The Delusionist

by Rachel Mathias

“He’s coming isn’t he?”

  Maya heard her voice. “Who are you with? His wife?”

  “I’m with Sam, his daughter. But I think we need to get going.”

  I hung up and started the engine, tears rolling down my face now. Sam took over the logical role and reached across me to turn it back off.

  “Don’t drive yet,” she said."Make a plan."

  “I have to make sure Josh is okay.”

  She took my phone, opened Snapchat again.

  “We need to put it on ghost mode. That’s how he knows where we are.”

  “But I want to find Josh,” I said, taking the phone back. “If you do that, I can’t see him. And I want him to find me because I want him to be here. With me.”

  “Okay. Let’s think.”

  “We haven’t got time to think,” I said, trying to breathe but only finding breaths that came in panicky bursts.

  “Get in my car. Switch off your lock screen so the app stays open, and get in my car. That way he comes here, but we won’t be here. We can be over there. She indicated a dirt track concealed by a concrete building.”

  I obeyed, with no other option. Before we left, Sam screenshotted the numbers for Josh and Maddie, then was scrolling through my contacts for another one.

  “Which Jonathan is it? There are loads of them.”

  “It’s not Jonathan. It’s Harry.”

  “What?” She stopped for a second and stared at me.

  “He calls himself Harry?”

  “I know, it’s some sort of nickname or middle name. He told me his real name was Jonathan.”

  “He calls himself Harry” she repeated. “Harry wasn’t any of his names.”

  “What?” I absorbed what she was saying before she said it.

  “Harry was my brother.” Then, "He could have had any other name.” What she was saying took a second to sink in. The sky was dark now, headlights were going on, and big fat droplets of rain were hitting the windscreen, faster, harder. “But he took Harry’s.”

  “I’m so sorry Sam. All I can say is none of this is your fault. What he has done, the way he has lived his life, none of it is your responsibility.”

  “He was my little brother.”

  “I know.” I reached out and held her hand. “Come on, we can do this.”

  I took the phone off her, found the number and let her photograph it. Then I scrambled out of my side and ran around to her door, took her by the arm, pulled her out.

  “Come on, let’s do it. Don’t give up.”

  We made a dash through the rain and climbed into her car. It smelt of bubble bath and handcream. I fastened my seatbelt and we reversed out of the car park, bumped down the track and came to a halt behind the building.

  “What now?” she asked, white as sheet, staring ahead at the rush hour traffic moving slowly along the main road, My car, which Harry knew well enough, would be visible from a hundred metres away, but Sam’s Mini could only be seen from the far end of the car park, and even then only partly. From inside the car, we had a decent view of anyone indicating left to come off the road, although there was obviously no guarantee that Harry would be in the mood to obey the highway code.

  “We need to phone 999. They can intercept him.” I said. “Can you do that?”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” She reached into her pocket for her phone, pressed the home button, shook it, pressed the button again, then turned and looked at me, horror-struck.

  “What is it?”

  “The battery’s just died” she said.

  “Shit, we’ll have to go back to the car for mine.”

  “You can’t do that. He’ll see you.” Her voice was raised in a panic now. “Rachel, please. He will be here any minute. And it defeats the object. If the phone is with us, he finds us first.”

  “I’ll turn off the app. It’ll be fine.”

  “There’s no time to get back there, even if you run.”

  I bit my lip, my hand on the door handle, unsure. She was in no state to make a decision. I was twice her age, and probably twice her size, which meant nothing in reality but in the heat of the moment, anthropologically maybe, it mattered.

  “What choice do I have? The police are my only hope. Your father has kidnapped my son.” I was opening the car door before I’d finished the sentence and slammed it hard, shutting out Sam’s pleading voice and ghostly face. The wind whipped my hair into my face and the rain came down harder. The noise of the road was more deafening from here, and my heart thumped in panicky rhythm, disabling me, making me slow, clumsy. I raced down the dirt track and back through the sentinel trees into the car park, clicking frantically on the unlock button until the orange lights flashed in response. Opening the driver's door, I reached inside, scanning the seats for the phone, while feeling the door close hard against my calves. I spotted the phone just between the two front seats and made a grab for it, but just as my fingers closed around it, another hand was on mine, squeezing my fingers so I screamed and let go, and then the door slammed on my calves again, making me cry out in pain.

  “I don’t think you’ll be needing that.” Stars of pain swam before my eyes. I must have fallen head-first onto the handbrake because I blacked out for a second. Then the world righted itself and I struggled backwards, stood up and steadied myself, looking around for Maddie’s car. It was a few metres away from me, driver and passenger door open, both seats empty. No Harry, No Josh. No Sam.

  “Josh!” I yelled, louder than I have ever screamed in my life. “Josh!”

  I have found myself without my phone plenty of times, leaving it at home, taking it in for repairs, or just not being able to find it for a few panicky minutes, and every time it has felt like the end of the world. “Can you phone my phone!” I have shouted at nobody in particular, then raced out to listen in the car, in the bathroom, in the fridge. A few seconds separation from a device that I spent the first half of my life without can lead me to paroxysms of anxiety that will be familiar to most of the population of the western world. But at that moment, staring wildly around a deserted gravel car park while the oblivious world roared past, those moments were thrown into a void of insignificance.

  I screamed Josh's name again, then Sam’s, then Harry's, then Help until my voice was hoarse. The rain pounded into puddles. I heard nothing back but the hum of lorries. Holding my hair out of my face I raced towards the trees, back to Sam’s car. The driver door was open. It was empty. My skin prickled with fear as I walked around it, stopping at the garage that had been our shelter from the enemy, or should have been, if I hadn’t abandoned it on a hapless mission. It was a plain, rectangular brick structure of no apparent purpose, a storage facility of some sort, or the housing for some sort of machinery. It didn’t matter. Paint was peeling off the wooden door which stood, creaking open and banging shut as the wind gusted. I opened it, truly and honestly expecting death.

  In the darkness, a small voice whispered “Mum? Is that you?”

  Without a phone torch to help, I fumbled in the darkness for longer than I should have with the ropes around his wrists and ankles. But when he was free, I held him closer than I have ever held anyone, and had the most extraordinary feeling inside, as if fire was burning in my stomach, a feeling I would now describe as a mixture of relief and wild, wild rage.

  “Can you walk? Do you think you can run?” I don’t know why I asked him that. It was as if I was doing a quick survey of our stock, an inventory of our arsenal which would help me make the next decision.

  “I think so. Where are we going?”

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “No, not really.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “That you were in trouble, that he needed to help sort it out and that he wanted me to help. As back up or something.”

  “Back up?”

  “To be honest, I didn’t think much about it. He said you were in trouble. That he had to stop you getting hurt by someone very dangerous.”

  “Sorry
Josh, of course, I understand completely.” I found myself stroking his hair wiping the tears from his face, while mine flowed undeterred.

  “Then he made me find you.”

  “He what? How?”

  “On the app of course. That’s how we knew where you were. But I figured that if we used my phone then you’d see where I was.”

  I hugged him tighter. “You are a genius. He is an idiot, and he thinks he works in tech. What did he say when he brought you in here, tied you up?”

  “He said I had to stay very quiet because it wasn’t safe. He said I mustn’t move, mustn’t make a sound or something really bad could happen. I wasn’t scared that he’d actually do anything to me, but he was just behaving really weirdly. Like a kind of robot or something.”

  I wiped my wet face with my sleeve. “Josh, I have no idea. Something must be going on in his head, but the important thing is that you’re okay.

  “What do we do now?”

  All I wanted to do was get home.

  “Can we go home, Mum?”

  “Yes, we can go home, but the girl I came to meet here, Harry’s daughter, as it turns out, this is her car.” I ushered him out of the door and pointed.

  “She’s gone,” he said.

  “She’s gone.”

  “Do you think he took her with him?”

  “I don’t know Josh, Can you think back for me. Did he say anything at all about his children?”

  “He was ranting on about stuff all the way down here. To start with he was saying what a great boy I was, how lucky you were to have me, how he remembered when his son was my age, stuff like that.”

  “Did he say his son’s name”

  “Not sure. He mentioned Sam.”

  “Sam. That’s his daughter. That’s who I came to see.”

  “Why did you want to see her?”

  “To find things out, but it doesn’t matter now. I need to find her Josh. Can you come with me? I need to see if she’s okay.”

  “Sure, let’s try this way.”

  The dirt track led to what looked like a gravel pit, half dug, half filled in with rubble, scrap metal, sheets of plastic and plywood. Tyre tracks had worn a path to the left, now a mud bath, which led to some more garages, not dissimilar to the one by the car park but more run down, with corrugated iron roofs and broken windows. I glanced into the pit at the rubble, then down towards the ramshackle buildings beyond.

  “Are you going to call her, see if she’s hiding somewhere?”

  “I don’t want to shout, in case he’s still here.”

  “We can do an army manoeuvre if you like, where you cover me as I go forward, and then…”

  “No, Josh, we’re not doing that.”

  And we stood there in the rain for a second, before I looked, and had to blink a few times to check I wasn’t imagining it. I could see a hand amongst the rubble. The plywood was moving, and Sam’s tiny figure slid out from underneath. The relief was enormous.

  “I could hear you. Thanks for not shouting though. I think he may be somewhere around.”

  “How did you get away?”

  “I ran as soon as I saw the car pull in. Sorry, not very sisterhood of me, but it was like autopilot. I crawled in here. He came lumbering past, but must have carried on that way.”

  “Did he know it was you? In the car?” I gave her a hand up the last bit of the slope and she dusted herself off.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what he knows. He didn’t call my name, I just heard his breathing, his footsteps, his …. Sobbing – I think.” She was crying too now, or maybe it was the rain on her face, or the rain that fell between our faces and made the world look sad. I hugged Sam Dawson then, not a family hug or a friend hug, but a hug with no name, a hug that was part sisterhood, part shared tragedy, part unspoken understanding of something impossible to articulate.

  “I think he’s gone off again.”

  “Again?”

  “He used to disappear, sometimes for months. Mum said it was to get drugs. Then he’d turn up out of the blue from nowhere, as if nothing had happened. Growing up we thought it was normal, having a dad who wasn’t there half the time.”

  Josh was intrigued by her. I imagined him comparing hard luck stories, realising he had come off lightly in our comparatively amicable broken family. But then who knows what children actually feel? Difficult emotions get boxed up and buried before anyone thinks to ask about them, buildings erected on top to prevent accidental discovery, and it’s only the therapeutic wrecking ball that can even begin to get close to the truth, dusty and unrecognisable when it emerges to a chorus of We should have let sleeping dogs lie…

  Harry had gone, and so had my car. We stood in the rain, waiting for each other to call it – time of escape 5.14pm - until Josh spoke up.

  “My phone might still be in the little car.”

  We found it in the driver’s door. My fingers hovered over the number 9.

  “Are you going to call the police?” Sam asked, biting her lip.

  But they were already answering, and I was already telling them where we were, and who they should be looking for. Shortly afterwards, a car arrived to take us home. Another officer stayed to question Sam. She motioned to me to say she’d call.

  “Not yet – he has my phone remember?” I called over my shoulder.

  She smiled and climbed into the police car and that was the last I saw of her.

  Chapter 28

  Abinger Hammer

  It didn’t take them long to find him, but seeing the blue lights in the rear view mirror, Harry had sped off, sending cars skidding out of his way, and had held the chasers at bay for a good twenty miles before a collision with a van on a notorious stretch of road near Abinger Hammer sent both vehicles plummeting off the road into oblivion. Two bodies were eventually found in the rubble around the wreckage, too badly burnt to be identified.

  The story was in the local press the next day, then disappeared from the minds and memories of almost everyone involved, except for a few of us who will never forget.

  Maddie recovered from her injuries soon enough. She was too lively to stay down for long. Maya and I were at her bedside a few days later. The police had first dibs on her, but we made her repeat everything just for us. Chris turned up with flowers and sat with his head in his hands as he was forced to hear it all again.

  “He turned up on Sunday, then it was basically hell, from that moment on.”

  Maya and I listened, unable to process what she told us.

  “He told me he’d been round to see Rach, that she was threatening to hurt herself. He wanted me to help him get her out of the house, make her safe.”

  Maddie and Chris took turns to tell snippets of the story, each of them too traumatised to do more than a couple of sentences at a time, and the truth was hard to hear. Once inside Maddie’s house, Harry took her phone, forced her to let him into it with her fingerprint ID and sent messages from it to her employer saying she was sick. I remembered him telling me about how his father used to shut him away, not let him eat until he agreed to work for him on some or other dodgy project. And here he was doing the very same thing. And meanwhile, he was reading my WhatsApp message to the group asking for someone to collect Josh.

  “I heard the message ping. It has a special ring tone, so I knew it would be you or Maya, and I could hear him through the door tapping out a reply.”

  The nurse came in and checked the screens. “Not too much excitement now. She’s had quite enough for one day.” Maddie closed her eyes, letting Chris take over.

  Maddie had somehow managed to overpower him enough to get herself out of the bedroom, but Harry proceeded to use his brute strength to ensure she wasn’t leaving with him. It was lucky she was one of the few of us who still had a landline because she would never have been able to crawl out of the house to alert the emergency services otherwise.

  “Well either he didn’t think about the landline, or he thought he had actually killed her…” Chri
s was almost sobbing as he spoke, and I thought how we had misjudged him, how I had so easily assumed that my charming online romance was somehow superior to this unconventional but truly loving relationship.

  “Maybe he didn’t care,” I said under my breath.

  Maddie managed a few more words then.

  “When he left, his last words were: Babe, you won’t be seeing me for a while. I’ve got to collect Josh from the station, then I’m going round to see Rach, because she needs me.”

  So that was the motivation to break down a solid door with her bare hands. I felt humbled. She smiled weakly and closed her eyes.

  “I just hadn’t realised he had taken the car. I could have got them to catch him earlier, maybe.”

  “It’s okay, ssshhh,” I stroked her arm, thinking nothing but how much I felt responsible for all of this.

  Maddie was in hospital for two weeks in total but came out almost good as new. Her spark was a little diminished, which made her only about three times as exciting as the average person. It was time for us to get on with our lives.

  I tried to find Sam, even went down to her home, only to find a Sold sign outside it. I called Julie, texted her, but there was no answer. Something wasn’t right about that, I thought in the night when I couldn’t sleep. In my half-awake dreams I had visions of them sitting around with Harry, laughing, cackling like witches. I would get up and go to the bathroom, splash water on my face, turn the pillows over, think about my breathing, but my body stiffened as the images came flooding back. One night, unable to get back to sleep, I made the mistake of switching on my laptop and googling the accident again. It was very brief, the sort of half-baked reporting that reflected the importance of non-descript lives. If they had been mothers or children, it might have been different. Society is strange like that, valuing the young so much more highly than the old.

  Chris has left his wife now and moved in with Maddie. Jess and Jason are married with a puppy and Maya is still with Simon, rubbing along as well as can be expected. Caro and James have moved to Dorset and we are all angling for an invitation for old times’ sake. Sally’s part-time lover disappeared in a puff of smoke one day, leaving her to patrol the internet for a replacement, which she still hasn’t found. Isabel is still a great friend, with no recriminations, and not a mention of I told you so. They all look after me more than I expect them to. Anna and Sadie fuss around me all the time. Josh is quieter than he used to be, and looks at me with a sad face sometimes, but then I let him beat me at Scrabble and it cheers him up.