‘What?’
‘You just said you were sorry about the roast thing,’ Gwen said.
‘I didn’t. I said ghost.’
‘You bloody didn’t.’
James opened his mouth but didn’t answer. He met Gwen’s eyes. They each knew what the other was thinking. They’d been here before.
The pull came on him, without any warning, as it always did.
‘Steady on, mate!’ the traffic warden said. ‘Are you all right?’
The lean man in the black suit had sprung up off the bus stop bench and barged into him.
‘I said, are you all right?’
The man was swaying slightly, glancing around in some confusion. Drugs, thought the traffic warden. The man didn’t look the type — too old, too well dressed — but nobody looked the type any more.
‘Mate?’
The man took a step, halted, looked around again, and met the warden’s eyes.
‘What did you say?’ the man asked.
‘Are you all right? You look a bit spaced.’
‘Alert protocol,’ the man said, as if that explained everything. ‘Threat to the Principal. Jeopardy. Investment is beginning, but the pull is wrong. The pull is wrong.’
‘Ri-ight. Whatever you say, mate. Just mind how you go.’
The man ignored him and began to stride away down the pavement. He bumped into an old woman with a tartan shopping trolley, and then clipped a pushchair with his hip.
The mother gave him what for. The man ignored her too, and moved on, start-stop, a few quick steps, then another bewildered glance around. He changed direction several times.
Definitely drugs, thought the traffic warden, shaking his head. The man was scurrying backwards and forwards, like Jerry Lewis doing his ‘confused’ shtick, except there was a curiously fluid grace to his movements.
Designer drugs, the traffic warden decided. He’d read all about those.
City Road was bustling. Tuesday lunchtime. Bookmakers with coloured-bead door curtains; army surplus stores selling camo-pants and Air-soft guns; slot arcades with doormen; Dragon Burger bars ripe with grease; conga lines of carts outside the Happy Shopper; resigned queues outside the Post Office; bunting-trimmed forecourts of pre-owned cars with stickered windows; hot-dog stands sizzling with onion smoke; bhangra pumping from minicab sound systems; reversing hooters and car alarms; hand car wash and valeting, redolent with pine scent; a council worker in Day-Glo overalls, picking up litter with a squeezy claw and dropping it into his yellow cart; kids with sherbet fountains outside Poundland, laughing at the man by the crosswalk proclaiming Jesus’ constant love to an uninterested crowd; men carrying cue-cases like shouldered arms as they wandered upstairs to the snooker club; double parking; hazard lights ticking; two Somali men arguing in a doorway; chuggers with clipboards asking for just a moment; the stable-smell of straw and pellet food exuding from the pet shop; two women in chadors; Telecom engineers erecting an orange hazard guard around the manhole they are about to lift; someone shouting to get Ronnie’s attention; the pip-pip-pip of the crossing posts; the air-horn of a boy racer’s GTi rendering ‘La Cucaracha’; carentan melons like bald scalps in the fake grass trays of a fruit and veg; people, people, people.
Too many noises, too many smells, too much movement. Too much input. The pull was wrong. The pull was wrong. He couldn’t get a clean fix on the alert. Location? What was the location? How could he respond if he didn’t have a definitive location? The upload was pulsing into him, but it was patchy and contradictory. It pulled him one way, then another, as if it was uncertain, as if it couldn’t make its mind up.
‘Where? Where is it?’ he demanded out loud. Faces in the crowd looked at him, confused, amused, alarmed, but they were just faces and he didn’t care what they thought. Some of them spoke to him, but he didn’t care what they said either.
Where was he needed? Where was the Principal? How could he have lost the fix on the Principal? Why couldn’t he focus? Why was the upload so disjointed? Was it being jammed?
‘Principal,’ Mr Dine muttered. ‘Majesty. Where are you?’
He felt his metabolism start to hike as the alert protocols took full control. His composition altered. He felt a surge as the investment began and power was relayed into him, unsleeving the deep-seated caches in his genes and bone marrow, and lighting up his higher senses. Still no fix. The pull was still wrong. Indecisive.
Turning wildly, he bumped against a news-stand, and a row of magazines slithered off onto the pavement. The vendor started to remonstrate with him.
‘I’m talking to you, twat! Oi!’
No time for an altercation. Mr Dine raised his hand. The vendor jerked backwards into his stand and ended up sitting on a heap of scattered tabloids.
Some of the faces were shouting at him suddenly. What did he think he was doing? Who did he think he was? Jackie flaming Chan?
Mr Dine ignored them. He turned left, then checked himself and turned right instead, stepping off the kerb.
There was a squeal and a crunch. A woman screamed.
The Autospares van, an older, commercial-bodied Escort, had come to a stop so suddenly, its rear end had swung out. The driver’s side door opened, and a chubby man with sweat patches on his beige, short-sleeved shirt got out and stared at Mr Dine, his mouth a goldfish ‘O’.
‘I didn’t…’ the driver began. ‘I didn’t see you. Are you…?’
People were gathering. Mr Dine was still on his feet, still glancing to and fro in a twitchy, panicky way. He realised he was the focus of particular attention suddenly. He looked down.
His legs had stopped the van dead. Ramming him had been like ramming a deep-seated bollard or a gate post. The bumper, number plate and grille had folded in around his thighs. The leading edge of the bonnet was crumpled like a bed-sheet. Dirty fluid gurgled out of the split radiator and pooled under the front wheels.
‘Jesus flippin’ Christ!’ the driver stammered. ‘How the-’
Mr Dine stepped away from the arrested vehicle. Bent bodywork groaned as his legs came out of the form- fitting impression. The bumper fell off.
No fix. Still no fix. The pull was wrong. Still no definitive focus from the upload, despite the fact that his body was now accelerating to full combat investment, hyping to maximum.
In another ten seconds it would automatically switch over to battledress. That was something that could not be allowed to happen in plain sight.
‘Excuse me,’ he said to the chubby driver.
‘But you can’t… you should go to hospital and-’
‘I have no further time for this digression.’
Mr Dine started to move. By the time the gathered crowd had realised the man in the black suit was shoving his way through them, he had somehow — inexplicably, in the opinion of many — already vanished.
The recorded voice said, ‘The phone you are calling is out of range or has been switched off. Please try again later.’
Gwen cancelled the call. Her head was throbbing so much, she was having difficulty accomplishing even simple tasks. It felt like a six-inch nail had been driven in through the top of her skull. She wanted to cry. She wanted to lie down. She wanted to cry and lie down.
Fiddling with the master control box, James let out a dull moan. His hands were visibly shaking.
‘Gwen, I can’t do it. I can’t work it. I can’t think straight.’
‘I know.’
‘Gwen, can you see the blue lights?’
‘No,’ she lied. ‘Try again.’
He looked up at her. His eyes were horribly bloodshot. Dots of sweat clung to his forehead and made his hair lank. ‘I can’t. I can’t. I can’t get the foetus to align.’
‘The foetus?’
‘The focus, focus.’
