putting a voice to them. “Some time ago, I remembered where I was before I was here. I was in a car with my mother and father. Dad was driving. He was arguing with my mum about money. I was sitting in the back with my colouring book. I was colouring a dragon. I remember I was angry because I didn’t have a green pencil for the scaly skin. Just this awful yellow. Dragons aren’t yellow.
“I looked up just as Dad lashed out and struck Mum across the face. She hit back and she was swearing at him, telling him she hated him, ordering him to stop the car. She was getting out. She actually opened the door. We were on the motorway. Dad kept telling her to shut up. She hit him again and his hands came off the steering wheel. The car went into a spin and then came off the road and hit a tree. Mum went through the windscreen. Dad’s head was wobbling like a doll’s. I was flying around the back of the car, but my legs were crushed under the chair in front. And then I was sitting on the doorstep outside this place. Mum and Dad were with me for a little while.
“Raymond Meadows told me at school about coma. His mum is dying from something in her brain. She’s in a coma. That’s where we are now. This is coma. It isn’t any kind of life. And it isn’t any kind of death. Mum went on. Dad went back. And now I’m on my own. I don’t know how long you can stay in a coma for. Maybe for ever. Coma is what we want it to be when we are asleep. I think death is like that too. We make death the way our dreams want it when we sleep. Nobody could accept death if it wasn’t prettified like that.”
Luke turned, the edge of his face limned with firelight. He giggled nervously. “That’s what I think, anyway.”
Will tried to swallow but his mouth was too dry. His throat clicked with the effort. Joanna’s eyes were filmed with tears.
“How long have you been here?” she asked, breathlessly.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I was born in 1960.”
“How did you remember what happened to you?” Will asked. “I can’t remember.”
“It comes to you. Eventually.”
Joanna’s mouth was on the verge of collapse. Fear shaded in all the places in her face where age was making a home.
“What is it?” Will asked.
Joanna put a hand to her mouth. “Harry, that’s my husband. We... we said to each other once, if ever we were on life support, if there was no hope... we said we’d switch the machine off. He’ll pull the plug on me.”
He and Joanna had left the house when the fire became too stifling. They thanked Luke and asked if he wanted to go with them.
“Go where?” he asked, not unreasonably. “There is nowhere to go. It’s all the same. All different types of badness. The same old badness dressed in different, horrible clothes. What’s the point?”
The point for Will was to not let the child’s melancholy infect him. But here it was, stringing out visions of Catriona, Elisabeth, Sadie, and now Joanna, all those who had gone with him and paid the price for it. He had fucked up. He remembered now, wanting to die, knowing that he might be able to make a difference from within, knowing that Catriona waited for him somewhere magical. He had lived like a clown. And now he couldn’t even die properly.
“I don’t know what happens to time here,” he said, as he and Joanna skirted an inky lake that bore awful salty deposits at its edges that resembled claws and faces stretched into different masks of pain. “Maybe it’s condensed or spun out.”
“I don’t know how long I’ve got,” Joanna said.
“Maybe it isn’t all that bad,” Will reasoned.
“I have to remember,” she said. “I have to, otherwise, I’ll die without knowing how I died. How tragic is that?”
“Is it? I’d rather not know.”
Joanna sat on the ground, brushing away the twigs that resembled fingers in rigor mortis, and the tiny leaves that were like desiccated eyelids. “My husband, Harry, God, what if he’s here too? I don’t remember if he was with me. What if he died?”
“Then you won’t be going anywhere. Shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean–”
But Joanna had ignored his tactlessness. “The last thing he said to me... I can see his face, he looked concerned. And then the flapping all around me.”
“Birds?”
Joanna shook her head. “Fabric. Like someone airing a bedsheet, but all around me, as if I was trapped in a bed while somebody was making it. Silk. Lots of billowing silk. And freezing. I was freezing my tits off.”
“You were sailing, maybe?”
Joanna snapped her head up at him. “No. Not sails,” she said. “Parachute.”
JOANNA’S RELIVING OF her sky-diving trauma helped Will in the remembering of his; a kind of trickling down of horror. He flinched as he remembered the barrel of the police rifle empty its contents into his head. It was as if he could follow the trajectory of the bullet enter his temple. It hadn’t taken his life, though. Just his senses. He fingered the bizarre, proud crater now, and saw how what he’d seen as the coquettish angle of Joanna’s neck had been caused by something far more awful.
“I need you to do something for me,” he said. “If you go back. If you get out of here and you’re okay.”
“God, I hope so.”
Will held on to her hand, almost desperately. “Remember this. I want you to find me. And help me to die.”
“But I couldn’t!”
“Please. You must. I need to die. I have nothing but that. I want nothing but that.”
It took hours to persuade her but in the end she agreed. Perhaps her relenting, or the forceful way in which he had put his argument, had helped to colour the scenery; either way, it had suffered more erosion. It was as if the heat of his need had scorched away layer after layer of rock and rubble, a gradual onionskin weathering, until everything was level, sanded, clean.
“What now?” she asked. Her exhaustion had manifested itself in the papery cracks around her mouth, the stone and glass that had filled her eyes. Her voice was the lonely shifting of wind across sand.
Will said, “We have a train to catch.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: CONTRABAND
THERE WAS A mini riot kicking off in Blackwood Crescent. The police had set up a cordon and would not allow Sean and Emma to pass.
“What’s going on?” Emma asked, trying to see further along the street. An armoured police van was parked on the pavement.
“Families at war,” the police constable told them. “Are you all right, mate? You look like you’ve just been caught up in something like this.”
“I’m fine. Look, my gran lives in there. Let me through, will you?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t.”
“I’m a copper too. Down in London. Here’s my warrant card.”
