Num8ers

by Rachel Ward

  Spider’s nerves were getting the better of him. He just couldn’t stop. “It’s very good of you. To stop for us. Very good.”

  “That’s all right.” You could tell now she was regretting her reckless impulse, would never do it again. “Where are you heading?”

  My stomach flipped as I realized we hadn’t agreed on a story. After two days on our own, we’d suddenly plunged back into the real world. Spider just plowed ahead, ad-libbing. “We’re heading to Bristol, going to stay with my aunt. She’s in Bristol, yeah.”

  “How did you end up at Whiteways?”

  “Um, we’ve just been hitching. Got dropped by the main road. Been walking for a couple of days.”

  As he was talking, I noticed the lady’s half-eaten bit of toast. She’d put it down by the gear stick and forgotten about it. Saliva jetted into my mouth. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Oh. My. God. I couldn’t help myself — I leaned forward, stretched my hand out, and picked it up, then sat back and crammed it straight into my mouth, folding it up so it all went in. It was cold and a bit soggy, and the best thing I’ve ever tasted. The salty butter made more saliva gush out, and some dribble ran down my chin as I chewed.

  This was all too much for the boy. “Mummy,” he squealed. “He’s eaten your toast!”

  He?

  “Oh,” came her reaction. “Never mind, Freddy. I’d finished, really.”

  I wiped my chin with my sleeve, reluctantly swallowed; I could have kept it in my mouth forever. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just…hungry.”

  “That’s quite all right,” she said evenly. The little girl started crying, quietly whimpering next to me. “It’s all right, children. We’re nearly there. Nearly there.” She didn’t need to say “Thank God” — we all knew she was thinking it.

  We were on the outskirts of a town now. I can’t tell you how good it was to see houses, to know there were shops and cafés only a few minutes away.

  She pulled up at the side of the road. “School’s off that way. I’ll drop you here. It’s only five minutes’ walk to the town center. And there’s a station, too.”

  “Right, thanks, thanks. You’ve been very kind.” I climbed out, past Freddy, who was holding himself so flat against his seat that he was almost two-dimensional. We got the bags out of the back and stood on the pavement as the car moved off into the traffic.

  “How lucky was that?” Spider said.

  “Mm, think we’ll be the last hitchhikers they ever pick up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, nothing. I don’t think we were their kind of people.”

  “Yeah,” he laughed. “And I think they thought you was a boy. Need their eyes tested.”

  “Spider, do you think they knew who we were?”

  “Nah, she wouldn’t have picked us up if she did, would she?”

  With the traffic streaming past us, I was starting to feel more exposed than when we’d been walking across the fields. We’d been cut off from civilization for two days. What had everyone been hearing about us? What had they seen on the TV or read in the papers? In one of those cars going past, was someone reaching for their phone right now, calling the police? I felt edgy, really edgy.

  “We should find a shop and then disappear, Spider. We can’t hang about.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  He grabbed the bags and set off down the road, long legs striding along. I had to jog to keep up. We’d got to the first few shops, keeping an eye out for a corner shop or a little food shop or something, when we saw a signboard on one side of the street: RITA’S CAFÉ — ALL-DAY BREAKFASTS COOKED TO ORDER.

  Spider had stopped. He was staring at the board, licking his lips. I could read his mind — I knew what he was going to say before he said it.

  “I know we shouldn’t hang around, but, Christ, Jem, I’m hungry. What do you think?”

  We both knew we should stick to Plan A — go into a corner shop, buy some sandwiches, water, cereal bars, all that stuff, and then find a shed or a garage or somewhere and have another picnic — but there was no way either of us could walk past that place.

  “Sod it,” I said. “Even a condemned man has a last meal, don’t he?”

  That big grin broke out again, and I swear a bit of drool trickled down his chin.

  “That’s my girl,” he said, and he picked up our stuff and headed into Rita’s.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I’ve never been to Africa and seen a hyena ripping into the carcass of an antelope, but I bet it would be pretty similar to the sight of Spider devouring a cooked breakfast. He used his fork like a shovel, didn’t stop to breathe or anything like that, just continuously scooped it up and in, up and in. He looked up at me. I hadn’t even touched mine.

  “What’s up with you? You’re not telling me you’re not hungry.” A bubble of egg yolk oozed out of the corner of his mouth.

  “No, I’m just enjoying the sight of it — it’s awesome.” And it was. After all that time out in the wild, eating chips, cookies, and chocolate, it was almost too good to look at: a couple of plump sausages glistening with grease; the perfect fried egg, pure white and pure yellow; strips of bacon fried into crispy waves; a pool of beans, the juice slowly spreading across the plate.

  He snorted, and his egg bubble grew and turned into a drip. “You’re mental. Dig in.” He waved a fork in the direction of the woman behind the counter, who I guess was Rita, and called out, “Hey, could we get some French toast with this?”

  “Coming up!” she replied cheerily, clearly a woman who liked to see people enjoying her food.

  I cut the end off one of the sausages, let out an involuntary groan of satisfaction as the first mouthful hit home, and then steadily worked my way through the plateful. Rita waddled out from behind the counter, bringing a plate of French toast. She was one of those people who almost look wider than they are tall, her enormous chest — barely contained by a man’s checkered shirt — bulging out from behind her apron. Her legs were bare under a square-shaped denim skirt, and she had on fluffy slippers, the pink fake fur globbed together in places where the bacon fat had spattered.

  “Shall I top those off?” she asked, nodding at our mugs of tea.

  “Cheers,” said Spider, moving his mug nearer the edge of the table. She shuffled over to the counter and fetched the big silver-colored teapot. The brown liquid steamed as it arced into our mugs. The café was empty apart from us, and she didn’t seem in any hurry to get back behind the counter.

  “Been sleeping rough?” she asked. It wasn’t an accusation, just a friendly question, the way she said it.

  “Yeah,” we both said together.

  She eased herself down into a chair at the table opposite ours.

  “Do you need to phone anyone, kids? You can use the phone here, free of charge.”

  Spider rested his fork on the edge of the plate. “It’s OK. We’ve got mobiles.”

  I couldn’t help thinking of Val, perched on her stool in the kitchen, her ashtray piling up with cigarette butts, and the look in her eyes as we drove away.

  “If there’s someone, somewhere, waiting for news about you, you should give them a ring. Just let them know you’re OK. Take it from me, lovey. I know what it’s like to sit looking at that phone, willing it to ring. Breaks your heart, it does.” She wasn’t looking at Spider and me anymore; her eyes were directed at one of the pictures on the wall, but I could tell she wasn’t seeing it. She was somewhere else, somewhere painful.

  I kept quiet, pretended to be reading the newspaper that was lying on the table next to me. I didn’t want to hear anyone else’s sob story. Spider was too busy wiping a piece of French toast across his plate and posting it into his big gob to ask, but she took our silence as encouragement to go on.

  “Happened to me, you see. My Shaunie. We used to have spats — everyone does, don’t they? He used to go off for a few hours, come home when he’d cooled down. I never thought he’d leave for good.” Her face was shining d
amply, from the heat of the kitchen, maybe, or the effort of telling us about her son. She wiped her forehead with the bottom of her apron. “Anyway, that’s just what he did. We fell out one day, can’t even remember what it was about, and off he went. I wasn’t too bothered, thought he’d turn up later. I got his dinner ready and put it in the oven to keep it warm. It was still there the next morning, dried up and stuck to the plate. Shepherd’s pie and veggies. That’s what I’d cooked him. Always liked a bit of shepherd’s pie. I rang the police. They weren’t really concerned. Seventeen, you see. You can do what you like at seventeen. I rang his mates, all the places he might go. Nothing. He just disappeared. Never seen him again. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead.” Her voice wobbled, and she stopped talking and sat there taking deep breaths in and out.

  Embarrassed for her, I kept my eyes on the table, on that newspaper, and for the first time the words in the headline came into focus.

  LONDON BOMBING — WHY DID THEY RUN?

  And underneath, a grainy security camera picture of people standing in line in a shop. The camera must have been near the ceiling, because you were looking at them from above, couldn’t see their faces, except for one person who was glancing up, looking straight at the camera. It was me, of course. In that service station. On the front page of the paper.

  Spider had put the last piece of French toast down on his plate.

  “That’s terrible,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Rita nodded, acknowledging his sympathy.

  “Here.” He held a grubby tissue out to her.

  “S’alright, I’ve got a hankie somewhere.” She dug in her apron pocket, fished out a big, white, man’s hankie, and blew her nose noisily.

  “Changes your life, something like that,” she said quietly. “You don’t like to go out, just in case the phone rings. You stop sleeping properly, always listening for that key in the lock. Think you’re going mad sometimes, when you see someone that looks just like him from the back, or hear someone behind you laughing just like he used to, and you turn ’round and it isn’t him.” Sweat was beading on her forehead again, and she lifted up her apron, completely covering her face for a second, and mopped it away. “You got someone, somewhere, going through what I’m going through — you give them a ring.”

  I could feel sweat prickling at my armpits and forehead as well, but for a different reason. Her words drifted over my head as I read the story beneath the headline: These are the first pictures of the two young delinquents seen running away from the London Eye minutes before Tuesday’s terrorist bomb exploded. Police are stressing that at this time the two are considered key witnesses who may hold vital information about the terrorist attack. They have issued an urgent appeal for them to come forward.

  Rita had stopped talking and was sitting, mangling her apron in her damp hands. Nobody spoke for a minute.

  “Thing is,” said Spider, “people can trace phone calls, can’t they?”

  “And you don’t want to be found.” Her eyes flicked between the two of us, not judging, and I thought that her Shaun must have been an idiot to leave a mum like that.

  I clocked her number. Fifteen, sixteen years to go. Would she see her son again, or would it be fifteen years of missed birthdays, lonely Christmases? I tried not to think about it — not my problem.

  “Tell you what. If you left a number, I could ring for you, after you’ve gone,” she said. “I could ring after a couple of hours, tomorrow if you like, just to let ’em know I’ve seen you and you’re doing OK.”

  Spider nodded. “Yeah, yeah, that’d be cool. Give us time to be on our way.”

  “I’ll get some paper and a pen.” Rita hauled herself back onto her feet.

  I leaned forward over the Formica table. “Are you crazy?” I hissed.

  “What?”

  “Giving her your nan’s number?”

  “Like she said, she can ring tomorrow, when we’re long gone. It’s sound.”

  I didn’t say anything, just pushed the paper across the table toward him.

  “What…?” he started to say, then he saw the picture. “Oh, shit.”

  We both looked toward the counter. Rita had her back to us, feeling around under a pile of paper for a pen. I tucked the newspaper into my coat, and, without speaking, we picked up our bags as quietly as we could and got up out of our chairs, trying not to scrape them on the floor.

  I looked back when I was by the door. Spider was still by the table. What the hell was he doing? He reached into his pocket and got a couple of fivers out of his envelope. For Christ’s sake, I wanted to scream, we haven’t got time for that! I eased down the door handle and pulled, praying that there wasn’t a bell about to betray us. It was OK, and I slipped out, Spider close behind me now.

  “Don’t run, Jem. Just walk. Keep it cool.”

  We were only a few feet away when we heard Rita’s voice coming out of the open door. “Where did…? Wait, come back!” We quickened the pace.

  “Don’t look back, Jem. Just keep going.”

  I didn’t need to look back. In my mind’s eye, I could see her standing in the doorway for a while, watching us disappear, then turning back, picking up the five-pound bills, and holding them in her damp hand as she sank down into a chair. Breathing heavily in and out, thinking of us, thinking of Shaun…until she realized the newspaper was gone, put two and two together, and reached for the phone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The town’s High Street was full of police informers. Every passerby was a pair of eyes and a mobile phone. While we’d been isolated in the country, I’d started to think we were just getting paranoid, that it was all in our heads, this need to run and hide. My picture on the front page of the paper told a different story. It was real. They were all out to get us. Walking along the road, it felt like it wouldn’t be long now. Even in a sleepy little market town in the middle of nowhere there were hundreds of people out and about: people who watched the news, went on the Internet, read newspapers.

  Another thing was bothering me. Try as I might not to meet people’s eyes, I couldn’t avoid them all, and there they were again: people’s numbers. Telling me stuff about strangers, handing me their death sentences. I wanted to walk around with my eyes closed, to blot the numbers out. I didn’t want to be reminded that everyone around me was going to die. The reason was walking beside me, holding my hand. Spider. For the first time in my life, I had someone I wanted to keep hold of. The date on the paper — December 11 — was like a slap in the face. Only four days to go.

  “Listen,” he said urgently. “We’d better buy some supplies quickly and then find somewhere to disappear. We’re too obvious here.”

  He wasn’t kidding. There may have been a few people walking or driving along who were lost in their own thoughts, not paying us any attention, but everyone else was clocking us. I guess we were a pretty odd sight: two scruffy kids, one ridiculously tall, the other looking like a midget beside him. And I guess my hunch in the car had been right: Most of them didn’t see a black man from one year to the next. There were certainly no other black faces around today. It was like one of those programs on TV, only in reverse — you know, where some white guy goes into an African village and the kids rush up to him, touching his white skin and feeling his hair. Except no one was rushing up to us. They looked at us and looked away. One woman, coming toward us on the sidewalk, glanced up quickly and then made her kid walk on the other side of her, away from us. And I thought, Sod you, whatever we’ve got, it’s not contagious, you stuck-up cow.

  We found a convenience store. Spider unwrapped some ten-pound notes from his wad of money and sent me in. I grabbed stuff as quickly as I could: a few chocolate bars and bags of chips again, yeah, but also some sensible stuff this time — water, fruit juice, cereal bars.

  The store, squeezed in between an antiques shop and a greengrocer’s, smelled stale. It was packed from floor to ceiling with snacks and drinks, newspapers and magazines, loads of porno ones
. It was like a little bit of London parachuted into the middle of nowhere. The guy behind the counter was reading a newspaper as I went ’round choosing. You could tell he was watching me.

  I put the stuff on the counter. There were cigarettes behind him, so I asked for half a dozen packs, and then I spotted something else: three or four flashlights huddled together on the shelf. I bought two, and the batteries to go with them. He put the stuff in a couple of bags, watching as I fumbled with the money. He knows, I thought as I stood there. He knows.

  He took the money. “Ta,” he said in a gravelly voice, like his vocal cords had been shredded by fifty years of smoking. Then, as I turned to leave, he called out. “Here…”

  And I knew the game was up. What was he going to do to us? An old git like that couldn’t stop me, could he? I kept walking.

  “Hey, you!” he shouted louder. I turned ’round. “You forgot your change.”

  I went back and took it from him silently.

  Outside on the street, I gave Spider one of the bags to carry, and he grabbed my free hand in his. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We ducked into a side alley between two shops. It twisted and turned, behind houses and past some vacant lots, then out onto a canal towpath. We followed it along for a bit. A wall sprang up on the other side of me, and a train rattled past beyond it. We came to a tunnel. The path was narrow— a damp, cold, curved wall on one side, a railing on the other to stop you from falling into the canal.

  Spider let go of my hand. “You go ahead. I’ll be right behind you.”

  It was difficult to see where you were treading, and my ankles kept twisting on the uneven path. Halfway along, I started to really lose my nerve. A figure appeared at the end I was heading toward: a big, dark shape blotting out most of the light. I looked over my shoulder, expecting to see someone behind us, too — it was a perfect place to trap someone — nowhere to go, no one to hear you scream.