Cloud Atlas

Werner’s toffees.

“No need. I memorized our route. I know it like the back of my hand. Any escape is nine-tenths logistics.”

“Better steer clear of the motorways. They have cameras and whatnot nowadays.”

I contemplated my career change from publisher to car rustler. “I know.”

Veronica impersonated Mr. Meeks—brilliantly. “I know! I know!”

I told her it was an uncannily accurate impression.

A pause. “I didn’t say anything.”

Ernie turned round and yelled in surprise. When I looked in the mirror and saw Mr. Meeks twitching in the rearmost compartment of the vehicle, I nearly drove us off the road. “How—” I began. “When—who—”

“Mr. Meeks!” cooed Veronica. “What a nice surprise.”

“A surprise?” I said. “He’s broken the laws of ruddy physics!”

“We can’t very well do a U-ie back to Hull,” Ernie stated, “and it’s too cold to drop him off. He’d be an ice block by morning.”

“We’ve run away from Aurora House, Mr. Meeks,” Veronica explained.

“I know,” the sozzled old duffer bleated, “I know.”

“All for one and one for all, is it?”

Mr. Meeks leaked a giggle, sucked toffees, and hummed “The British Grenadiers” as the Range Rover wolfed down the northward miles.

A sign—PLEASE DRIVE CAREFULLY IN SCOTCH CROSS—shone in the headlights. Ernie had ended our route plan here with a big red X, and now I saw why. An all-night petrol station servicing an A-road—next door to a pub called the Hanged Edward. Midnight was long gone, but the lights were still on. “Park in the pub. I’ll go and get us a can of petrol so nobody’ll spot us. Then my vote’s for a swift pint to celebrate a job well done. Silly Johns left his jacket in the car, and in the jacket—tra-la.” Ernie flashed a wallet the size of my briefcase. “I’m sure he can stand us a round.”

“I know!” enthused Mr. Meeks. “I know!”

“A Drambuie and soda,” Veronica decided, “would hit the spot.”

Ernie was back in five minutes carrying the can. “No bother.” He siphoned the petrol into the tank, then the four of us walked across the car park to the Hanged Edward. “A crisp night,” remarked Ernie, offering his arm to Veronica. It was ruddy freezing, and I couldn’t stop shivering. “A beautiful moon, Ernest,” added Veronica, looping hers through his. “What a splendid night for an elopement!” She giggled like a sixteen-year-old. I screwed the lid down on my old demon, Jealousy. Mr. Meeks was wobbly, so I supported him as far as the door, where a blackboard advertised “The Massive Match!” In the warm cave inside, a crowd watched TV soccer in a distant fluorescent time zone. In the eighty-first minute England was a goal down to Scotland. Nobody even noticed us. England playing Scotland, abroad, in the deep midwinter—is it World Cup qualifier time again already? Talk about Rip van Ruddy Winkle.

I’m no fan of television pubs, but at least there was no thumpy-thumpy-thump acidic music, and that evening freedom was the sweetest commodity. A sheepdog made room for us on a fireside pew. Ernie ordered the drinks because he said my accent was too southern and they might spit in my glass. I had a double Kilmagoon and the most expensive cigar the bar could muster, Veronica ordered her Drambuie and soda, Mr. Meeks a ginger beer, and Ernie a pint of Angry Bastard bitter. The barman didn’t take his eyes off the TV—he got our drinks by sense of touch alone. Just as we took our seats in an alcove, a cyclone of despair swept through the bar. England had been awarded a penalty. Tribalism electrified the audience.

“I’d like to check my route. Ernie, the map if you will.”

“You had it last.”

“Oh. Must be in?.?.?.” My room. Extreme close-up, Director Lars, of Cavendish realizing his fateful mistake. I had left the map on my bed. For Nurse Noakes. With our route marked out in felt pen. “.?.?.?the car .?.?. oh, God. I think we had better drink up and move on.”

“But we’ve only just started this round.”

I swallowed hard. “About the, er, map?.?.?.” I checked my watch and calculated distances and speeds.

Ernie was catching on. “What about the map?”

My answer was drowned in a howl of tribal grief. England had equalized. And at that exact moment, I fib not, Withers looked in. His Gestapo eyes settled on us. Not a happy man. Johns Hotchkiss appeared beside him, saw us, and he looked very happy indeed. He reached for his mobile phone to summon his angels of vengeance. A third lout with oil-stained overalls completed the posse, but it appeared Nurse Noakes had so far prevailed on Johns Hotchkiss to leave the police out of it. The oily lout’s identity I was never to discover, but I knew right then: the game was up.

Veronica sighed a frail sigh. “I had so hoped to see,” she half-sang, “the wild mountain thyme, all across the blooming heather, and it’s go, lassie, go?.?.?.”

A drug-addled semilife of restraints and daytime programs lay ahead. Mr. Meeks stood up to go with our jailer.

He let out a biblical bellow. (Lars: zoom the camera in from the outside car park, across the busy bar, and right down between Mr. Meeks’s rotted tonsils.) The TV viewers dropped their conversations, spilt their drinks, and looked. Even Withers was stopped in his tracks. The octogenarian leapt onto the bar, like Astaire in his prime, and roared this SOS to his universal fraternity, “Are there nor trrruuue Scortsmen in tha hooossse?”

A whole sentence! Ernie, Veronica, and I were stunned as mullets.

High drama. Nobody stirred.

Mr. Meeks pointed at Withers with skeletal forefinger and intoned this ancient curse: “Those there English gerrrrunts are trampling o’er ma God-gi’en rrraights! Theeve used me an’ ma pals morst direly an’ we’re inneed of a wee assistance!”

Withers growled at us: “Come quiet and face your punishments.”

Our captor’s southern Englishness was out! A rocker rose like Poseidon and flexed his knuckles. A crane operator stood by him. A sharky-chinned man in a thousand-quid suit. An axwoman with the scars to prove it.

The TV was switched off.

A Highlander spoke softly: “Aye, laddie. We’ll nort let ye doone.”

Withers assessed the stage and went for a get real! smirk. “These men are car thieves.”

“You a copper?” The axwoman advanced.

“Show us your badge then.” The crane operator advanced.

“Aw, you’re full o’ shite, man,” spat Poseidon.

Coolheadedness might have lost us the day, but Johns Hotchkiss scored a fatal own goal. Finding his way blocked by a pool cue, he prefixed his distress with “Now you just look here, you grebo, you can go shag your bloody sporran if you think—” One of his teeth splashed into my Kilmagoon, fifteen feet away. (I fished the tooth out to keep as proof of this unlikely claim, otherwise no one will ever believe me.) Withers caught and snapped an incoming wrist, hurled a wee Krankie over the pool table, but the ogre was one and his enraged foes legion. Oh, the ensuing scene was Trafalgaresque. I must admit, the sight of that brute being brutalized was not wholly unpleasant, but when Withers hit the deck and disfiguring blows began to fall, I proposed a tactful exit stage left to our borrowed vehicle. We departed via the back and scuttled over the blustery car park as fast as our legs, whose combined age well exceeded three centuries, could carry us. I drove. North.

Where all this will end, I do not know.

THE END

Very well, dear Reader, you deserve an epilogue if you’ve stayed with me this far. My ghastly ordeal touched down in this spotless Edinburgh rooming house, kept by a discreet widow from the Isle of Man. After the brawl at the Hanged Edward, we four blind mice drove to Glasgow, where Ernie knows a bent copper who can take care of