All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye

by Christopher Brookmyre

  She had a look at herself in the sun-visor mirror. Blood still rimmed her nostrils and smeared her top lip. Her hands were sticky with it, her clothes dotted by it. She definitely, definitely wouldn’t be getting those trousers repaired.

  Yes. Best to remain hidden right enough.

  Some chamber in her mind echoed with a recall of the last time she looked in a mirror. Was it really that morning? It already felt like years ago, some memory of an earlier time in her life.

  Even in the insulated and suspension-cushioned capsule of the VW, she felt the train begin to decelerate, prompting another quickening of the pulse and tightness in the gut. She hoped to hell the website had been right about clearing all officialdom at the English end and simply driving clear at Calais.

  An announcement over the PA announced their imminent arrival and informed her that the local time was an hour ahead of GMT. She looked at the dashboard’s digital clock, which read 11:05: only eight hours since she’d been watching the weans play at Kaos Kottage in East Kilbride.

  The train stopped and only a few seconds later the huge side doors slid back, allowing cars to begin filing out. She started the engine and pulled away slowly. There were no booths, no officials, no customs checks: just an overhead sign reminding her to drive on the right, and, beyond it, open French road. She put her foot down and enjoyed a moment of blessed relief, which turned very soon into fatigue. With the pressure off – for the time being, at least – her aching body was able to get a word of protest heard above the rest of the voices clamouring in her head.

  She had already decided to drive all the way rather than flying to Nice. A look at the road atlas she’d bought at the supermarket told her she could probably manage it in about ten hours. A flight would be far quicker, but not if it turned out that the first one out of Charles De Gaulle wasn’t until three in the afternoon. Plus, she’d still need a car when she got there, and saw no point in taking on the risk of stealing another one.

  A neon sign in the middle distance advertised a roadside motel. It was a chain name, a modest, low-rise and low-frills kind of place, conveniently anonymous. She came off at the next exit and drove into the car park, where she spent a few minutes cleaning herself up, employing the practised-mother’s hanky-and-saliva method every daughter naively swears she’ll never use herself. She checked her reflection again. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but at least only for the usual reasons. It would do. She didn’t want to attract anyone’s interest or solicitations, and a lone female looking bashed-up would do precisely that. They’d think she must be on the run from someone scary and dangerous, but the truth was worse. She was on the run to someone scary and dangerous, and she couldn’t afford to have anyone prevent her from doing so.

  The room was clean and basic, though it did have a phone, which prompted a reminder that there were people back home who’d be very worried and not a little confused by now. She lifted the receiver, then placed it back down again without dialling any digits, before pulling the mobile phone from her jacket. No point in having the charge go on to her room bill; she’d let the mystery caller pay for it. In fact, she’d half a mind to dial her cousin Grace in New Zealand and leave it connected until the batteries ran out.

  Instead, she called Michelle, finding it engaged. She tried her mobile instead, but it was switched off, probably for recharging given the hour. Jane remembered hearing Donald chide Michelle over this unnecessary practice, but she had retorted with something about not actually wanting to be phoned at that time of night, especially as the chances were it would be a confused Junior House Officer who’d misread the rota and phoned the wrong pharmacist.

  Jane waited five minutes and tried again. Still engaged. Reluctantly, she dialled her own number. She’d hoped to have Michelle pass on the news to Tom, but she couldn’t wait all night. She’d just give him a few bullet points and get off before he could start the histrionics.

  That line was busy too. Reason told her they were most probably on the phone to each other. She could get through on Tom’s mobile, she knew, which was when she was forced to admit to herself that she really didn’t want to talk to him right then; only Michelle. She looked at the clock, calculating how much sleep she could hope to get before she’d need to be on the road again. It wasn’t a lot, and it was ticking away against the pulsating sound of engaged tones.

  Forget it, she thought. They’d be worried, sure, but she had to focus, prioritise. Their worries weren’t her biggest concern. Sleep was more important.

  She got undressed and climbed into bed. Twenty minutes later, she knew she had no chance of sleep without letting them know she was okay. That, whatever else she told herself, was immediate priority number one. She gave Michelle’s number one more try.

  ‘Mum! Where the hell are you? What’s happened?’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘The police have been round. They said you just disappeared. Dad’s up to high doh. Where are you calling from?’

  ‘Never mind about me. Is Rachel okay?’

  ‘Never mind? Rachel’s fine, but the rest of us are worried sick. Nobody could find you, and we didn’t know what to think, after what happened today, and then … it was on TV about two burned bodies being discovered out by Calder Glen, and we were terrified that …’

  ‘I’m sorry. I should have called sooner, but I never had the chance.’

  ‘Why? Where are you?’

  ‘I can’t say. Look, I can’t talk long. I just wanted you to know—’

  ‘You can’t talk … Mum, what’s happened? Oh God. Are you … Is someone else there? Are you under some kind of duress? Just say “I’m fine” if that’s the case.’

  ‘There’s no one else here, honey. Keep the heid. There’s just something I have to do.’

  ‘Like what? Why can’t you tell me? What’s going on?’

  ‘I have to go now, honey. I’ll be in touch. Call your dad for me, would you, please?’

  ‘Me? Why aren’t you calling him? What the hell do you want me to tell him?’

  ‘Tell him …’ Jane took a breath. ‘Not to wait up.’

  The sensation of coming around to the sound of the telephone’s automated alarm call was the only evidence Jane had of actually having been asleep. It seemed like she’d just lain there all night feeling sore and beat, her head whirring as it processed memory and prepared for what was to come. There was no moment of bleary disorientation, no waves of reality crashing in to wash away the merciful oblivion of her dream-state. The second she was conscious, at exactly five a.m., she knew exactly where she was and what she had to do. She got up, pulled her clothes back on and checked out, before grabbing breakfast from a vending machine in the lobby: a styrofoam cup of bad coffee and a cellophane-wrapped pain au chocolat. She placed the coffee in the Beetle’s cup holder and the pastry on the dashboard, beginning to consume both only once she was on the autoroute south.

  Dawn broke some time after six. A crisp blue sky was revealed above, spring sunshine lighting the fields and bringing up the temperature on her instrument panel. Jane had always wanted to drive through France, and had, in her fantasies, imagined a sunny day just like the one that was shaping up, but she wasn’t going to be stopping to take the air and see the sights. She just drove, eyes on the tarmac and the traffic, singularly and tirelessly mowing down the miles towards her destination, though it seldom left her thoughts that she had no idea what awaited her there.

  I don’t want money, Mrs Fleming. I want you.

  What on earth did she have that this person could possibly want?

  She tossed their brief conversation around and around in her head, trying to assess what could be inferred, what differences there might be between what he was saying and what she had interpreted him to mean.

  I’m not offering an exchange.

  She didn’t know who this man was or what he had to do with Ross. What she did know was that he had taken pictures of Ross’s ransacked apartment, and had been the one who broke it to her that her
son was missing.

  It hit her with a sudden chill that maybe she was in the process of delivering to this man the very thing that Ross didn’t want: a weapon to use against him. What if the guy wanted Ross to do something, give him something, tell him something, but he wouldn’t comply?

  Believe me, this is not about Rachel.

  How better to force his cooperation than to get hold of someone close to him? Rachel in the first instance, then, when that didn’t work out, get his dear old mother to hand herself over.

  But then she remembered: the phone had been secreted by that girl at the supermarket, before the attempt on Rachel. In any case, right then it didn’t matter what it might or might not be about, what she could interpret or deduce. All that mattered was the one thing she knew for certain: if he said the only way to help her son was to get to this address, then she was going, as he put it, to accede unquestioningly to his request.

  She made a couple of stops to fill up the tank and to stretch her legs, but she wasn’t feeling the long haul as too much of a strain. Jane had always enjoyed driving, especially long distance on open roads like this, or in the city at night when the streets were quiet, these being the times you could really buy into that romantic notion of the car being an instrument of freedom. It was a good deal harder to believe that the road could take you anywhere when you were stuck on the M8 at Shawhead, the traffic moving slow enough for you to read, ‘Wash me, please’ and ‘No hand signals – driver having a wank’ scrawled on the grimy rear of the artic in front. Having provided an on-call, zero-notice free taxi service for Ross and Michelle for the best part of two decades, it was perhaps inevitable that it would occur to her to give it a go for real, especially when the alternative of an evening was sharing the living room with Vegetable Man and Henrik Larsson. That was arguably the greatest factor in her decision to start private-hire driving: avoiding the tandem isolation of two people who lived alongside each other rather than together; driving around in the darkness because it was too late to truly run away.

  They weren’t meant to be joined at the hip, and they weren’t meant to share all of each other’s enthusiasms, but at the very least they were meant to be pals, weren’t they? She and Tom weren’t pals. They were like workmates with nothing else in common but this shared occupation, speaking without saying anything other than the necessary technical discussion that the job in hand entailed. Right now, the job was living together and sometimes being grandparents. In the past, as mum and dad to two kids, there had been more to it, and for that it had been easier to ignore what was missing.

  Of course, there was a lot more to being a taxi driver than having a set of wheels at her disposal or merely a passable knowledge of Lanarkshire geography. For example, you didn’t just need to know how to get somewhere, you had to know how long it would take in the prevailing traffic conditions, so that you and the dispatcher could think two or sometimes three jobs ahead. It required an ability to read customers and situations, to anticipate the obstacles and delays and to understand the crucial differences between what the fare told you and what he or she actually meant. Most of this she learned the hard way, such as how a call-out to a pub at eleven o’clock didn’t mean the fare had any firm intention of leaving the establishment at least until he’d finished the round he’d got in at last orders. Some of the drivers seemed to have a sixth sense, always managing to be in the right area as a fare came up, thus avoiding idling or long, passenger-free jaunts between pick-ups, but really this was all down to experience.

  Her first fare was the most nerve-racking, even though it was just picking up some old wifey outside Safeway and taking her home with a boot full of messages. All the way there, she’d felt disproportionately apprehensive and could feel her cheeks redden in anticipation of being somehow found out. Tom’s encouraging words – ‘You’re kidding yourself on and you’ll be back here in an hour’ – rang in her ears, in the end providing ample motivation through spite. It also reminded her that while she might be kidding herself on, the fares wouldn’t know that she hadn’t been doing this for ten years. In the case of her debut, the old wifey gave no indication of suspecting she was in less than experienced hands, though the fact that she proffered a fiver unprompted once Jane had dumped the last of her bags on her doorstep did save Jane from walking away without remembering to ask for payment. After that, she just relaxed and got on with it.

  She went out four or five evenings a week, sometimes more. At first she’d start after dinner, just as Tom was reattaching the armchair’s umbilicus, but in time she progressed to eating earlier on her own and leaving a portion for him to microwave. She enjoyed it, on the whole. There were times when it was boring, but never as boring as being stuck in that living room, and even on the quietest nights, she still got more conversation than she would had she stayed home.

  Some talked from the minute they climbed into the car, others said no more than their destination. She could usually tell what she was in for from the off. If they sat up front, they wanted company, and you were in with a better shout of a tip too, as they weren’t going to treat you like you worked below stairs. There was no code of client confidentiality as guarded the consulting room, the couch or the confessional, but there still seemed an assumption that what was said in the car was sacrosanct, as she’d been party to the most unguarded and indiscreet personal revelations from people who’d only met her less than ten minutes back.

  The fares didn’t actually need to speak to grant her glimpses into their lives, and often they were lives you wouldn’t want any more than a glimpse into. Poverty, squalor, desperation and so much loneliness. Destination Hairmyres or Wishaw General, ferrying worried and sometimes bereaved relatives to and from their last hours with loved ones. Angry wee men, seething all the way home from the pub, no amount of drink enough to anaesthetise their grudge against the world at large, turning Jane’s thoughts to the poor dear who would be opening the door to that in a few minutes. Young women, out of their faces despite the bumps swelling their waistbands. A moonlight flit while an abusive partner is out of the house, Jane being treated with a reverent gratitude like she was one of the emergency services, and pleaded with not to disclose her destination to anyone.

  It certainly afforded her a sharp perspective upon where her own complaints ranked in the grand scheme, though humility and consolation were not the same thing. In her grandmother’s words, ‘There’s always somebody worse aff than yoursel”, and there was a difference between being grateful for what you had (or hadn’t) and settling for it. Jane had a comfortable home and an honest, dutiful husband, even if she didn’t want to be there spending time with him. She wasn’t abused, she wasn’t bereaved and she wasn’t dying a slow, painful death.

  Just a slow, numb one.

  She got glimpses into better lives, too. Having brought up Ross and Michelle, she’d long ago made her peace with the younger generation being the ones who had all the fun, but it wasn’t them she was jealous of. She drove people who were her age or older to restaurants, bars, hotels, theatres, the airport, and it wasn’t the good times they were in for that made her envious; at least, not entirely. It was the good times they were having before they stepped into her car, before they dialled the cab firm’s number, before they booked the table or the tickets.

  And then there had been that one, most haunting night that had stayed with her such a long time after, like a secret stolen treasure, and yet one that ached to recall. The fare was a guy in his mid-forties, going to King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in town. She didn’t get much of a look at him in the few seconds the inside light came on before he closed the door and extinguished it. He had a full head of flecked salt-and-pepper hair, she saw that much, and was wearing jeans and a leather overcoat.

  As predicated by his choice of seat, they talked, or rather, mostly he talked. He was off out to see some band Jane had never heard of, though it was twenty years since that distinction would have put the said performers into any exclusive percentile of obscu
rity.

  ‘Me and the missus don’t go oot much any mair, just the odd restaurant a couple of times a month,’ he said. ‘But I’ll be staunin’in these places wi’ a Zimmer, because it makes me feel the same as it did when I was my weans’ age, you know? The atmosphere, the smell of drink and smoke, the posters on the walls, folk gettin’ aff wi’ each other in the corners. That rush when the lights go doon. Pure magic. It never changes.’

  Clearly, he didn’t ken the score.

  He was still blethering away enthusiastically as they reached his destination. When Jane put the overhead light on to take the fare, she finally got a good look at his face and confirmed her growing suspicion that she knew him. Ferguson, had been the job name. Iain Ferguson. Ferret. That’s how he’d been known, though only as a convenient corruption of his surname and no reflection upon his physical appearance or libidinous conduct. This was worth stressing given that Jane remembered having sex with him, in a drunken and barely competent, but nonetheless enjoyable, one-night stand.

  He paid the fare, giving her a twenty-pound note to cover a seventeen-pound ride. She thanked him and told him she hoped he enjoyed the show. He hadn’t recognised her and she chose not to jog his memory.

  She was idling in town when the call came for the return trip. It was often worth hanging around in the city centre at that time of a Saturday night if a fare had taken you in there already, but she knew not to be kidding herself. She had waited because she wanted the job.

  She walked down the basement steps and into the bar, which was deserted but for a couple of staff and a girl in goth garb placing club flyers on to the empty tables. She could hear the thrum of the music from the venue proper upstairs, could feel the bass vibrate around the building.

  ‘Taxi,’ she explained as a barman approached, ready to take an order. ‘It’s for—’

  ‘On you go up,’ he said, nodding to the door that led to the stairs. ‘Band’s no’ finished. Or you can stay here if you prefer. You want a drink?’