“I see what you mean.”
“It’s more like”—he shuffled closer—“the universe saying, Hang on a minute. Yeah? Pay attention a sec.” He leaned right forward and opened his eyes dramatically. “ ‘Wake up, people!’ Yeah?”
“Yes,” she agreed, but she was thinking of a quiet voice, remote, frightened: Lizzie?
“I mean, the weather. The flippin’ weather. How else would you get British people to sit up and take some notice, eh?” He chuckled to himself. “You know they can’t explain it.”
“The snow?”
“They’ve got billions of computers and radar and all sorts to do the forecasts. It’s multimillion-pound, innit? Farmers, shipping, whatever, everyone’s got to know the weather. But all that snow, right, it’s not coming from anywhere. I mean, hello? Hello? Anyone think maybe that’s a bit important, maybe? Like maybe we should turn off the computers for a bit? Sorry, madam, don’t mean to shout at you. I should let you talk to your hubby.”
“It’s all right. I’m trying to avoid him, actually.”
“Oh. Sorry. Like that, is it?”
“Very much so.”
The hands went back to their retreat in the frayed pockets of his coat. “Not my place to say, but isn’t that what we’re talking about? Sorry for poking my nose in, but you find out what’s important. Don’t you? You chuck away all the nonsense and you decide what’s really important in life.”
“What do you think’s really important in life, then?”
“Haven’t decided.”
“Very good.”
“Yeah. Crack myself up, I do. Where are you off to, then?”
“Oh. Just . . . going for a ride.”
“Good for you. See, don’t take the phone. What’s it for? There’s trees, there’s wildlife, there’s . . . ducks, that’s why you get on your bike, innit? Not to get messages from the boss and the hubby and the kids’ school. It’s bollocks. Chuck it.” The kids’ school. She was already standing up and reaching for the bike, her hands shaking and her face hot. “Go on, I dare you. You’ll thank me for it.” She felt tears coming. She bowed her head, mounting quickly. “All right. Off you go.” The phone was still in one hand; the handlebars wobbled crazily as she pushed away. “Blimey. Sorry I spoke, eh?” She couldn’t hear him. An acid flood of memory had unstoppered itself. She was hearing the school secretary’s painfully professional voice. We think it would be wise for him to have some time off. A few of the teachers have expressed concerns. Has anyone ever suggested this kind of evaluation before? She pedaled furiously to escape the rush, ignoring the last shout from behind: “Any chance of a shag?”
• • •
London’s gravitational pull weakened as she pushed on west. Beyond the extended suburbs disguised as Berkshire county towns, padded out with halfhearted green interruptions on which no one had yet built rustically named roundabouts and three-bed semis, the last traces of the city faded from the landscape. Her route turned disobliging. It forgot about looking for parks and cycle lanes and well-marked flat backstreets. It became an afterthought, a few signs scattered over tangles of country lanes that had never been meant to carry people farther than from farm to field. Chalk hills rose around her, funneling the wind. It was much harder going.
Her wad of cash thinned quickly. She didn’t want to use plastic in case it gave away where she was, but when she became desperate and tried anyway, it turned out the card machines in the supermarket weren’t working. Asda’s got the Plague, someone yelled gleefully from the back of the queue. The next night she experimented with curling herself into a dry and sheltered corner around the back of a quiet petrol station, and was amazed to discover how cold the night was, and how full of imaginary threats. She lasted less than three hours before cycling toward the nearest glow on the horizon and paying far more than she wanted to for a room above a pub. The next day she risked using a cash machine, thinking she was far enough out in the country by now that Nigel wouldn’t be able to track her even if he saw the transaction online and came straight here. The machine ate her card.
By elusive degrees the towns grew stranger. It was nothing she could pin down. She saw what she expected to see, pasty young mothers, men in work clothes looking at machinery, dog walkers, pensioners, drab corner shops, and low-rise schools, but something had changed, or was about to change. The patterns were out of kilter. The mothers weren’t around the schools at the right times, or the men around the pubs, or the pensioners around the post offices. Everyone seemed wary of everyone else. And there were fewer of them, she was sure of it. She thought at first it was just an effect of the hours she spent alone in her strange bubble of sweat and weariness and the buzz of the chain and the hiss of tires on the road, but the emptiness wasn’t only in her. The winter skies swathed the villages in it, the wind blew it down every dead-end lane and across every unmowed playground. The world had had the stuffing pulled out of it. Its shape and its fullness were going. It felt limp. Almost ready for the tip, she thought; almost ready to be thrown out.
The weather turned against her as well. She rode west and a cold rain blew east, slowing her down, soaking through her gloves and down the neck of her top. Her clothes stank, her hands blistered, the withered muscles in her bad leg winced with every crank of the pedals. She’d thought that nothing as trivial as bodily pain would matter to her anymore, but she had to stop more and more often, and when she stopped she thought more and more intently about what it would be like to be dry, to be clean, to put her feet up, to have food waiting for her, to turn round and put the relentless wind at her back. Then she would remember all the things she’d done to earn her punishment.
—Good night, Mum.
—Night night.
—Mum?
—What?
—Can you stay a bit longer?
—No. Night night. Go to sleep.
—Please?
—No. I can’t. I’ve got a lot to do.
—Just five minutes.
—For God’s sake, Gav. You’re too old for this.
—I’m really scared.
—Scared of what? It’s bedtime. There’s nothing to be scared of.
—Just a couple of minutes. Then I promise I’ll go to sleep.
—No. No, Gavin, I can’t stay with you every night for just a couple of minutes. You’ve got to get over this. You frighten yourself silly with these stories you tell yourself. You’ve just got to stop it.
—I’m trying, Mum.
—Oh, God. Don’t start crying. Jesus. I don’t have time for this.
—I’m sorry.
—No, you’re not sorry. If you were sorry you’d stop doing it.
—I can’t help it!
—I’m closing the door. I’ll come back in half an hour to make sure you’re okay. All right?
—Don’t close the door!
—If you’re going to cry like that, I’ll have to close the door. Dad and I have work to do.
—Please!
—It’s your bedroom. It’s your own bedroom. There’s no one else here. No one can come in. All right? If you think there’s anyone else in here, then it’s because you imagined it, you did, all by yourself. You’re going to have to start learning to unimagine them. I don’t have time to go through this every night. Night night now.
—Mum!
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled aloud, between gasps of effort as the hostile wind tried to stop her completely. “I’m sorry.” She wondered sometimes what she’d say to him when she finally tracked him down. That was all it came down to. I’ve made myself suffer as much as I can. I’m sorry.
• • •
Signs told her she was not far from Bristol. Less than halfway there, and her cash was running low. Everything was supposed to be cheaper in the country, but in the village shops they made her pay twice or three times what it said on the stick
er even for a tin of fruit. One bristlingly irate lady refused to serve her at all. I don’t want your money. You can clear off. It’s your sort’s to blame for all of this. Go on. Clear off, or I’m getting my husband. She’d snatched a chocolate bar on her way out and pedaled away from shouts and screeches and insults and threats, listening anxiously for the sounds of a car behind, but no one had followed. There weren’t many cars on the roads anyway. She’d overheard someone ranting about petrol shortages that same morning.
In an area of exhaustingly tightly folded small valleys—there were snowdrops in the hedges, ignoring whatever had changed; to them it was just another season passing—she came to a place where the narrow lane was barred. Bright orange police tape was spooled across it. do not cross, it said. A paper sign had been taped to a tree; the rain had made it entirely illegible. Two bulky concrete roadblocks sat under the tape. She ducked and steered the bike past them, then freewheeled down into the outskirts of a village.
The place was deserted. She’d become attuned to different degrees of background silence. The bike clicked and squeaked rhythmically, the spokes whirred, her own breath was a constant rasp, but when she was out of the wind and away from people those noises sharpened and drew somehow close. She rode through the village feeling as if she was miles away from the nearest dwelling. It had been a comfortable place once, but every house yawned with emptiness as she passed. She came to the bottom of the valley where the roads met. A helpful blue arrow indicated her way southward. She was about to turn that way when it occurred to her that there might be a shop.
She’d already begun to fantasize about finding a village shop momentarily unattended. Five seconds to fill her pockets and she’d be out the door and riding away, no money spent and a day’s calories in her bags. Or passing a shop in the dark, far from any houses, and seeing things behind unbarred and unwatched windows. Her pump was a solid aluminum tube. She was sure it would break glass. How hard could theft be? But here it seemed like she had a whole village to herself, a prosperous, Telegraph-reading Somerset village. She stopped and listened for a while. There was a steady racket of crows somewhere behind the houses. Their clamor reinforced the desertion; wild birds didn’t gather so noisily when there were people around.
She turned the wrong way at the junction and rode slowly toward the village center, watching for any signs of life.
She came, as she’d hoped, to a shop. It was as silent and as shut as every other building she’d passed. She felt all the windows looking down at her. She waited a long while on its doorstep before rattling the handle tentatively. When she pressed her face to the window she could see stacked shelves inside, biscuits and soup and plastic-wrapped bread.
She had the bicycle pump in her hand and was staring at the glass, breathing hard, when she caught the reflection of someone moving across the street behind her.
She swiveled around in abrupt shame, thinking to get straight back on her bike. At first she thought the person who’d surprised her was a pensioner in a black shawl, coming out of one of the humbler houses opposite. Then she saw a young hand feeling at the door, not coming out but trying to get in. What she’d taken for a shawl was a hijab. The person was a pudgy girl, badly dressed in a beige anorak and black leggings and cheap flat boots. She didn’t seem to have noticed Iz at all. She fumbled slowly around the door of the house as if bewildered to find it shut.
As Iz watched, held in place by her reflex of embarrassed guilt, the girl backed away from the door and shuffled along the grassy verge to the next house. She stood in front of it for a moment and then prodded its door as well. She was facing away and half hidden by her head scarf, but even so Iz was touched by the peculiar hopelessness of the gesture. She couldn’t have been older than Gav. Another lost child.
“Excuse me,” Iz said. “I don’t think anyone’s here.”
The girl turned around slowly, looking dull and confused.
“Are you lost?”
The girl didn’t answer. Her shoulders sagged and her mouth was half open. She was clutching something green and messy in one hand. It looked like a fistful of wilted salad.
“Everyone’s left, I think,” Iz said. “The police have closed it off for some reason.”
The girl stepped hesitantly closer. Her eyes didn’t focus. She moved as if following the sound of Iz’s voice, as if she was blind.
“Lizzie?” the girl said.
Iz dropped the bicycle pump.
“Lizzie? Is that you?” The girl shuffled toward her. “Say something.”
Horrified beyond reason, Iz backed into the window behind her, stumbled, turned the corner, and ran.
“Lizzie?”
There was only one way to go, a narrow street between empty white cottages. Her legs were used to pedaling and wouldn’t run properly. She staggered away, bile in her mouth.
“Help,” the strange sad voice called behind her, still coming. “Please.” There was a corner ahead. She ran around it. A fenced path went between the last house and an enclosed farmyard, ending in a gate with an open field beyond. Unable to think where she was going beyond the urge to get away, she stumbled along the path. A flock of crows rose up from the field ahead.
“Lizzie.” Or perhaps it was just the gargling of the crows; she didn’t stop to look over her shoulder. She pushed through the gate into wet grass, looking around, thinking, my bike, I left my bike behind, and yet unable to turn back or even slow down. There were stones standing upright in the field, immense weathered red-brown fists and knuckles like petrified eruptions of the deep earth’s age. Lengths of police tape were strewn around them in the grass. The view opened wider and more stones appeared, huge, some as tall as she and all a thousand times more immense. They seemed to be leaning in. She smelled a putrid and deathly smell. Something like a mound of abandoned bedding lay ahead of her, out in the field. Two more crows screeched up from it as she approached. When she saw that, she wanted very badly to stop. She had to go back, to get her bike, to ride away. She looked over her shoulder involuntarily and stumbled in the long grass, spinning around. It felt as if the sky spun with her. The stones were a ring around her, and the pile of fabric lay in its center. Not bedding, she saw, as she dropped to her hands and knees, but clothes, a mound of clothes.
Ugly flat boots.
Her gaze fixed on the boots and jammed.
The same ugly flat boots. Black leggings, torn to reveal glimpses of mottled white filth. Iz covered her nose and mouth with her hand as she got herself to her feet. The stench was death and rot. The ground seemed to be humming with a subacoustic groan, the voice of the assembled stones. Like an optical illusion falling into place, the reality of what she was looking at showed itself. It became booted feet, bloated legs, a maggoty corpse swathed in nylon and polyester and grime, a grimacing bloodless head half separated from the body by a long gash too revolting to look at. The hijab was still tied around the head. Iz reeled and turned and bolted. The chthonic rumble surged under her feet. Shadows fell around her as though the stones were moving. Her path into the field was a swath of flattened grass. She followed it unthinkingly. No one was ahead of her or behind; the village was empty of all but its dead. She ran under the compulsion of absolute terror, stumbled across her bike, and rode away out of the village and along the closed road until she had to stop to throw up.
19
She lost her way badly that afternoon, and as dusk came she found herself with no choice but to beg and bribe the landlords of a nakedly unwelcoming local pub for the use of an unprepared and unheated upstairs room. The thought of going on in the darkness looking for somewhere else was unbearable. She handed over most of her remaining twenty-pound notes. At least they let her wash in hot water. She barricaded the door to the room and lay on a mattress covered in a plastic sheet, listening to the grumbles of regulars coming up through the floorboards.
The next day she was puffing through a villag
e when she passed a church with an open door. She hadn’t seen the inside of a church in thirty years, but it suddenly seemed like the right place for her to go and take the step that needed taking. Some change had been completed, some accidental rite of passage. She didn’t even know what it was, exactly. (“That’s the point!” shouted the spotty leftie woman with the fiercely earnest eyes and the unfashionably lumpen glasses, standing on a stile to overlook her little audience and the cameramen behind them, all gathered in a snowy field. Her fervor made her shine for the cameras. She can’t get enough of being on TV, that one, Nigel sneered. “We don’t know! That’s the point! You can’t talk about these things that way. It’s not up to us to decide whether it’s true or false. We have to stop thinking like that, before we do anything else.”) She only knew that she’d arrived at the place of certainty where Gavin had lived all along. It had been so simple for him.
—Who’s that, Mum?
—Who?
—That man. The little one. No, you’re looking the wrong way.
—Gav, love . . .
—He’s gone now.
Or:
—Mum?
—Yes, love?
—If we go to Italy this holiday, will Miss Grey be there?
—Of course she will. If you want her to be. Don’t you think?
—I don’t know. Wouldn’t she need a ticket for the airplane?
She sat in a pew and apologized, out loud, for all of her forty-three years. She knew now what she’d say to Gavin when she got there and found him. There was no question of pleading with him to go back with her, no nonsense about wanting to be a family again. That lie was over. She’d go with him and Gwen, wherever they were, whatever they were doing. She’d drink herbal tea and meditate and wear crystal pendants, as long as they’d have her; and they would, because they’d see how sorry she was and how far she’d come. They’d know she meant it.
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