by Louise Welsh
Davy heard her quick intake of breath. He squeezed her hand. ‘Don’t worry.’ He touched Malcy’s shoulder. ‘Through the intersection and left at the river.’
A traffic light switched from amber to red. Malcy ignored it. Other traffic lights lined the way. All of them dead.
Davy said, ‘There’s been a bit of unrest, a split in the New Corporation. Word is that an opposition is coming together. Bream pretends not to be bothered, but I reckon he’s shitting it.’
Malcy said, ‘Are you burning our boats, Davy?’
The older man shrugged. ‘Maybe I’ll head for the islands, see what’s going down there. Fancy it?’
Malcy grinned, pleased to be invited. ‘More than I fancy telling Bream we’ve been giving guided tours of the city.’
Magnus said, ‘I’m delighted you two have worked out your holiday plans. Why don’t you find a vehicle of your own and get going?’
‘Turn left.’ Davy patted the driver’s left shoulder, as if he was a horse that needed to be nudged in the right direction. A hint of mania had returned to his face. ‘We’re doing you a favour. You can do us one in return.’ He grinned at Stevie. ‘Fair’s fair.’
Malcy turned the Humvee into a narrow street. It was the kind of place Stevie would have sought out on a city break. A much publicised ‘hidden corner’ designed to tantalise in-flight magazines and tourist guides.
Davy tapped Malcy’s shoulder. ‘Here’ll do.’
Malcy drew into the kerbside, outside Curl Up & Dye, an abandoned hairdresser’s shop.
Magnus turned towards the back seat. ‘This is our car.’
Davy shrugged. ‘Armoured vehicles like this are hard to come by. We’ve got guns. You haven’t. Suck it up.’ He pointed outside. ‘Last sighting of the opposition was somewhere around here. I reckon you don’t have to do much. Just let yourself be seen. They’ll find you.’
Malcy said, ‘They’re unarmed, Davy. It’s not safe.’
The older man shrugged. ‘They were unarmed when we found them.’
Malcy pressed a button on the dashboard and the vehicle’s doors unlocked with a click. Stevie saw Magnus’s fists bunch. She touched his arm.
‘It’s not worth fighting for.’
Magnus got out of the front passenger seat. Stevie opened her door and stepped onto the pavement outside the salon. She leaned back into the Humvee and looked at Malcy. ‘Check the petrol gauge. You’ve got about three miles left in the tank.’
Davy started to say something, but she shut the door on his words, his feverish smile. The Humvee’s engine revved, loud in the quiet street. It sped towards the corner and was gone.
Forty-Two
The Humvee had barely disappeared from sight when they saw the dogs. The pack ran in their direction, a snarling body with many slavering jaws and wavering tails. The dogs were generations from the pets that had been left to fend for themselves when the Sweats took their owners. Magnus followed Stevie, leaping over the jagged glass of the hair salon window, into the gloom of the shop. Women with fabulous hair scowled at them from skewed pictures on the walls. Rows of tall mirrors had been smashed, their fragments muted beneath dust. Magnus’s boots slipped against the scree of shattered glass. He bumped into a lamp and sent it toppling to the ground.
Stevie was ahead of him, barrelling through the salon. ‘Scissors …’ She rifled the surface of a cutting station, swearing under her breath.
Magnus swept his hand across a counter littered with debris: combs, brushes, kirby grips, tubes of dye, a hairdryer; but not a cutting blade in sight. The dogs were in the shop now. A brown and white beast with pit-bull ancestry was at the head of the pack, its mouth foaming with rabies froth.
Stevie picked up a bottle of shampoo and hurled it at the dogs. She barged through a door at the back of the salon and Magnus followed, into a small, windowless room, barely bigger than a cupboard. There was no lock on the door. They flattened themselves against it and felt the weight of the pack batter and bark against the other side.
Magnus whispered, ‘How long will they keep this up?’
It was too dark to see Stevie’s face, but the door was untrue and a little light leaked into the small room. He could make out her body. The flare of her hips beneath the too-large pair of men’s trousers she had looted in Eden Glen.
‘Until an easier target comes along.’ The door jumped at their backs as the dogs kept up their assault. ‘Or until they break through this matchstick wood and have us for dinner. They’ll stop when our bones are clean.’
‘Thanks for that.’
Magnus pressed his full weight against the door. The walls of the small room were made from hardboard, the ill-fitting door from the same flimsy material. It had been bashed together by somebody with no pride in his work. Magnus’s eyes were beginning to adjust to the dark. He made out an aluminium sink set into a single kitchen cabinet. A microwave sat to its right. The sink was littered with mugs and plates. Where there was crockery there might be a knife. He stretched towards the worktop, but it was a hand’s breadth too far for him to reach with his back against the door.
Stevie saw what he was reaching for. ‘Think you can hold them off by yourself for a moment?’
‘I’ll do my best.’
She darted away and started to look through the abandoned plates and mugs.
‘Shit, shit, shit … fucking hairdressers … forks and butter knives.’
She remembered that rabid dogs were afraid of water and tried the tap, but it was dry. The pack was howling now.
Magnus said, ‘Any chemicals? Ammonia or bleach or whatever it was women used to dye their hair with?’
Stevie was rooting through the cabinet beneath the sink.
‘Washing-up liquid and cloths.’ She kicked the cabinet shut.
The dogs heard the noise and slammed against the door with renewed force. The door juddered at Magnus’s back. It seemed looser than before and he worried about its hinges. It was too dark to see what Stevie was doing, but he could hear her knocking against something. The dogs heard her too.
‘This is just a partition.’ She was back inside the kitchen cabinet, pulling at the pipes beneath the sink. ‘If we rip it out, we might be able to smash our way into the next room.’
‘Let me try.’
Stevie braced herself against the door. Magnus put his arms around the cabinet and hauled. A long ago leak had rotted the hardboard behind it and it came away more easily than he expected. Plates and cutlery clattered to the floor. The dogs bayed. The hairs stood up on Magnus’s body. This pack would be one of many roaming the streets. He wished for a gun and thought of Shug. It was only a few years since he had bathed the boy each night in the kitchen sink, cautious of the temperature of the water, careful not to scald his tender skin.
He shoved the kitchen cabinet across the small space. There was a tricky moment while Stevie slid aside still holding the door and Magnus scooted the cabinet into place, but they managed it, both of them drenched in sweat.
Stevie lent her weight to the barricade. ‘This won’t hold them off for long.’
Magnus pulled at the wood, widening the gap.
Stevie said, ‘I’d rather die running than crouched in a hole.’
Magnus kicked at the rotten partition, braced for an assault from the other side of the wall. He wanted to remind Stevie about Thelma and Louise, her resolve to live beyond their adventure, but it felt too much like tempting fate. The damp wood crumbled and split. He glimpsed a pale sheen of light, distant grey in the darkness.
‘I think there’s another exit.’
‘How far?’
‘Too far to tell.’
They worked quickly together, slotting bits of broken partition between the base of the kitchen cabinet and the uneven floor, trying to jam the barricade in place. The dogs heard them moving and hurled their bodies against the door, snarling. The cabinet rattled. Soon it would give way. Flesh was nothing against sharp teeth and strong jaws.
Magn
us missed the weight of a gun in his pocket. He said, ‘Dogs are stupid animals,’ although he had known plenty of smart dogs in his time.
‘Let’s hope so.’ The hole had grown big enough for them to squeeze through. Stevie crouched, ready to go first. Something rustled in the darkness beyond and she hesitated.
Magnus squeezed her shoulder. ‘Let me.’
He crawled forward on his hands and knees, exposed to whatever lurked there. It was a small hole and he was forced to turn sideways to get his shoulders through. The floor beneath his hands was cool tile, his face gritty. Magnus got to his feet, coughing. He was in some kind of hall. Light leaked dimly from the ceiling. He stared upwards and saw large windows set in a vaulted roof, high above; their glass rendered almost opaque by grime and fallen leaves. He thought of the red sandstone of Kirkwall Cathedral, the building’s atmosphere of permanence, which had been a comfort, even though he was not a religious man. There was a whoosh of air, so solid he raised his hands against it and let out a small cry. A flock of pigeons swooped through the space, a swirl of dust and feathers. They circled, regrouped and glided back to their roosts.
Stevie was quick behind him. ‘We need to find something to cover the gap.’
Magnus said, ‘What do you think this place was?’
‘A shopping centre.’
Stevie spoke as if it was obvious and Magnus realised she was right. Retail units circled the central hallway. His eyes sharpened and he saw that the hairdressing salon they escaped had a locked and shuttered entrance onto the shopping area. The soaring roof space above them was interrupted by a mezzanine housing more stores and cafes.
Stevie was dragging at a counter that had belonged to a concession stand. He took the counter’s other side, pleased by the solid weight of it. Together they shoved it against their escape hole.
The sound of the dogs had receded, but there were other noises, too faint to grasp. Magnus scanned the atrium and realised that any resemblance to Kirkwall Cathedral was superficial. The shopping centre was falling apart. Its ceiling had been decorated with bronze, artichoke-shaped lamps which now hung precariously amongst exposed cabling. Some had fallen to the floor where they lay shattered, like doomed spacecraft. The roof was breached in places, the walls blackened with damp, the floors buckled. The usual looting had left traces of plundered goods in its wake; clothes flattened against the floor like atom bomb shadows.
The most arresting thing about the shopping centre was not its damaged shopfronts, peeling display boards or toppled benches. It was not the bird shit and feathers that clumped and spattered beneath roosts of cooing pigeons. A thick layer of grey dust coated the space. It lay smooth against the floor, ruffled in places by the scurryings of small creatures. The dust had crept across abandoned furniture, settled in cracks and grooves, had slid, thick and silent, across every fold and scratch. It gave the centre a grainy atmosphere: black and white TV footage, fuzzed with static. It caught in the back of Magnus’s throat, powdered his skin.
He had imagined Shug and Willow somewhere like this. Had secretly thought they might be glad to be found and returned to the relative comfort of Orkney. But it would be exciting to be young and at the centre of a city’s rebirth. For the first time it occurred to him that Shug might have been right to leave the islands. Wrong in the way he had gone about it. Certainly wrong to be involved in little Evie’s kidnapping, but right to make a grab at life.
Stevie touched his arm. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
She walked towards a phalanx of stalled escalators and the faint glow of light beyond them. Magnus followed her, reminded again of the shoot-em-up computer games he had played as a boy. They had been located in cityscapes like this. Desolate buildings, full of corners and hidden cells, where enemies could hide unobserved. He missed his lost Glock, regretted the confiscated hammer.
The shopping centre had been designed to allow crowds to sweep through its halls. Magnus looked up at the mezzanine and saw they were exposed from every angle. A snatch of video footage returned to him. People running across the open concourse of a mall, while gunmen with concealed faces mowed them down; bodies dropping to the ground; white tiles smeared red.
Stevie’s voice was soft. ‘Do you remember all this? These shops?’
He saw what she meant. The Body Shop, Next, Boots, Clintons, Lush, H. Samuel … The once familiar shopfronts made him think of Christmases past, the squash of crowds in Oxford Street as he struggled to find presents for his mum and sister Rhona, the rush to get his parcels to the post in time.
Their escape from the dog pack seemed to have exhilarated Stevie. Her voice was brighter than it had been since they left the islands.
‘I used to love shopping.’
‘I couldn’t stand it.’ Magnus had owned two smart stage suits. One midnight-blue, the other black, both lined with scarlet satin. The rest of his wardrobe had been the same as he wore now: jeans and T-shirts, a jumper when the weather required.
Stevie said, ‘Would you wish it all back, if you could?’
Magnus was trying to tread carefully, but the floor was gritty beneath its layers of dust. Every footstep announced their presence.
‘There are people I miss. I’d wish them back. I’d wish back medicine too: dentistry and hot water, comedy clubs and pubs, TV, cinema, trains …’ He let his words tail away. It was a foolish question and he was foolish for answering it.
The exit was in sight, an outsize, revolving door that would once have magically spun when customers approached.
Magnus said, ‘Here’s hoping that’s not locked.’
Stevie was no longer paying attention. She touched his arm. ‘Did you hear that?’
They froze in mid-footstep. Magnus forced himself to stay still. To run blindly might be to run towards danger. The noise sounded again.
Stevie nodded towards the dim of a shop unit. ‘There.’
Magnus heard it. A single note plucked on a guitar string. He glanced back the way they had come.
‘Keep moving.’ He put a hand on Stevie’s elbow, as much to steady himself as to urge her on. A chord twanged. It was a G followed by an F and an E.
Magnus was no longer master of his limbs. He halted. ‘I know that song.’
Stevie was a step beyond him. ‘What?’
‘ “Wade in the Water”.’
Stevie screwed up her face. She looked as if she wanted to hit him. ‘So?’
Magnus felt stubborn and stupid; unsure of why he needed to stop, but certain that he must. ‘I’ve got to check it out.’
Stevie pulled Magnus to the shelter of one of the escalators. The staircase offered poor cover. They were exposed from three sides and the mezzanine above. They hunched down, instinctively making themselves smaller.
‘You were the one who told me to keep my guard up. Someone could be trying to lure us.’
The fear of cannibalism he had been prone to since the Sweats flitted across Magnus’s mind again. He shook his head. ‘It sounds stupid, but that song means something.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Magnus. We’re only a few miles from the City Chambers. Belle might still be there, she could lead us to the kids. We can’t afford to lose any more time.’
He knew Stevie was right. They had come so far, it would be tragic to spoil it by dying now, like an ancient explorer drowning on the stretch of sea between his galleon and a newly discovered land.
Wade in the water, wade in the water … The guitar picked out the notes and the chorus sounded in Magnus’s head.
‘It’s a protest song, an old protest song.’
He thought Stevie was going to tell him to pull himself together, but a stillness came over her. The song stopped too, as if the guitarist were allowing them time to think. Outside the sun must have emerged from behind a cloud. The interior of the shopping centre brightened and the exit glowed like a promise. Something rustled close by, breaking the spell.
Stevie got to her feet. ‘Okay, we’ll trust your instincts. No one wants
to find the kids more than you do. And if there is some kind of opposition, we should find out what it’s about, before we walk into the middle of it.’
The music started up again, low and tentative, the bones of the song played in a nervous staccato, like a distress call from the rubble of an earthquake.
Forty-Three
The shop unit was in a twilight gloom that recalled illicit afternoon pints in London snugs. It took Magnus a moment to realise where they were, then he saw the decals peeling from the walls. Sweet-faced princesses, amiable beasts and animals with grins that were all personality. Magnus had forgotten the franchise existed, had never been in one until now. He whispered, ‘It’s the Disney Store,’ though Stevie had probably already realised the place’s identity.
The shop’s stock had been ransacked. The unit was empty, except for bare display cases and a few overlooked toys. Magnus’s foot crunched against something. He looked down and saw a plastic tiara snapped in two beneath his boot. The tiara was small, designed to crown a child. He picked both halves up and examined the false jewels moulded to its silvered peaks. Once there had been whole factories dedicated to such fripperies; teams of workers packing plastic gewgaws snug in boxes, for distribution across the globe. He thought he should be disgusted by the waste of industry, but a wash of nostalgia pricked his eyes. He set the broken pieces gently on a display case, treating the toy like the artefact it was.
Stevie nudged him. He followed her gaze and saw a slight figure sitting cross-legged in a corner, cradling an acoustic guitar.
The guitarist was dressed in black. They wore a wide-brimmed felt hat and despite the gloom, a pair of dark sunglasses. There was something of the self-conscious troubadour about the guitarist’s style. Magnus wondered if they had chosen the Disney Store because they were attracted by fairy tales and romances.
He crouched on the floor, keeping his distance, and spoke softly.
‘My name’s Magnus and this is my friend, Stevie.’
