by Steven Hall
“Hey?” I said.
A shadowy Scout stepped around the remains of the fire, bundled sleeping bag under her arm. She cleared a space to lie down next to me.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m freezing,” she said. “Do you mind?”
“Sure, no. I’m freezing too.”
Lying on her side, she hooked an arm over me, dragging her unzipped sleeping bag up over us both like a duvet. She shuffled up some more, tucked herself into me, head on my chest.
“It’s standard un-space procedure.”
“Right.” With her ear against my ribcage, I felt sure she’d be able to hear my heart as loudly as I could.
“It is.”
“Not arguing.” I untangled an arm from my own sleeping bag, putting it around her shoulders. “There. Am I getting it now?”
I felt the little shudder of a laugh through her body. “Yeah, I think so.”
After a few seconds of warming up clothes, sharing breath and fingertip-and-ear-drum-heartbeat she said, quietly: “Can I tell you something?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“It’s advice really. It’s embarrassing so I’m going to whisper it.” Scout stretched and shifted, taking the hem of the sleeping bag up to my ear with her. “Right.” The tiny micro sounds of her mouth, pops and ticks around little whispered words. “You should know that when a girl takes her clothes off in front of a guy, it usually means something.”
Somebody let off a box of fireworks in my stomach. I was winded; they went up like a million-coloured bomb.
“Yeah?”
“Yep.”
Her lips, gentle, insubstantial and full of a million volts, pressed against my ear in the lightest of kisses.
I tucked down my chin. Scout looked up at me.
“Erm…” she whispered.
I kissed her.
22
A Tetris-Gap of Missing Bricks
I opened my eyes to see sunlight beaming down through the warehouse ceiling. The air stung cold but the sky was a pure pure blue.
Scout was resurrecting the fire, dressed in her combats and my big blue jumper.
I thought about her skin under my fingers, her ribs and her hips. I thought of her wet black hair fallen over her eyes and cheeks and nose and her breath and the sounds she made blowing it, moving it. The thoughts spiked in me, hot needles.
“It’s almost midday,” she said, seeing me shift around.
Under both our sleeping bags, I shuffled up into a sitting position. “Thanks for the lie-in.”
“Well, I think it was needed.” Having constructed her new paper and wood wigwam, Scout blew into the dusty white ashes at its core. I watched her for a little while.
“So,” I said, “what next?”
“Well, that depends what you’re talking about. If you’re asking about the journey, we’re a good four hours behind, but we should still make it today if we push on hard enough.”
“What if I’m talking about. About.” I let myself slump backwards onto the floor. “I’m not too good at this.”
“You mean what’s happening with you and me?”
“Yes.”
“Because we had sex?”
“Yeah.”
“Hmmm.”
“Yeah.”
What the hell does ‘Hmmm’ mean?
Scout messed around with her fire for a while like some kind of surveyor. I was trying to work out how to restart the conversation when I noticed she was blushing. Scout was actually blushing.
“When I was little–”
I looked up.
Scout made a big blow at the ashes, a poke at the fledgling fire with a stick. “When I was little, about seven or eight or something, there was a toy I really wanted. It was more like a science game actually–”
“A science game?”
“Leave it, Sanderson.” Another poke. “Anyway, I’d worked it all out and if I could save up all my pocket money for six weeks I’d be able to afford it. But when you’re a kid and you really want something, really really want it so you can’t sleep or eat properly, six weeks is forever. So I stole it.”
“Did you get caught?”
“Nope, but I was so ashamed of stealing the thing that it was completely ruined for me. I didn’t get a second’s fun from it, just guilt. In the end, I threw it off a bridge.”
I smiled. “This from the girl who collects laptops?”
“The point is–you have to pretend I’m Jesus and this is like a parable, okay? I’m trying to say I don’t do things if I’m just going to feel like shit the next day.”
I thought about it. “You’re saying I’m not going off the bridge?”
“You’re not going off the bridge.” Scout gave me a smile about things intimate and shared, a newly hatched sort of a smile, cautiously stretching its wings. “Providing I’m not going off?”
“Scout, you were never going off.”
Something in the way I said it made her leave the fire alone altogether and turn around to look at me properly. It made me feel like looking at me properly too.
“No?”
“No.”
“How would you know that?”
A nonsense in the back of my head said–tell her. Tell her how you felt when you first saw her, about the tattoo on her toe, how your hands knew just when and where to touch her, how you could both be so in synch the very first time. She’s got to be thinking the same thing. Right now, she’ll be thinking: It’s as if you’d–‘Don’t say it,’ I told the nonsense, ‘I know what you are and I’m not buying, not today.’
“I just feel it,” I said.
She tried it for size. “You just feel it. Like, you know in your heart. That kind of thing?” She was trying to tease but there was too much curiosity behind it, a joke-spoiling flash of honest asking.
I could sense the nonsense still watching me from the back of my head.
“Yes, actually,” I said. “Pretty much just like that.”
Scout nodded the way chess players nod at each other. “Good answer.”
The nonsense smiled. Go on then.
“Look, I feel stupid asking but–have you been getting that feeling too?”
She’d gone back to poking the wigwam. “Oh God,” she said quietly into it. “He’s going to be another stalker.” She flashed me that flick-knife smile as the first threads of smoke started to unwind from the new fire.
Twenty minutes later, after black coffee and bread, and a tin of tuna for Ian, we’d almost packed up camp.
“Scout, you know what you were saying about going off the bridge?”
“Yeah?”
“Just this once, no tricks, that’s on the level, right?”
She looked at me before shouldering her backpack.
“Just this once.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s on the level.”
The day laid out another procession of tunnels and climb shafts, stairwells and big empty cavernous spaces. We took turns to carry Ian, bumped shoulders as we joked, accidentally-on-purpose touched knuckles in a way that led to an I-won’t-mention-it-if-you-don’t sort of hand holding, walking and talking the distance away under fizzing strip lights.
We stopped to fill our water bottles up from a huge gushing main supply pipe that churned and thundered into some sort of partly covered industrial collection tank. We kissed at the edge and Scout called it the least romantic waterfall on the planet.
The dark, when we encountered it, had swapped its universe-ending edge for something intimate and close and inevitable. In a deep storeroom stacked with inflatable beach toys and out-of-date travel brochures we turned our torches off and kissed and touched again in the blind absoluteness of it. Fabric, hair, skin, fingertips, hands and mouths. The invisible hard floor. Buttons and belts, breath and sound.
Somehow, even with all of this, we made progress.
We snuck through a STAFF ONLY corridor behind the changing rooms in a department store, through an underground car park and down into a
sandwich chain store’s supply room to stock up on food.
“What I don’t get,” I said, as Scout loaded up with baguettes, viennas, ciabattas and various tubs and packets of filling, “is why we didn’t just come down into un-space later. Like here.”
“It’s just the way it works. You know like the London Underground map isn’t accurate to the streets above it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s sort of like that. Anyway, you’re not saying you’d rather have skipped the last twenty-four hours are you?”
“No,” I smiled. “Definitely not.”
“Good.”
Early evening and we were taking a break, sitting on our rucksacks and passing a bottle of water between us. Ian thumped against the door of his carrier. He’d come around to thinking how he’d like to get out and explore whenever we stopped, the only problem was, Ian wasn’t remotely interested in us or our timetable and could happily saunter off for an hour or more at a time.
“No,” I told him, “we’re only having a quick break. But next time you can do whatever you like.”
Two big green eyes stared contempt up at me through the wire bars.
“How’re we doing?” I passed the water over to Scout.
She looked up from her red notebook, taking the bottle from me.
“Good. At the end of that passageway, there should be access to the basement of a library. That’s where we need to be next.”
“That passageway?” I looked across. The passage in question looked short and dingy and sort of like a dead end. “Are you sure?”
Scout smiled. “Have I been wrong yet?”
“I don’t know, do I? We haven’t got anywhere yet.”
She shook her head, getting to her feet. “Fine, I tell you what. I’ll go and check it out. You stay there–no, don’t trouble yourself–and I’ll go and make double, triple sure we’re going the right way. How does that sound?”
I raised my eyebrows in pretend surprise. “Wait. You mean, you’re not already triple-sure?”
Scout shrugged on her backpack with an I’m-not-smiling smile. “Listen to you. Don’t push it, Sanderson.”
“I’ll be right here.” I called after her as she headed down the passage. She turned around to flick me the finger and disappeared into the black.
I had another drink then put the water away, got to my feet and pulled on my backpack. I was checking my pockets to make sure I had everything I needed when I noticed Scout’s red notebook lying on the floor next to the wall. I bent over to pick it up. I was turning it over in my hands when she reappeared at the passageway’s entrance.
“I told you this is the right way,” she called over. There’s a gap in the brickwork down here that leads through to the library stacks. We–Eric, stop.”
Scout was staring at me.
“No, sorry, I wasn’t–” I held up the red notebook. “You left it on the floor. I wasn’t going to read it or anything. I was just picking it up. “
“Eric.”
“Fine,” I pointed behind me with the book, holding it out at arm’s length. “I’ll even put it back over there and pretend I never–”
“Eric, for fuck’s sake shut up and keep still.”
And I saw the expression on her face.
My heart bumped, kicked out a thud of electrical panic. I stood shock-still, the arm with Scout’s little red book still stretched out behind me.
“Don’t turn around,” she said quietly. “Just bring your arm back in very, very slowly.”
I started to move my arm in a creeping centimetre but then there was something, a shadow of fast growing movement in the floor behind me and my eyes flicked across and down. And then:
I whipped my arm in, throwing myself forwards as the thought-funnel of teeth and blades blasted out of the floor and slammed together with a definitive clopping snap where my arm and shoulder and head had been half a second earlier.
“Ludovician” I shouted it out in gut-reaction horror, hitting the ground hard at the same time as the massive idea of breaching shark crashed back down and under the floor behind me, its splashdown throwing up an impact wave of meaning and thought which blasted and bundled me forwards across the concrete.
Scrambling up onto my feet, scrambling back and grabbing the handle of Ian’s carrier then running towards Scout.
Me and Scout running down the passageway.
“Through the wall,” Scout shouting, “through the hole in the wall.”
“Christ.” The idea of the floor rising up under our sprinting feet into a rolling bow wave. “It’s coming up, it’s coming up again.”
Scout throwing herself through a Tetris gap of missing bricks at the end of the corridor and me following, then being yanked back–Ian’s carrier wedged in masonry behind me. Me twisting my wrist around, yanking hard and then the box drag-scraping loose against the mortar and chipped brick, momentum sending me stumble-tripping backwards through the hole after Scout.
I landed in a heap on a tiled floor with Ian’s carrier on top of me.
“Move.”
I looked up to see a bookcase coming falling down towards me and I rolled, shoving Ian out of the way as the thing fell, tumbling hardbacks, breaking against the wall and burying the hole I’d come through in splintered wood and broken heaps of books.
A solid thump from the other side of the wall.
The pile of books rattled but didn’t move.
Then Scout jogging out from behind the fallen bookcase, standing over me white and sweating. “Jesus, I’m sorry, I had to–God, Eric, are you alright?”
But I was already scrambling up to my feet, grabbing up the carrier.
“Hey hey hey,” she said, stopping me, hands on my shoulders. “We’re safe, we’re safe. It can’t come in here. Look around you. Come on, Eric, come back to me.”
I stared around, vacant and shock-eyed.
We were on the edge of the shadowy stacks of a huge library. I looked back to Scout.
“See? It’s okay,” she said. “The books. All these books mean it can’t come in here, it can’t find its way through to us.” She hooked her arm around my waist, semi-supporting me. “Let’s get away from the edge, just to be sure.”
“Your notebook,” I said, still somewhere outside myself, “I lost your notebook.”
“That doesn’t matter, you idiot. We’re on the final leg anyway.”
“I thought we had until tomorrow before it could find us again.”
“So did I. Let’s find somewhere to collapse, get our heads together.”
“Fucking hell,” I said.
“Jesus, tell me about it. How’s the cat?”
We unloaded our stuff in a daze and sat in silence for a while, backs up against a shelf of fat geography books. Ian was okay, rattled, grumbly and angry but basically okay. After a few minutes growling he turned his back on us and pretended to be asleep.
“Fuck,” I said.
Scout nodded, eyes unfocused and looking straight ahead.
We sat quietly for three or four minutes.
“Scout?”
“Hmmm?”
“You said you had a sister. Would you talk to me about her?”
“Why?”
“Just so I can stop thinking about the shark.”
Scout looked at me.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to–”
“No, it’s okay. Talking’s probably a good idea. It’s Polly. My sister’s called Polly. What do you want me to tell you?”
“Just…anything. What’s she like?”
Scout thought. “She’s a brat. An alcopop-drinking, short-skirt-wearing, hanging-around-Spar type superbrat.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she smiled a vague smile. “You know, if I ever snuck in late at night I’d have to creep past her room to get to mine and if she heard me, I’d get a note under my door–£5 or Dad finds out where you weren’t at 3 a.m. this morning.”
“That’s very professional.”
“Yep, extortion to fund her white cider habit or something. She managed to land me in so much trouble once that I missed out on a big, end-of-year weekend away me and some friends had been planning for, for forever. And she did it on purpose”
“What did you do to get her back?”
“What makes you think I did anything?”
“Because you did, didn’t you?”
Scout smiled.
“Go on,” I said.
“There was a boy she really fancied in her geometry class, Craig something, and he’d asked her to a party. She’d liked him for ages, had a hidden diary with all these awful poems about him.”
“And you showed him the poems?”
“Nope, I told him she’d been born without a vagina.”
The sound of us laughing rolled around the dusty bookshelves and out across the quiet floors.
“That’s really awful.”
“Well, she is really awful.” A second’s pause. “She was.” Scout flicked her eyes away from mine. “You lose track of time down here. She’ll be eighteen now, that’s older than I was when I left home.”
“I’m sorry,” I said after a long moment.
“Why?” Scout had turned away so I couldn’t see her face, adjusting the straps on her rucksack. “What did you do?”
Stack by stack, stairwell by stairwell, we found our way into the deepest foundations of the library; a place of blinking old bulbs and shelf after shelf of turn-of-the-century books, sitting all dusty and quiet in their old-fashioned ranks.
“Look.”
“What?” I put Ian’s carrier down and went over to where Scout knelt.
She passed what she’d found up to me, a torn corner of newspaper with half of one side covered in winding biro letters. Some sort of formula.
“We’re getting close,” she said.
“This is Fidorous’s?”
“Yeah, that’s his handwriting.”
I stared down at the paper, rubbing my thumb over the little blue letters to feel for the ever-so-slight denting his pen had made as he wrote. “Are we going to make it today?”
“Oh yeah,” Scout said, setting off again between the stacks. “We might be there within the hour.” She turned around and smiled. “If your map reading’s up to scratch.”
