The ‘now’ was annoying.
‘Why not?’ he said.
‘No, totally. Why not.’
And months later, when they were lying side by side in bed one Sunday morning, she said something else that got to him: ‘I met your friend Lancaster the other day.’
Joseph rolled over to face her.
‘He was in town.’
‘What did he want?’
‘Nothing. Just to know how you were, how you’d been since you got back.’
‘Odd that he wanted to ask you, not me.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘Not much. That you’d moved on with the new … career. But, to be honest, compared to him you’ve hardly changed.’
‘How’s that then?’
‘He was just a boy last time I saw him; now he’s all grown up.’
‘We’re all older.’
‘If I didn’t know him, I don’t know, I wouldn’t want to run into him on a dark night.’
‘Lancaster?’
‘The shaved head, muscles on muscles. I barely recognised him.’ She turned her face to the ceiling. ‘I think he was more interested in what you may have told me, to be honest. About what went on out there. He kept asking if you’d been in touch with any of the guys, that sort of thing.’
Joseph didn’t fill the pause.
‘But you’ve told me nothing, so I just put him at ease.’
A burning sensation built in Joseph’s chest. He shut his eyes. Blackened feet, a triangular split, apples.
‘It’s a while ago now,’ he said.
‘A year. Nearly.’
‘Yeah well, there’s no sense dwelling on it.’
‘Dwelling on what?’
‘Stuff,’ Joseph said.
Naomi sighed.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Stuff,’ she repeated.
63
Joseph does not return to the multi-storey car park. They’ll find the Mercedes there eventually and it’ll work its way back to Emily, who’ll put two and two together. Scrunched note notwithstanding, she’ll understand.
Hopefully.
Either way he has a new mission to complete.
The job now, with the false trail laid, is to go to ground properly. He knows where and he knows how. Just has to pick up his kit en route. Doubly important now that he’s not seen or recognised along the way. So that rules out catching any more lifts or taking public transport. Instead, he’s got to tab it out. But ‘it’ is actually quite far. What, seventy-odd miles along the road?
Doable, and yet …
Fewer as the crow flies, but pushing on over stiles and through hedges is a lot more time-consuming.
For now he’s walking purposefully out to the edge of town into a bit of suburban estate, complete with traffic-calming measures and cul-de-sac signs. He checks his watch: three thirty-nine. Not a soul about. Everyone here tucked up in their beds. Lucky them, but strangely he doesn’t feel tired himself now. He’s too busy scouting the driveways. There are some decent cars parked in front of these little boxy houses. Mostly newish. Strange, splashing that much cash on a shiny car to stick outside your Barratt home. Still, in his time Joseph has spent good money like an idiot, so who’s he to judge?
He’s not about to pinch another car, because actually he has no idea how to start one without a key, but he is checking them out, looking for … Yes, here’s one, a Volvo estate with a set of roof rails. And on top of the rails, a pair of those bike-stand things. Which will mean, possibly …
Joseph tries the garage door, which doesn’t budge.
No joy there, then, but round the corner in the next close he spots another bike rack on a people carrier and this time it’s easy to force open the door of the little shed to the rear of the two-up-two-down house. Inside there’s not much starlight but, using his hands, he finds not one but three adult bikes to choose from. This one here is a racer. But the next one has panniers and, bonus, lights. He lifts it carefully onto the garden path. This is what insurance is for. Still, he feels a bit bad, so he pulls some notes from what’s left of his cash – which doesn’t, it seems, leave him very much at all! – and puts them under a flowerpot just inside the shed door.
The bike has a clicky back wheel, so best carry it a little way up the road. Skirt that pool of streetlight. And swing a leg over the saddle here. Wow, it’s somewhat large, this bike. He’s nicked it off a giant. Joseph either has to shimmy forward on the saddle or pedal standing up, which does the job for a mile or so, before it’s actually quite uncomfortable, damnit. He’s not been on a bike in ages. You never forget, blah blah, but your thigh muscles do. And the bag is a bit awkward, slung across his back like that. Still, he’s making good progress, and he can endure. He goes on another couple of miles, gets into a sort of stride, works with the pain, does his best not to hate the bike and the long-legged freak it belonged to. He can’t take the most direct – motorway – route, for obvious reasons, has to cut up through East Meon, Liss and Liphook instead, names he recognises dimly, though what’s this just short of Haslemere: a seam of grey sky in the east, dawn breaking, colour creeping in.
He’s done thirtyish miles. That’s more than he’s cycled in the last decade. And on a bike so big he can barely reach the pedals.
Hold on.
Dismount.
Didn’t Lara’s bicycle have a sort of …
He checks the seat post.
Aha.
Calmly he opens the quick-release clamp and drops the saddle a couple of inches, refusing to think about the pointlessly hard time, raw inner thighs and whatnot, he’s given himself over the last three hours, out of sheer …
Look: traffic is starting to build. There’s a car or two waiting at this junction. That chap has his shirts hung up in his rear window. He’s off somewhere for the week, possibly staying in a Travelodge. Ah, the luxury of a cheap hotel. Not for Joseph now, though! No: he needs to be closer by, somewhere he knows he can hide out completely, unobservable yet observing.
What?
He’s got to keep an eye on them.
Who?
Don’t be daft, one quick-release stupidity is enough.
Lara.
Zac.
Naomi.
Christ, this hill. Why does one in every five cars cut so close to him? Maybe he’s not vacupacked in luminous spandex like that bloke who just shot past him, but still, he’s here, struggling through these pine woods, trogging on. He’s forgotten how hilly this part of the world is. You just don’t notice them in an Alfa Spider. The Alfa, ha. Black with red leather seats. The smell of them! He bought it brand new with his first real bonus. Sounded great ripping through these tree tunnels, despite Naomi’s ‘really?’ when he parked it out the front.
Oh, Naomi.
It was just a car.
Maybe it cost a bit more than he should have spent on himself, the bonus actually being a little less than he’d been expecting, or hoping for, at least, but not to have bought it would have been to admit that fact, wouldn’t it?
Yes!
Got to keep up appearances.
Anyway, if he had the Alfa now, he’d chase down that white-van man and give him a talking to at the next junction, for whipping by so close to a cyclist, him, former Big Beast Joseph Ashcroft, who isn’t even wearing a bike helmet, for God’s sake!
At least it’s easier going with the saddle at the right height. Keep turning the pedals. Just a few miles now, miles in which to answer the question: where to ditch this bike? How about a pub car park? A sort of pay-it-forward gesture, helpful to the next person who needs a ride home. He could even pop in for a plate of egg and chips before leaving it outside, couldn’t he. Tempting, but no. This village pub doesn’t open for another four hours anyway. In the end Joseph props the bike next to an ancient red phone box on the village green. And from here he sets off on foot, feeling oddly buoyant.
Well, he hasn’t sunk yet, has he?
>
64
Joseph kicked off his brogues and sat down on the leather sofa. It was 11.15 p.m. on a Friday. He’d just got home after a punishing week in which he’d mostly been selling a budget airline. Naomi handed him a glass of champagne. Actually, fizzy white: their compromise.
So far, so normal.
Then she said, ‘I’m pregnant.’
The bubbles were suddenly sharp on Joseph’s tongue. He stood up, sat down, stood again and walked over to some pot plants. Arrayed like that, in a semi-circle before the bay window, they looked congratulatory. Rightly so! Why, then, was Joseph swaying in front of them, fear dropping through him, making it important to grip the back of the couch?
Naomi knew he’d lost his father young, but not how.
What with his mother dead in Alicante, he’d sort of left out the specifics of Huntington’s chorea.
Of course, he’d meant to tell her at some point, but never quite got around to it, because let’s face it, whole weeks, months, seasons went by without him thinking about it himself. Not much, at least. Certainly not with a name, plus implications. The disease was a bit like that homeless guy who’d set up camp in the alcove to the left of the bank’s service entrance: Joseph had got good at looking the other way. There was never a right time to tell Naomi about it, because it wasn’t necessarily relevant!
Now, however, it was.
Joseph was thirty-one. He’d never had a symptom, and he’d never taken the test. He was a rational man, yet that ‘and’ had somehow developed shades of ‘because’.
That’s right, the causal links had jiggled themselves about; not confronting the disease by seeing definitively whether he had the disease was what he did to ensure he didn’t have the disease.
But if he did have it, there was a chance the child might have it, too.
Which meant he had a duty to tell Naomi about it now, didn’t he?
She’d stopped taking the pill without warning him?
Oh Christ.
‘That’s fantastic news,’ he said.
Naomi put down her glass and they held each other. Wow, did she feel good in his arms. Differently good: better. Now was the moment.
‘Fantastic,’ he said again.
‘I know.’ Her hair was soft under his chin. ‘Nine weeks.’
‘Wow.’
‘You’re okay with it?’
‘Of course I am! I mean, did you … was it …?’
‘Accidentally on purpose, yes. I was going to tell you, but I didn’t think it would happen this quickly.’
Now was the moment, now!
‘You’re not angry about that?’
Now!
But no, he heard himself saying, ‘No, no. I get it. I mean, we were always going to have kids at some point.’ He rubbed her back. ‘Some point is now!’ – NOW … no! – ‘It’s … decisive of you. I like that.’
They stood holding onto one another, Joseph looking over the top of Naomi’s head at the piles of correspondence, newspapers and CDs – Jarvis Cocker staring back knowingly at him – and the moment stretched out, meaning he could still bring it up, still, still yet, yet still …
But no.
All he eventually said was, ‘We’re going to need a bigger place.’
65
Right now, en route to pick up his luggage, not so much from an airport carousel or five-star bellhop, more from underneath some rubble, he’s headed for somewhere more bijou. Yes, forget neoclassical column frontages, abstract topiary (surely a contradiction in terms?), integrated salmon pools, underfloor heating, blah blah: think bum hole instead.
Bum?
For God’s sake.
Bomb.
But that’s what they called them! Back in the day. Bum holes. Yes, well: they were eleven, not forty-four. Still, that means it’s not a mistake as such. Bum hole is the correct memory, so it’s not a slip caused by …
Stop thinking about it.
Instead: might as well take the footpath here, with all the flint bits poking through that ground alongside. It looks like the reddish earth has a million grey-white teeth. Trudge on. Do the dog-leg around this big L-shaped field. He knows roughly where he’s going because he used to walk Gordon, the actual dog …
That was afterwards. A long time afterwards!
No, the bomb hole was a thing from boarding school. It, meaning the school, stood on a ridge. Still does! Beneath the turreted red-brick building and across the flat valley floor there were sports pitches, but the sides of the ridge were flanked with woods. And in the woods: long culverts overspilling with ferns and stunted, scrubby hawthorns and rhododendron bushes interspersed with beech and ash and fir trees (every year the groundsman would cut one down to use as a Christmas tree in the hall) and even the occasional oak.
That looks like an oak tree there, in the middle of the field, as a matter of fact.
Ah, back in the day. The teachers turfed them all out into the woods for whole afternoons at a time. Thousands of good trees to climb. Joseph remembers the races. Up that tree with the smooth bark and across the long bough to drop into the canopy of the other one and half fall half slide back to earth. They timed each other with digital watches that were new, as in not long invented. Back in the day. Poor old Ben Doherty: he fell out halfway down and broke his arm, but he swore he’d done it slipping off the retaining wall behind the pool and even if they didn’t believe him, the teachers didn’t try to stop them going into the woods. They were out of sight there and that was all that mattered.
Joseph is puffing a bit. Not far now, though. Through the trees at the top of the rise and down the other side. That little copse with the ruin in it should be off to the right. Do the thing properly: scope the site to check nothing has been disturbed. Yes, and keep to the hedgerow now for the final approach.
All looks fine.
All is!
Ah, familiar rubble.
Mess of brambly branches to one side, under which, safe and sound: kit.
Excellent.
In fact: that’s a relief.
Tiredness sweeps it.
It’s been quite a time, after all, what with pounding that drain in Emily’s garden, the drive to Southampton, making it through to the ship wired on adrenalin, jumping off said ship, that freezing water, climbing the rope and ladder, skulking about still so cold, forging on to liberate the bike, riding the bike a cool sixty miles, plus a final push on foot to here: no wonder he’s exhausted. Let’s just settle down in the corner to rest a while, before …
Because although this is a good spot to hide in for a while, it’s not actually good enough, is it?
Location, location, location.
Bomb holes.
In the woods, at school.
Paul Holmes said somebody in his brother’s year had actually found an unexploded bomb in one once, but that made no sense: if it hadn’t exploded there’d be no hole, and anyway Paul Holmes also said he’d seen a wolf.
Ha.
The bomb holes were real enough, though, craters six or eight or ten feet wide and most of them so deep you could stand up in the middle. They were caused by stray bombs dropped from German planes in World War Two. If only one had hit the school building, Paul Holmes said, then they wouldn’t have to do French. Good point, but stupid: there wasn’t a major city nearby so the Germans were terrible aimers; if they’d tried to hit the school they wouldn’t even have hit the woods.
But they weren’t trying to hit anything sensible, were they? Their planes were just full of anti-aircraft holes and jettisoning their payloads wherever, which meant the woods. Not only the woods in the school grounds, either: they’d pockmarked the whole area. Joseph knew this because one Sunday afternoon he had hopped the iron fence to explore the Forestry Commission land that ran east towards the village. There were more bomb craters in those woods, too, all grown over with brambles and ferns. He liked going there, so went back, alone, privacy being in short supply at boarding school. As in non-existent. To find it, you had to es
cape. Leaving the school grounds was a risk, yes, but by telling nobody about it he managed never to get caught.
They didn’t build dens out-of-bounds. No, they used the best school-woods-holes for that, clearing out the brambles and laying branches over the top, thick sticks first, then thinner ones interwoven with ferns, and on top of that they scattered leaves and kicked up earth. Camouflage! Necessary because as soon as they started building their den, other kids did too, and since they were other kids that meant they were on the other side. Gangs formed along year-group and friendship fault-lines. Over the next few weeks each gang built its own den, or battled to take over someone else’s, or tried to destroy what it couldn’t win.
A bit like at Airdeen Clore.
Ha.
And then on another Sunday afternoon, Mark Fenyard stole some matches from Mr Stead’s jacket. Mr Stead taught woodwork. He only had seven fingers and he smoked a pipe. Everyone pocketed a slice of bread at breakfast and later went to the woods to toast it over a fire of leaves, cardboard, pine cones and toilet roll. For some reason they decided to make the fire in the den. There was no chimney. The smoke didn’t smell as nice as Mr Stead’s. It was soon so chokingly thick in the den that everyone else climbed out, but Joseph was still crouched over the fire with streaming eyes holding the bread on a sharp stick in the flames when the Myers gang launched their raid.
Hostile takeover.
They’d seen the smoke and crept up. The first Joseph heard of it, everyone was yelling and a branch came jabbing through the ceiling. He tried to grab the end of it but couldn’t and then more light spilled into the den as one edge of the roof came up. There was a lot of earth and wood in that roof. Myers and his gang shook it and kicked at it and the whole thing collapsed in on top of Joseph and the fire. Falling earth blotted out the flames. He managed to drag himself out backwards covered in dirt and twigs and from the outside the den now looked like a nest, gently smoking. He wasn’t hurt. And the funny thing is that it was funny! The Myers lot ran away. Everyone saw Joseph wriggling himself free and laughed at him, saying he was an idiot, but meaning he was brave, and he liked the idea of being a brave idiot very much.
Escape and Evasion Page 15
