“Someone’s here,” he said. “Can you hear?”
Emma stiffened. Her hand rose out of the shadows between them and a finger pointed. Out of a black cumulus of hedges, Marshall stumbled. Now they both heard him, his voice weak, almost childish.
“Sean?” He sounded unsure, as if the mind controlling the utterance could not fully appreciate the awful prospect that he was still alive. “Sean. Help. Me. Emma. Emma. Save. Me. Oh. God.”
Emma began to rise, her breath coming in stitches, her eyes filled with tears.
Sean held her back and put a hand over her mouth. He drew her face close to his and slowly, deliberately, shook his head. Emma’s eyes widened and grew angry. He leaned into her and whispered, as quietly as he possibly could, “Marshall is dead. That is not Marshall.”
Marshall was standing at the centre of the green, cocking his head, as if he had somehow caught a sliver of what Sean had passed on to Emma and was trying to pinpoint where the fragments of sound had come from.
Watching Marshall, Sean could see little things, little tell-tale signs that suggested it was not the man. Marshall would not wear his hat so far back on his head, like Sinatra. His belt buckle was tied across his coat, something Marshall never did because it made him feel restricted and didn’t allow him access to his gun. This Marshall had thrust his destroyed hand into his pocket. Sean guessed that was because, dead, it would have stopped bleeding. This Marshall could not replicate the flow that was needed. This Marshall had to hide the lack of bloodshed.
Sean saw the only way they could escape. “Here,” he mouthed to Emma. She gaped at him uncomprehendingly. “Love me. Fuck me.”
Already his hands were moving under her skirt, touching her, trying to coax some heat and wetness from her. She protested, trying to wriggle back, her eyes on Marshall as he staggered across the green. But maybe something in Marshall’s gait, the way his drunken stumble had arrested itself and was becoming, by the second, more controlled, caused her to give pause.
“Trust me,” Sean said, rubbing his fingers against and into the soft, moist yield of her sex. He guided her hand to his trousers and she unzipped him, drawing him out into the cold. He risked, “I love you,” because he needed to say the words and he needed her to be reassured. She nodded and leaned over him, quickly stiffening his cock with her mouth. She drew away and shuffled over him, apeing the position they had been in earlier. When she sank on to him, she had to stifle a moan by stuffing a fistful of jumper into her mouth. They moved against each other as slowly as they dared, and instantly rainbow motes began to tremble in the air, six feet away. It was like white noise on a television screen. Emma’s thighs trembled at the end of every upstroke, Sean’s when he rose to meet her coming back down, the price they had to pay for stealth: every shred of them wanted to speed up, to sprint for that delicious moment.
Emma watched Marshall, or what had once been Marshall. He seemed to have shed every aspect of the pretence, but for his shell. He knew they were there. He could read it in the warmth that had impinged upon the cold air of the park. He could smell the animal in them as they rutted. But he couldn’t see them. Yet. She recalled the pathetic, determined figure that had pressed through the bars of the hospital gates, like an unpopular child desperately trying to keep up with the would-be friends who were attempting to lose her. This person had evolved. This was real danger. It possessed knowledge and guile and strength. Will would have been dead by now, were he in the same situation from which they had rescued him. She wondered, as she felt herself grow giddy from the soft, impossible rhythms that her body was being sucked into, if the creature’s evolution had reached its ceiling yet. She wondered if, in a short while, it would be able to see them in the dark, if its eyes might develop some kind of thermal recognition now that it realised such a thing would be useful to it.
Pondering this, she felt the moment upon her. She knew she was going to come soon and could not stop herself from upping the ante. Sean tried to respond by reining in her new energy but she would not be denied. The colours sparkled and pulsed, as if catalysed by this development.
And Marshall saw.
The colours coalesced, forming a vertical palette. Smears of fresh hues as the colours merged ran up and down the palette as it twisted, creating a column. The air around it seemed to distort, as if unsure what side of the column to be on.
Emma bucked against Sean, beginning to make soft, yelping noises. Sean gave himself to the feeling too, and within a few strokes was there with her. They lurched apart at the moment of climax. Cheke was rushing them now, the glamour that was Marshall already reabsorbed. She shot twice, but the curtain of colour between them distracted her aim and the bullets were wayward. Dogs had started barking all around them. Lights were coming on in bedrooms. The third bullet caught Emma in the throat and she went down, clutching her neck with both hands. Somehow Sean managed to drag Emma into the maelstrom before Cheke laid her hands upon them. He had the final impression of her gun rising, level with his head, but he threw his arm across his eyes and toppled forwards into the cold fire. This time there were no faces in the flames, no incitement or enticement. None was needed.
Now, as with the first time in Myddleton Lane, Sean rewarded his courage, or recklessness, with a scream that he believed would never end.
A LOCK-UP GARAGE in the south of the city that he had broken into. A bottle of cheap wine. The remains of a bad chicken sandwich from a petrol station’s shop. Was this all he had left? Everyone with whom he came into contact had left him or died. Everything he owned had been reduced to rubble.
Will spread the tabloid on top of the crate and shifted his position on the cold, uncomfortable stone floor. There hadn’t been a car in this garage for years, although a black oil-stain proved that it had once been used for that purpose. Now it seemed the garage was used primarily by tramps, or crack-smokers. Someone had tried to set fire to the garage and succeeded only in blackening the walls and leaving behind a permanent sour-scorched smell. There was a sleeping bag in the corner, but it looked too ragged and stained to offer any comfort. Inexplicably, a garden rake and a broken hockey stick leant against the wall. The only other object in the garage was a cardboard box filled with swollen, mouldy paperback books.
The death toll from the previous day’s accident had reached a thousand. Of those, around six hundred had died on the ground. The number of victims was apparently increasing by the minute. Emergency crews weren’t rising to the questions asked of them by grisly reporters as to the likely final total. The newspapers had gone ahead with their guesstimates anyway. There were a lot of noughts.
Will’s thoughts turned to that beautiful rippling mass at the centre of the inferno. It had resembled a wall of water, or of molten steel. He wanted it so badly. He could almost feel what it would be like to immerse himself in that thing. He might displace the surface without breaking it for some time, like the dimpling that a waterboatman’s legs create on the surface tension of a pond. He might suddenly burst through its pellicle in a sudden implosion of silver bubbles. He could taste a bright, fresh flavour – what an apple might taste of if it were a hybrid of fruit and steel – feel the gush, a slight astringent sting, through his nostrils. Brilliant shivers against the skin. What might there be to see on the reverse? He had to have it.
But there were no more dates from Christopher. The Graham Greene novel’s dark itinerary ended with this crash. He rubbed at the inked appointments as if believing that some final secret date might reveal itself from the smudges he was creating. He sat for a long time, trying to remember what Catriona’s laughter was like or how her lips felt on his body. He couldn’t do it. His memory wasn’t up to the task. Or was it that, as he shed the people who connected to his life, they became intrinsically, essentially unimportant? They didn’t have immediacy any more. They were memory. And memory faded. When Will died, he thought, Catriona would cease to exist for anybody anywhere. It would be as though she had never set foot on the planet.
Will pushed himself away from the crate, suddenly aware of the panic in his breath and the restive knock of his heart. Had Catriona existed at all? What proof had he that she had been there? If he met a stranger and tried to convince him of the reality of a woman that he had loved, that stranger might be as unmoved as the garden rake by the wall. He wouldn’t have to believe in her because he didn’t care. Whether she had existed meant nothing to anybody who had never met her.
Will jammed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
