The Race

by Nina Allan

  The room was stiflingly hot, even with the balcony doors open.

  “There’s some beer in the fridge,” Em said. “Are you hungry? We could have a bite to eat here at the flat, then go into town for dinner later on?”

  “That sounds great,” I said. “I’m starving.” I put down my rucksack and went to hug him. “It’s good to see you, Em, it really is.”

  We drank beer and ate saveloy sandwiches and we talked. It was almost a month since the Delawarr, more than six weeks since Lumey’s disappearance. I’d been in touch with Em by phone pretty much every day, though I’d seen nothing of Del or Claudia. Del did call once. He said that if anyone were to ask I was to say that Lumey was enjoying an extended holiday with her grandparents.

  “Which grandparents?” I asked him.

  “Who cares. It doesn’t matter. Honestly, Jen.” Our conversation was awkward, to put it mildly. The strain in Del’s voice was plain, though it was harder to tell if it arose out of grief or from the weight of the many promises made to Claudia. Promises to keep away from me, most likely.

  I didn’t enquire. We go back a long way, Del and I. Either we’ll patch things up eventually or we won’t. Even if we don’t, my brother knows I will always care for him and that’s all that matters.

  There had been no further news of Lumey. Little by little she was slipping away from us, the real child replaced by memories, the memories less and less grounded in reality as the days went by.

  “Claudia thinks Lumey can talk with the dogs,” I said to Em. “Without an implant, I mean. She thinks that’s why Lumey was taken.” I’d put off saying anything to him about my conversation with Claudia, not because I wanted to hide anything, quite the opposite. I wanted to see his face when I told him. That way I’d know what he really thought.

  Em was silent for a moment. I took another bite of my sandwich. Em had layered some kind of spicy chutney with the saveloy. It tasted delicious.

  “She’s probably right,” Em said finally. “I’ve heard of something like it before.” He took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth, then began telling me about a conversation he’d had with a work colleague a few months back. “We were talking about the war, and Thierry was arguing that most war crimes don’t arise out of hatred, they arise out of fear, which in many cases is just a more refined form of ignorance. It’s ignorance of an enemy’s true motivation that leads us to fear them. Thierry said that the any future wars would be won by the side that was most advanced in its development of empathic intelligence. He seemed to think that empathic intelligence was the future.”

  “You’re talking about mind reading?”

  “Not mind reading, exactly. I think true telepathy – the kind you see in films – is probably a myth. But something approaching it, definitely. A kind of empathic sixth sense. The work that’s been done with the smartdogs is just the start. All runners are natural empaths to an extent, we’ve known that for a long time. The implant is just a facilitator for their inborn talent. Children like Lumey though – children who don’t need an implant at all to communicate – they’re the next stage. A new race, almost. And yes, as Claudia said, that would make her very valuable indeed.” He paused. “What does Derrick think?”

  “He says he doesn’t need the cops, that he’ll find her himself. He says he won’t stop looking until he does.”

  “How is he, Jen?”

  “He’s all right. He’s taking care of Claudia.” I wiped my greasy fingers on a paper napkin. “I know he misses you.”

  “I miss him, too.” He took a sip of his beer. Em always drank his beer from a glass, a habit I found rather endearing. “I can’t help thinking that this has all been my fault, you know. That there was something I should have done, or done better.”

  “We all think that, Em, and we’re all wrong. If I said that to you, you’d tell me the same. Anyway,” I said. “Lumey’s still alive.” I told him about Claudia’s phone call from the mysterious woman and what she had said. “They have that, at least. Del thinks they’re lucky, luckier than some, at any rate. He said that to me himself.”

  “He’s a strange bastard.”

  “Don’t say bastard,” I said, and we both smiled, remembering how Em’s mother Margrit always used to tell Del off for his foul language. Margrit hated swearing. She loved Del though, she and Gra both, and he loved them back.

  ~*~

  We ate dinner just off Borough High Street, at a small Anatolian restaurant not far from the London Bridge tramway. Em had taken me on a tour of the city’s main sights – the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the London Eye – and afterwards we walked back across the bridge into Southwark, browsing the second hand bookstalls along the Embankment and the antiques market, where Em insisted on buying a gift for me, a glass-crystal pendant with an old-style London shilling embedded inside.

  “It means you’ll return,” he said. He hung the pendant around my neck. The river’s surface shimmered with coloured lights. At the restaurant we ate chargrilled lamb with couscous and talked about the old days. I told him about the time Del made Monica Dalby walk across the exposed floor joist on the fourth floor landing of Charlotte House.

  “What an arsehole,” Em said earnestly, and I laughed. “I found a twenty-shilling note up at Charlotte House once. Someone had rolled it up and pushed into a crack in the wall of one of the upstairs toilets. The toilet stank like a cesspit, but the note was brand new. I remember I spent it on back copies of Astronomer Royal.”

  We collapsed into giggles. Then we finished our wine and went back to Em’s place and fucked. Afterwards we lay side by side, close but not touching because of the heat. I felt sweat pooling and then drying in the hollow of my collar bone.

  “Would you come and live with me in London, Jen?” Em said to me at last. “If I found us somewhere bigger to live, I mean?”

  “I don’t know, Em,” I said. “I’d have to think about it.”

  I took his hand in mine and squeezed, and he squeezed back.

  ~*~

  For Adi Welitsch’s gloves I chose grey doeskin, with a pale pink lining. The pink silk – the colour of mallow – was watermarked all over with tiny roses.

  When she first saw the colour of the lining, Welitsch seemed a little unsure. Then she laughed her brisk, no-nonsense laugh and said okay.

  “I’d never have chosen that pink in a million years,” she said. “I’m amazed you thought of it.”

  “I know you’ll like it,” I said. “When the gloves are finished you’ll see what I mean.” I was still in awe of her, just a bit. When I asked her who recommended me she just smiled. Then she said she’d been noticing my work for some time and fancied treating herself, though I suspect it was Angela Kiwit who encouraged her to come and see me. The press like to play up the rivalry between Kiwit and Welitsch, but I’ve seen them in town together more than once, having coffee at Goldfrapps, on the Bulvard, or just walking their dogs along the front and shooting the breeze.

  Welitsch is half Hoolish, and proud of it.

  It’s August now and very hot, even at night. When I open the windows the sea breeze creeps in, bringing with it the reek of seaweed and the song of crickets. On summer evenings the crickets never stop shrieking. Some people say it gets on their nerves but I like it.

  For the backs of Welitsch’s gloves I’ve chosen a hornet motif – two life-sized hornets, one for each hand and embroidered in silk. The black silk is shiny as onyx, the yellow like fire. The colours sum up Welitsch perfectly, somehow. I haven’t told her about the hornets though – I want them to be a surprise.

  I draw the needle carefully through the leather, making sure not to snag it. The aim with this kind of embroidery is to create a smooth surface, and so the stitches must be very fine, one-twentieth of an inch at most. With stitching this intricate I work more by instinct than by sight.

  I like to listen to music as I work, and this evening I’m playing a CD by Paula Komedia, the same CD I first heard at Brit and Tash’s
place out on the marsh road. The long, meandering songs about the war, the tangled guitar riffs and driving rhythms she wrote to accompany the words of Valparaiso’s Patagonian Odyssey.

  Brit and Tash split up not long after the Delawarr. Del said they’d been having problems for some time.

  Argentina is two thousand miles away across the Atlantic. I have never been there and most likely never will. I have heard there are wild horses there, great cities on a grassy plain that have never been bombed. I close my eyes for a moment, trying to imagine them, the way you screw your eyes shut at the end of a dream.

  You’re trying to recapture its magic, but you never can.

  2: Christy

  Sapphire revealed itself to me only gradually, a town within a town, nestled in the shadows of my birthplace as the truth of a thing lies concealed within its outward appearance. You’ll imagine that I created Sapphire as an escape – from the ordinariness of my own life, from the difficulties I found in making friends, from the isolation I felt after our mother left. I’ve learned not to waste time denying this – some of it is probably true after all, at least partly – but my main reason for writing about Sapphire was because the place felt so real to me, and I wanted to imagine it in greater detail.

  Whenever I wrote about Sapphire, it was like being transported there. The best way of making magic happen is to describe it.

  I first began writing when I was still in my teens. I had no intention of showing my scribblings to anyone else. I wrote for myself, as a kind of journal, or like those letters you write to a lover after a break-up and never send. If it hadn’t been for my friend Robyn, things might have stayed that way. Robyn kept on at me to send one of what she called my stories to a magazine.

  “The way you write is special,” she said. “You have a unique voice.” That’s the way Robyn spoke – she had a gift for making even mundane things sound exciting and magnificent – and in the end I did as she suggested, more to shut her up than anything else. I never dreamed that anyone might actually want to publish something I’d written, but that’s what happened.

  “I told you,” Robyn crowed. She seemed to take it for granted that I would be successful, that people would want to enter the worlds I created. I did not share her confidence, but either way, it was out of my hands now. There was no going back.

  Writing stories felt necessary to me but it could also be frightening. There were times when I found myself afraid of what I might discover – about my brother Derek, about myself. But even the worst secrets cannot stay buried forever. I believe that secrets are alive, like worms in subsoil. When the weather is dry the worms dig deep in search of water. But when it rains you’ll find them burrowing to the surface.

  ~*~

  Our mother left for good when I was fifteen. The last words she spoke to me were to tell me to tidy the yard. There was nothing unusual in that. When Mum was upset or angry or just needed time to think she always got rid of me by telling me to clean something. I never minded. It was always better to be out of her way when she was feeling unhappy.

  Our backyard was often filthy, ankle deep in dead leaves and plastic carrier bags and other rubbish. It was my job to clear it up, to sweep everything together and stuff it inside the heavy green refuse sacks that Mum kept in the cupboard under the sink. My brother Derek called the yard Christy’s Domain. He rolled his eyes as he said this, leaning on the word ‘domain’ as if he meant to frighten me with it. He’d stolen the word off the cover of a James Herbert horror novel he’d pinched from a house clearance in Manor Road. The book lay around in his bedroom for ages, a scuffed paperback with a purplish-black jacket and a picture of a giant rat on the front. The story was meant to describe what might happen to London after a nuclear bomb strike, but mostly it was about people getting killed and eaten by mutant rats.

  The book frightened me, but it interested me, too. I remember a wet Sunday afternoon in November when I barricaded myself inside the one of our three sheds whose roof didn’t leak and pretended that nuclear war was going on outside. I didn’t need to imagine the rats, they were there already. I was always catching sight of them, especially last thing at night, dashing back to the place where they lived under the shed. They were normally sized though, which disappointed me, not much bigger than the school gerbil.

  Our house was on Laton Road, a large Victorian semi my father was able to buy cheap because of the state it was in. Dad did it up himself mainly, but there were some things that never got finished and so there was a makeshift feel to it, the sense that all his efforts might begin to unravel at any moment.

  The garden was enormous, a hundred feet long at least and half as wide. The end closest to the house was concreted over – that was the yard. The rest of the garden was grass and a few soggy rose bushes. At the far end was a single apple tree that sprouted dirty white blossom in spring but never produced a single apple as far as I know. There were three large sheds, two up near the house and another half way down towards the apple tree. The sheds had been there since forever and seemed permanently on the point of falling down. My father used them as storage space for the business. What didn’t fit into the sheds ended up under tarpaulins in the garden or in the yard.

  The neighbours were always complaining about the state of our garden, but that didn’t stop them using it as a dumping ground for their own rubbish. We had all kinds of things chucked over: broken bicycles and half-empty paint tins, dustbin bags full of soiled nappies. Once we even had an old mattress. I suppose the neighbours thought we had so much of our own rubbish that we wouldn’t notice theirs. Every fortnight or so my father would hire an open-bed truck, skim off the worst of the detritus and drive it to the municipal dump over near Bexhill. It cost quite a lot to dump stuff. You could dump ordinary household refuse for free, but the security guys there knew Dad was in house clearance, so he had to pay trade rate. It all added up.

  From October to late March the sheds sagged with mildew and trapped condensation. They became a refuge for thousands of woodlice, also leggy grey spiders that dashed towards you at a ragged canter the second you opened the door. In summer the sheds filled up with sunlight and the smell of creosote. There was another smell too, like dust mixed with grass clippings, that rose up from the boxes of old newspapers that were everywhere about the place, inside the house as well as in the sheds. Dad was always saving up newspaper to use as packing, so it tended to accumulate. If you dug to the bottom of some of the boxes you could often find papers dating back ten years or more.

  Those old newspapers fascinated me. The stories about out-of-date murders and people I’d never heard of who used to be prime minister gave me an odd feeling. I couldn’t stop thinking how weird it was that at the time the paper came out the stories I was reading now had still been happening. It was as if just by opening the paper I could travel back to that time, actually live in it for a moment. I especially loved the photographs, the grainy black-and-white images of people stepping into cars or on to jet planes, moments of passion or anger frozen forever.

  I spent a lot of time reading those papers, not knowing if the emotion I felt was excitement or sadness. I thought of the newspaper stories as history, like we learned at school only not as dead.

  On the night before my mother left it rained. The weather had been dry and hot for weeks, but that night it came down like a waterfall. I lay in bed, listening to the thunder rumbling in the hills around Battle, wondering if the summer was over and hoping it wasn’t. I could hear Mum’s voice in the next room, talking on the phone to one of her friends. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I could tell she was complaining about my dad by the way she spoke, her voice rising and falling in agitation, whining and sighing like the wind in the telegraph wires. The familiarity of that sound was almost comforting, seeming to suggest that nothing would change.

  Dad was downstairs, watching TV, the same as most nights. He seemed not to care what was showing, so long as it went on until late. By the time I fell asleep he stil
l hadn’t come up.

  When I went downstairs the next morning, Mum was already in the kitchen drinking coffee. She was still in her dressing gown, a red velour wraparound my father had bought her for Christmas the year before. Her hair was a mess, which was a bad sign. My mother’s hair seemed tied in to her moods the way dried seaweed is supposed to be tied in to the weather. When she was feeling okay about stuff it lay smooth and flat between her shoulder blades like polished brass. The morning she left it was sticking out from around her face in all directions, motionless and stiff as thorn twigs, bulked up about her shoulders like wads of foam packing.

  “Go and tidy the yard, Christy, would you?” she said. She glanced at me briefly with reddened eyes, then turned away and stared down deep inside her coffee cup. Something about her voice unnerved me. It was as if she was pretending to be angry just to keep me away from her.

  The radio was playing The Archers. I went outside. The rain had stopped just before it got light, but the sky was still overcast and there were puddles everywhere. The air felt damp and cold. I hugged myself and shivered as I realised I’d forgotten to put on my coat. I thought about going back inside to fetch it then decided against it.

  The yard was covered in leaves. I unlatched the door to the small shed, the one nearest the house. The smell inside had altered overnight, the warm reek of creosote replaced by the stench of musty newspapers and damp earth. I pulled the door to behind me and stood in the half dark, still shivering. Rain-coloured light trickled in between the boards, outlining the shape of the door in streaks of grey.

  I had the feeling that something bad was about to happen. I had these feelings sometimes, these hunches, and I knew that once they started it was hard to stop them. The yard broom stood in the corner of the shed. Its bristles jabbed upwards like torture spikes, like the hair of the Struwelpeter in the weird German cartoon that had so terrified me when I was six. I snatched at the broom, almost knocking it over, then took it outside and began to sweep the leaves into a pile. As well as sweeping the leaves I cleared the gutter run-offs and drain overflows, where more leaves and pieces of rubbish lay clumped together in sodden stinking masses.