disappear into his skin.”
Will was exhausted, and in no mood for verbal trickery. After recovering from his faint, the bus driver giving him a cup of tea from his flask, he had thumbed a lift to Sloe Heath from a guy in a lorry on his way up to Leigh. At the hospital entrance he had stood for an age, as sunlight began colouring in the things around him, not quite believing that he had reached his destination. His relief was offset by the hollowness of losing Elisabeth and Sadie so close to his target. If it wasn’t for him, neither of the women would be... Well, best not to think too much about that.
He had not been approached by any staff as he made his way through the hospital grounds. It seemed that they were quite happy to allow pedestrians to use the path through to the north end of the site. He had barely walked for five minutes before he was accosted by this nut and his tall, silent, striding friend.
“Where do you want to go?” the nut asked. “Where do you want to be?” He was dressed in blue plus-fours and a white T-shirt. A red baseball cap was jammed down on his head, the peak violently curved. He wore tiny round sunglasses. His eyebrows were conjoined, forming a single black bar above the lenses.
“I don’t know just for the time being, thanks,” Will said, in what he hoped was a dismissive way.
“Just browsing, are you?” the nut said, and gave him a shocking, wolfish grin, full of long, white teeth. “Tarry a while,” he said, putting on an upper-class accent. “Take tea with Christopher and I, and we’ll talk of how we might help you. He said you’d be coming. We waited for days. But he was right. He was right. You came.”
Christopher wasn’t hanging around to see what Will would do. Will shrugged. It was just nice to get the offer of help after such a long time making his own luck. Keeping up with someone who was around six and a half feet tall wasn’t easy though. Will and the nut had to jog in order not to lose him.
“What’s your name?” Will asked, in an attempt to halt his plasma and fire nonsense.
“Yoda,” the nut replied.
“What’s your real name?”
“Tonto Moratorium-Pith. Junior.”
“Yoda it is,” said Will, trying hard to conceal his irritation. “What about him?”
“That,” said Yoda, reverentially, “is
“Who is Christopher?”
Yoda affected a puzzled look and pointed at the diminishing figure. “Christopher’s him.”
“Yes,” Will said, patiently. “I know. But who is he?”
“He is special,” Yoda said. “Come on. He makes blinding tea. And biscuits. Sublime biscuits the like of which you have never eaten.”
The sublime biscuits turned out to be a plate of malted milk, ginger nuts, and Jammie Dodgers. In a room that was like a shrine to brown, Christopher served tea from a brown teapot and sat cross-legged to drink it, his attention solely on the television, which was broadcasting a Rita Hayworth film.
“He won’t blink while he’s watching this,” Yoda educated Will. “But his mind will be ticking over like a Swiss clock factory.”
Will slurped his tea and ate more biscuits than he was probably welcome to, and found that they were sublime after all.
Yoda said: “Watch this.”
He cleared his throat and crouched by Christopher, looking up at his face as a mother might regard a son who had just come top in an exam.
“Twenty-eighth of May 1959,” he said.
Christopher said, in a sing-song voice: “Thurs-day.”
“Fourth of February, 1962.”
Christopher said: “Mon-day.”
Will sniffed. “Is that right? How are we supposed to check?”
“You try him then, doubting John-Thomas.”
Will shook his head. “This is stupid.”
Yoda took off his sunglasses. He might as well not have bothered. The eyes were small, black and round. Red marks remained where the bridge and arms had been. “You pig our biccies and won’t play? Then git, boy. Git. And see if anyone else will help you out. Our hospitality is third to second. And we’re second. And we happen to be second to none and all.”
“Sorry,” Will said, and thought of his own birth date. “Christopher. Eighth of June, 1970”
Christopher said: “Mon-day.”
Will clapped slowly. He thought of the date he had lost his virginity. “Tenth of May, 1986”
Christopher said: “Sa-tur-day.”
“Hurrah,” Will said. “Nice trick. Impressive.”
Christopher turned to lock eyes with him.
“Oh dear,” Yoda said. “You distracted him from his viewing.”
Christopher was crying. He said: “Flame me.”
“What?”
Yoda was flapping. “You heard him. Quick, quick, or it’ll be blood he needs. Where are the matches. Where
He reached over and drew Christopher’s hand out, palm upwards. Yoda struck a match and gently placed it onto the skin. The match flared and went out. A line of smoke rose from Christopher’s palm. Christopher leaned over and inhaled it.
He said: “21st January, Osaka, 2.03 p.m. 22nd January, Basel, 5.22 a.m. 22nd January, Darwin, 6.47 p.m. 23rd January, Birmingham, 10.19 p.m.”
“What’s this?” Will said, laughing nervously.
“I don’t know,” said Yoda. “He’s done it before but I don’t know what it means.”
“Write them down,” Christopher said. “Write them all down. You’ll wish you had if you don’t.”
He went on for another ten minutes, listing dates and locations and specific times. His tongue peeking from between his lips, Yoda scribbled what he was saying on the inside cover of a tattered Graham Greene novel. When Christopher had finished, he fell into a deep sleep from which he could not be revived, even when Will started kicking his chair and demanding to know what these dates meant.
“Leave him,” Yoda said, reverentially. “He has spoken.”
“Spoken gibberish, more like. I shouldn’t have come here. What a waste of time.”
“Christopher said, while we were waiting for you, that the girl wasn’t dead. That she would return to you. Soon.” Yoda’s beatific smile failed to curtail Will’s sudden rage.
“Sadie? What do you know about it?” he shouted, leaping from his chair and causing Yoda to rock back on his heels and fall to the floor. “Where is she? What about Eli? Cat?”
“I don’t know,” Yoda said, trying to crawl away. “I don’t know. Christopher said...”
“Christopher said?
Will didn’t know what he was going to do but he had a very strong feeling he might actually try to harm Yoda or Christopher, anything in order to get some information from them.
He was reaching down to grab hold of Yoda’s T-shirt, ignorant to the barked demands for an explanation for his presence from the starched nurse standing in the doorway, her hands squirming together. He was reaching when, out of the window, he saw the mountaineer, Flint, striding towards him across the grass, gripping by the hair the heads of Elisabeth and Sadie.
But then he saw that it wasn’t Flint after all, just a groundsman carrying buckets of pondweed. The nurse had her hand on Will’s arm now, but he couldn’t turn away, even though the shape of his shock had been softened, made manageable.
“I think you should leave, sir,” the nurse was saying, at the same time as exhorting Yoda, whom she called Mickey, to get up and tidy his magazines. “It
“Probably,” Will said, shaking his head. Nice place, he thought. Even the staff get in on the madness. He took the Graham Greene novel and stuffed it in his coat pocket, wondering what he should do now. So much of his hope
