Going Out

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘You were stealing?’ Chantel interrupts, moving and making rustling sounds.

  ‘Oh – is that the spliff? Cheers, mate – yeah, well, we were just kids really. Everyone used to do it. Anyway, we caned a load of packs of Juicy Fruit and mineral water and loads of packets of biscuits for some reason, and the poor guy’s just standing behind the counter watching us, almost smiling really because we’re all being so cheeky, and then, suddenly, I saw the girl, and then she’s gone, but I overheard someone saying something about the A1, so we’ve legged it out of the garage and back into the car and I’ve decided to go for a spin up the A1, see what’s going on there. So there I am, bombing it up the A1, and this guy in the car goes “Dave, look behind you,” so I look in the mirror, and there’s about fifty cars following us, because obviously they think I know where I’m going, and then suddenly I realise that the Old Bill think that as well, because I can see a load of blue lights flashing up behind us, so I’ve just thought to myself, fuck this, and spun the car around across the central reservation – it’s just a grass verge on the A1 – and headed back the other way. But sure enough, because that’s what I’ve done, all the other cars in the convoy have gone and done the same thing. What a mental fucking sight.’

  ‘Why were they following you?’ Chantel asks.

  ‘Rave culture, innit?’ David says. ‘You see a bunch of ravers in a car, and if you’re lost you follow them. Then you’ve got two cars with ravers in them, and someone else sees you and thinks – convoy! – so they follow you, and before you know it you are a convoy, but everyone’s as lost as everyone else.’

  ‘I missed out on all that,’ Chantel says. ‘I would have been about seven in ’88.’

  ‘How old were you, David?’ Charlotte asks.

  ‘In ’88 I was fifteen,’ he says. ‘But when all this shit was going down I was eighteen or nineteen or something. I’d just passed my driving test the year before.’

  ‘My dad does that,’ Julie suddenly says.

  ‘What?’ Charlotte asks.

  ‘He follows cars for no reason. If he’s stuck in traffic and someone turns off, he thinks they know a short cut so he follows them. It’s insane, because they could be going anywhere but he assumes they’re going to the same place as he is, and he just follows them.’

  ‘Your dad’s weird,’ says Chantel.

  ‘So, did you ever find this rave?’ Charlotte asks David.

  ‘Yeah, of course. We went back to South Mimms, followed someone else, and eventually found where we were supposed to be. That’s the thing. Somehow – whether it was through luck, judgement, coincidence, chance, God . . . I dunno, whatever – we always ended up in the right place. It’s mental when you think about it, but suddenly, at the right moment, we’d be listening to the right pirate station that had the instructions, or we’d follow the right car, or we’d bump into someone who knew the organiser, or we’d work something out by logic, which is pretty fucked up considering how many pills we used to be on at the time, and we’d get where we wanted to go. Every single time. Or we’d find somewhere better, using the same methods.’

  ‘There’s a moral to that story,’ says Charlotte. ‘But I’m fucked if I know what it is. Give us that spliff, Dave.’

  Luke’s still under the blanket. He thought he’d come out when Sophie went but it didn’t feel right. He’s too comfortable and sleepy and outside still sounds too terrifying. If he stays where he is, he can pretend he’s in bed at home; that’s the plan. Luke’s problem: when you see something on TV – because, of course, Luke’s seen roads and vans and journeys and everything on TV, so these things aren’t alien to him – it’s not real. When you see something on the screen, you’re in your room. This experience feels like actually being inside the television, which isn’t what Luke wanted. Luke wanted to go into the world – the real world that everyone else experiences – but to him it just feels like the inside of a TV, like the glass has sucked him in and now he’s banging around in this box, trying to get out. Or – worse – he’s escaped from the TV into the outside world like some intrepid neon ray, and now he can’t find the way back in. Either way, this is bad. Either way, he wants to go back to where he started. But as long as he stays under the blanket, he can try to ignore it. He’s been trying to think about Wei, and being healed, but his imagination won’t work any more. He’s having trouble thinking about anything apart from being lost and scared.

  ‘Are we there yet?’ Chantel fake-whines.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, nearly,’ David says. ‘Stop moaning.’

  ‘Where now?’ Julie asks.

  ‘Next left.’

  ‘Are you sure? That looks like a motorway up ahead.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the A1. Don’t worry, we’re not going on it.’

  Charlotte’s found some country-and-western station on the radio.

  ‘I love this,’ she says. ‘It’s so crap.’ She starts singing along.

  ‘Hurry up, Julie,’ Chantel says. ‘This is excruciating.’

  ‘Bitch,’ says Charlotte.

  ‘Slag,’ says Chantel.

  ‘Ladies,’ says David. ‘Settle down.’

  ‘We’re only joking,’ says Chantel. ‘Are we there yet?’

  ‘No,’ David says.

  About ten seconds pass.

  ‘Are we there yet?’ she asks again.

  ‘No, shut up.’

  ‘Is this it?’ Julie asks.

  ‘Oh, yeah. We are there. Nice one.’

  Luke can feel the van slowing and turning, then turning again. Eventually it goes backwards and forwards a couple of times, then stops. The engine cuts out but Luke’s body is still vibrating as if the van’s still going. There’s the sound of people shifting around, and a door slamming, then a door opening and a blast of cold from outside.

  ‘Luke?’ says Julie. She pokes her head under the blanket. ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi. Where are we?’

  ‘South Mimms. We’re going to get some sandwiches and stuff.’

  ‘OK. I’ll just stay here.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, I can’t exactly come in with you, can I?’

  ‘I suppose not. Are you sure you’ll be OK?’

  ‘Yeah. Julie?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What am I going to do if I need to piss?’

  She looks alarmed. ‘Do you?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘Oh. Well, we’ll stop somewhere when you do.’

  ‘Will I have to get out of the van?’

  She frowns. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

  ‘I could use a bottle or something.’

  ‘Don’t worry. We’ll work something out.’

  It’s quiet when Julie and the others have gone. The world could have just ended, and Luke wouldn’t know. If the world ended and Luke was the only survivor, would his life even change? If Luke and Julie were the only survivors, would he even notice?

  As he sits up, he feels dizzy, and sick. Inside the van it’s bright with all the light coming in from outside. In fact – what are those lights? What is this place? Luke thinks of his bedroom, and of outer space. Is this place the gateway between them? Could this be like a place he’s seen on TV, a no-man’s land between reality and fiction; between his bedroom and the moon? Or is it just the outside world, a place where everyone else goes all the time and Luke’s been trying to escape into all his life?

  Once, Luke cut one of his left fingers on a knife. As soon as he felt pain, and saw blood, he tightened his right hand around the hurt finger and squeezed, not wanting to look and see how badly he’d cut it. But, after a few moments, he couldn’t not look any more. And it’s the same now. Luke can’t not look any more. He needs to see how bad it is, and he’s hoping that something about it will be comforting, and that he’ll be able to come out from under his blanket for a while at least, and act normal, even if he does have to wear a space-suit, and even if he might just expire any second. He opens the door to the van and looks
out. Fuck it; big mistake – this is outer space.

  In Luke’s imagination, the outside world is basically a field with a tree in it and a mountain in the background; maybe a water-feature as well – a stream, river or lake. This isn’t that. Luke’s head spins. Maybe it’s the helmet, or the rain – which has made everything that’s not orange look black and wet. Maybe this is a joke. All he can see are cars, lights and concrete, and because Luke has no sense of space or landscape, to him the cars and lights and concrete go on forever. He’d intended to get out of the van and walk around, but now he can’t move. This is the kind of place in which you’d find aliens, big men with guns and children dressed in oily rags hanging around in the rain, excluded from the shiny concrete-and-mercury-vapour paradise in the distance.

  If Luke had to find his way home, what would he do? He wouldn’t be able to do anything, because his house isn’t in this world, or, if it is, it may as well be as far away as the moon is from the earth. If you wanted to get to the moon, how would you do it? If you were a person, you might dream of building a rocket. If you were a moth you’d fly into a lightbulb. Luke wants the others to come back, because he feels like he’d die out here on his own. But what if they never came back? What then? Luke instinctively knows that left alone in this harsh environment with no computer and no telephone, there’d be only one thing he could do. He’d strip off his space-suit and run towards the nearest bright light, and hope that it would be like the sun and kill him quickly. That would be better than facing death at the tentacled hands of whatever lurks in places like this, or collapsing on some dusty highway, hungry and miles from anywhere, knowing your address but not how to read a map.

  Luke puts his head back under the blanket.

  He wonders: maybe moths don’t think lightbulbs are the moon. Maybe they found out how far away the moon is, and simply chose suicide instead of failure. Wouldn’t you?

  Chapter 36

  ‘Do we need this many sandwiches?’ Julie says.

  ‘I didn’t know what Luke wanted,’ Chantel says. ‘And David wanted loads.’

  ‘Munchies, innit,’ David explains.

  The girl behind the counter sort of grins at him.

  ‘What kind of torch do you want?’ Charlotte calls over from the torch display.

  ‘A big one,’ Julie says. ‘Just hurry up.’

  ‘Just get the most pretty one,’ Chantel says.

  Charlotte makes a face and then picks one, seemingly at random. She brings it over to the counter.

  ‘That’s £51.98,’ the girl says, after she’s scanned the torch.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ says Chantel. ‘Who can spend fifty-two quid at a garage? We haven’t even got petrol yet.’ She hands over her debit card anyway.

  Outside, it’s still raining.

  ‘We’d better get back for Luke,’ Julie says. ‘He might be worried.’

  ‘Why?’ David says.

  ‘We were in there for, like, forty minutes,’ Chantel says, giggling.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ says David. ‘You’re right. It’s eleven o’clock.’

  Chantel’s holding up her long skirt so it doesn’t drag in the glittering orange puddles. Charlotte’s walking next to Julie.

  ‘You OK?’ she asks.

  ‘Yeah. I didn’t realise it was so late.’

  ‘We’ll get there. It’ll be cool. Don’t worry.’

  ‘I’m not.’ But Julie can still feel tears welling in her eyes.

  Luke doesn’t say anything when they get back to the van. He’s still under the blanket. David and Chantel get in the back and Chantel pokes at Luke’s blanket a bit and offers him a choice of sandwiches and drinks, but he doesn’t say anything. Eventually she gives up and gets some beer out of her bag. Julie wonders if she should go and check to see if Luke’s OK but everyone’s in the van now, and they want to go. It’s getting so late. She takes a bite of her cheese-and-pickle sandwich – she doesn’t usually buy sandwiches, but felt daring tonight – but then, in her mind, she sees a familiar image of some sandwich maker with blue plastic gloves pressing the slices of bread together in a huge factory with dead flies and dirt and people who are paid so little they probably wipe their arses with the blue gloves.

  She stops chewing the mouthful of sandwich. This is why she doesn’t buy sandwiches. What if some fucked-off worker put acid in it? Acid’s only about £1.50 now. Oh, shit, Julie’s got to get this dirty poisoned stuff out of her mouth. She opens the door and gets out of the van, spits out into the gutter and throws away the rest of the sandwich. Back inside, she rinses her mouth with Ribena and lights a cigarette.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Charlotte asks.

  ‘Nothing. I was just chucking the wrapper away.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to eat anything, then?’ Charlotte says.

  ‘No. Maybe later. I’m not as hungry as I thought I was,’ Julie says.

  ‘No wonder you’re so thin,’ says David.

  ‘Where am I going now?’ asks Julie.

  For the next half an hour or so she just concentrates as David directs her through Radlett towards Watford while he and Chantel eat about three packets of sandwiches each and Charlotte plays with the radio. Luke doesn’t say anything and for some reason this makes Julie want to cry.

  ‘Skin up,’ says David to Charlotte, as they go through Watford.

  Charlotte settles on a local station and reaches for her embroidered bag.

  ‘I thought you were skinning up,’ she moans. ‘I don’t even want to smoke any more. I’m stoned already from that fucking spliff you gave me back at Epping. Dope totally fucks with my head. I’ve so got to give up.’

  ‘I’ve run out,’ David says. ‘You’re all right fucking caners.’

  ‘I’ll skin up,’ says Chantel. ‘As long as someone holds my beer.’

  There’s a rustling sound from the back of the van. Luke is sitting up.

  ‘I’ll hold it,’ he says. ‘As long as I can finish it.’ He laughs in a weird way.

  ‘Hey, mate,’ David says, reaching over and slapping him on the back. ‘We were all a bit worried about you. Glad to see you back in full effect.’

  Chantel gives Luke her beer. He reaches in his bag for the straws Julie brought for him so he could drink through the helmet, then he sticks one of them in the can and starts sucking furiously. ‘That feels a bit better,’ he says, when he’s finished. ‘Hey, Chan, weren’t you skinning up?’

  ‘I, uh . . . Yeah,’ she says. ‘I was, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Luke?’ Julie says. He doesn’t reply. ‘Luke?’ she says again.

  ‘I so want to get wasted,’ he says to Chantel and David.

  Charlotte looks at Julie and raises her eyebrows. Julie just shrugs sadly. She doesn’t know what’s going on any more. Why is Luke being like this? Why is he ignoring her? Why is he using words like ‘wasted’? And why is the van full of sickly sweet smoke and an oniony, beery smell? Why the hell is Julie driving it, and where the fuck are they all going?

  On the radio people working late in the Watford area are phoning in asking for requests. At some point, someone from a fire station asks for ‘The Look of Love’ by ABC.

  ‘I fucking love this,’ Charlotte says, turning it up.

  Pretty soon everyone except Julie is singing along.

  ‘I haven’t heard this for ages,’ Chantel says. ‘They used to play it in the shop I worked in. It’s really old, isn’t it?’

  ‘I remember it being on Top of the Pops,’ says Charlotte. ‘Which is depressing.’

  ‘They had it on that tape they used to play all the time in The Edge, didn’t they?’ David says to Julie.

  ‘I think they have it on tapes in all shops,’ she says.

  ‘What shop did you work in?’ David asks Chantel.

  ‘Surf & Skate in Basildon,’ she says. ‘Why?’

  ‘I suppose you weren’t a millionaire then.’

  She laughs. ‘No. I was a total pikey. I lived in a shack with a goat.’

  ‘
Oh yeah, Leanne said something about that,’ David says. ‘What’s the story?’

  Chantel’s twisting a roach for the spliff. ‘I dunno. It was my gran’s place from just after the war. Me, my mum and her boyfriend, Rob, all lived there with Gran, in this tiny place. Rob was a total speed-head but thought he was going to make it as a songwriter, so he didn’t really feel like he had to get a job, and my mum used to work in the pet shop by the market. But then it shut down and she got a bit depressed. Rob was always caning her dole cheque as well as his, and she never even had enough money to go for job interviews. If she did go, there’d always be someone younger who they could pay less so they’d get it.

  ‘So basically they were both unemployed, and my mum used to get fucked off with Rob and try to make him leave and then he’d go and stay at some mate’s place for a few days and Gran would be happy – she didn’t like Rob – but then Mum would start eating Mars bars constantly and hand-washing everything in the place and crying about the state of the garden, the house and her life and how she’d let Gran down because she couldn’t even keep her house nice for her, and how we’d have to move out of there soon – although at that point Gran was really ill and we couldn’t leave her – until Rob came back. Then they’d “start again”. He never saw anything wrong with the way we lived but Mum used to read Hello! magazine and Homes & Gardens and dream of having a decent life, and she was always doing things like trying to learn flower arranging or knitting from a library book. But Rob would always just end up treading on the knitting when he was pissed, and Billy would eat any flowers you left lying around.