The Hunger Trace

by Edward Hogan

  They kicked up ropes and tunnels of water, until Christopher stopped, wiping the grime from his face. ‘Oh. Erm. Nearly forgot, Louisa. I’ve got something for you,’ he said.

  Adam looked up as soon as he heard the bell ring in Christopher’s pocket. It took Louisa a little longer to realise.

  ‘Yours, I presume,’ Christopher said in his suave detective voice, handing the mouse head key-ring to Louisa. She did not look at Adam, who remained a couple of metres away, beneath the awning.

  ‘Where did you find this?’ she said to Christopher.

  ‘Wait,’ Adam said.

  ‘Erm. It was in the downstairs bathroom at home. I knew it was yours straight away of course. Erm. I’m no fool. You must have left it there in the halcyon days of you being friends with Maggie.’

  Louisa closed her fist around the mouse head, silenced the bell. Adam walked out from under the awning, and grimaced against the rain. ‘I was there,’ he said.

  ‘Shut up,’ she said. Christopher flinched.

  ‘I was there,’ Adam continued, ‘But I never did oat.’

  She opened her hand, looked again at the charm and closed her fist. ‘You know what? Fuck you.’

  ‘Erm. Erm, now now, children,’ Christopher said, bemused. ‘Don’t bicker.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything. You and me had argued, and I was mad, but I didn’t do oat. Look at me,’ Adam said to her. ‘You know I’m not lying.’

  ‘Don’t try that fake nonsense on me,’ Louisa said. ‘I’m not some lonely housewife you can play mind games with.’

  ‘Don’t do this,’ Adam said. ‘Don’t use this as an excuse.’

  ‘An excuse?’ Louisa said.

  Adam’s shoulders sank. And then he received a text message. The vibrations of his phone sounded like a throat being cleared, his pocket was lit green. Automatically his hand reached down, but he stopped himself. Louisa laughed. ‘Answer it,’ she said. ‘Go on. Off you pop.’

  ‘What’s, erm, going on?’ said Christopher.

  ‘Adam has got work commitments,’ Louisa replied.

  ‘You can’t go,’ Christopher said. ‘I’ve had a wonderful evening, and this could be it. It could be one of those nights. A night to remember.’

  ‘I’d rather forget it,’ Louisa said. ‘I’d sooner forget all of it. You know what you are?’ she said to Adam, who was already nodding. ‘You’re a decent fuck, and nothing else.’

  ‘Aye,’ he said, and started to walk away. He pulled the jacket over his head as he left the car park, and began to run towards the hill. Christopher shouted to him. ‘Adam, wait. It’s only just begun. We could be the fun-boy three. Erm. Youth.’ But Adam did not look back.

  Louisa and Christopher walked up the hill against the rain, because there was nothing else to do. Christopher spoke of the Game and Country Show, and of the death of Robin Hood, its various representations. He spoke of the Prioress, and her attractiveness. He slurred his words badly. ‘Erm, erm. I can’t believe she didn’t come back to stop the bleeding. I think she would have done. She couldn’t have, erm, forgotten because she had love on the brain. I mean, what about when they carved the figures together? Erm. Sometimes I take some Zuclopenthixol, and then I have one too many. It’s a lethal cocktail, but it feels good at the time.’ He laughed and then stopped. ‘There must have been blood everywhere.’

  Louisa could barely hear him. She walked a few paces in front. She pulled up her hood but let the rain run down her face unchecked and into her eyes which stung already. She was stuck between never wanting to see him again, and praying that the wheels of his Golf had sunk into the ground. They had not. She saw the flash of his car pass by near the top of the hill. He slowed down, but when she did not turn, he kept going.

  By the time they got to the house, Christopher was shivering. He had forgotten to fasten his coat, and a bib of wetness soaked his jumper. ‘I’ve got some letting to do myself, now. Some purging. Erm. Erm. I’m going to the toilet to commit perjury.’

  He ran upstairs. Louisa took her time to work through his words, and worried for a moment. ‘Christopher, what do you mean?’ she said. But she could already hear him vomiting in the toilet. She went up to her bedroom, where she saw Adam’s overnight bag, forgotten in the corner. She replaced her jeans with an identical dry pair. ‘You okay?’ she said.

  ‘Erm. Yes. Like father like, erm, son, eh?’

  Louisa descended to the kitchen, and looked at the notice-board where she had pinned the postcard Maggie had sent about the van repairs, now coated with dust and bird particles. Mrs Musters as Hebe. Louisa noticed for the first time that the eagle was perched not on a rock, but on a dark, smoky cloud. Mrs Musters stared out with a strained smile. Louisa took out the pin and turned the card over. Maggie always flattened the ‘M’ of her name so that it looked like the distant bird that a child paints in a picture of a sunny day.

  Louisa washed the nutrients from some beef in preparation for the hawks’ morning meal and listened to the pressing insistence of the rain. The wild birds would be struggling, but her own were safe, if slightly unfit, in their communal shelter. She thought of Adam, of the proposal he had made in this house.

  By the time Christopher came downstairs, Louisa was crying, her hands squeezing bubbly pink liquid out of the strips of beef shin in the sink. Christopher charged around the living room, rejuvenated after his purging. Louisa could not hold off the tears and it wasn’t long before Christopher noticed. ‘Oh,’ he said. He crept, with comic quietness, to the computer, turned it on, and came over to Louisa at the sink with the same soft footsteps. Louisa could see his reflection in the kitchen window. He had stopped a yard from her back, and was peering round her, into the sink. ‘Erm. Put. The meat. Down,’ he said.

  Louisa laughed. ‘Oh shut up,’ she said, sniffing. ‘I’m alright.’

  ‘Erm. Erm. Step away from the meat,’ Christopher said.

  Louisa let the strips of beef slide into the sink with a sop. She ran her hands under the tap, and dried them on her jeans, leaving slight traces of blood on the worn-white denim. She turned around.

  ‘It always seems like there’s, erm, someone missing from the party, doesn’t it?’ Christopher said.

  Louisa nodded.

  ‘There’s never the, erm, full complement.’ He studied Louisa’s face.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she said. ‘Never seen me cry?’

  ‘It’s not that. I’ve seen you cry loads of times. Erm, I’ve just never seen you cry whilst wearing make-up.’

  Louisa wiped the darkness from her eyes. He had seen her cry loads of times; she considered that, and knew it was probably true. She looked at him. The vessels in the whites of his eyes had broken from straining to vomit. One of his eyes was blue, the other grey like David’s. He had probably lost a contact lens down the toilet, Louisa thought.

  ‘I’ve got something, erm, amazing to show you. It’s absolutely first class. Blow your socks completely off.’

  He knelt down at the computer, and shoved the chair towards Louisa, who sat down, shattered. Christopher went to the video search engine. Louisa did not know if she had the patience for a Jason Donovan song now. She rubbed her eyes, thought of all the women she knew whom Adam could have been with, that very moment.

  Christopher typed FPS Water Balloon. A list of thumbnails appeared. He clicked one, and maximised the video so it filled the screen. A red balloon. A red balloon with what looked like a Stanley knife heading towards it, extremely slowly. ‘Christopher, what is this?’

  ‘Quiet,’ he said, in a deep voice.

  At the moment the tip of the knife hit the surface of the balloon, the red skin shed, smoothly peeling away in two directions from the point of contact, leaving a suspended balloon-shaped mass of bright white water, the surface rippling into the most incredible tiny peaks of silver light. Louisa could still see the line along which the balloon skin had broken, and the knife continued to travel slowly through the perfectly formed capsule of water. Gradually, the sh
ape became hairy, and gave way to gravity, but Louisa remained transfixed. The images resonated with the slow rhythms of her drunkenness.

  ‘What—?’

  ‘Slow motion, high speed camera. A thousand frames per second,’ Christopher said.

  Louisa frowned.

  ‘It’s what your birds see,’ Christopher said.

  Louisa took a sharp intake of breath, remembering the falconry display on the lawn, and Christopher’s question about how fast the wasp was travelling. Meanwhile, on the screen, a bullet ran through a lemon, the skin of which opened slowly in a zig-zag pattern. ‘It’s amazing,’ she said.

  ‘It’s certainly, erm, eye-opening,’ he said.

  ‘It’s eye-changing,’ she said, and they smiled.

  ‘Erm. That’s right. Before these cameras, nobody had ever seen what these things looked like.’

  More images flashed up: missiles breaking their own circles of haze, televisions exploding decorously, the elements flying apart in perfect order. There were more water balloons, some breaking over people’s faces like membranous sheaths. A face was slapped, the hand stroking softly but distorting the features, almost folding the nose over. The lips became cod-like as the waves of the blow passed through the skin like a crease being ironed.

  It was beautiful, Louisa thought, and so considerate of Christopher. It was like something Maggie would do. Louisa decided not to mention this to Christopher, but the idea of Maggie’s influence gave her hope. She glanced at the timer, which promised another nine minutes of high definition eruptions and disasters. The thing about seeing the world slowed down, she thought, was that you could watch something terrible unfolding, without the ability to do anything about it. Perhaps you would not even notice that it was happening.

  Louisa yawned and ruffled Christopher’s hair. He put his head against her shoulder, and she cradled it, closed her eyes. She could feel the pulse in his temple, the vessels constricted by dehydration. She could hear the rain, like words tapped out on a typewriter. She dropped down a level, into a half-sleep, and on this plain she saw Adam, his thick fingers on her thigh, his head turned away. He had a way of breathing through his mouth that left him parched. She blinked. Christopher’s right hand had slid along the inside seam of her jeans, and up between her legs. His head was against her breast. She blinked again, and then realised what was happening. She stood sharply from the chair, grabbing his wrist as she did so and pushing him back. He fell against the computer. His look of fear did nothing to assuage her, just pumped the blood lust further. ‘Never, ever do that,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. She recognised the plea in his voice, the inability to go back and withdraw an action.

  ‘It’s completely off the bloody scale. I mean, did you really think . . . ?’

  Still on the floor, he let his chin drop onto his chest, like a little boy. She thought he might cry, but he flung out his arm and punched the table. The noise of it shocked Louisa, made her jump. ‘Get out,’ she said. ‘Just get out.’

  He got to his feet, and scrambled into the hall. The latch defeated him for a moment, but he soon worked it out, and was gone, leaving the door open, the rain sidling into the house, discolouring the rug. Louisa stood in her living room, with the outside spilling in, and a blank noise in her head.

  She slammed the door.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  A few hours before, Maggie had seen two red circles in the dark of that late February afternoon. The lights engorged as her eyelids drooped, sending a long shudder of warmth through her. They were just brakelights. But in her mind they were also the lamps of that pub by the Thames. And they were the only things keeping Maggie’s anger at bay as she tried to drive east.

  She had followed the red lights all the way out of Derbyshire, watching as those crimson eyes had multiplied into the distance with the incline of the road. She had been micro-sleeping for the last thirty minutes, releasing the brake every once in a while to roll forward a few pointless metres. The travel reports had warned against the M1 but the A-roads proved just as bad. Up ahead, there was an accident, a road closure, something. She did not know where she was, but she hadn’t travelled far. Newark? Grantham? Sleaford? The journey felt longer because she had set off in daylight.

  Maggie knew that a hundred miles to the east there was a red-bordered triangular road-sign with the black silhouette of a stag on a white background. She knew she would not see that sign tonight. Drivers up ahead had started to attempt three-point turns, and the ominous fact was that they could manage the manoeuvre safely, for there was no oncoming traffic.

  She thought of the deer in their thick winter coats, exhausted by the rut, back in their single-sex groups. The two stags she wanted were in their fifth head. The man from Norfolk had sent pictures – front, flank and rear. All she wanted was to see them in the flesh. One little thing. She felt Drum Hill, and the tendrils of its bad fortune, reining her in. She needed a drink.

  After another half hour, Maggie turned off the main road and found a restaurant connected to a small hotel. A huge pylon stood in the field just beyond the car park. She could hear the electricity fizz, could feel the pressure on her skull. The size of the pylon dwarfed the hotel and the cars, and made her suddenly aware of the view of the place from above.

  She walked into the restaurant, took a booth, and ordered two whiskys. ‘Will you be eating, madam?’ the waitress said.

  ‘No thanks,’ Maggie said, handing back the greasy, laminated menu. She remembered once when she was a teenager, she and her friends had gone into a restaurant like this on the outskirts of London and sat in there for three hours, abusing the offer of free top-ups on coffee. The waiter had been forced to go to the shop to buy more. They were wired and choking on laughter, and they all had headaches.

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t have alcohol unless you’re eating,’ the waitress said.

  Maggie took the menu back. ‘Probably for the best,’ she said. ‘Soak it up.’

  She ordered curly fries and decided to stay in the hotel for the night. She thought about calling home to tell someone, but she knew they would all be out. There was nobody, really, to tell.

  At dawn she lay on one of the single beds, kept awake by the flatline of the pylon and the hiss of the rain. Who stayed in these hotels? People on work conferences, tired lorry drivers, murderers, falconers. Maggie gave up on sleep. She turned on the TV in the top corner of the room, and watched the future: a shadow of low pressure was moving down from Iceland, over the east of England, to bruise its heart.

  * * *

  Miles away, Louisa opened her eyes. She had slept with the lamp on, and woke because it went out. Her digital clock was dark and numberless, a collection of possible eights. Powercut. The rain on the roof sounded like an engine left running. It was tireless, unremitting, mirthful. She smelled smoke, and remembered that this could signify the onset of a stroke. Later in the day, she would recall that thought, and wish it had been true, wish that the blood had simply drained from her brain. She rose from the bed, got dressed, and went downstairs.

  The smell passed in and out of her senses as she moved through the house. In the living room she stood still and tuned in to the world. Outside, the lawn and surrounding fields had flooded. She had been right, she thought, to put Iroquois indoors, for her bow perch was almost completely underwater. The water itself provided the strongest source of light, a dull glaze like a dirty glass table.

  The wind outside changed direction and she caught the smell of smoke again. There was a base tone to it, which her mind identified before she was truly ready. She steadied herself on the back of the chair and then hurried to put on her boots. The pulse thumped in her head, and with every beat her vision greyed, closed in from the sides.

  When she got outside, she saw the dark arm of smoke rising above the stables and whipping back around it. The centre of the roof had already caved in. Louisa ran forward until four brief, crackling explosions stopped her. She screamed and raised her ha
nds to shield her face. Fire had caused the right half of the shed to collapse – her Harris hawks, a lanner, and Caroline. She could smell the sweetness of feathers, the wood smoke, and the flesh. She thought she might be sick, but she did not have time. The other side of the shed remained intact, but smoke rolled in a fossil black tail from the vent pipe. Louisa kept running.

  Two slats of wood dropped away and she saw Iroquois, bating in bursts, the leash pulling her down. And then she saw Diamond through the smoke. A blue flame crackled in front of the hawks. She did not know if the screams she heard were real or imagined, or even if they were her own. She ran towards the door. The heat did not get through to her – she was shivering – but the smoke was overwhelming. She could not get any closer, so she sprinted back towards the house, realising as she did so that the sprinkler hose would not reach, and buckets of water would be futile. She went inside, took her shotgun from under the sofa and ran back out, loading cartridges and pouring extras into her pockets.

  She tried once more to approach the shed, but could only get within ten metres. The flames fingered Iroquois’s perch, took hold of the leash, spun up through the fibres and across the bird. Iroquois’s figure appeared black within the orange light, and she opened her wings, dipped her head into the brunt. The sight put Louisa on her knees. She stood again, shouldered the shotgun and fired into Iroquois’s breast. She fired two more rounds blindly into the blackened, crumbled half of the shed before reloading and turning the gun on Diamond. She aimed, but he bated. Smoke obscured the view. The fire advanced towards his block perch, but Louisa could barely see the bird. There was another blue fizz of wire igniting, and a dark shape arrowed through the roof and into the sky. It was Diamond, his severed leash still smoking like a blown-out wick. He tanked towards the woods. Louisa’s first instinct was to raise the gun, but she caught herself, called and whistled. She ran across the waterlogged field, stumbling and splashing. It was useless. She stopped and watched Diamond clear the coppice, his wings becoming a distant tremble, before he was gone, beyond the range of Louisa’s inadequate vision.