Escape and Evasion

by Christopher Wakling

  He’s in.

  79

  Best not turn on the light. No windows to speak of, but the gaps round the edge of the up-and-over double doors to the front of the garage would be clearly visible to anyone who happened to look, not that they would, it being midnight, though they still might, so let’s not take the risk.

  Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, because as the freezer lid comes up with that little squelchy sucking sound he’s always quite liked a light comes on inside.

  What have we here, then?

  Joseph does some rummaging, turns up a box of Calippo ice lollies, ferrets one out, rips it open immediately, shuts the freezer, sits down with his back to it and eats the whole thing in the dark. Christ, that tastes good. You’d never have thought eating an ice lolly alone in the dark in the garage in the middle of the night could be so satisfying, but it is. He bites his way through the lolly quickly, upends the nearly empty tube and feels some of that unfreezing stickiness run down his chin. It’s not until he’s finished that he realises he has no idea what flavour slash colour it was: orange, yellow, red?

  He opens the freezer again to see – purple!

  Ha, some sort of non-poisonous berry concoction, probably.

  Beat that, woods.

  It’s tempting to eat another but something stops him. That’s strange. The big Lexus isn’t where they normally park it, and he didn’t see it on the drive. There’s just Naomi’s old Golf in here, plus a huge empty space, and that wall of storage units filled with paint, weedkiller, bags of charcoal, old bits of pram, paddling pools, sprinklers, toolboxes, plus assorted forgotten crap. Also the kayaks strung up in the roof, the kids’ bikes on the back wall, next to his and Naomi’s, below the windsurfer, wishbone, daggerboards, sails. And the old golf clubs. That electric go-kart was a mistake; it never held its charge long enough for both kids to have a go, and Naomi refused to give her blessing to a second because they weren’t that into the first one anyway. Why not? With two they could have done some racing up and down the drive, around the roundabout and so forth.

  Something else besides the big car is missing as well.

  That’s it, not there in the space behind the big gas barbecue.

  The … jet ski.

  Where is it?

  Humph.

  (Naomi: ‘Really. You’ve only used your speedboat twice in three years.’)

  (Joseph: ‘Our speedboat. And so what?’)

  Has she sold it?

  And the Lexus?

  She’s probably flogged the boat as well.

  And … so what!

  She’s right.

  Meaning: they must get shot of the whole lot.

  It’s inevitable now anyway, really, so forget about it, because what matters is the job in hand. Which is? Let’s have a proper look in the freezer, open up the trusty rucksack, and fill it with those free-range sausages, that organic chicken, some line-caught Alaskan salmon fillets, that pork joint, and a pack of British minced beef. There’s not much point taking the pizza. Or is there? It’ll thaw and then he’ll have the cheese and peppers and whatnot. A pack of frozen peas: why not? The backpack is pretty heavy now, though there’s still room in it, and Joseph still hasn’t really dented the freezer because it’s huge and what Naomi said would happen (‘we’ll just keep eating what’s on top while the stuff below sits in permafrost’) has happened. Well, Naomi, now’s your chance to see what lies beneath. Will she notice, do you think? Possibly. Strangely, this thought doesn’t so much worry as excite Joseph. Who else knows the door code? Might she see the missing food as a sign?

  He could pinch more and make it absolutely obvious someone has been foraging but he doesn’t, and not because he’s worried about the meat spoiling before he can eat it, or the weight of the pack. It’s because he wants a reason to come back.

  Does he need one?

  Don’t answer that.

  Instead, let’s ram a handful of these Calippos into the bag’s side pocket (keeping one free for the journey home), shut the freezer lid softly, and beat a careful retreat.

  This he finds very hard to do.

  Because what he wants – with every fibre in his tired body – is to let himself in through the front door, take off the brogues he’s not wearing, turn back the hands on the big grandfather clock, further back than that, much further, years, to a time before he even clapped eyes on this great big house, the oven door, his father dead in a chair, the album Live Rust, right back to the very start, and then he wants to wind time forward selectively so as to be able to climb back into Naomi’s bed.

  Damn, she’s just up there, making this difficult!

  ‘This’ being walking across the lawn, away – from her, from them, left right left towards the little gate, this strolling away and off into the balmy night.

  Balminess notwithstanding, it’s hard!

  That’s why he’s doing it so slowly, backwards, or sideways, at least, keeping one eye on the house until it’s out of sight, though even then he has to fight himself free of its super gravitational pull.

  Perhaps a popsicle will help.

  Calippo, whatever.

  No idea what colour this one is either, but yes, the little sugar rush is better than a poke in the eye. He doesn’t need another one of those: the cut just beneath his left eye is actually pretty painful. Let’s hold one of these frozen lollies to it as we make our way home. That makes it go sort of numb, which feels better, but with the pain now gone his stomach takes over, kicking up a hunger storm.

  Right, well, that’s something to do, isn’t it? Take his mind off Naomi and the kids, and the hunger, of course, by cooking a square meal.

  80

  Back in the den Joseph strips frozen chicken thighs from their packaging and drops them straight into his aluminium cooking pot. He adds a handful of Cumberland sausages too. This lot can all cook in its own juice. He sets the Primus flame on low and settles back to wait. How long will this chicken–sausage casserole take? Well, the gorgeous smell of the meat suggests swift progress, but he knows he must cook it all properly. After a while, he peeks beneath the lid. The chicken thighs have shrunk a fair bit. He tips a bit of the juice slash grease run-off, there being – wow – a lot of it, into the bushes beyond the mouth of the den. Help yourself, ants. He’ll just keep a little of the gunk back to stop the sausages sticking. Which they don’t, not really; because they’re browning, not burning, as he waits some more.

  Oh, just get on with it!

  There being no need for ceremony in a hole in the ground, he tucks in straight from the pot, wolfing whole sausages and sporking up chicken thighs to bite bite-shaped bites from, cave-man style. No need for condiments! Just: meat. Blimey, he’s hungry. Though the bottom of the pot comes into view he’s still chomping on. But no, best save those few bits there for tomorrow morning. He eats one last sausage despite this good intention before putting the lid back on the pot. And then, belly swimmingly full, he takes to the cot shelf for the night.

  Or half of it, at least.

  Somewhere around three o’clock he wakes feeling odd.

  Though he tries to go back to sleep, the sensation won’t shift.

  In fact it gets worse. In short order the oddness turns into discomfort which in turn becomes a yellow fact. He feels very sick.

  Twenty minutes later he’s on all fours, having crawled a few yards from the bomb hole, and the contents of his stomach are spread somewhere in the darkness around him, but he’s still retching and retching and retching, until he’s rid himself of every last drop of bile, sausage chunk and chicken shred.

  Even then, he keeps on throwing up nothing for a good long while.

  Somehow, between bursts of dry-heaving, he manages to crawl back to the hole, and once there he half falls through the hatch to lie flat out on the dirt floor.

  It feels like he’s torn his own stomach out.

  The rest of him is going through some sort of hot ’n’ cold spin cycle.

  And his head, his hea
d. It’s full of jackhammers.

  He’s hugging himself, physically holding himself together, but then that starts to hurt, because everything hurts! He’s squirming to rid himself of himself, by turns thrashing weakly and lying very still and squirming up against the earth wall again.

  He doesn’t know how long this goes on for, but it goes on, and on, and on, until at some point he sort of forgets his own existence and shuts down, overcome.

  81

  It’s broad daylight outside; the hatch seam is glowing and he can see the pattern of branches above the roof tarp, bisecting each other greyly.

  Why is he lying here, flat on the floor and not on the cot?

  Doesn’t much matter, forget about it!

  But my God, the thirst: there’s no ignoring that.

  Well, at least he’s ahead of the boiled water game.

  He rolls over to find the container and hears himself groan thinly. Wow: infant-weak. Remember those new lambs, still umbilically connected, staggering to get up in Shropshire? Pulling the container towards him takes a huge effort. Even unscrewing the plastic lid is a trial. But eventually he manages, and slop-fills his cup, and raises it to take a few gulps, gulps that quickly become double gulps, the lovely cold feeling spreading through him as he drinks deep, such a relief at first, but a relief quickly undone by the roiling sickness which wells up again almost immediately, and he’s too slow, too weak, absolutely unable to make it out of the den this time before once again he throws up.

  Damn!

  Actually: no worries.

  Look, it’s mostly just water, already sinking in.

  And anyway, it’s not as if he’s planning to entertain visitors any time soon.

  Ha.

  He rests his face on the earth.

  Seriously, though, he’s going to have to rehydrate somehow. They taught him the importance of that in the Brecon Beacons. He sits up again and pours out another cupful of water, sets it beside the cot, and levers himself onto the little sleeping platform, moving very carefully.

  Easy does it.

  Meaning: small sips.

  He takes one.

  Some time later, he takes another.

  It’s dark when he refills the cup.

  Then it’s day again.

  And then night.

  82

  Time passes, as it does. Two, three, days? He has no firm idea. He’s able to stomach the water, which must of course run out eventually, and does, and he seems to be thinking straight now because he’s checking his watch and working out there’s just a couple of hours to go until the next nightfall, that being the sensible time to make the trip to the stream again.

  He makes the trip.

  It takes him an age.

  He’s so tired by the time he’s hauled the water back to the den that he goes straight back to sleep, a purification tablet still fizzing in his bottle. When he next wakes it’s mid-morning. He sets to boiling the water, but the aerosol of cooking gas gives out after only a couple of minutes. He digs in his pack for another, searching through all the pockets, but no, he already knew that was the last one: from here on in he’ll have to rely upon the fire.

  As he’s reassembling his pack he comes across his satchel. He checks to see the envelope is still there and finds himself turning it over in his hands. Look at that bastard St Thomas’ Hospital crest. He’s sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor of the den, and the wood noise filtering in is particularly peaceful all of a sudden. Bucolic. What a word. Why not open the thing finally? He’s thinking straighter than he was.

  No.

  It’s not about him.

  It’s about superstition trumping statistics.

  And Lara and Zac.

  And Huntington’s chorea.

  Damn: even thinking its full name sort of weakens him. He takes a metallic sip of the now-more-or-less-pure water to fortify himself, thinking: stare it down for once. It being an autosomal dominant genetic condition, not a recessive one. Correct. Which means it doesn’t lie dormant and skip generations. So if a father has the gene, each of his children has a 50 per cent chance of inheriting it and developing the disease.

  Well, Charlie is in the clear.

  And yes, yes, yes, Joseph has always understood that doesn’t alter his odds.

  But still, not knowing for sure has been part of his defence from the outset.

  How so? Not knowing doesn’t affect the odds, does it? He knows that! He’s a banker, for God’s sake, meaning he’s worked with probability for years. Yes, but it also means he knows statistics have their limitations, and that big deal-makers rely as much upon instinct as they do on spreadsheets. In fact, he’s seen it – remember Sinclair and that coal-fired power plant swap?! – the higher the stakes, the more gut feelings come into play.

  Are there any higher stakes than the well-being of his children?

  No.

  So don’t open the envelope, then!

  In any case, sticking to the facts for now, probability-wise, were he to find out he had the evil gene, each of his kids would then have a separate coin-toss chance. Heads you win, tails you lose. No worse than for him and Charlie.

  Correct.

  But that’s not the whole of it, is it? Dig a little deeper and you’ll see the chance of both of them being free of the disease is only 25 per cent, meaning one or other of them is more likely than not to end up taking a twitching chair-death ride.

  Last time he checked, a half times a half still equalled a quarter, and he has two kids, not one.

  Which is it to be, then?

  Zac or Lara, Lara or Zac.

  You decide!

  Damn this envelope. He should use it to light the fire. But he hasn’t and he won’t because it wouldn’t alter the fact that somebody somewhere knows the score, and he could always ask them to write it down on another bit of paper.

  He should have taken the test before he got Naomi pregnant, of course, but he didn’t. Because, because, because: it wasn’t the way he wanted to play the game. Not getting tested was working! As in, it was holding the horror at bay. From where he’s standing now he knows getting himself tested then would have been preferable to hiding in a hole in the woods with this unopened letter in his hands, but, well, just, but.

  He thought he wanted to know when he finally booked himself in for the test, then the minute the needle pricked his arm – a nice male nurse with a tattoo of a kingfisher on the side of his neck took the blood – the jab of discomfort spelled m-i-s-t-a-k-e.

  They don’t call it blissful ignorance for no reason: he’s proof positive, isn’t he, that there’s something to be said for actually sticking your head in a bespoke hole in the ground.

  So why is he still fingering the envelope, here in the gloom?

  Because: things change.

  Him, for example!

  As far as balances go, he’s redressed some, surely? Liberating all that capital, giving it away to the deserving poor and so forth, via Monaco, et cetera, and Milton Keynes. That surely has to count for something? He knows it can’t entirely make good the hurt he caused with Heidi Sparks, or undo the, er, other extravagances, the Sea-Doo jet ski and Cleveland Square mezzanine, the personal driver parked tight to the kerb, plus that Padstow holiday home with headland views, the teak-decked motor launch by Cockwells of Falmouth, et cetera, et cetera, et-bloody-cetera, all that frankly lovely stuff Naomi wanted no part of. He’s given all that away, too, more or less!

  83

  And look at him. When he holds the envelope up to the seam of light he sees that his hands are blackened, grainy with dirt. Yes, they look like they’re made of wood. His nails, grey and ragged, need cutting. That one there on his left forefinger has a proper edge to it; look how easily it slides up under the corner of the envelope flap, seeming to have a dirty mind all of its own. Get the thing over with, the finger says; you may still be too much of a pussy to look but I’ve got other plans. Watch me break the gummed corner of this flap as I—

  Just then,
the roof above Joseph comes alive.

  There’s a scattering, rustling sound, and a shadow works its way through the debris overhead. The sound of sniffing breaks through. It’s a dog, finding its way through the broken bushes to the hatch, which, for ventilation, Joseph has propped ajar.

  There! He sees a slice of black paw in the gap.

  Where there’s a dog, there’s an owner. Nearby, probably, and headed this way.

  Joseph crawls directly beneath the hatch and punches it open. Shock the nosy bastard away! He sticks his head out of the hole, sees the dog has already sprung back. It’s a black Labrador, recently decanted from a four-by-four given the glossy, healthy look of the thing.

  ‘Fuck off!’ hisses Joseph.

  The dog wags its tail at him.

  ‘Get lost!’

  The dog takes a step closer, but is immediately distracted: its nose drops to the ground and it barrel-wriggles through the undergrowth to the south side of the den. Joseph is up out of the hide himself, crouched low and scanning the woods as best he can for any sign of the owner, but drawing a blank: no muted Barbour approaching, no flashy Gore-Tex ramble-wear either. The dog has stopped nearby, just over there in fact. What the hell is it rooting around in the mulch for? Ah! Joseph gets it. All that chicken–sausage mess he threw up.

  ‘Stop, dog!’ he says, sidestepping through the undergrowth towards it.

  But of course the dog doesn’t pay him any attention at all, and by the time Joseph reaches it it is finishing up, lifting its head, cocking an ear, stiff tail still wagging, giving Joseph the playful eye.

  ‘Get lost,’ Joseph repeats. He tries a growl but it sounds ridiculous. He puts his knee against the dog’s shoulder and sort of nudge-bumps it away, once, twice, and third time harder. ‘Just get lost!’

  The dog sniffs the ground some more and wanders off. It’s still hungry, because this kind of dog always is, and sooner or later its goddamn owner is definitely bound to appear, meaning Joseph has to get shot of it right now, but how? Without thinking, he picks up a half-rotten broken bit of branch, and slings it hard at the dog, hoping to drive it away, but sadly the throw isn’t accurate and the stick clatters into the bush behind it, and of course the other thing this sort of dog likes to do, beyond eat everything, is retrieve sticks: immediately it squirms into the bush, tail still wagging, pushing in hard to fetch.