Jean rang Jamie and got no answer. She rang Katie, but Katie was clearly busy and Jean didn’t want to be told that she was being paranoid, so she hung up before they had an argument.
She rang the hospital. She rang Virgin. She rang Wessex Trains and GNER. She rang the police and was told to ring back in the morning if he was still missing.
She had brought this on herself. By thinking of leaving him.
She tried to sleep, but every time she began to drift off she imagined a knock at the door and a young policeman standing on the step looking serious, and she felt sick and giddy and terrified, as if someone were about to hack off one of her limbs.
She finally got to sleep at five in the morning.
42
George was not in the mood for sitting in a restaurant. So he went into a newsagent’s and bought himself a tired sandwich, an orange and a slightly spotty banana.
He returned to his hotel room, made an instant coffee and ate his snack supper. Having done this, he realized that he had nothing left to do, and it was only a matter of time before his mind slipped its anchor and began to drift.
He opened the minibar and was about to remove a can of Carlsberg when he stopped. If he woke in the small hours and had to hold the forces of darkness at bay he was going to need his wits about him. He swapped the Carlsberg for a Mars bar and found the Eurosport channel on the television.
Five young men appeared, standing on a mountainous outcrop wearing helmets and rucksacks in the obligatory Day-Glo colors now worn by young people in the great outdoors.
George was working out how to increase the volume using the remote control when one of the young men turned unexpectedly, ran toward the precipice in the background and launched himself into the void.
George lunged at the television in an attempt to grab the man.
The shot altered and George saw the man plunging down a vast rock face. One, two, three seconds. Then his parachute opened.
George’s heart was still hammering. He changed channel.
On channel 45 a scientist received an electric shock, his hair stood on end and his skeleton became briefly visible. On 46 a group of pneumatically breasted women in bikinis gyrated to pop music. On 47 the camera panned over the aftermath of a terrorist outrage in a country with an incomprehensible language. On 48 there was an advert for cheap jewelry. On 49 there was a program about elephants. On 50 there was something in black-and- white with aliens.
If there were only four channels he might have been forced to watch one of them, but the sheer number was addictive and he went round the clock several times, pausing for a few seconds over each image until he became a little nauseous.
He opened the Ackroyd, but reading seemed an onerous task at this point in the evening, so he went next door and began running a bath.
He was getting undressed when he remembered that there were parts of his body he did not want to see. He turned the bathroom lights off and stripped to his vest and underpants, intending to remove these just prior to climbing into the bath.
But as he was sitting on the edge of the bed removing his socks he saw, on his left bicep, a constellation of tiny red dots. Six or seven, maybe. He rubbed at them, thinking they might be some kind of stain or clothing fluff, but they were neither. Nor were they tiny scabs. And rubbing did not remove them.
As the floor gave way over a wide, yawning shaft in the now-familiar manner he briefly consoled himself with the thought that he would not be thinking about Jean and David for a while.
The cancer was spreading. Either that or some new variety of cancer had taken root now that the first had weakened his immune system.
He had no idea how long the spots had been there. He had no memory of having ever examined his biceps in detail before. There was a voice in his head telling him that they had probably been there for years. There was another voice in his head saying that this meant they were symptoms of a process which had already done its deadly work below the surface.
The crouching was making him uncomfortably aware of the sandwich, the banana, the orange and, in particular, the Mars bar. He did not want to throw up again, and in a hotel to boot. So, keeping his eyes closed, he forced himself to his feet and strode back and forth between the window and the door, hoping to repeat the calming effect of the afternoon’s walk. By the time he had done this two hundred times the rhythm was going some way to alleviating the panic.
This, however, was the point at which he heard water lapping on a tiled floor. It took him several seconds to work out what might be making the sound of water lapping on a tile floor. When he did so he opened his eyes and sprinted toward the bathroom, tripping on the corner of the bed and smacking his head against the door frame.
He got to his feet and stumbled into the darkness of the bathroom, slowing down to prevent himself slipping again on the flooded floor. He turned the taps off, threw all the available towels onto the ground, gently removed the plug then knelt beside the toilet to get his breath back.
The pain in his head was considerable, but it brought some relief, being a more everyday kind of pain that peaked and ebbed in a predictable fashion.
He put his hand to his forehead. It was warm and wet. He really did not want to open his eyes to find out whether this was due to blood or bathwater.
He flipped the door closed behind him with his foot so that the darkness thickened.
Fuzzy pink lights hovered on the back of his eyelids like a distant goblin village.
He did not need this. Not today, of all days.
When he had got his breath back he clambered slowly to his feet and made his way into the bedroom, keeping his eyes tightly closed. He turned the lights off and put his clothes back on. Opening his eyes, he removed a selection of cans, bottles and snacks from the minibar and returned to the chair in front of the television. He opened a can of Carlsberg, found the music video channel and waited for more pneumatically breasted, gyrating women in the hope that they might stimulate a sexual fantasy gripping enough for him to forget where he was, and who he was, and what had happened to him over the last twelve hours.
He ate a Snickers.
He felt like a small child after a long, long day. He wanted someone bigger and stronger to carry him to a warm bed where he could fall into a deep sleep and be transported swiftly to the beginning of a new morning in which everything would be good and clean and simple again.
The woman singing on the television looked about twelve years old. She had no breasts to speak of and was wearing jeans and a torn T-shirt. There would have been something unsavory about watching her if she did not seem so terribly angry bouncing up to the camera every few bars to shout into the lens. She reminded George of a younger Katie in one of her more volatile moods.
The music was raucous and tuneless, but as the drink began to do its work, he realized how young people, possibly drunk themselves, or under the influence of mind-altering drugs, could find it entertaining. The driving rhythm, the simple melody. Like watching a lightning storm from the safety of one’s living room. The idea that there was something even more violent happening outside one’s head.
The young woman was followed by two black men chanting over an insistent disco beat. They were wearing baggy trousers and baseball caps and using some kind of impenetrable ghetto slang. On the surface they seemed a lot less angry than the young woman in the previous video, but they gave the very definite impression that, unlike the angry young woman, they would not think twice about burgling your house.
They had three female backing singers who were wearing very little clothing indeed.
He opened a small bottle of vodka.
By midnight he had drunk himself into a stupor and was wondering why he had not done so earlier. He felt very relaxed and kept forgetting where he was. Which was good.
