trusted things would come out right, shouldn't they? It's my belief they will if they're meant to. You're the proof.'
While Rory didn't care to be reduced to this, he stayed quiet as the woman said 'Funny that you can't think what they're after if it's supposed to bring you back. Anyway, they're the ones need bringing back now, aren't they?'
At once Rory knew she was right, but not in the way she imagined. Whatever Hugh and their cousins had set out to do for his benefit, it wasn't just unnecessary now; it felt more dangerous than his mind could encompass. He had to call them back. 'Where are my things?' he said.
'Nurse will have to show you.' His urgency seemed to alarm the old woman, who clutched her husband's hand with both of hers as she called 'Nurse.'
'You'll know where they're keeping people's stuff, won't you? Just tell me where.'
'I don't know where they can have got to.' This apparently referred to the staff, because she added 'They ought to look at you if you're thinking of getting up.'
'I just want my mobile.'
'Are you stuck with one of those as well? You can't use them in here.'
'Then I'll have to outside.' Rory had another thought and slid open the drawer of the bedside table, which was so rudimentary it was colourless. The drawer did indeed contain a key with a blurred number inked on a plastic tag, which he used to indicate the metal lockers at the far end of the ward. 'I won't tell anyone you said,' he assured her. 'It's all locked up in there, yes?'
'You oughtn't to be walking when there's nobody to see to you. You don't know how you'll be.'
'Let's find out.' Rory hoped to encourage her by including her, but it simply made her more nervous. He withdrew the needle from his arm and laid the tube on the bedside table before groping under the sheet, where he found a reason to be grateful that his sensations were still understated. He took some time and care over disencumbering his penis from a tube, which he hung over a metal stand, where it emitted a single unstoppable drip. In shuffling his feet one at a time to the edge of the bed he pulled the sheet from beneath the mattress. Planting his hands on the bed, he levered himself more or less steadily into a sitting position, which bunched the sheet in his lap. 'You mightn't want to watch this,' he advised.
'Don't you worry about that, love. You won't be showing me anything I haven't seen on my Jack.'
Rory found this flirtatious and equally uncomfortably maternal. Perhaps she only meant how he was dressed, which was bad enough. He was wearing an abbreviated gown that tied none too closely at the back, so that it would have exposed his buttocks if they weren't done up in a plastic pad, all of which left him feeling worse than infantile. He poked his feet over the brink of the mattress and lowered them to the floor, then stared at the woman as he wobbled off the bed. He meant to make her look away, but she gazed at him with additional concern. Resting one hand on the windowsill, he wavered to his feet. Perhaps he'd managed to deflect more than her attention, because she vanished.
So did the room and his body into utter nothingness. Only the realisation that it contained some kind of light prevented it from extinguishing his mind as well. He was about to devote any strength to producing a nightmare cry when he became aware of his hand on the windowsill. He hadn't reverted to insensibility after all. He'd just stood up too quickly, and the insight seemed to restore his senses. The blankness retreated to the limit of his vision and beyond, exposing the sight of the ward full of beds and the woman watching him more solicitously than ever. 'You aren't well, are you?' she seemed almost to hope.
'Never better,' Rory declared and took several increasingly confident steps to the end of the bed.
She looked as if she weren't entirely convinced he was walking. Her husband and the occupants of the other beds were demonstrating how out of the common it was. Rory wasn't about to let anyone steal his confidence, not least because he had a sudden unappealing notion that someone would be glad to. As he padded down the aisle between the sheeted bodies he had to fend off the idea that their insensibility was capable of drawing him in. He hurried to the farthest of the lockers opposite an unoccupied desk and slid his key into the lock.
His mobile was resting on top of a pile of his clothes. The thought of venturing outside in his present outfit to phone resembled a bad dream. He grabbed the mobile and his clothes and shut the locker before shouldering the doors aside and dodging into the corridor. It was deserted, which only made him feel more like an escaping prisoner. Nobody could stop him, or was there someone who could? Was he forgetting a name it was dangerous to forget or else to remember? Hugging his belongings, he followed the overhead signs to the nearest Men.
The room beyond the terse word was deserted too. Above the sinks a mirror multiplied the white tiles of the walls, so that Rory felt surrounded by a relentless absence of colour. He was suddenly afraid of not seeing his reflection. He made himself step forwards, and in a moment saw a ridiculously costumed apparition with his face. He took refuge in the nearest cubicle, where he planted his clothes on top of the low cistern before fumbling to undo the gown and tear off the degrading pad. In no time he was dressed, socks and shoes too. He stuffed the pad into a bin and left the gown hanging in the cubicle as he returned to the corridor.
Nobody could see the escaped patient now. He was just another visitor. He hurried to the lifts, the nearest of which opened at once to his summons as if it were as impatient as he was. It certainly seemed eager to box him in with its dull flat grey doors and walls and floor and ceiling. The greyness struck him as less a colour than a substitute for one, and as much of a threat to close his senses down as the white tiles had been. He stared at the numbers above the doors and tried to grasp what colour the illuminated digits were. Perhaps the attempt to determine it helped him retain his senses, but he hadn't identified the tint of the lacklustre 1 by the time the doors released him.
The lobby was scattered with visitors and staff, who presumably saw as little of him as he did of them. As he emerged from the building his mind appeared to lighten to match the sky. So long as it didn't grow as blank, he thought, and switched his mobile on. He took several unnecessary moments to decide on calling Charlotte. Wherever she was, he assumed it must be out of reach, because she was represented by an automatic message. As he listened for Hugh and then for Ellen, his concentration felt dangerously close to blotting out his surroundings. Worse still, it seemed to have blotted out his family. All three were as silent as packed earth.
THIRTY-FIVE
As Charlotte stepped on the escalator at Liverpool Lime Street she became afraid that she would miss a call. Retrieving the mobile from her handbag, she triggered the display. While the stairs bore her downwards she was able to watch the signal dwindling as if, like her, it were being dragged into the earth. It vanished as the stair beneath her feet, sending her off the escalator. She had yet to hear from Hugh or Ellen in response to her increasingly terse messages. The destination boards at either end of the underground platform promised a train to West Kirby in two minutes, which meant that for at least another ten she would have no chance to hear.
She dropped the mobile in her bag, where it nestled against the flashlight she'd bought in an Indian store near the station. Whichever way she looked along the sparsely populated platform she was confronted by a tunnel shrunk around darkness, but for hours she'd been unable to distinguish her claustrophobia from her anxiety about her cousins, if indeed that hadn't overwhelmed any other feelings. In the taxi from the hospital, and then on the train out of Leeds, she'd kept hoping that a call from Hugh or Ellen would let her go back to watch over Rory. She ought to contact the police; she couldn't contact the police. The two imperatives persisted in switching back and forth inside her skull, even more insistently now that she was unable to make a call.
Before long a train with west kirby luminously emblazoned on its brow rose out of the left-hand tunnel. More people than Charlotte had time to identify boarded as she did. Her section of the carriage was unoccupied but flanked by onrushing blackness. She seemed to be able to live with this; perhaps she was growing resigned to her condition. She was more troubled to be met by darkness when the train emerged from the tunnel on the far side of the river.
Her phone showed that nobody had tried to call while she was underground. She hoped Hugh or Ellen had thought to bring a flashlight, although would they have expected their task to take so long? Of course she didn't know that it had. Attempting to raise her cousins yet again wouldn't help them or her nerves. Streetlamps alongside the railway drove back the dark, which only made her worry how much light her cousins had and what it might be illuminating. Houses flocked by, curtained windows glowing, and she thought of families at dinner or in front of
