The Hunger Trace

by Edward Hogan

  Louisa walked back through the wisps of ash to the centre of the field. She hit the ground, her knees slipping through the standing water and unstable earth, so that she fell forward onto her arms. She stayed like that while the shed folded in on itself like a rotting fruit.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Adam found her an hour later, dragged her home and called the fire service. At the time, Louisa did not wonder how he’d found the nerve to drive up the hill. She took whisky and Valium and fell into a disturbed sleep for a few hours.

  When she came downstairs, Adam was still there, sitting in the living room. ‘Is there anything I can do?’ he said.

  She stood in the middle of the room. ‘Like what?’ she said. ‘Give me a back rub?’

  He blinked slowly.

  ‘Where is he?’ she said.

  ‘Who, the fireman? They’ve gone. It’s extinguished.’

  ‘I mean the boy.’

  ‘I told you. I saw him down in the village. He’s fine.’

  ‘Did you speak to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look alright, did he?’

  ‘Louisa, what are you talking about? You’re not making any sense.’

  ‘It’s not the time for it.’

  He stood and moved towards her, but she backed away. ‘I could call the radio station, see if they’ll put word out about the missing bird,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want their help. I don’t want anyone to know. I don’t want anyone touching him.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I don’t think you do,’ Louisa said.

  Adam’s face showed a flicker of frustration, but he held it in check. Louisa retrieved her soiled coat from the kitchen floor and put it on.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Adam said.

  ‘I’m going out,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not fit to drive, duck. Let me give you a lift.’

  ‘Go home.’ She was already out of the door when she said it.

  Louisa waded through the mud and water to Maggie’s house. The back door was open, so she went in. She knew Christopher wasn’t there. She shouted from the hallway, then went upstairs and looked around. The place was empty. She did not know when Maggie was coming back, and she did not feel like she could wait. She dialled Maggie’s mobile from the house phone, but it was switched off.

  She went through to Christopher’s room, took a suitcase from the wardrobe and began pulling his clothes from the hangers, and throwing them in. Back in the living room, she made the call, pulled in an old favour. There could be no refusal, all things considered.

  Half an hour later, she sat in her van, ready to seek him out. The mud hung heavy on her clothes, patches of it drying like cracked skin. Christopher’s suitcase lay on the middle seat. The smell of smoke now mixed with a chemical stink, something the firemen had used.

  What had it been like for the hawks to see the flames coming slowly in ultraviolet, the world gradually blotted out with brightness and no way to get free? She closed her eyes and thought of the videos Christopher had shown her. She thought of him dropping a cigarette, too stupid or scared to put it out. She thought of him dousing the beams with petrol. How quickly would the fire have killed them? She found herself hoping they’d been suffocated, but she knew Iroquois had not been killed by the smoke. Iroquois had burned, the lines of her big body quivering in the heat as she thrashed. Louisa opened her eyes, closed both of her fists and smashed them into the dashboard over and over. As the plastic cut her hands, as the tissue compressed and burst the vessels inside, Louisa was possessed by a rage she had not felt since she was a child. She let it grip.

  She found him in the Hart, an hour after most of the lunchtime crew had gone. He looked as she expected him to look – pale. Before him on the bar stood a coffee, a glass of water, and a pint of lager. ‘Erm. Oh, hi. Hangover cure,’ he said, quietly. ‘Caffeine, lion’s blood and hair of the dog.’

  ‘Get in the van,’ she said.

  ‘I heard sirens this morning. Erm. What happened? I thought you’d, erm, called the Feds on me.’ He smiled.

  She took him by the collar of his coat and pulled him off the stool. He stumbled slightly. ‘Okay, okay,’ he said. For a boy of his size he came away easy.

  She did not speak in the van, and did not look at him. His evident fear awoke no compassion in her; the sleeping tablets made her separate. Christopher looked at the luggage. ‘Erm. I’ve got a suitcase like that. Are you going on holiday?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is it just a natural barrier against me and my wandering hands? I can understand that. Erm. Where’s Adam? Have you made up? Erm, I hope I haven’t created a triangle. Where are we going?’

  She did not answer. They hissed along the tree-lined roads, past the burnished woodlands sagging with the weight of water. The railway crossing was flooded, but the van ploughed through without difficulty.

  As they left Detton, Matlock, and Cromford behind, the lawns got neater and the cars more modern. After an hour of driving, Louisa pulled into a cul-de-sac, much flatter and roomier than the one which Adam had forced her back down all those months ago. The houses were the colour of crabs, their fleshy brightness hardly dimmed by the saturation. Louisa noted the water draining off the steeply cambered road, and the predominance of pea-shingle. She thought of the stables. How had the fire moved across the floor? The pictures came back into her mind – the heat, and the darkening shapes within.

  ‘What’s this soulless place?’ said Christopher.

  Louisa remained silent.

  ‘I’ve been to dwellings like these before, with Maggie. I helped her with one of those goats. Erm. I didn’t help her, really. I had a disc problem.’

  ‘Number fifty-three,’ Louisa said. ‘Your mother lives there. She’s expecting you.’

  Christopher seized up suddenly, the seat creaking beneath him. ‘Oh right,’ he said. He ducked his head and peered at the purple door. ‘But what about—?’

  ‘You said you wanted to see her.’

  ‘Erm. Yes.’

  ‘Well then. Off you go.’

  He opened the door slowly and stepped down out of the van.

  ‘Your case,’ she said.

  ‘Oh right,’ he said. ‘Erm. How long am I staying?’

  Louisa sighed. Christopher pulled the case down off the seat, bumping it against the paintwork and then the black pavement, as treacly and soft as the top of a Bakewell pudding. A business card floated to the ground, and Christopher picked it up and put it in his pocket automatically. ‘These cases are virtually, erm, in, erm, destructible,’ he said under his breath, and then louder he said, ‘Louisa?’

  ‘I can’t take responsibility for you,’ she said. ‘Do you know what you did to me? I have absolutely nothing left.’

  Christopher backed away from the van.

  ‘Just tell me one thing,’ she said. ‘Did you mean it? Did you do it on purpose?’

  He screwed up his face with the effort of thought. ‘Erm. Sometimes I have one too many,’ he said.

  Louisa leaned over and shut the van door. She saw Cynthia standing on the front step of her house. She was still thin, her hair like a short curved blade. She did not look at Louisa. Both women watched Christopher as he marched towards the house, dragging his suitcase behind him.

  * * *

  Maggie had slept through her check-out time. She woke in a light just a few grades brighter than the night before. The car park outside her window was submerged, and the fire-escape rattled with the overflow of the drains.

  Her boots squeaked on the marble-effect rubber floor as she approached the front desk. She could hear the muffled drone of a conference from one of the function rooms. The receptionist wore a badge that read ‘Nick’.

  ‘Any chance of me getting out of here today?’ Maggie said.

  Nick consulted his computer. ‘It’ll be tough to make it any further east,’ he said. ‘There’s a big stretch of the A47 closed with the flooding. A17 is trailing way back, too.’


  ‘Right. But it doesn’t seem too bad, here,’ Maggie said.

  ‘It’s heading this way,’ Nick said, earnestly. ‘You can get back okay. The roads are clear going inland.’ He made one final check on his computer. ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘Yeah, if you’re going in the direction of Nottingham, you’ll be fine.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Maggie said with a smile. ‘Thanks.’

  She began to walk out towards the restaurant. ‘Madam?’

  Maggie spun towards him.

  ‘Don’t you have any bags?’

  Maggie smiled. ‘I left them in the car,’ she said, sure that she was not the only person in this hotel to sleep in their clothes.

  She called the man in Norfolk and cancelled the visit. He was somewhat relieved, having been up before daybreak tending to storm damage on the farm. ‘Some other time,’ she told him, wondering when.

  Maggie drank two cups of coffee and got back on the road. She called in on a vet in Derby and ran some errands in the city, setting out for the park in the late afternoon twilight. The weather worsened as she travelled home. It was like watching the world melt. Soon the land was glassy. Verdigris moss patched the stone walls; the power station towers rose in the distance. How had this place become home? She had known no such landscape as a child, and yet from the moment she arrived in Derbyshire, she had felt its resonance, as though the gorges and undulations were replicated precisely within her on some smaller scale. She had read that brain matter could physically change shape, could be carved out or soldered by experience. She believed that. She thought of Christopher watching his Robin Hood tapes in the living room. What shaped his mind? His father had died clutching the ground as though it were the sheer face of a cliff, like the joke about the drunk.

  It was dark by the time she reached Detton, and parts of the village were now impassable. She took a high route, welcoming the pressure in her ears as she climbed Drum Hill. The flanks of the road had collapsed, and were running back down the slope in a thick rope of mud; Maggie thought of the thinning treads on Louisa’s old van, and resolved to warn her.

  When she got to the driveway she saw the water running from all sides of the diving platform. She heard the noises of the animals. But she did not see the ruin of the aviary, which was steeped in darkness beyond her vision.

  Maggie took her bag out of the Land Rover and made her way to the house. Her curls stayed in the shape of the headrest. The house was cold, but there was no real flooding. A few leaks here and there, nothing urgent. She called Christopher’s name into the dark, and received no reply. Nothing unusual about that, even when he was home. After keeping herself awake for the drive, the tiredness now hit Maggie hard. She climbed the stairs to bed without turning on a single light, and was asleep by seven, none the wiser.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Christopher had felt conscious of his filthy boots on the carpet. It was a light colour, and so springy that the platform of mud on his soles stayed firmly on the surface. It was like some kind of coral, and he was by no means employing false flattery when he said, ‘This carpet is truly beautiful.’

  ‘We think so,’ said Cynthia.

  His heart rate was, he acknowledged, through the roof. He did not really recognise her the way he thought he would. Her eyes were blue, her jumper was baby blue, and she had a bluish light in her skin, too, the way milk sometimes does. He decided not to examine her body.

  ‘With the carpet in mind, do you think you could take your boots off?’ Cynthia said.

  ‘Oh right,’ he said. He slipped off the boots without bending down. He used his toes to flip them out of the door and onto the path. ‘Erm. Adios,’ he said. ‘Adios amigos.’

  In his damp socks, and with the door closed to seal in the quiet, Christopher absorbed the details of the place: spotlights on the ceiling, a clock which was just two hands stuck to the wall, and a professional-looking photograph of Cynthia, a man, and a little girl, all of them wearing black, posing in front of a white background. He laughed. Cynthia followed his gaze, and pointed to each model in turn.

  ‘This is Mike, my husband. This is me, obviously, and this is Georgia, although she’s grown since then. She’s thirteen, now. She hates that picture.’

  ‘Erm, erm. The teenage years are a time of turbulence and rapid change.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cynthia.

  ‘I found them quite, erm, turbulent myself. I shouldn’t worry.’

  ‘No. We’re not worried. She’s fine.’

  ‘And then you’ve got to factor in, erm, sexual awakening.’

  Cynthia looked away.

  ‘Who actually is Georgia?’ Christopher said.

  ‘She’s my daughter. You’ll probably meet her a little later if you—’

  ‘Oh right. My half-sister. I didn’t know I had a sister. Or even half of one.’ He stared at the picture and began to laugh again. ‘You all look like you’re out of a magazine,’ he said.

  Cynthia searched his face. ‘Welcome,’ she said, as if beginning a sentence. ‘Welcome.’

  As the afternoon turned dark outside, Christopher sat on a soft sofa with his arm along the back, warmed by the hot fin of the radiator. He had sat there, in such a position, for several hours. He balanced a cup of tea on the armrest and watched a film on the TV. It was a western, about a stranger who helps a poor homestead family. It was a good film, but everything the characters did made Christopher feel like crying. When the funny little boy of the family asked his father if he could beat the stranger in a fight, Christopher found he had to hold his breath. He put it down to his hangover. And emotional turbulence.

  Cynthia made phone calls in a room upstairs. She had work to do, she said. Her voice reached him in quick, faint tremors, like a quivering bowstring. ‘Twang,’ Christopher said out loud.

  He turned off the television when it started to get too much, because he didn’t want his mother to think he was a baby. The bare insides of his forearms had started to itch, and he scratched them vigorously. He remembered the business card falling out of Louisa’s van, and he pulled it from his pocket now. Adam Gregory. Public Accompaniments and Home Visits. Christopher frowned, but before he could work out what it meant, he heard the front door open. The noise of the outside world – the rain and yawning air and motors – was shocking, and brought attention to the silence of the house.

  A girl breathed heavily, out of sight in the hallway. She came into view via the mirror on the living room wall, her shoes in one hand as she walked to the coat closet. She was short, her hair wet and scraped back, dark-rimmed spectacles rain-blotched at the end of her nose. She took off her coat and hung it on a hook inside the closet. Christopher stood and walked to the living room doorway, his feet so quiet on the carpet that she didn’t hear him approach. He could smell the damp wool of her jumper, a trace of smoke. She squeezed out four tablets of chewing gum, crunched them in one side of her mouth, then reached down under her jumper, pulled a packet of cigarettes from her shirt pocket and went to put them inside her coat.

  ‘Howdy,’ said Christopher.

  She spun quickly and closed the door, trying at the last moment to hide her shock. ‘Hi,’ she said. Her eyes widened. ‘Oh hi,’ she said. ‘Mum said you might . . . I’m Georgie.’

  ‘I’m Christopher Bryant.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Erm. Howdy.’

  She smiled and held her breath. ‘Have you seen my mum?’

  ‘Erm. Yes. She looks quite nice but I haven’t got to know her yet.’

  Georgia laughed. ‘No. I mean, do you know where she is, right now?’

  ‘She said she was, erm, erm, working.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Georgia said. She turned and climbed the stairs.

  The early part of dinner would have been quiet, but the powerful central heating gave Christopher nasal congestion, which meant he had to breathe through his mouth while chewing his food. It sounded like an eighties electric guitar effect. Cynthia kept her head down, while Georgia began to rel
ax a little, looking from Christopher to her mother.

  ‘Erm, erm. I like beans,’ Christopher said.

  ‘Good source of protein,’ said Georgia.

  Christopher laughed, thinking of his father’s argument for carnivores. ‘Erm. Protein is the building blocks of life,’ Christopher said. ‘And that’s the clean version.’

  Cynthia poured water into Christopher’s glass. He beamed and thanked her. ‘Erm. I thought you’d be a right witch,’ he said to her.

  Georgia gasped.

  ‘Is that what—? Who told you that?’ said Cynthia.

  ‘No one. Erm. It was just a hunch.’

  Cynthia shook her head slowly.

  ‘There have been a lot of women in my life,’ Christopher said. He did not mention Louisa Smedley, but he spoke at length about Maggie. Maggie Bryant, he called her. ‘Erm. We were partners in crime, in some ways.’

  Nobody interrupted. Cynthia sighed and cleared her throat.

  ‘She was really, erm, really fast,’ Christopher said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Cynthia, quietly. Georgia looked at her mother with an expression of surprise.

  ‘I mean, erm, I could usually beat her over short distances. The fifty metre dash. But anything longer than that, she would always, erm, pip me to the post. We had some really classic battles. Erm. It was Clash of the Titans, at times. Maggie’s specialty was the erm, uphill race. She had tireless stamina.’

  ‘What do you mean, had?’ Cynthia said.

  Christopher looked up, finished his mouthful of chicken, beans, potato, water. ‘She doesn’t run any more. Don’t suppose she has the, erm, time.’

  The empty shell of a baked bean dropped through the water in his glass, losing its colour as it fell.

  Cynthia took the plates through to the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher. Christopher could hear her muttering. He stared out of the window at the dark wet street, the brakelights of the halting cars spreading through the droplets like red thistletops. ‘Where’s the man of the house?’ Christopher asked, scratching at his arms, one after the other.