A fireman walked past and Anna said: ‘Gas explosion?’
‘’Fraid not’, he mumbled without stopping.
‘’Fraid not?’
‘They were very lucky, neighbours got them out.’
Anna turned around and went home.
On the way she phoned Paul: straight to voicemail again. This time she didn’t leave a message. As she turned on to her road she saw two men outside her flat. One was knocking on the door; the other was looking through the living room window with his gloved hands shading his eyes. She was instantly irritated. Who the hell looks through a living room window like that if you don’t answer the door? She was about to march up the road and announce her presence with an ‘Oi’, but something stopped her. They didn’t look like salesmen or Jehovah’s Witnesses. They could have been policemen coming to tell her about Meena but that didn’t make sense, this was a time for family and friends, not work colleagues up the road. And the one knocking on the door didn’t look official: he lumbered, almost strutted, and he spat in the road. And the other one: who wore gloves with a three piece suit? In September? Anna slowed. They hadn’t seen her but if she simply turned around and walked the way she had come they would notice, so she crossed over and walked down the first side street she came across, Osbaldeston Road. She glanced at the men who were both now standing in the road looking at the flat. She walked fifty yards up Osbaldeston Road and waited a few moments. Then she walked back to the end of the street and looked round the corner. One of the men had moved his car, a blue Ford Focus, up outside Anna’s flat; his companion was still standing looking at the flat. The driver said something and the second man nodded, walked over and got into the car. They drove off. Anna waited a few moments to see if they came back. When they didn’t, she walked very quickly to her own front door and went inside.
She had no idea why she did what she did next, but she started packing a bag. Clothes, laptop, flashdrive, address book. She fed the fish. She phoned Tom, who didn’t answer, and left a message: ‘Hi honey, sorry to bother you, just needed to tell you that we, I, have rats, yeah I know. Having the exterminators in, they are going to fumigate, or whatever the hell it is they do, so I am going away for a few days. I know you weren’t planning on coming home this weekend, but if you changed your mind change it back again. The flat is off limits for a little while. I’m going to stay at Grace’s. Talk soon. Love you.’ Christ, she thought, that came easy. She didn’t stop moving as she spoke. She went to the kitchen and threw some bagels, cheese, tomatoes and juice into a carrier bag. ‘Pretend it’s a picnic,’ she said to herself for no reason whatsoever.
Anna drove a blue Citroen Pluriel. In terms of speed it was one step up from a pedal car. Why that mattered to her as she loaded her travel bag, computer and cheese into the back made no sense. Nor did the fleeting thought that if they knew where she lived they would know what she drove. Which she instantly decided was a step too far toward paranoia. She got in, started the car and drove off. When she got to the end of the road the Ford Focus passed her going in the other direction, this time with a third person in the back. ‘Good instincts,’ she thought, before realising that it did not signal anything good.
Anna drove all the way up to Hampstead Heath. She had no idea why. She didn’t particularly like it up there and didn’t know it very well, but it felt random, and random felt safe. She parked the car and wandered up Parliament Hill. She took out her phone to call Paul again but she didn’t dial. Instead she called Grace.
Grace lived in Muswell Hill. She had been left money by the grandparents of her daughter and she had used it to buy a house which she renovated and sold and used the money to buy another and then another. Grace owned a four-storey townhouse in the heart of London that was worth around one-and-a-half million pounds. She didn’t have a mortgage or a job. She lived on the rents of the three other houses she owned and she also supported her daughter, Laura, who was studying medicine at Cambridge. Grace thought the random events that had come to make up her life were funny. Laura and Tom had grown up together.
‘Anna,’ she said when she answered the phone. ‘What a lovely surprise.’
‘Grace, I may need a head check but I think I’m on the run.’
‘OK,’ said Grace slowly. ‘I think I am a bit out of practice but I’ll give it a go if you like.’
‘Meena’s flat burnt down, Grace. Did you hear about the fire in East London last night? That was her flat. She was in it. Neighbours rescued them. I asked a fireman if it had been an accident, well actually I asked if it had been a gas explosion. He said no. When I went back to my flat there were two men trying to get in.’
‘Trying to get in?’
‘Well, banging on the door and looking through the windows. They went away and came back again. In between time I went in and packed a bag. Am I being paranoid?’
Grace didn’t say anything for a moment. ‘Have you spoken to Paul?’
‘I’ve tried. He left me a message yesterday, asked me to call him, said he was ‘concerned’. Concerned for Paul is significant, Grace. Grace? You think I’m being paranoid don’t you?’
‘I don’t know, sweetie. What sort of car were they driving?’
‘A blue Ford Focus.’
Grace paused for a moment. ‘Well, there is one of those sitting across the road with a man in it reading a paper.’ More guarded than dramatic.
‘What if it is the same one? Maybe they know you are my best friend and that I would come to you?
‘OK, calm down Anna.’
‘What if they have my phone tapped?’
‘Can they do that with mobile phones?’
‘They can do anything.’
‘Can they? How do you know? And hang on, why would they?’
‘Oh bugger! Grace, I phoned Tom and told him I was coming to stay with you. If they intercepted that call they would be waiting for me at your house.’
Grace was quiet for a moment. ‘OK. You may be being paranoid and goodness knows you’ve had a shock but…’
‘Yes, I know, it could be nothing. But I’m not going to use this phone again, just in case, and I am going away for a few days. Instinct, Grace, my instinct says something bad is happening.’ She heard Grace sigh. ‘Grace?’
‘OK sweetie. Listen to your instincts, but if they start talking too loudly call me. Please.’
Anna cut the connection and something long forgotten to her began to sweep up from her stomach toward her throat. Something like fear, and it concentrated her mind. She walked over to a bench that looked down on London. It was nine in the morning; the autumnal light was trying to break through the smog that hung over the city. It looked a long way away and it felt empty. Her hands were tingling and her stomach was tight. She took her laptop from her bag and opened it up. She logged on to her private email address, hesitated for a moment before typing T into the ‘to’ box. Tom’s address appeared automatically. ‘Dear Tom, I’ve lost my phone! Must be time for a change. Will call you with my new number asap. In other news Grace has suggested we go to Paris for the weekend. How spontaneous am I? Will bring you back an onion. Love mum xx.’ She pressed send and turned off the laptop. She wanted to sit and stare down on London for a while but her instinct was to keep moving and so she stood up, almost nodded down at the city in front of her and walked quickly back to her car. It may be, she thought, that actually all my instinct is telling me is that I need a couple of days beside the sea, that I am over-reacting to what are simple coincidences, that I am bored and just trying to shake myself back to life. She raised her eyebrows to the sky and shook her head. ‘Listen to your body,’ she whispered to herself and unlocked her car door. She got in, locked the door and began to drive in the opposite direction to Manchester.
10. A Prisoner Of The Past
Adam Sands was leaving the faintest of marks on the world he found himself in. This was not some sort of ecologic
ally-aware grand design for being. It had simply evolved, the way retreat can.
He lived in Margate and he sold books for a living: some rare, some second hand, some slightly over-priced. He didn’t make a lot of money but didn’t live a life that required it. He lived quietly; the books helped with that. His small shop was considered quaint by people too polite to call it outdated. It smelt of old paper and salt, and the local community tended to like the idea of having a bookshop rather more than they liked the idea of shopping in it, so it was rarely full. Full would involve about nine people, including Adam. He had been thinking in recent months about modernizing, and by modernizing he meant serving coffee and putting a second-hand sofa next to the History section, but he tended not to make decisions if he could avoid it. Anyway, he got by with the help of online sales, specializing in outdated leftist texts and out-of-print fiction. Niche markets that required as wide an audience as possible. Perhaps the best decision he ever made was getting a website designed and constructed by a bear of a man called ‘Freaky Bob’. Adam had paid him for his work by lending him his small boat a few times so Freaky Bob could go fishing, and giving him all three volumes of Leszek Kolakowski’s ‘Main Currents of Marxism’. These books were received with a reverence that did not correspond with the fact that they were not wanted by anyone else in the country, and had in fact been sitting in the Politics and Philosophy section for the whole of the six years Adam had owned the shop.
Three times a week Adam cycled the nine miles to the sheltered housing, warden-controlled flat his 88 year old mother lived in. He would do her shopping, read to her and sit in silence while she told him about things that didn’t make sense, like the internet, mild incontinence, the cost of milk and God. He had ostensibly come to Margate, from Goa via Thailand and four different Greek islands, to be near enough to look after her after a minor stroke. In truth, he had drifted ever since he left nursing and she had managed for the twelve years he had been away from England and he didn’t really have anywhere else to settle anyway. She was strong beneath the frailty, and sarcastic. Every time she saw him she asked: ‘Are you still persevering with that book business, dear?’
‘Yes mum, I thought I’d give it another week, see how it goes.’
And she would sigh and say: ‘With your education you should be writing books, not selling them. You do actually sell some don’t you?’
‘No mum.’ Exasperated, tired. ‘Mostly I collect them to stop other people from reading.’ Later he would cycle home, maybe do some yoga and he would play his guitar very, very quietly.
Today a non-buying customer was lamenting the end of bookshops to Adam and not buying anything as he did so. ‘It’s the overheads you see,’ said the man who didn’t own a bookshop to the man who did. ‘These big online corporations, your Amazons, they can buy in bulk and they don’t have the shop overheads. Have you thought of going digital’? He had well cut hair, an expensive light brown leather jacket, pressed tan trousers and a very red face that hinted at high blood pressure or a tendency toward alcohol. As the man spoke Adam thought that the skin around his face lost interest in holding his head together when it got below his mouth. He could see its point.
Adam said nothing, secure in the fact that the non-buying customer would.
‘Not that you would be able to compete of course. It’s all about size now. It’s just a matter of time I imagine before all shops become a thing of the past…’
‘What about the butchers?’ Adam said quietly. ‘Hard to imagine people buying their meat online, isn’t it?’
‘Not really, we do our supermarket shop online now. We’re almost there already.’
‘Right,’ said Adam, who didn’t eat meat and had no idea why he was wondering about online butchers. ‘But you don’t know where the meat comes from. Might that not matter to some people?’
‘Not really, not when you think about it.’
And both men stood silently pretending to think about it.
Adam had closely cropped grey hair, a tanned well-lined face and a largely passive expression gathered around a tight mouth and blue uncommunicating eyes. His right arm was embroidered with a full sleeve Japanese-style tattoo depicting large waves and floating flowers, clearly displayed under a short-sleeved red and even more floral Hawaiian shirt. Tall and slim, he moved quietly as befits a man in a bookshop and often wore reading spectacles perched on the end of his nose, which softened his appearance enough to attract the random thoughts and occasional feelings of strangers in his shop. A long time ago he made his living by listening to people tell him their troubles, and he rather enjoyed the fact that now he could make his living by barely hearing a word anyone said.
In the corner, carefully looking through second-hand fiction, again, were Grimy Nige and Jim. They were regulars. Adam thought that sometimes they came to simply stroke the books and wondered why they didn’t spend more time in the library, or at least he did until he visited the library and found out there weren’t very many books in it any more. Adam quite liked Grimy Nige and Jim, in part because they rarely spoke and in part because they were so excited when they bought the latest James Lee Burke that they argued—they were both probably in their mid twenties—about who was going to carry it.
‘What do you do about new books?’ asked the man.
‘Sell them,’ said Adam.
‘No, I mean how do you compete with the supermarkets and so forth?’
Who actually said ‘so forth’? Adam wondered. The worst thing about working in a shop was that you can’t just say ‘Well I have to go somewhere else’ and walk away. It was his shop, it was a small shop and there was nowhere to walk to. He had to stay there, and the chances of someone coming in and wanting to buy something were slim to nil so he couldn’t say ‘Excuse me I just need to attend to this less boring person who is actually shopping.’ He just had to stand there and be polite. Shops were like prisons in that way, he thought.
‘Compete?’ mused Adam quietly, ignoring the fact that the man in his shop looked slightly uncomfortable with this. And then something like rescue arrived. Two customers, not apparently together, came in in quick succession. The first was a blonde woman wearing a beige French mac and long brown boots. She smiled confidently at Adam and started looking at the half-heartedly titled ‘Psychology and Alternative Therapies’ section that formed itself when Adam decided to merge Freud and ‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Pets’ with Reiki, the I Ching and—just for the hell of it—a book about Astrology.
It was her walk Adam noticed: her stride was short and her shoulders hunched. She moved as though moving was an inconvenience and managed to present a gracelessness which made her appear less attractive than she was. Adam assumed she did this on purpose. He tended to think most people did most things on purpose, even if they didn’t always admit it. He wondered why she did that and she instantly became more interesting to him, although he realized, vaguely, that given the man who currently appeared to be trying to move into his shop he would be interested in anyone at the moment. ‘Maybe she is clever,’ he thought, and women of a certain age who are clever tend to play down their looks for fear they are not taken seriously. ‘That would explain the coat,’ he thought, which was horrible. ‘Or maybe she thinks she is clever but isn’t. And has rubbish taste in clothes as well?’ Anyway, this was one of the things he did to combat the slowness of the shop when it began to feel oppressive: make stuff up about strangers.
The other customer—who brought the total number of people in the shop to six, and it was neither a Saturday nor the publication date of a Harry Potter book—was a young thin man Adam had not seen before. He looked at Adam and the red-faced man and when they both looked back he turned away and started flicking through the shelves nearest the door, which were ‘Cut price—miscellaneous’. If anyone was going to steal anything on their way out let it be something hard to categorize was Adam’s reasoning.
‘Mi
nd you,’ said the man loudly. ‘You seem to be bringing in the punters now.’ A pointless sentence designed as a precursor to him expanding his boringness outward.
‘I was just saying to this gentleman that I imagine it is very hard to compete against the larger bookshops. What is that brings you in here, my dear?’
Adam didn’t know whether to cringe or hit him. He didn’t need to do either. The pretty blonde woman glanced up and said with the vaguest hint of a sneer: ‘I like looking at books.’
‘Well that’s the problem,’ the man said immediately. ‘Lots of people like looking at books, not so many of them like buying books from bookshops.’
Adam had had enough now. ‘There’s a shoe shop down the road, you might want to pop in there later to not buy any flip flops and explain to them the end of footwear is nigh?’ As he spoke Adam picked up a handful of books from under the counter and walked round to the fiction section to place them on the shelves. They didn’t need to go on the shelves but it left the man at the counter alone, facing outward at a shop full of people who liked books. The man looked confused for a moment. In front of the counter was a small table with large books displayed. They were there because Adam had seen tables like that in other, what he liked to call ‘proper’ book shops and it offered a place to put books that he didn’t really understand but knew it was good to sell on. The odd celebrity biography, some cook books and most recently a book about cake decoration that cost £35. The man stepped forward and picked it up. He didn’t open it, he turned it over in his hand seeming to both weigh it and see the price on the back.
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