'Which way is it? How far?'
Hugh was silent long enough that she thought he was preparing to say more than 'You're best getting a cab.'
How could he have experienced a vision of her plodding uphill to his house, the noisome sweaty mass of her quaking from head to foot with every step? As she struggled to expel it from her mind she managed to say 'Try not to blame yourself, all right? Rory needn't have answered while he was driving. He ought to have switched his phone off.'
'I shouldn't have asked him to come.'
'Don't brood, Hugh. We'll all be together again soon,' Ellen said, which ended the call, or silence did.
Staring at her undefinable reflection didn't help her take her own advice, but she wasn't anxious to return to Mumbo Jumbjoe or visit any of the other sites. She pushed her chair back and stood up, and the girl on the balcony turned her head. She'd donned sunglasses, which obscured whether she was gazing at Ellen with sympathy far too close to dismay if not bordering on revulsion. All at once Ellen felt sick and headed for the bathroom.
Rory's portraits flanked her as she hurried down the hall. She could have thought her own painted eyes were foreseeing her present state and concealing their distress. She shoved the bathroom door open, and then she recoiled. One glimpse in the mirror, not even of her entire shape, was enough. She grabbed her portrait from its hook and carried it in front of her face to the mirror. It was almost exactly as wide as the protruding plastic frame, and so tall that she couldn't see her reflection over it once she slammed it into place. She hadn't glimpsed herself again, let alone anybody else. Nobody a good deal more than sufficiently thin to hide behind her had dodged out of sight, as she confirmed by twisting her head around so hard her neck ached. Perhaps she wasn't going to be sick after all, though she felt worse than queasy as her distended hands splashed cold water on her clammy face. She might have to deal with worse than nausea. When she recalled the veiled gaze of the girl on the balcony, she wondered how she would be able to bear stepping outside the door.
NINETEEN
'Is Charlotte in there?' Catching sight of her at the back of the lift, Glen waved a handful of papers. 'Pass these to her,' he said and called 'They're for your cousin.' Someone in the front rank that was pressing everybody else towards the walls accepted the documents, and as the doors struggled together against the mass of bodies Glen's attention drifted left of Charlotte. His eyes widened, and he reached out as if he wished he could rescue her from the crowd. Then the doors shut, though only just, and the cage packed with bodies set about ascending, so sluggishly that she could have imagined it was being dragged down and in danger of sinking into the earth. People were relaying the papers to her over their shoulders, since there wasn't space for them to turn around. Were there three pages or four? As they arrived beside her she saw they were bordered in black. She was about to take them when the person whose bones were digging into her left side did, and she noticed that his hand was covered more with soil than flesh.
She couldn't retreat even an inch. She could only watch as he transferred the papers to his other shrivelled hand so as to grasp her face and twist it towards him. When her eyes strained to look away he released her and gestured at the doors, scattering earth like black dandruff on the shoulders of the woman in front of him. The lift shuddered to a halt and the doors staggered apart. For a breath, if she had been able to draw one, Charlotte thought only darkness was waiting beyond them. Then earth piled in, flinging everyone helplessly together on the way to filling her eyes and nose and mouth. Her companion seemed quite at home in it, because his fingers wriggled wormlike through it to fasten on her hand and pull her deeper into the suffocating dark.
She fought to cry out, but her mouth was gagged with earth. She strove to free herself from the scrawny clutch, but she was pinioned by bodies that had ceased to move and the one that should have. She tried to suck in a breath, but it consisted of earth too. Was she dreaming out of utter desperation that she'd managed to produce a sound? It was feeble and flattened, muffled by distance or worse. Nevertheless it seemed to travel past the blackness, and she put all her dwindling energy into repeating it. This time it succeeded in wakening her, and she threw out her hand to rid it of the sensation of being held. It collided with a barrier in front of her at considerably less than arm's length.
There was nothing like that so near her bed, and certainly no wall. She wasn't in her flat; she wasn't even on the roof. She'd thought spending the night on the padded sunlounger would rid her of the sense of being shut in before she had to travel to Hugh's – her four rooms had never seemed so oppressively small and dim, or even slightly until last night – but she hadn't slept much. She'd kept being wakened by a smell of earth and having to remind herself that it belonged to the plant-pots by the lounger. Each time she'd opened her eyes the night sky had looked far too close, a black lid above her face. Once it had grown lighter she'd managed to doze fitfully, and then it had been time to get ready to leave. Nothing had relieved the claustrophobia that felt as if her surroundings were smaller than her head: not showering in the glass cell of the bathroom cubicle rendered nearly opaque by steam, nor walking down the narrow street overshadowed by tenements to the main road that might have seemed wider without the traders' stalls and the crowds around them, nor the bus crammed with shoppers, nor the multitude of Saturday commuters at Kings Cross. As for the train to Yorkshire, it consisted of just two carriages for a journey of over two hours. Her seat and the one in front trapped her in a space so restricted that she had to slant her knees towards the window in order to press them together. She was further pinned by the side of the carriage and by her neighbour in the aisle seat, who must have been startled by Charlotte's nightmare cry. Charlotte opened her aching eyes and turned to make some apology, but the seat was unoccupied.
It was the only empty one in sight. When had her skinny neighbour deserted it? As soon as she was seated Charlotte had closed her eyes in an attempt to ignore the lack of space, and so she hadn't observed her seatmate, she had only felt the gaunt shape settle next to her. They must have been so eager to descend that they'd advanced into the foremost carriage as a station closed around the train. It was Leeds, where Charlotte had to change.
None of the disembarking passengers looked particularly thin, but locating her next train was surely more important. As she hurried to the nearest monitor a faint quake rose through the display, bone-white letters on a background black as earth. A train to Huddersfield was leaving platform thirteen in three minutes. Charlotte sprinted up an escalator towards the expansively arched roof and along a wide corridor with a view across the city to the moors. Despite the spaciousness, she felt as if her nightmare were still cramping her mind as she dashed down a second escalator to her train.
Was she the solitary passenger? The nearest carriage was deserted. Half the seats faced forwards, to be confronted across the midpoint of the carriage by their twins. Charlotte sat there to take advantage of the space between the halves, although it rather made her feel as if she were facing an unseen audience instead of just her overnight bag. She was regaining her breath and wondering why her brief sprint should have made it hard to breathe when the train jerked forwards.
A guard came calling for tickets, to little if any effect elsewhere on the train, and then Charlotte was alone. Trees and hedges blotted out the sky before the train was engulfed by a tunnel – no, just a bridge no more extended than the nervous breath she took. Several bridges that felt like threats of carrying her underground preceded the first station, where the train opened its doors for nobody visible and emitted a string of beeps as shrill as an alarm to indicate they were closing. As fields partly overcome by suburbs spread out on both sides, Charlotte did her best to concentrate on the sky. Was she apprehensive about seeing Rory? She couldn't understand why else the journey was making her so tense. The train halted at another station, and as it shrilled she was tempted to make for the doors. Of course they were too distant, and her nervousness was unforgivably irrational. Or perhaps she was right to take the sound as a warning, because the train had barely left the station when it plunged into the dark.
The tunnel shut her in with the rows of empty yet unfriendly seats and the vista of their equivalent beyond the doorways that kept rocking out of alignment between the carriages. The further rows appeared to be squeezed together like the segments of an accordion robbed of air. Why did she need to imagine that anybody sitting there would have to be unnaturally thin? The blackened hand that twitched between the seats as if responding to her thought must be the reflection of a crack in the wall of the tunnel, just a small crack, not an indication that the place was unsafe. The wall was rushing past almost as close to the side of the carriage as she was, with a muffled
