meet me at the station, as he had promised.

  Em lives to the north of Croydon, in Gypsy Hill. The name sounded serene and romantic, but as a concrete physical place I could barely imagine it. The Gypsy Hill tramway station turned out to be a smooth, box-like structure made of glass and granite, straddling the tracks like a giant aquarium. As the train came to a standstill I caught sight of Em, standing waiting for me on the platform just beneath the exit sign. As we hugged each other in greeting I felt my nervousness about being there slip its
hooks out from under my ribs and sneak away. I pressed my face against Em’s shoulder, smelled his smell – Daz washing powder mixed with the summer-ripe, slightly musky odour of his underarm sweat. He’d lost some weight, and had a new pair of glasses.

  I knew the moment I saw him that we would fuck. Knowing that made me want him all the more.

  “You didn’t bring much,” Em said. I had my old canvas rucksack, the same one I used during my final year of school and that I still carry everywhere. It contained my wash bag and two changes of underwear, a clean T-shirt. That was all.

  “Why?” I said. “Should I have?”

  I linked my arm through his as we left the station. We were okay, always would be okay most likely, but we had stuff to talk about.

  Em lived in Cadence Road, a long, scruffy cul-de-sac not far from the station, lined with dusty plane trees and multiple fast food outlets. Em’s flat turned out to be in one of the tenement buildings I’d glimpsed from the tramway, a five-storey mansion block with flaking pinkish-grey render and wide steps leading up to the entrance. It looked old, pre-war most likely. The front door opened on to a large square hallway with scuffed woodblock flooring and a carved black umbrella stand. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting – the shiny, chrome-and-glass land of rich bankers and corrupt gas officials Del was always on about I suppose – but this wasn’t it.

  “It’s not very grand, I’m afraid,” Em said. “I like it here, though. And it’s useful being close to the station.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s nice.” The building seemed even bigger from the inside, vast, in fact. Each landing had several apartments leading off it. I heard snatches of music coming from behind the closed doors, people talking, once even laughter. Our footsteps clattered noisily on the uncarpeted stairs.

  Em’s apartment was on the fourth floor. The rooms of the flat were not large – a compact sitting room with a kitchen alcove, plus a bedroom with a tiny bathroom leading off it – but everything was clean and neat, and there was even a small balcony. From the balcony you could look out over the rooftops towards the avenues and grand houses of Blackheath and Greenwich. A silvery flash at the horizon was the river Thames.