‘It’ll all end in tears,’ he said, sourly. I didn’t tell him that I thought he was almost certainly right. Bending my back, I grabbed Alkland round the waist and shoved him upwards as hard as I could. The hauling power of the couple above was not Herculean, but another shove sent Alkland clear just as I heard the sound of footsteps thundering down the corridor.
I leapt off the desk, swung it as close to the corner of the room as I could, and then leapt up to grab the sides of the hole. I pulled myself up through it to the sound of shouted warnings from outside the door of my apartment. As soon as I was in the old couple’s living room I placed the disc of ceiling material back into its hole. The jagged spur from the part that I’d broken was just enough to stop it from dropping straight through. Okay, that was just plain lucky, I admit it.
I flipped Alkland onto my shoulder, almost fell over, and then got my balance. Thanking the old woman, and agreeing to reimburse Neville for any costs involved in the fixing of their floor, I pulled open the front door as a loud crump from below told me that the BugAnaly™ had finally got what was coming to it. Some rather distressing screams suggested that a couple of the ACIA agents had been standing a bit too close. Still, never mind, eh? For one, you think Alkland and I would have left my apartment under our own steam if they’d caught us? For two, I don’t give a fuck. I’m where I am now because when I was young I wanted more. I wanted to live in a film. I looked, and I found. Now I live in that film, and here the bad guys are everyone who isn’t you and if they die you don’t have to give a damn.
Now I don’t care much for that younger me, and I wish to God I could take back what he did, unfind what he found. But I can’t. I did what I did and I was who I was. That was me once, just like the teenager who wanted to be a rock star was me, like the child who’d never had someone’s brains splashed over his face, and whose fingers were small and warm and safe in his father’s hand. They were all me, and they’re all in there somewhere, standing alone and lost in twilight. But I can’t find them. I can’t find them because they hide when I try to look for them. They hide from me. They don’t want to know me, because they know nobody’s really there.
Oh fuck, ignore everything I say from now on. I’m not myself. Or maybe I am. It’s been so long I can’t remember. The more you get to know someone, the more there is to dislike. If you get to know them well enough, you hate them.
And who knows me better than anyone else?
Rafe does.
I didn’t hold out much hope of the ACIA men being confused by the old ‘hole-in-the-ceiling’ ruse for long. As I trudged up three flights of steps as quickly as I could, I hoped to hell that Shelby was going to be early for the second time in her life.
May Shelby marry the least boring and stupid doctor, lawyer or orthodontist of her generation. May their dinner parties be the most celebrated and exclusive soirées Brandfield has ever known, and may they have a golf club specially formed for them to be the sole members of.
She was there, is what I’m saying.
As I took the last flight of steps two at a time, feeling my back pull and twist with the weight of an unconscious administrator, I heard the stair door bang down on my floor. They’d seen the circle in the ceiling. Or Neville had grassed on me, which is probably more likely. I kind of hoped he had, in fact: that way he and his wife would have been less likely to have harm done to them.
When I crashed out of the access door on the roof and saw Shelby perched on her heliporter looking poised and cool in the glow of light from her instrument panel, I felt relief wash over me like a kiss of flowers. I stumbled over to within ten feet and then slipped Alkland forward off my shoulders as gently as I could. It wasn’t terribly gentle, and he made a quiet groaning noise, the first sound since we’d left the apartment. I dragged him over to the heliporter and kissed Shelby resoundingly on the cheek. She blushed and looked at me sideways.
‘Well, hi,’ she said.
‘Shelby?’ I said. ‘I’m always happy to see you. It’s always a pleasure, always. Today, however, and I’m referring for the moment solely to the times when I’ve seen you in a, shall we say, professional capacity, I’m more pleased than ever before.’
‘Stark.’
‘There are no words to express my joy. None at all. I have a dictionary, and I’ve looked. I’d have to paint you a picture, sculpt a sculpture or maybe try to express it through free-form improvisational, dance.’
‘Stark, you’re babbling,’ she said. ‘It’s completely charming babbling, and I don’t want you to stop necessarily, but perhaps you should babble in the air?’
‘You’re absolutely right,’ I said, and in my head went through fifty different ways of getting myself and an unconscious Actioneer onto one seat. I found one that wasn’t blatant suicide and went for it. It involved hanging on to the centre pole with one hand, one leg next to Shelby’s and the other helping brace Alkland on my side. I was tired before I was even fully in position, but it was the only way.
The second I was settled the access door opened and three ACIA men burst out at once. One had blood on his suit. Another man came out immediately after them. They all shouted at me simultaneously, and two of them dropped to their knees to take aim. The other seemed to try to stop them for some reason, but he was pissing into the wind.
‘Eeu,’ said Shelby, wrinkling her perfect little nose, ‘they look way aggressive. I think we should go.’ She slammed the lever gracefully and once more we were treated to the gratifying sight of bullets passing immediately underneath us as we rocketed up in the air. If anyone needs an extremely competent getaway driver who is also on first-name terms with the most prestigious maître d’s in Brandfield and the surrounding district, I can recommend Shelby without hesitation.
Alkland slumped dangerously under the acceleration and once more I had to do my reaching out and grabbing him thing. As Shelby took the heliporter up to fifty feet above the roof I wrapped my left leg round Alkland’s and clamped my arm around his chest. The heliporter swung into forward motion and we streamed forward through a hail of bullets, hail that was, unusually, travelling upwards very quickly. With small and precise movements of her manicured hands Shelby slalomed through the air, obviously not actually dodging shells but just making us harder to sight on. Alkland grunted suddenly and I concentrated on clinging on to him, my head hunched against the sound of rushing wind and passing bullets.
The heliporter picked up speed and within a few long seconds we were out of range, pelting forwards through the cold air. I looked back to see that they were still firing at us, tiny flashes of light in the darkness.
‘To where?’ asked Shelby intently.
‘Head for Sound,’ I said, panting. ‘And keep high. How much charge do you have?’
‘Bags,’ she said, grinning. ‘Something made me think I might be hearing from you again way soon. The batteries are all full to the max.’
‘Shelby, I.’ I looked at her, wanting to thank her, wanting to say how nice it was to have someone who was always there, who was my friend. Who liked me. Not that many people do, you know. Not enough, anyway. I couldn’t get my mouth to work, and the sight of the kindness on her face was more than I could take. After a quick glance forward Shelby reached out one arm and pulled it round my shoulders, and I cried.
My father owned a bookshop. Not at first: when I was very young he just worked in one. Then finally he took the plunge and got some money together, and opened his own. I was about six by then, and I can remember very clearly the first time I walked into his new shop. It’s the best memory I have, the memory I would keep above all others.
My father believed strongly in there being a right time for everything, and in doing everything at the right time. When he picked up some holiday photographs, he wouldn’t stand out in the street and flick through them, throwing away the moment of seeing them for the first time. He’d keep them in their folder until he was home, until he’d made a cup of tea and settled comfortably in his chair, and t
hen he’d slowly unpack the photos and look through them one by one, savouring them.
Likewise with the shop. He didn’t let us come and look as soon as the lease was signed, but made us wait until he’d redecorated it and got in all the books, built up his opening stock and arranged them carefully on the shelves. Then, the night before it was due to open, he came and collected my mother and me and we went down to the shop together, walking slowly through the town as a family, walking to the shop like the customers would.
When we reached the dark green door he smiled and pointed up at the sign above the window. ‘Stark’, it said on the top line in gold on green, and then ‘Books’ beneath. Our name was much smaller than the ‘Books’, and I didn’t understand why, not then. I thought he was just being modest, as always. It wasn’t until much later that I realised why he’d had the sign painted that way, and when I realised it was too late, and I felt a bitter twist of sadness that will never go away. He’d had ‘Stark’ painted small so that there was enough room for ‘& Son’ to be added later, if I wanted it to be. But I never realised, and it never was.
We waited while he sorted through the unfamiliar keys, and though I was several feet below their level I caught the look of quiet pride and love in my mother’s face as she watched him open the door. It swung wide and my father shepherded us in, into the pools of soft yellow light.
Stark Books was a beautiful store. I don’t suppose there have been many bookshops like that, and there are certainly none here. My father loved books, loved them with a passion that so few people understand, and he taught me to love them too. My mother taught me what little I know of kindness, and my father showed me that there is magic in a book, that anything can lie between the covers, that though they are so quiet and still every one is like a gate.
His shop was not so much a place to sell books as a place for them to be. The carpet was thick green and the bookshelves rich brown, and as we walked quietly among them it was as if we were visiting the place where the books lived. As we looked in every corner and saw how every inch was my father, my mother and I gripped each other’s hand more and more tightly, and the more we saw the less sure I was that the glow we walked in was due to any lamps. The glow was my parents.
We finished the tour at the back of the shop, in front of a door. Without any ceremony my father reached forward and opened it, and we walked into the back office. It was cosy and warm like the shop, and as my mother walked around her steps faltered and her mouth hung open. For this was to be her place.
My mother was an accountant. Before she had me she worked for a big firm, and while I was growing up she did little bits of work for people. Now I was old enough to be at school I knew she fancied working full time again, but she hadn’t been able to find a way back in.
There were two desks in the back office. One had a picture of my mother on it, as my father’s desks always did. On the other was a big red ledger, and a poster hung on the wall beside it. The poster was of a Tiffany stained glass window, and was my mother’s favourite. The desk also had a little china pot on it, and held a black biro, a red biro and a green biro. My mother’s colours, the colours she used when she prepared people’s accounts for them with her breathtaking neatness.
She reached out and ran her hand across the back of the chair that was to be hers, and then dipped her hand into her pocket. She pulled out a small piece of soapstone, a tiny polished figure, and placed it on my father’s desk. Then she and my father fell together and hugged each other so tightly I thought bones might break.
I wish I’d died then. That would have been enough.
But now I was still alive, and they were dead, and as Shelby piloted us over Colour towards Sound, one arm on the wheel and the other tight around me, I cried, cried until I thought my heart would stop.
We came so close to dying half an hour later that thoughts of my parents had to be pushed to the side for a while. That hurt, felt like a betrayal of them, but in all that happened afterwards they were there, and I saw everything through a film of green and gold.
The first thing I noticed when I finally got myself under control was that Alkland’s breathing, which had been obscured by the violence of my own, was shallow and uneven. I wiped the back of my hand across my eyes and turned his face so that I could look at it. It was deathly pale.
‘What’s wrong with him?’, asked Shelby, gripping my arm to leave me free to examine Alkland more closely.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and then I saw. I felt it first, in fact, felt that my leg, the one I had wrapped round Alkland’s, felt slightly colder than the rest of me. Looking down I saw that there was a dark stain on it.
‘Oh no. Oh shit.’ I moved my leg and bent round to look at Alkland’s. He’d been shot.
I reached down and twisted his leg gently. There was no exit wound: the bullet was still in his thigh. From where it had gone in it had to be somewhere near the femoral artery, and blood was coursing in a steady stream out of the ragged entry wound.
Shelby paled when she saw the dark smear of blood on my fingers, and snapped her eyes back to the front, swallowing tightly.
‘How bad?’ she asked.
‘Terrible,’ I said.
‘He didn’t look terrifically well beforehand.’
‘He wasn’t. Shit.’
‘Where am I headed, Stark?’
‘Cat,’ I said. She turned and looked at me.
I nodded. ‘It’s the only place we’re even slightly safe.’
‘Stark,’ she said, ‘far be it from me to question your call, but how are a bunch of cats going to protect you from ACIA?’
‘ACIA are the least of our problems,’ I said, moving into a position where I could get my jacket off. ‘Someone else is after us.’
‘And, like, he has this phobia of cats?’
‘No.’ I wrapped one arm of my jacket round Alkland’s thin leg and knotted it tightly. Shelby made a small adjustment and the heliporter banked to the right slightly, heading towards Cat Neighbourhood. ‘But the cats are on my side.’
Shelby looked at me for a moment, long enough to see I wasn’t joking, and then shook her head.
‘Stark,’ she said, ‘you’re an odd person.’
Alkland shuddered deeply and I tightened my grip on him, looking closely at his face. If you ever get shot in the leg, take my advice: make sure you’re in the best of health beforehand, and try to ensure it doesn’t happen when you’re freezing cold, in the dark, hundreds of feet above the ground. In fact, you might want to give the whole thing a miss. If s not as much fun as it sounds, and it’s bad for you. Even worse than smoking, probably.
Alkland’s skin was deteriorating ever more quickly, its cohesion breaking down. The parts stretched over his increasingly prominent cheekbones looked taut, but his cheeks felt spongy and my fingers left ripples in the skin that didn’t fade.
‘Is he going to die?’
‘I’m amazed he’s still alive,’ I said.
I was. The condition he was in from Jeamland alone would have put him near the edge. The amount of blood he was losing from a major gunshot wound should have finished him off. Somewhere deep inside his failing body the Actioneer must be holding onto life pretty damn tightly. I slacked the tourniquet for a moment to freshen up the blood running round his leg, and then tightened it again.
This done, I stared unseeingly towards the ground for a while, trying to anticipate all the ways in which this was going to make things even more difficult.
‘Stark,’ said Shelby, and the eerie calm in her voice made me look up immediately, ‘I think we may have a situation.’
‘What?’ I said, but she didn’t answer immediately. Instead she turned round at the waist and leant over to look at her feet. When she came back up again her face was flushed slightly from the run of blood, and I noticed for the first time in quite a while how pretty she was.
As if to answer my question a tiny red light on the heliporter’s minimal instrument panel began to flash. S
helby looked at it, and then at me, and smiled a terrible small smile, as if she was realising for the first time that the kind of thing I do isn’t a game, and that bad things really can happen.
‘No juice,’ she said. ‘Next stop, the ground.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, gently. ‘You said you were loaded.’
‘I was. His leg wasn’t the only thing that stopped a bullet.’ The blades of the heliporter missed a beat and we dropped a yard, but then they cut choppily back in. As best I could without losing Alkland, I leant over to have a look myself.
She was right. The second battery had a large hole in it, and the third was nowhere to be seen. We were a couple of hundred feet above the ground, half a mile from Cat, and we had no gas.
‘Start heading down,’ I said. ‘As quickly as possible.’ Shelby was already onto it. The blades missed a beat again and we dropped heartlessly for another couple of yards.
‘I can’t see the ground,’ she said. ‘Where do I head for?’
I glanced quickly around below us. The gate to Cat was slightly to our right and still about six hundred yards away. It didn’t seem likely that we would get that far, never mind clear the wall. Sound doesn’t go a bundle on streetlights, and the area beneath us was very dark, dotted with only the occasional unhelpful point of light.
‘Head towards the gate,’ I said. ‘We won’t make it, but there’s open spaces around there.’
‘Stark,’ she said suddenly, ‘if we don’t make it…’
‘Forget that,’ I said. ‘I owe you dinner.’
Alkland moaned slightly, his arm twitched and I nearly lost hold of him. I’ll be honest and admit that for a second I thought it might almost have been better if I had. His chances of coming through this were getting smaller by the minute, and his weight was dangerously overloading the failing heliporter.
But it was only for a second, and if you think badly of me for thinking that, it just shows you’ve never been in a similar position. You’d be surprised how you might react in certain situations, what you’d find out about yourself and your instinct for self-preservation at all costs.
Only Forward Page 28
