instantly and turned to face him as one, their eyes glassy and unfocused. Slowly, eerily, they each raised their left arm and held up the index finger. 'One!' they shouted together. Then they splayed out their fingers and thumb. 'Of five!' Some stupid catchphrase from a kids' cartoon, Church thought, but he still felt a shiver run down his spine as he hurried up the street to the car.
As he threw his bag into the boot, he heard the shuffle of feet on the pavement behind him. He whirled, expecting to catch the children preparing to play a prank, only to see a homeless man in a filthy black suit, his long hair and beard flattened by the rain. He walked up to Church, shaking as if he had an ague, and then he leaned forward and snapped his fingers an inch away from Church's face.
'You have no head,' he said. Church felt an icy shadow fall over him, an image of the woman at the riverside; by the time he had recovered the man had wandered away, humming some sixties tune as if he hadn't seen Church at all.
On his way to Ruth's, Church passed through five green lights and halted at one red. Nearby was a poster of a man selling mobile phones; the top of the poster was torn off and the man's head was missing. Further down the road, he glanced in a clothes shop to see five mannequins; four were fine, one was headless.
And as he rounded the corner into Ruth's street, a woman looked into the car, caught his eye, then suddenly and inexplicably burst into tears.
He finally reached Ruth's flat just before 1 p.m. She was ready, with a smart leather holdall and Mulberry rucksack. 'I can't help believing all this will have a perfectly reasonable explanation and we'll both end up with egg on our faces. God help me if the people at work find out,' she said.
'Let's hope, eh.'
Church drummed his fingers anxiously on the steering wheel as they sat in the steaming traffic in the bottleneck of Wandsworth High Street. Ruth looked out at the rain-swept street where a man in a business suit hurried, head bent, into the storm with a copy of the FT over his head-as if it could possibly offer any protection. 'You know,' she mused, 'I have the strangest feeling. Like we're leaving one life behind and moving into a different phase.'
'Too much Jack Kerouac.' Church's attention was focused on the rearview mirror; he had the sudden, uncomfortable feeling they were being followed.
'It's frightening, but it's liberating too,' Ruth continued. 'Everything was set in stone before-my job, where I was going. Now it feels like anything is possible. Isn't that weird? The world has turned on its head and I feel like I'm going on holiday.'
'Sunny Bristol, paradise playground of the beautiful people. I hope you packed your string bikini.'
'Have you got any music in this heap?' Ruth flicked open the glove compartment and ferreted among the tapes, screwing up her nose as she inspected each item. 'Sinatra. Crosby. Louis Armstrong. Billie Holiday. Anything from this century?'
'Old music makes me feel secure.' He snatched Come Fly with Me out of her fingers and slipped it into the machine. Sinatra began to sing the title track. 'And old films and old books. Top Hat, now there's a great movie. Astaire and Rogers, the perfect partnership, elegance and sexuality. Or A Night at the Opera-'
'The Marx Brothers. Yeuckk!' Ruth mimed sticking her fingers down her throat.
'Or It Happened One Night. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Romance, passion, excitement, great clothes, great cars. You can't get better than that.'
Ruth smiled secretly when she saw Church's grin; he didn't do it enough.
'Life was great back then.' He waved his hand dismissively at the jumble of shops on Upper Richmond Road. 'Where did it all go wrong? When did style get banned from life?'
'When they decided big money and vacuous consumption were much more important.'
'We need more magic. That's what life is all about.'
Ruth flicked her seat into the reclining position and closed her eyes while Sinatra serenaded the joys of 'Moonlight in Vermont.' The traffic crept forward.
The journey through southwest London was long and laborious. In rain, the capital's archaic transport system ground to a halt, raising clouds of exhaust, steam from hissing engines and tempers. By the time they reached the M4 more than an hour later, Church and Ruth were already tired of travelling. As the planes swooped down in a neverending procession to Heathrow, they agreed to pull in at Heston Services for a coffee before embarking on the monotonous drag along the motorway. By the time they rolled into the near-empty car park, Church's paranoia had reached fever pitch; at various stages on the journey he had been convinced that several different cars had been following them, and when a grey Transit that had been behind them since Barnes proceeded on to the services too, it had taken all of Ruth's calm rationality to keep him from driving off.
Beneath the miserable grey skies, the services seemed a bleak place. Pools of water puddled near the doors and slickly followed the tramp of feet to the newsagents or toilets where the few travellers who hung around had a uniform expression of irritation; at the weather, at travelling, at life in general.
As Church and Ruth entered, they could see through the glass wall on their right that the restaurant was nearly empty. They proceeded round to the serving area where a couple of bored assistants waited for custom and bought coffee and Danishes before taking a seat near the window where they could see the spray flying up from the speeding traffic. Through the glass, distant factory towers lay against the grey sheet of sky, while beneath the fluorescent lighting the cafeteria had a listless, melancholy air. Despite the constant drone from the motorway which thrummed like the bleak soundtrack to some French arthouse film, they spoke quietly, although there were only three other travellers in the room and none of them close enough to hear.
'This is killing me,' Church mused. 'Every time I look behind I think someone's following us.'
Ruth warmed her hands around her coffee mug; she didn't meet his eyes. 'A natural reaction.'
Near the door, a tall, thin man was casting furtive glances in their direction, the hood of his plastic waterproof pulled so tightly around his face that the drawstrings were biting into the flesh. At a table on the other side of the room, an old hippie with wiry, grey hair fastened in a ponytail was also watching them. Church fought his anxiety and turned his attention back to Ruth.
'When I was a boy this would all have seemed perfectly normal,' he said. 'You know how it is-you're always convinced the world is stranger than it seems.'
'That just goes to show we lose wisdom as we get older, doesn't it,' Ruth replied edgily. 'We've obviously been spending all our adult lives lying to ourselves.'
'When I was seven or eight I had these bizarre dreams, really colourful and realistic,' Church began. 'There was a woman in them, and this strange world. They were so powerful I think I had trouble distinguishing between the dreams and reality, and it worried my mother: she dragged me off to the doctor at one point. They faded after I reached puberty, but I know they affected the way I looked at the world. And I'm getting the same kind of feeling now-that all we see around us is some kind of cheap scenery and that the real business is happening behind it.' He glanced around; the man in the waterproof had gone, but the hippie was still watching them.
'I'm finding it hard to deal with, to be honest,' Ruth said. 'I've always believed this is all there is. I've never had much time for ghosts or God.'
Church nodded. 'I always thought there was something there. An instinct, really. You know, you'd look around … sometimes it's hard to believe there's not something behind it all. But these days … I don't have much time for the Church … any churches. After Marianne died, they weren't much help, to say the least.'
Ruth sipped her coffee thoughtfully. 'My dad was a member of the Communist Party and a committed atheist. I remember him saying one day, The Bible's a pack of lies, written by a bunch of power-hungry men who wanted their own religion.''
'Christmas must have been a bundle of fun in your house.'
'No, it was great. It was a really happy, loving home.' She smiled wistfully. 'He died a couple of years ago.'
'I'm sorry.'
'It was sudden, a heart attack. His brother, my uncle, was murdered and it just destroyed my dad. It was the unfairness of it … the complete randomness. Uncle Jim was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and some desperate, pathetic idiot killed him. You know, I work in the law and I see all the motivations for crime, but if I came across that bastard today I'd probably kill him with my bare hands. No jury, no legal arguments.' She bit her lip. 'Dad just couldn't cope with it. It didn't fit in with the ordered world view, you see. He tore himself apart for a couple of days and then his heart gave out. And in one instant I could understand the need for religion.' Emotions
