Thieving Fear

the receptionist, who gave Rory a pink smile bordering on straight-lipped. 'Yo Yorkshire! This is the Sabya Show every weekday afternoon on Moorland Radio. My next guest will be Prue Walker, great-grandmother and founder of Wrinkles Against Racism . . .'

As Rory left the concrete building, which was so featureless it might almost have been designed to deny perception any hold, he saw the Frugo supermarket across the business park. If Hugh had been at work Rory could have looked in on him. Perhaps he'd found a girl at last, hence his reluctance to be visited. Unlike Rory, he hadn't discovered that he didn't need them.

Six lanes of traffic were racing back and forth across the moor under a blue sky and flocks of giant clouds. Rory climbed into the aR tSeVe rYwh eRe van and drove onto the motorway, where drivers peered at the letters stencilled on the sides and rear doors of the vehicle before signifying comprehension with an enlightened grin or an aggravated scowl. As he headed west, sunlight flooded across slopes aglow with heather, and someone else might have fancied it was celebrating his approach. Once the motorway began a protracted descent into a valley he saw Can Do on the horizon.

It looked dully familiar. It never had before, and he tried to see it from the viewpoint of a new spectator. At this distance the jagged mass against the stately clouds resembled the ruins of a castle or of some less identifiable building. Closer, colours formed within the outline, eventually betraying that the bulk was constructed from thousands of tins. The viewer would experience a shift of perspective, having grasped that to be separately visible at that distance the tins must be unusually large. They were the biggest cans of paint Rory could find, and he'd lost count of the number of times he'd loaded the van before driving up on the moor to paint every tin the colour of its contents and glue it into place. He'd done his best to see that the arrangement was completely random, but perhaps that was an impossible task. There was an inadvertent pattern, so simple a child could have produced it. Wasn't childlike desirable? Weren't those the perceptions he believed everybody should recapture? Childish was the word that occurred to him just now, perhaps because he felt dispirited by his introversion. He was driving out of the valley, past a herd of sluggish trucks, before he observed that someone had sprayed paint over his work.

Wasn't this a kind of life? The trouble was that when he drove off the motorway, along the road that passed by Can Do, his mind felt as distanced as ever. He parked as close as the road would take him and stepped down from the van. The turf and especially the heather must be springy underfoot, but the sight of the graffiti was dulling his senses. The scrawl didn't even include words, let alone any meaningful image or use of colour. It was the kind of random anonymous doodling that showed up on derelict buildings, a mass of drooling pallid purple loops. Didn't they add to the enigma that Can Do presented to any distant spectator? Might this enliven a few minds? He turned to shade his eyes and peer at the traffic coursing up and down the landscape, but it was pointless to look for signs of interest. He felt as if the graffiti had infected his work with their meaninglessness, unless they were a kind of comment. Perhaps they demonstrated how uninspired and uninspiring his work was, and not just this example. Should he revert to being uninspired in a way that pleased the public? Once he might have painted the landscape, until he'd seen that paintings were as redundant as photographs, pathetic samples of reality if not attempted substitutes for it. Nevertheless he was surveying the moor in case it could entice his perceptions out of the dark undefined place into which they seemed to have sunk, when he thought he heard his name.

He'd turned his mobile phone off at Moorland Radio, and it was still dormant. Nobody was hiding behind Can Do, though more graffiti were. They weren't even visible to traffic, which added to their meaninglessness. He was standing in the shadow of the discoloured piles of metal when the voice repeated 'Rory Lucas.'

Was it just in his head? It seemed muffled enough. As he dodged around the cans, darkness sped across the moor towards him, flattening the heather and the grass. A wind must be up, although he couldn't feel it. His senses had flinched inwards, away from the voice and its implications. His imagination must be playing tricks. He'd stimulated it too much.

A glossy crow sailed up from the undergrowth at the edge of the road and flew straight at him. He was wondering how it could fail to see him – if it took him for part of Can Do – when he realised that it was a plastic bag. Ordinarily he would have appreciated the visual pun, but just now it disturbed him. Was he smoking too much skunk to keep his senses primed? He'd never known the effects to linger the next day. He didn't enjoy hallucinating unless he'd set out to achieve it, still less the useless experience of hearing voices. As the airborne litter subsided in the clutches of a patch of heather he tried to hear the voice again, to prove he could produce it and silence it at will. The effort shrank his consciousness until he lost all awareness of his surroundings, but he wasn't certain that he heard his name in his head. Then he grasped what he was doing – attempting to rouse a hallucination before he had to drive. The notion dismayed him as much as the idea that the voice was lying in wait to take him off guard, and he fled to the van as another flood of shadow rushed towards it. He was glad Hugh hadn't wanted him to visit. He would feel safer at home.

SIX

Ellen felt as if she were being scrutinised not just by Mrs Stevens but by the framed photograph on the desk. She was about to favour it with a remark when she heard sounds overhead: a heavy thud followed by a cry. The proprietor of the Peacebrook Home didn't react, and nobody seemed to have gone to the aid of the injured, even once the cry was repeated with additional anguish. 'Should I go and see what's happened, do you think?' Ellen was driven to ask.

'There'll be no need for that, thank you.'

Mrs Stevens sat back in her generous leather chair, and the lower reaches of her sleeveless blouse bulged as though celebrating her last meal or many of them. Her small face was set in plushy flesh that underlined her diminutive chin with a larger version, while her pale arms were so plump they hardly seemed defined. Ellen had been reflecting that at least she was slimmer by comparison, but now she was worried about whoever had fallen. The cry came again, and she was on the way to standing up despite the proprietor's reply when she heard an exaggerated voice that she guessed was a nurse's. 'Have you knocked your table over again, Thora? There it is for you. We'll have to see about getting it screwed to the floor, won't we? Why don't you come down and sit with the others now. Your quiz show that you like is on soon.'

He sounded as smug as Mrs Stevens had settled into looking. If Ellen had turned the situation into a test, she had no idea how she'd fared. As she sank back onto the chair its creak made her feel yet more examined. 'Sorry,' she said sooner than she'd planned to speak.

'Ah,' Mrs Stevens said, perhaps with satisfaction. 'What for?'

'I wasn't meaning to imply nobody was dealing with it.' When Mrs Stevens only gazed at her Ellen said 'I suppose I did, but I was wrong.'

'Nothing wrong with being conscientious.'

'I'm that, I hope. I'd look after your residents the way I'd look after any of my family.'

'Do they need it?'

'My family?' The proprietor's question seemed both irrelevant and oddly ominous. 'They're fine,' Ellen said. 'My parents are forever travelling and my cousins are all working.'

'If more people cared for their families there'd be less need for us.'

Since she was resting her fingers on top of the photograph, Ellen wondered if she had the couple – a young white man arm in arm with a young black woman – in mind. 'Yours?' she said.

'Why, do you see a problem?'

'I hope not. No, of course not. Certainly there shouldn't be.' Ellen thought she was saying too much and then not enough as the proprietor's gaze failed to change. 'They're your children, are they?' she said, which earned no response. 'Adopted?' she tried saying.

'Why are you asking that?'

'I don't mean both. It needn't be either.' Ellen felt as if she were strewing her words in her path. 'I don't even know why I said it. Forget I spoke.'

Mrs Stevens turned the photograph away from Ellen. 'They're my son and his partner.'

'Of course, I should have known.'