'You shouldn't let them put you off. They've got to know something, it's their job. You ought to go back and make them speak up.' Perhaps the driver saw how much this troubled Rory, but his pause seemed little more than momentary. 'Here you are,' he said.
Rory was afraid he'd been returned to the hospital, but he was almost as disconcerted to see the railway station. How long had he been unconscious of his surroundings? Presumably as long as the driver's pause had actually lasted. 'You sure this is where you think you ought to be?' the driver said.
'It's where I want.' As Rory focused on the digital display beyond the complications of the grille he was unnecessarily reminded of a bedside monitor in a hospital. He slipped a fiver through the gap beneath the grille and looked back from the pavement to find the driver watching him with such concern that it seemed to menace Rory with inertia. 'I was visiting,' he repeated and willed himself to leave it all behind, to move, to turn.
The sky was black, the interior ahead of him white. The black taxi had brought him to the station, not the hospital. However incomprehensible the giant voice that filled the tiled booking hall might sound, that must be the fault of the address system rather than of Rory's senses. Nevertheless he took care not to outdistance them by dodging too fast through the crowd to the nearest available ticket window. 'Where can we get you?' the clerk said.
He tried not to be thrown by how pensionable she looked. 'Thurstaston,' he said.
'Not here, pet.'
'I'm not expecting it to be. It's where I have to go.'
'I'm telling you you can't do that from where you are.'
'Of course you can. I can, I mean. I've done it.' Rory's panicky frustration must be affecting his eyes, since the window appeared to be growing opaque, veiling the clerk's face. The patch of blindness shrank as he managed to grasp his mistake. 'Sorry, it was the nearest station,' he said and manufactured a laugh. 'West Kirby. I know you've heard of there.'
He would have been surer if he'd been able to distinguish her expression. Her face drifted into focus as she told him the price. 'Going now?' she said, and he wished he could without lingering over the transaction. Once her skinny fingers had stretched through the aperture under the window to hand over his tickets and token change he made for the destination board.
A train would be leaving for Liverpool in less than fifteen minutes. At least he could stop worrying about his unsteadiness once he was seated. Perhaps he might doze, except that the prospect of losing consciousness revived his panic. He bought a flimsy plastic cup of coffee at a refreshment counter. A girl in a white overall reminiscent of a hospital uniform shut the steam in the cup with a lid. This must have made the hot drink safe, because he forgot about holding it as he showed his ticket at the booth.
The train straight ahead was his. Every door was open, but he walked to the farthest to save time at his destination, however much it felt like trying to leave a pursuer behind. He remembered to plant the cup on the rudimentary table before he sat down. He was about to lift the lid when it occurred to him to phone again before the train moved off. He groped for the mobile and poked at Hugh's number and lifted the faraway bell to his ear.
The ringing ceased at last, to be succeeded by silence that felt as if a listener were holding his breath. When the belated voice spoke Rory found it worse than artificial. He could have fancied it was eager to abandon all pretence, to reveal the identity beneath the bright mechanical repetition. 'Call me. Don't leave me wondering,' he said with at least as much desperation as impatience and tried Ellen, to be met by the same silence and eventually the same message, which seemed to have grown hollower, as if it were emerging from deep in a hole. He could only reiterate his plea and call Charlotte. This time the silence and its companion voice, beneath which lurked an echo like a muffled mocking imitation by another speaker, made Rory feel close to being dragged into the depths, and so did his own repeated appeal. It was beginning to resemble a ritual whose purpose he didn't understand and might prefer not to, but he was unable to bring any other words to mind. Indeed, he had reverted to pleading 'Don't leave me –' yet again before he fumbled to shut off the call.
He let the phone drop on the upholstery and stared around him. Commuters were boarding trains on either side of him, tugging their shadows after them. Shouldn't this be sufficiently vivid to anchor Rory's senses even if the artificial light reduced the trains to monochrome? Perhaps the unreality of his calls had affected him, because he could easily have taken the windows for screens on which he was projecting images. He was stretching out a hand to touch the glass when the train jerked forwards, having shuddered like a dreamer struggling to leave a nightmare behind.
Had it spilled his coffee? As he made to dodge the threat of being scalded he saw that the dribble had only formed a ring around the base of the cup. It was too pale to stain the table. It lingered like an obscure symbol as he moved the cup, but in a moment he couldn't see where it had been. Perhaps the girl at the counter had put too little coffee in the cup, because Rory wasn't sure whether he was tasting it or simply how he thought it should taste. At least it wasn't as hot as he'd anticipated; indeed, he could imagine that he felt it growing colder in his hand. He took a gulp and was almost sure he tasted coffee, however faintly. When another mouthful proved no more conclusive he planted the cup on top of its lid so as to concentrate on the view from the train.
The streets sailing past the windows were threaded with headlamps brighter than the generalised amber glow that blotted out the sky. He tried not to feel that the glow was muffling the cityscape, although in the distance it looked thick as orange paint, smudging the shapes of buildings. Or was fog doing that? He wouldn't have expected to encounter any at this time of year; it made him feel as if he'd been unconscious longer than he knew. Straining his eyes seemed to attract the indistinctness, which drained substance from a line of houses he'd thought were clearly defined. As he tried to make sense of this he realised that he couldn't hear the train.
He was devoting his energy to seeing, that was all. He peered at the interior of the carriage until his impressions seeped back, the upholstery yielding beneath his weight, the wheels clicking like the needles of a knitter at a bedside. How much of his brain did it take to hold onto these details? When he reached for the cup he couldn't judge how hot it was, even by tipping the drink into his mouth. He downed it before he was able to taste it, and he was trying to believe that he had swallowed a drink when he grew aware that the windows had turned blank.
Surely it was just that his perceptions had fallen short of them, but that was bad enough. Once he put down the cup at which he'd been staring he was able to recapture the sight of the city steeped in ochre. As it fled past the windows he couldn't help reflecting that it was the colour of light about to die – the colour of the death of colour. Had the fog advanced, if it was fog, or was his peripheral vision shrinking? When he glared across the city he saw that another layer of buildings had lost all its features, while beyond it he could distinguish nothing at all. The train had fallen so silent that it might have been denying its existence, so that he was suddenly afraid of being too intent on the view to hear his mobile if it rang. While he didn't want any of his senses to falter, he needed to be certain that Hugh and their cousins could reach him. Suppose he had already missed a call?
The busy clicking reappeared as he groped over the upholstery, and the carriage established its presence around him. Having located the mobile, he clenched his fist on it as he saw that there had indeed been a call. He couldn't read the number, which resembled digits less than random blackened scratches, as if somebody had tried to claw their way up through the miniature screen. Rory jabbed the key to ring the number back and clapped the mobile to his ear. A bell that sounded shrivelled by distance had barely repeated its note before it seemed to recede into silence. 'Who's there?' Rory said or shouted, he couldn't judge which.
In a moment he had an answer of sorts, though the voice was so muffled or so remote that it might as well have been buried. He couldn't make out any of the trinity of syllables, let alone the identity of the speaker. 'What did you say?' he demanded, which brought a repetition of the answer. It was just as incomprehensible, but perhaps distance wasn't the problem; perhaps the voice was whispering close to his ear. 'Speak up,' Rory urged and strained to grasp the response. It seemed to be playing at remoteness again, and as he strove to hear he felt as if he were being drawn into whatever depths it might inhabit. No doubt the narrowing of his vision aggravated the effect. He was so anxious to identify the name he kept being told that he only belatedly noticed how much of the city had vanished.
He stared in dismay through the window beside him and then across the aisle. He could see no more than a few hundred yards in either direction, and even the visible buildings looked perfunctory, little more than outlines nobody had bothered to fill in. Behind them there appeared to be nothingness, not so much as a hint of the sky. As he peered past them, desperate to make out whatever was there, another lurid line of buildings was erased. He turned his reluctant head to see a street merge with the advancing blankness on the far side of the carriage. Was
