book he was reading and leaned across the bed. Around them, well-wishing cards crowded the tables and the windowsill. The amount of cards, the various colours of hope, could not shake the husband’s belief that his wife was as good as dead. He had decided, when the week was up, that he would switch her off. She wanted it that way. They both did. The ventilator had been breathing life into her for five days. It could not fix the warp of her spine, the crushed vertebrae, the jigsaw puzzle of her ribs.
Her eyes opened.
The husband ran to find one of the nurses. She told him to relax, then gently pushed past him and closed the door on the bedroom. A short time after, there was activity. A great deal of it.
“Joanna,” he said, his voice staggering over the word, as if he had never said it before. “Joanna.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: THE HILL
THEY MADE LOVE. The Negstream shivered into view. They went in.
It was still daytime. A raw wind funnelled down the street, stripping the soporific warmth of climax from their bones.
Sean said, “Pardoe found three leaks this morning. They had passed through overnight and were walking down a Newcastle street. They killed and ate a dog. They didn’t have much clue as to where they were or what they were doing, thank God, or it might have been a lot nastier. Pardoe said that he spent most of last year tracking down what the police had thought was a serial killer. It was just a very clever leak who developed an appetite for young women. He took seven before Pardoe caught up with him and sent him back home. They found some of the bones in an old skip near the public tip. He had been living there. Or dying there. Whatever.”
Emma looked tired. Her eyes were developing raccoon-like rings and her lips carried a grey tinge that had nothing to do with the flat, colourless light here. “How long, do you think, before there’s a flood?”
“Pardoe reckons two or three days, but he looked a bit white while he was saying it. I reckon we’ve got around twenty-four hours. Give or take.”
“Give or take a minute?”
Sean laughed. Emma was still strong, despite the attritional nature of crossover. The Negstreams caused no immediate wear and tear on the body or the mind; rather, it caused a gradual stripping-away of the body’s defences. Sean was managing with the erosion for the time being but Emma appeared to be feeling the full brunt of its subtle violence. She was being steadily dismantled, softstripped from within. Sometime soon he would reach out to touch her and she would implode, like a fractured china jug handled by a clumsy child, or the shell of a condemned building battered by the wrecking ball.
Seeing Will hadn’t helped. Thin and pale in his hospital bed in high dependency, he had been surrounded by machinery and nurses. The police were nearby too, guarding him from vigilantes who wanted to mete out some rough justice to a man who had used a young girl as a hostage. Maybe they were also on hand to make sure he didn’t make a miraculous recovery only to bolt. That didn’t seem to be an option to Sean as he had looked down at the other man’s bandaged head. Serious tissue loss, a doctor had told him. Which was a fancy wrapping for
A nurse had come in to wipe Will’s face and check his IV was feeding the right amount of saline into his veins. The slackness of his skin as the swab cleansed his lips and eyes had made Sean’s back creep. It was as if Will was dead already but his body didn’t know how to play the part.
They had promised him that they would visit him again, but Sean doubted he could hear their pledge.
At the end of the street they came upon a park that, for a moment, filled Emma with enough hope for a little sunshine to return to her demeanour. But there was no hill to be found in the park, just a pond with water so still and black it resembled a polished slab of ebony. Sean hugged her for a long time in an attempt to lift her out of her disappointment.
“We have to go at this a different way,” he said.
“Doggy style?” Emma asked, her voice muffled by Sean’s jacket.
“No,” Sean laughed, closing his eyes and breathing deeply the scents that clung to Emma’s hair. There was apple in there, and honey. And good old-fashioned I-want-you-till-I-die pheromones. Not for the first time, he wished this was somebody else’s problem and he could get on with unwrapping Emma’s various layers, getting to know the woman who meant so much to him. It had been a long time since he felt so committed, so clear about what he wanted. Being with Emma was like sucking a strong mint: she cut through all the dross in his head and found the little part of his brain that said
“I think we have to try to remember how we found the hill when we were children. I know it came to me so easily sometimes, it was as if it was hanging around behind my eyes, just waiting for me to shut them.”
Emma nodded in his arms. “I know. I can still smell what the grass was like. It was always midnight on the hill. There were always people walking around. They seemed lost but they gave off this indestructible air.”
“Who else but the dead can be indestructible?” Sean asked.
“Maybe we should find a hill near Warrington. Maybe that would help.”
“At night.”
Emma moved away from him. “Yes, at night. We should take a picnic. Kids’ food. Comfort food. Try to find a way back to a time when we were young. When we didn’t have to worry about anything.”
“We could go to Hill Cliffe. There’s a pretty little cemetery there. And a good view of Warrington. You can see the parish church and the detergent factory–”
“How lovely...”
“–and Fiddler’s Ferry power station. You can see the old clocktower in the centre of town, at Market Gate.”
“I’ll make us jam sandwiches, that really sweet, seedless stuff. And margarine. On cheap white bread.”
Sean closed his eyes and smacked his lips. “Mmm-mmm!”
“And Monster Munch,” Emma suggested.
“Pickled onion flavour?”
“Of course.”
Sean opened his eyes and frowned. Something was going wrong. The sky had bruised a little and the air had grown chillier. Looking at Emma was like looking at someone through unwashed gauze. Her edges had softened; there was a smudgy gleam to them. He reached out for her and told her to close her eyes, to lie back on the grass with him. She didn’t question him. Her breath, excited and hot, told him all he needed to know. His heart was pounding.
Emma said, “And I’ll bring some of those cheese triangles...”
“Ugh, I hated them,” said Sean, remembering the flavour in his mouth, the sludgy texture. “But I liked sweets. Sherbet fountains and moon dust.”
“Okay. We’ll get some. And comics.”
“
“
Sean shrugged. “It’s a whole different world to me, all that girl stuff.”
“Didn’t you have a sister?”
Sean shook his head. “Naomi was always into whatever I was into. Football, war comics. Bollocks like that.”
“Shall we take some toys to the hill?” Her hand in his grew damp; the dewy grass moved through their clothing. The air turned heavy with moisture. Something was happening to the ground at their backs. It felt as though they were being gently tilted.
“I preferred Sindy to Barbie,” she said, squeezing his hand.
