The Hunger Trace

by Edward Hogan

  They would be looking for Christopher down in the village: the White Hart and the off-licence; the back of the Co-op where the cardboard boxes would be rain-beaten to the consistency of porridge; Foxton’s butchers where he sometimes bought a cob filled with pork and apple sauce. They would be driving further out towards the college, and the houses of his teachers and counsellors and two-faced doctors, and to the homes of people he sometimes listed as his friends when he needed an alibi for some dubious mission.

  Louisa reached down into her orange rucksack and turned off the transmission receiver. She walked towards her neighbour’s land, leaving both bags behind on her front step.

  They did not know his mind the way she did. She shared no blood with him, no official bond, and for much of his life they had ignored each other, but they shared a territory. She also shared Christopher’s desire to walk away – to put a flat palm up to the intricate humiliations of life with other people. This time, however, she would not let herself do that.

  Louisa spent an hour in the woods, which were dark and livid in the wet. All she found were the abandoned accessories of Christopher’s childhood: a blue tarpaulin, an old tyre, a knotted rope snapped seven feet from the ground; beer cans in various stages of degradation, and a Power Ranger figurine, half-buried, with its legs in the air. Water had filled the mouth of the fibreglass tyrannosaurus, and now poured out between the teeth, as though the dinosaur was salivating.

  The collapsing of sodden branches had given her a couple of false leads, but when she emerged from the trees, she did so without much hope. She sheltered for a moment beneath the diving platform, dodging the thick droplets coming down from the edge. Maybe they were right, she thought. Maybe he was in the village.

  Walking back towards the cottage to get the van, she looked over at the ruins of the aviary, the black wood shining in some places like film. For a while, in the woods, she had forgotten the hollow pain in her chest, but she knew that it would never leave her for good.

  She started the van and pushed off down the hill. At the end of the descent, the road swung left and ran parallel to the brook. It wasn’t until she was half a mile down this road that she remembered the den. It had been built, after all, with her own cast-off materials. She remembered the moment with David in her kitchen, the steam from her mug, the boy coming into the room. She stopped the van.

  For the first time since her arrival at Drum Hill, the field was completely underwater. The flood plain was almost still, the weaving flows and currents from various sources of water barely visible on the surface. It was a broken yolk. Louisa looked across at the den beyond the brook, and bit her thumbnail. She thought of David and the boy splashing and playing in that brook when it was nothing more than a trickle, when you could see the tiny fish in there and read the labels on the discarded packaging that floated by. Now the water was lapping at the entrance to the den. And the longer she sat watching from the van, the more certain she became that Christopher was inside. If he wasn’t in the den, he was in trouble.

  Then she saw the piece of clothing. It floated on the surface in the middle of the temporary lake, shiny and bloated. It was dark blue, and quite a distance from the den. Had she not seen it, she might have turned the van around and driven back across the little bridge – even though it would have taken time, time which she imagined to be running out. But as it was, the sight of the fabric was enough to make her get out of the van and run down into the field. ‘Christopher,’ she shouted. She could not have guessed the height of the flood, and she fell forward into the water immediately, smacked by the cold of it, her head going under and then coming up, the shock kicking in. She gasped, pumped her arms, and was reminded of the tingling feeling when she had fallen from her bike as a child, that numb purgatory before the pain took hold. When she regained her footing, she saw that the water was up to her chest. She called out for Christopher again as she waded towards the dark blue shape and heard her own voice, smeary and formless, echoing back from the pines. After a few more yards of slow progress, she could see that the piece of clothing contained no body, so she scanned the water, looking for any signs of movement. She was surprised by the effort it took to drag herself along, the outer layers of her body already heavy and devoid of sensation, like a granite casing.

  She took hold of the garment, squeezing an air pocket from the cotton. She held it above her head, against the background of the pencil grey sky and the tall, sagging pines, and unpeeled the folds to see that it was her own T-shirt. Her stomach flipped as she tried to think of a rational explanation. She took three steps forward, still holding the T-shirt above her head, and then she was dragged under by the current.

  In that flash of panic, the pressure of the culvert’s suction contained such violence and intent that Louisa thought it was an animal. She got her head above water for a second, spat, gasped and was wrenched back under. A charge of pain rose up her leg as her right ankle lodged, and then cracked, against the grate of the inlet pipe. She fought to keep her left foot firmly on the ground, and it took several seconds – most of them submerged in the midnight of the floodwater – to regain her balance. She rose and spat the gritty mix until it was just saliva. The wild pressure from the drain tried to pull her flat, but she dug her left foot deep into the soft soil, tried to keep her chin in the air and the back of her head in the water. Her foot was trapped; the pain was constant and she knew the ankle was broken. Louisa was furious with herself. She took hold of her right thigh and tried to pull herself free, but nearly blacked out with the pain, and the effort destabilised her, caused her to swallow more of the foul water. She was now shivering wildly, and her body felt granulated, disintegrating.

  As the moments passed, she grew calmer, and accepted the simple gravity of the situation. It seemed so strange to be standing upright, head just above the water, half a mile from her house containing her guitar, grill pan, ice-tray and Scotch. And yet she could not move. Such a predicament, she knew, would not last forever. She tried to think, but soon it became almost too cold to do even that.

  Time moved on with the immeasurable blankness of the flooded field before her, and yet her temperature was dropping rapidly. The nerves in her face sparked with cold and she was vaguely aware of her functions being stripped away. In the space of these stretched and silent moments, her knowledge of the outcomes, the stages and treatments of hypothermia came to her in a tangled mass. She had heard of animals that literally dug their own graves in a final act of terminal burrowing, and recalled reading that delirious sufferers often removed their own clothes. She remembered fragments of a list of symptoms from a first aid course. Inertia, poor judgment and hallucinations. With this in mind, she considered the sad possibility that she had been hypothermic for forty-seven years.

  There were flashes of delirious wellbeing, but the pain was exhausting now, taking over. Soon she was fighting back the temptation to wish numbness upon herself. The loss of sensation, as it took hold, was so seductive, such a comfort. She nudged the trapped right foot just to provoke the distant hit of hurt.

  Louisa began to notice gaps in her thoughts, little absences. She believed she saw Adam’s sports bag float past along with Diamond on a duck’s back, his wings outstretched. Her eyes kept closing; when they did, the culvert pulled her under and she had to haul herself back up, coughing up water as she broke out of the plummeting stoop. The last time she brought her head above the surface, she looked out across the dull void of the flooded field and stared up at the pines, which had never appeared so tall. This was a new angle. The entrance to the den was now submerged, and she thought of Christopher one last time, tried to will his name into a scream, although she could not move her lips. I have failed, she thought.

  Closing one eye and then the other, she noticed that half of her vision was blue, everything a clean cobalt monochrome. As she withdrew into the stone of her body and relinquished herself to the pull of the water, she recalled a doctor on a TV news programme, commenting on a little boy
trapped in the snow, his pulse slowed to a single beat per minute. Doctors have a saying: you’re not dead until you’re warm and dead. She had always believed that; lived her life by it.

  She lost consciousness, and the water poured into her. Her breathing slowed, and her metabolism closed down with the cold. Some minutes later, her heart stopped.

  Maggie was inside the hollowed chimney of the paper mill, staring up at the rain flashing in the circle of sky. It was the kind of place Christopher might have come to – abandoned, private, off-limits. But he wasn’t there. Maggie quietly apologised to David, her words muffled by echoes, the sentences swallowing themselves. She walked back out to where Adam sat in the driver’s seat of the Land Rover, his head bowed.

  She had been unable to raise a substantial search party. Richie Foxton took his van out. The staff from the park, most of whom she dismissed as soon as they had fed the animals, promised to be vigilant on their journeys home. Philip Cassidy had gone out separately to search the pubs in Detton and the surrounding area. Reg Birkett, from the Parish Council, had refused to mobilise a team, claiming that most deaths and injuries in floods are sustained during ill-advised rescue attempts. The police told her much the same, said the best thing she could do was stay home and wait. If someone had spoken to Christopher today, as Adam had, then he couldn’t really be classified as missing. They said she was overreacting.

  In the Land Rover, she wound down the windows to clear the steam. Adam’s familiar scent mixed with the fresh mud and wet stone smells from outside. ‘Is Louisa going to look for Christopher?’ she asked.

  He kept his eyes on the road. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  The field, when they reached it, appeared otherworldly, as if scattered with fragments of their premonitions: the fire and rescue team and the ambulance, its lights melting in the rain-twisted visor of their windscreen, the punctured vessel of the brook. The sight of the den, which Maggie had forgotten, now made her nauseous. ‘Please, no,’ she said, over and over. The rescue team were in life jackets and dry suits, some of them up to their necks in water, three of them surely carrying Christopher’s body on a stretcher. She and Adam both jumped out of the van. Maggie plunged into the water and waded towards the stretcher. The men from the rescue team shouted at her to stay back. Philip Cassidy, who had arrived by the brook after searching the pubs and called the emergency services, went after Maggie, restrained her.

  Adam stood for a moment on the road, his hands on his head, his lips pursed, for he had seen Louisa’s empty van, the door open. He watched Maggie’s reaction as Philip spoke to her. She frowned, and shook her head slowly. The paramedic called out to the men approaching the ambulance with the stretcher. ‘We’re going to have to intubate her. Nice and quick.’

  Adam went down into the water too, but he could not move fast enough to get to the stretcher. The men in their dry suits passed him by, metres away. They looked like performers, their hands and arms moving in smooth powerful strokes as they loaded the stretcher onto the ambulance. Adam saw her. Just a glimpse of the body he had seen rising from the bed that afternoon.

  Maggie was now calling after the last remaining members of the rescue team. ‘My boy. Christopher,’ she was saying. ‘Do you know where he is?’

  He was less than a mile away, but much higher. Christopher looked down from the diving platform on his woods, which were just a brown pincushion now, the silver slants of rain coming in through the opening lights of the houses and streets in the distance. An hour ago, Louisa had stood beneath him, run her hands through her hair, and pulled up the hood on her waterproof jacket. He thought of nachos and hot-dogs and whisky and cheesecake, and began to cry. In the distance, he could hear shouts and sirens. He started to move, to call back, because he thought the shouts were meant for him.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  From the corridor of the hospital, Maggie looked out on a poorly lit courtyard with a carp pond, a couple of benches, and a plastic heron standing at the edge of the water to deter real herons from landing there. Patients and visitors were prohibited from entering the courtyard because of the possibility of contracting salmonella from the fish. Maggie thought of what Christopher would have said on being confronted by such a rule. That’s ludicrous. I’m not going to have, erm, coitus with the bloody fish. But he was not there to say it because he did not come to the hospital.

  That afternoon on her way back to the house to make more phone calls, she had found him walking through the garden, in tears, his sleeves rolled up, his forearms out, a faint pink crosshatch of scratches on the skin. She held him, took most of his weight. He trembled against her. She took him into the house, gave him brandy and ran a bath for him. When he came out, she told him she was going to the hospital, and asked him to come along.

  ‘After what she did to me?’ he said. ‘You must be insane.’

  ‘But she was trying to—’ Maggie stopped herself, realising what she was about to say, realising that Christopher would not be able to take it.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Philip is downstairs if you need anything.’ She held him again, couldn’t help it.

  It was after midnight when they finally stabilised Louisa. ‘She’s sedated,’ the doctor said. ‘The thing about hypothermia is that it’s a preservative state. The cold protects the brain. We have to hope she got cold quickly, and that it did a good enough job. Her temperature is up now, so it’s just a question of waiting.’

  ‘How long will she be like this?’ Maggie said.

  The doctor turned down his mouth and shrugged.

  ‘Will she get better?’ Maggie said.

  ‘Difficult to say. She was in cardiac arrest when they found her. She was almost completely unresponsive.’

  That’s just her way, Maggie had thought with a sad smile.

  The vitiligo fish mooched around by the underwater lights, featureless. She thought of Louisa in that suspended realm, her body shut down, her mind alive. Maggie tried to imagine it as a pleasant place – somewhere solitary and clear. Somewhere Louisa would enjoy. The stillness of one long moment.

  Adam came down the corridor in the dry clothes she had brought: Christopher’s jeans turned up and gathered at the waist, a green polo shirt. His short hair was soft, his eyes red.

  ‘Ta,’ he said, pointing down at the clothes.

  ‘You look ten years younger,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Any more news?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can I go and see her?’ he said.

  ‘Nurse said family only,’ Maggie said, rolling her eyes.

  In the early hours of the morning Maggie drove Adam back through the city, which was bright with the daubed reflection of its streetlight canopy. Out in the villages – where the power was down – the view was more sinister, the water lurking in syrupy, malignant pools. They looked away from the field when the headlights caught the reflective strips of swiftly erected hazard gates and signs. She pulled up by his car. ‘Sake,’ he said.

  ‘You gonna be okay?’ she said.

  ‘I will if she will.’

  Maggie nodded.

  ‘We left it badly,’ Adam said.

  He got out of the car, unable to say more just then. His feet, in Christopher’s too-big boots, sank into the pudding ground. Maggie left him with his hands in his pockets, looking at the two bags on the porch which loomed in the full beam, as if promising a holiday.

  Over the next few days, there were complications in the ICU. An infection, pneumonia. Louisa was conscious but weak, unable to talk. Watching her strong-jawed, wide face, Maggie longed to see the brightness of her eyes.

  In the intervals between these episodes, Adam and Maggie met in the pub across from the infirmary, or by the window looking out onto the carp pond. Adam told Maggie all he could remember of the last six months. Such was his way, he did not invent compliments from Louisa to Maggie, keeping instead to the real speech. Sometimes Maggie, delighted to recognise the behaviour of her friend in what Adam said, would laugh freely and then remember t
hat they were sitting at the sorry end of the story. She would then stare into her drink, or at the sharp beak of the fake heron. The way Adam told it, Louisa was a different character to the woman who had tried to crush her hand when David first introduced them. That was something, at least.

  They talked, too, of that day in the rain, of Philip finding her, how strange it must have been: her open van, the field so still and quiet, her head and shoulders lolling in the water, as though she was standing, peering into the flood. Maggie could not help but imagine the scene, although it upset her greatly.

  Eventually, Adam told Maggie the truth about their argument that day in the house. He told her about Diamond and the transmitter, how Louisa had refused to join him in searching for Christopher. ‘So when I said to you, in the car, that she was out looking for him, I thought I was lying. But it came true, I suppose,’ he said. ‘She did go and look for him, didn’t she?’

  After two days, Christopher came into the pub across from the hospital. ‘This dump looks like a cabinet,’ he said, taking in the dark wood panelling. ‘And smells like my navel.’

  ‘Have you come to see Louisa?’ Maggie said.

  ‘Erm. Yes. I thought I’d be the bigger man.’

  He sat down. Maggie smoothed an errant flick of hair at the crown of his head, which sprang back to its original curl. He nodded briefly at Adam. ‘I’m sorry, Adamski, if I caused any undue relationship tension between you and Louisa. It’s difficult for me to read signals sometimes – it says so in my evaluation document. I certainly didn’t mean to create a triangle of any kind.’

  ‘It’s no bother, youth,’ Adam said.

  ‘It’d be nice to create a square for once,’ Christopher said.