“What the fuck are you doing?” the girl’s voice from the end of the ward.
“The Dictaphones,” I started. There it was–the fourth one, broken in pieces, just outside the light circle. I hooked the leather bag over my arm and sprinted to the remains. What are you doing? Come on, almost there almost there almost there–
I skidded down and started to throw the biggest chunks of Dictaphone into the leather bag, wincing at the cigarette still clamped in the corner of my mouth. I wafted at the blue smoke and made a quick scan around me into the gloom. I thought I saw something, something happening to the tiles at the far end of the ward, the end we’d come from. I jumped to my feet just as the blinds came down and afternoon sunlight poured in. I saw the movement in the tiles again, this time clearly. For a second it was a nonsense information, then my eyes refocused.
Every sinew in my body went slack and cold.
“Oh my God,” I said, quietly, simply.
“Run,” the girl’s voice screamed.
My legs were weak and soft and I almost couldn’t feel them. I had a dark horror that they’d give way as soon as I forced myself forwards, but, trembling, they held. I pushed myself into a run, painfully slow, a slow-motion run with a billion years between each and every footfall and Nobody’s leather bag full of Dictaphones swinging clumsily over one arm.
Up ahead, the sound of breaking glass as the girl smashed the chair through the window and beat once, twice, with its legs to knock the jagged shards from the frame.
“Run,” she screamed at me again. “Fucking run.”
I forced everything I could from my shaking legs, and as I came up on the laptop I kicked at it hard, sending it spinning across the tiles towards the girl and she put the chair down like a step in front of the broken window and I could hear-feel a sound like hissing of memes breaking the surface of the world and the girl bent and grabbed the laptop and shouted “Come on” and she stepped up onto the chair and launched herself out through the window and disappeared and then–it was just me.
Just me running.
Just me running, my stomach sick and my body shaking and not knowing if I’d make another step, every step expecting my leg to sink and be dragged down or caught and snagged and jerk-shaken. Just my feet hitting the floor one after the other and too too slow with silence all around and in between every step:
thud
thud
thud
thud
Then I was at the chair and I jumped, one foot hitting the seat and pushing me up and higher and I tucked and ducked and everything was silent–me in the air, travelling out through the broken window and out into the daylight.
I came down feet first and then forwards onto my hands and knees with a couple of solid marshy thumps. Wet grass and waterlogged earth splattered up as the toes of my shoes, my knees, and my outstretched hands splashed down into cold sucking mud craters.
“Don’t lose that,” said the girl’s voice. The cigarette had fallen out of my mouth as I landed and was lying curling out smoke in amongst the muddy wet grass.
I looked up.
“And start doing as you’re told,” she said, “or I’m leaving you behind.” She turned and headed off down the long grass lawn at a steady run.
I pulled myself up to my feet, wiped off my hands against my jeans, picked up the cigarette, placed it tentatively between my dry lips and gave a few experimental drags to keep it alive. Hooking Nobody’s leather bag over my arm I jogged painfully off down the lawn after the girl. By the time I reached her she was head and shoulders into a large overgrown rhododendron bush.
“What are you doing?”
“Move,” she said. I sidestepped and she backed an old off-road motorbike out from between the leaves. She swung the thing around and step-hopped across into the saddle. “Get on.”
I reached my muddy foot across the seat behind her and she dug around in a trouser pocket for the key.
“Are you hurt?”
“What? No. I don’t know.” Events had become a spinning waltzer with me trying to grab hold of any streak of sense as the world zipped by in coloured stripes.
“Shit.” She stared back towards the hospital.
I followed her eyes up the lawn.
A muddy spray of split-second impressions–rainy-day football matches, yellow stamping Wellingtons, skidding trainers–a million tiny moment fragments were being blown free from the wet grass in a fast stripe of pressure moving down the lawn from the hospital towards us. A large conceptual thing just below the soil.
The bike’s insides throttle-whined, high-pitched and angry, and we powered forwards in a sloosh of mud and water. The girl forced screaming acceleration out of the engine and we hurtled past fat bushes and bare trees through the hospital’s grounds. I was thrown back, dangerously close to overbalancing.
“Hold on,” she shouted, without turning her head, and the words tumbled past me fast and short in the rushing air. I reached around her, finding her thin but solid waist under the big army jacket and locking my arms around it. I ducked down into her slipstream to stop the cigarette throwing bright orange sparks at my eyes. Nobody’s bag bounced awkwardly in the crook of my elbow.
“Is it still there?”
I turned. Less than fifty yards behind us and keeping pace, ideas, thoughts, fragments, story shards, dreams, memories were blasting free of the grass in a high-speed spray. As I watched, the spray intensified. The concept of the grass itself began to lift and bow wave into a long tumbling V. At the crest of the wave, something was coming up through the foam–a curved and rising signifier, a perfectly evolved idea fin.
Mark Richardson. Mark Richardson. Mark Richardson. Mark Richardson.
“It’s still coming.”
“In my pocket,” the girl shouted back.
“What?”
“In my pocket.” She throttled the bike as we hit a bump, bounced and splashed down. “In my coat, this side.” She nodded her head to the left.
I uncoupled my hands, struggled Nobody’s bag up onto my back and tried to get my jumping bouncing hand inside her coat pocket. Finally, I got hold of what was in there. It looked like a small lumpy torch handle wrapped in black tape, then I realised there was a fuse at one end. I risked a glance behind and the thought fin was closer, higher in the water. The shark was closing the gap.
“Light it,” the girl shouted. “How far away is it?”
We hit another bump and I squeezed tighter with my right hand.
“Close–forty yards?”
“Light it, count two, and drop it.”
I forced my right arm loose from around her waist and leant forward against her for balance before taking the cigarette out of my mouth. Clutching tight to the bike with my thighs, I brought the orange tip into contact with the fuse somewhere above my left eye. The fuse turned itself into a red smoky sparkler and I squinted, holding the thing out and back behind me, away from my body.
“One, two.” I let go.
The bike bounced up again, my body lifted upwards off the seat and I grabbed back around her waist in time for the suspension-bounce landing.
Not very far behind us–an explosion.
“Can I help you?”
The man behind the counter in the electrical suppliers wore a dark grey suit with black highly polished shoes and a bright orange tie. It was an expensive looking place.
My jeans were wet and caked with mud. Long brown splatter marks striped my arms and my face and my soaking wet shirt. My shoes were full of water and they squelched.
“Hello,” I said. “I was wondering if you sell Dictaphones?”
17
An Invisible Eddy of Breeze
I sat on the side of my bed in the Willows Hotel unpacking a new Dictaphone from its cardboard and plastic and polystyrene. Early evening, the pale sunlight dipped towards orange, the day lowered into long shadows and abandoned stretches of light.
My wet and muddy clothes were in a heap in front of the wardrobe. I??
?d thrown on a pair of shorts and an old hooded top. The girl’s army jacket hung over the back of the chair, her boots tucked underneath and Nobody’s laptop perched on the seat. The shower running in the bathroom made a heavy pattery hiss, the rhythm broken every so often with silence and splashes as the girl moved around under the flow of water.
Setting the box to one side, I turned the tape player over in my hands.
I’d lived a detached and carefully controlled existence–all detailed planning, trying to stay safe, trying to reconstruct the events and the people who’d gone before–a sixteen-month life of dusty facts, static stories and silent archaeology. But today changed everything. The world around me had transformed into a hot liquid thing, alive and twisting with real events happening now and with unknowable possibility fingers stretching out towards the future. For me, the perspective shift was huge; a change in the nature of time, a rush of things happening that couldn’t be slowed or re-examined or re-translated or pondered over at a later date because–because now I was part of the picture, I was involved.
Was this what I’d wanted? Was there even enough person inside me to step out like this, into the lights of the full-time world?
I ripped open a packet of batteries and loaded two into the back of the new Dictaphone, pushing each of them into place against the tension of the springs.
If I hadn’t wanted this I could have stayed in the house with the celebrity chef cookbooks and the TV and carried on all still and lost and hiding away from the shadows moving under the waves. The Ludovician would have found me eventually, probably, but I still could have stayed. The house, the training, the fragments, it was a world I knew, a continuity I understood. I could have been just that. But now things were different. I’d made them different.
I fished my hand around inside Mr Nobody’s leather bag, feeling for sharp plastic, pulling out the pieces of the broken Dictaphone one at a time. Eventually I found the main body of the stamped-on player and carefully extracted the tiny cassette from its broken cradle. The tape had a white forking crack across one of its faces but I couldn’t see any other damage. I slotted it inside the new Dictaphone, pressed play, and the speaker hissed out a familiar tinny recording. I smiled.
“Hey.”
The girl condensed from a nebulous cloudy thing into something solid and focused. I rubbed my eyes.
“Sorry,” I said. “Nodded off.”
She stood in the bathroom doorway wearing one of my T-shirts and a baggy pair of trousers with the belt tied into a kind of knot. Her black bob had been rubbed dry with a towel and was now big, confused and messy. “Don’t say anything,” she said. “Do you have a brush?”
I nodded and pointed towards the chest of drawers.
“I’m Scout,” she said, turning back and tugging the brush through her hair.
“I was going to ask,” I said. “I’m Eric.”
“Eric Sanderson, I know.”
“You know?” I propped up on my elbows.
“Course.” She looked confused. “What did you think? That I was in the neighbourhood, just passing through?”
I hadn’t thought about it at all. I’d left that puzzle standing with all the others–huge and quiet, like the rows of strange stone heads on Easter Island–as I ran for my life. Now I began to see how all the questions were still there, waiting for me to come back and face up to them one by one.
“No,” I said a bit weakly, “I suppose not.”
Scout took Nobody’s laptop off the chair and sat down, pulled the brush through her hair a few more times, then settled back against her big coat. She was probably in her very early twenties, pale and too thin. Her black bobbed hair was a shocking negative of her white skin and her eyes were sharp sharp green. She had high cheekbones, and what they call ‘good bone structure’ on those makeover programmes on TV. I realised she was beautiful, or possibly proto-beautiful–there was still a youngness about her, as if she hadn’t quite aged into the person she was going to become.
I crossed my legs and rubbed at my face.
“Listen,” I said, “I’m so out of my depth here. It’s like, the life I had, it didn’t work like this. I’m not–” I almost said I’m not Eric Sanderson. “I’m not an adventurer, is what I’m trying to say. I’m struggling to catch up.”
I wasn’t sure why I suddenly needed to come out with any of this.
“I phoned you, remember?” she said it slowly, in that tone people use when they’re explaining something to a friend who really should know it already, but seems to have forgotten. “I was going to head you off in Manchester, but then Nobody did his thing. I tried to warn you but the signal was terrible.”
“That was you?”
“Who else?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I didn’t know if you could even hear me, so I backtracked here and hoped I’d catch up with you in time. It wasn’t easy, with the floods.”
“No,” I said, nodding. “Thanks. But,” I stopped, checking if the question was stupid, not being able to tell and so asking it anyway–“I mean, why?”
“Why what?”
“Why what? Why everything. Why are you here? How did you know–how did you find out about me?”
She reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a little white card, holding it up for me to see. It was one of the business cards I’d made. Finally, a light went on in my head.
“You’re Un-Space Exploration Committee?”
“Wow,” she said. “You are having trouble keeping up. Yes, I am. Well, kind of. Unofficially.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I’m not a fully paid-up member,”–she smiled a smile which suggested there was a lot more to it than that–“but that’s lucky for you because the Committee’s written you off, they won’t touch you with a stick.”
So they did know, all this time when I thought I was going crazy they were real and they knew about me. They were keeping quiet, doing nothing. Just watching.
“They won’t help me because of the shark?” My brain was making time now. “No,” I said, thinking it all the way through. “You’re talking about Mr Nobody, aren’t you?”
“I’m talking about his employer. But like I said, that’s okay because I’m more sort of freelance. My fee’s £5,000, which you’ve got to agree is very reasonable considering I’ve already saved your life once. As well as the cash, I get to keep certain items we might come across on the way, starting with this laptop.”
“Wait,” I said, losing myself in the tumble again. “Your fee to do what?”
“To be your guide, stupid. You’re looking for Trey Fidorous, right?”
“You know where he is?”
“Yep.”
“Really?”
“Yep. Five grand. It’s a steal isn’t it?”
I thought about it. There weren’t too many choices. I could trust her or I could stumble on alone until I reached the end of the trail I’d been trying to follow, and then what? Go home and die my quiet death in the house? Was that really still an option? I already knew the answer. No matter what I told myself, I couldn’t be nothing again, and I couldn’t undo any of the things I’d started. And anyway, what she said was true–she had saved my life once already.
“Okay,” I said, “but you get the money once we’ve found him.”
“Fine. I’ll trust you. You’ve got the face for it.”
“What does that mean?”
“Vulnerable, confused. A bit lost and useless, you know,” she gave me a quick sly smile and something flared inside me, something distant, different, familiar, alien. A ghost of something. An invisible eddy of breeze. As quick as it came, the whatever-it-was was gone.
“Only,” Scout was still saying, oblivious, “if I’m not getting anything up front, you’re going to have to buy all the supplies and all the food. Everything we need.”
“Okay,” I said, shocked and distracted by the sudden thing inside me, trying to chase it back into th
e dark.
“And we’re going to have to include breakfast, lunch and dinner in that.”
“Okay.”
“Starting from now.”
“Okay.”
“No, really. Starting from now.”
My brow slowly crunched itself up, pulling me out from the back of my head and into the real world.
“Sorry, what?”
“Come on,” she said, jumping up. “I’m starving.”
Aunty Ruth made us both full English breakfasts with sausage and bacon and eggs and beans and fried bread and I didn’t realise how hungry I felt until the mountain of food landed on the table in front of me. My body, my elbow especially, was bruised and stiff from the falls and slams of the last few hours but my stomach and insides had recovered surprisingly quickly.
I’d expected either electric curiosity or matronly disapproval from Aunty Ruth when she saw Scout at the table. I thought turning up for dinner with a girl dressed emergency-style in my baggy clothes was likely to earn me a raised eyebrow at the very least, and, if there was disapproval, a stern ‘Can I have a quick word with you?’ at a more private later date. But, at first, apart from a warm little ‘Hello, love’ which Scout returned with a broad but slightly embarrassed smile, there was nothing at all. Ruth seemed more concerned with explaining the whereabouts of Ian.
As she unloaded the plates of food and piles of toast from her carrying tray, she told me that Ian had been with her for most of the afternoon.
“Oh, I hope you don’t mind, love, but he was crying. I sent John up to fetch him. I could hear him from all the way down here and I couldn’t stand listening to it, it was breaking my heart.”
Crying? I’d only heard Ian meow once, and that’s when I’d stood on him by accident. Ian would quite happily sit in the same place for hours and hours and hours, unless of course, he thought it would be of benefit to him to be somewhere else.