Too late to check now, though, too late to back away. The clerk behind the counter was already watching me with interest; and I might have lost everything that defined me to myself but it seemed that I still had some pride, unless it was sheer bloody stubbornness instead.
Whichever, I walked boldly in where no man of my description had walked before...
Walked? Shuffled, more like. Waddled, maybe. My legs wouldn’t stride, and my bare feet in those deck shoes conformed to someone else’s bunions were already beginning to blister. If I wanted to walk without wincing—which I did, most definitely—then I had to go flat-footed and with care, leaning at curious angles to shift my weight.
All in all I was a procession in my own right, and something of a sad one. I watched the clerk struggle with a smirk that would rise despite his training, and felt a flush of anger in response.
Good. Use it. Apologetic would be the worst thing, just now...
I leaned a little on the counter when at last I got there, glad of its good support after that long stretch on my feet, and this last couple of metres over carpet seemingly the longest; and fixed the clerk with my best version of a steely stare, and said, “I’d like to hire a car. Please.”
“Yes, sir,” swallowing his smile, but I thought maybe reserving a little pleasure for later, for when he turned me down. In fact, I thought I saw his nostrils flare as he set a form on the counter between us, and was doubly glad I hadn’t had the chance of a drink. “Any particular type?”
“Doesn’t matter. Nothing too small,” I amended quickly, thinking that I might need to stretch out and sleep in it. “I’m going across country. Just me, no baggage or anything, but I’m not comfortable driving a little car.”
And I was talking too much already, explaining where I didn’t need to, starting to plead almost. I bit down hard on my too-eager tongue, and was silent.
“Have you got your driver’s licence with you, sir?”
Thank God, I had: one old habit not apparently broken in the recent upheavals. It was in the back of my purse, where I always kept it; and while I had the purse out, stained and strangely-smelling as it was, I thought I might as well produce my Access card as well, to add a little verisimilitude. I may look rough just now, but at least I’m creditworthy...
So I fished, and my fingers found plastic just where they ought to; but when I eased it out it wasn’t my Access card at all. Wrong colour.
Gold colour.
American Express it was, when I looked more closely. And yes, definitely gold. Which required more disposable income and considerably more creditworthiness than I’d ever mustered yet; but there was my name embossed into the plastic, and there was my signature on the back when I turned it over to check, and I supposed that I should be getting used to this, but oh, it was hard.
When I looked up, the clerk was frowning as he watched me, and I could read his thoughts as clear as if they’d been written in mud baked under a hot sun: that surprised you, didn’t it, sir? Whose pocket did you lift the purse from, then, didn’t they look like a gold-carder?
But he didn’t say anything yet, he must be saving it for later. He took the licence out of its plastic holder and checked it minutely, probably wishing they’d introduced photographs already so that he could prove immediately that it wasn’t mine; then he grunted—in frustration, I thought, at finding no convictions, no penalty points—and asked if I’d ever had an accident.
I lied, of course. What was I going to say: yes, I’m fresh out of hospital, discharged myself early after I totalled my car last week, but I can’t remember a thing about it? No, I lied in my teeth and just hoped not to have another smash, because surely the insurance wouldn’t cover me after I’d signed my name to a false declaration.
Another grunt, and I wasn’t at all sure that he’d believed me; but I suppose he didn’t have any right of interrogation, he just had to take my dishonest word for it. So we filled in some of the form, and then he ran the card—my card?—through the machine for authorisation, and I knew, I just knew he was expecting the little screen to flash a warning at him, Card Stolen! Alert Police!
But obviously it didn’t, and neither did it have any problems with the amount it was going to cost me to hire an Orion for a week. The disappointment on his face was manifest, he couldn’t hide it. There was nothing left for him now except to challenge my signature when I produced it; and he tried his best to do that, he spent a long time scrutinising it against the card, but in the end he had to give way.
Which in some respects was as much assurance to me as to him. If he who was trained and practised and trying so hard couldn’t spot enough difference between two signatures to pick one as a forgery, then likely neither one was. Which meant that I really had signed that card and I really was gold Amex material suddenly; and it might all be mystery bordering on magic, but it was one more confirmation that I wasn’t being conned here, I wasn’t being set up. Whatever had changed in my life, I’d effected those changes myself; and what I could do once, I could work out now why I’d done it.
Sure I could, no sweat. None at all.
o0o
I took the keys that the clerk so reluctantly gave me, and walked out of there feeling surprisingly grateful. Every business had the right to turn down custom; his manager couldn’t possibly have blamed him, the way I looked and acted, however solid my bona fides might appear. But he hadn’t let prejudice rule him; he’d done his checks, I’d passed, he hired me a car. However much against his better judgement, he was letting me drive away in the company’s property, and yes, I was properly grateful.
Next question, could I actually do it? Could I drive, was I in any condition?
Answer, yes and no. No, I wasn’t in any condition; but yes, I could drive despite that. Slowly, but I always drove slowly anyway, except apparently when flying MR2s off tight corners; uncomfortably, but I’d expected that; safely, so long as I stopped often to rest. I had to concentrate fiercely, the old days were gone when driving was easy and natural; and I couldn’t concentrate for more than twenty minutes at a time, half an hour at the most. Any longer than that and my vision started to blur, I couldn’t move my eyes left to right without a sharp pain inside my skull, my hands started to shake on the wheel and my legs ached cruelly just from working the pedals.
So I established a routine, designed to save me the insurance money I wouldn’t get if I drove off the road from exhaustion. Designed to save also my life, perhaps, and others’ lives with it. I watched the milometer religiously, and took a ten-minute break every ten miles, tilting the seat as far back as it would go, just lying still with my eyes closed and trying to relax, neither to think nor anticipate.
At thirty miles I started looking for a tea shop, and found one open in a village five miles further on. Same again after another thirty, more or less; though by then I was into the rugged, rolling moorland that was prelude to the Lakes, and close enough not to want to stop. Made myself do it, though, for the pleasure of a good hot cup of tea on a dry throat—could be the last, was very likely to be the last for some time now—and the good sense of it, not to break a habit that was working, that had brought me most of the way across the country without a dent or a scare.
I was hungry: hungry enough to slaver at the scones and the coffee cake, with barely enough cash in my purse to pay for an individual pot of tea. But hunger was good, it was helping: keeping my mind sharp and giving a physical focus to my body, so that I thought less about everything else that was wrong with me, all the damage I was carrying.
Back in the car again, another twenty miles and now this was known country, and that helped too. I wasn’t following a route-map in my head any more, signs and numbers; I was spotting landmarks, turning left just after the ruined barn and then looking for another unexpected left, hidden back of a twisted tree that had exploded into leaf since my last visit here, to hide the track even better.
Picking clues from landscape, clues from memory—and rejoicing that I could
still do that, that some things in this grotesquely-altered world were still as I remembered them, as I had left them last—and always, always heading up.
o0o
Came a time, came a place where the track went up no further, where it petered into wheel-ruts and nothing amid the sheep tracks. There must be an ongoing right of way to the top, but it seemed that even Wainwright had never found it. So far as I knew this particular route featured in none of the guidebooks and was marked on no tourist trail. Even the farmers seldom came this way after their sheep any more; the deep tracks of Land Rover tyres in mud were breaking down year on year as winters passed and they were not remade, as they crumbled through the droughts of summer and before the roots of tough grasses.
And here at the track’s end a thin smoke was rising, straight and true like the trunk of a tree until the wind caught it and it eddied into confusion like a moorland tree in the spring’s blur; and I turned off the engine and left the car right there, and all but ran a dozen eager, stumbling paces to the lip of the hollow.
This was it, my secret place, my refuge: a haven in my teenage years and a constant reassurance since, somewhere I kept in my head like a treasure. Not my home, never that by any definition, let alone Frost’s; I was under no illusion here, I was only ever taken in on sufferance and I could get turned away at any time, licence revoked and never come back, this place is closed to you.
But it never had been, yet. I came when I needed to, and here I found what I needed.
o0o
Here I found Luke, today as always, heating water in a billy over his small fire; and he smiled up at me and made a gesture of welcome, said, “Jonty, come down. I’ve been expecting you.”
He always said that and as always I believed him, though I’d come as always on impulse and without warning. Had no way to warn him, indeed, there wasn’t an address to send a postcard to; and yet every time I came there was already water heating and two mugs set out. Something cynical in me always murmured that the water wasn’t so hot yet, and that it was easy enough to hear a car coming up the track, working hard; but Luke would never work to set up a false implication, just to impress. He wouldn’t see the point.
Besides—if he cared, which he didn’t—he was impressive enough simply in himself, that spirit clothed in that flesh which was called by his name. He stood up as I slithered down the grassy slope into the hollow, he met me with a hard hug at the foot; and I toppled into his arms like a child, I clung like a child in despair, my eyes screwed tight shut and my face buried in the loose cotton weave of his shirt.
Smoke and spices he smelled of, and not the first to do that to me since I’d woken into this remade world; and I thought maybe that was another reason why I’d started to believe Suzie when she talked of impossible things. Not only that she’d had photographs and known about Luke, but also that she’d tasted like him, a little. In her case it was cigarette smoke and Chinese spices, poor substitutes, but resonant in combination; now here—at last—was the truth, the thing itself, Luke’s own golden skin that smelled of woodsmoke superficially and beneath that the strange spicy otherness that I privately called the tang of angels.
He pushed me away too soon, but that was Luke. Ice-chip eyes surveyed me, glacier-green and seeing everything, but only in black and white: admitting no compromise, no shading.
“You’ve been hurt,” he said, and his strong hands shifted from my shoulders to my face, brushing feather-light over scabs and bruising.
“Yes,” I said, trying not to flinch, and failing.
“Come and sit down. Water’s heating.”
Water was; and when it seethed in the billy, when it spat hissing onto the hot stones that made Luke’s hearth, he lifted it two-handed, bare-handed from the fire and poured into two chipped enamel mugs. I didn’t blink, either at his immunity of flesh or else at being given nothing but near-boiling water to drink. I’d been here before.
Instead I sat slowly, wearily, awkwardly cross-legged on the grass, cradled the mug for the comfort of its heat in my knackered hands and let my eyes wander around the hollow. Every time I came things were different here, there were different things; and yet it always looked the same, it had only ever looked like a junkyard set in a quarry garden, metal scrap and mechanical parts rusting like nameless, neglected sculptures among plants and shrubs and even trees that surely shouldn’t grow up here.
I was fifteen when I found it first, on a solitary adolescent hike; and Luke had been sitting over his fire and smiling up at me, and water had been heating.
I thought he was nineteen, then. I remembered working it out practically on my fingers—older than eighteen, for sure, but younger than twenty—and feeling certain, feeling so cocky I didn’t even need to ask.
Looking at him now, with another dozen years banked up behind me, I still thought he was nineteen; still thought that was exact. Full growth but no maturity, whip-fast reflexes and not an ounce more flesh than he could need or want; fire and hunger, passion and arrogance and the habit of instant judgement with no sense of perspective, no leniency.
And beauty, of course, he was the child of delight; and pain, of course, an extraordinary pain that faded as his perfect body aged, which meant not at all; and above and surrounding and engulfing all, the certainty that there was no forgiveness, that there could be no reconciliation in this world or any other.
And that also was pure nineteen-year-old thinking, and not subject to debate. No, he never changed; and I loved him for it, and grieved for it, and depended on it, and that also would not and could not change.
He sucked unconcernedly at water that would have blistered my throat, and said, “Tell me about it.”
What, you mean you don’t know all about it already? But even a creature who could access infinity was presumably not omniscient, or Luke would never have found himself here, on this cold hill’s side; and as he was now, no, of course he didn’t know, how could he? He might have some sense of prescience for what affected him closely, but he had no all-seeing eye on the world’s events.
Nor television nor radio, and he’d hardly be reading the papers every day.
So okay, I’d tell him. I would. But I’d come here to escape, I’d crossed the country in an effort to leave it all behind, not to bring it with me. So—looking to divert his mind without any real hope of it, just grabbing almost at random—I said, “That’s a new caravan, isn’t it?”
Whether he actually needed a caravan, I wasn’t sure. I knew he could sit all night in the rain quite unperturbed; I thought he could nest in the open in the snow and not be cold. But even Luke’s parsimony fractured occasionally. He always had a fire, though I could never reason any need for that or for his heating the water that he drank; and he’d always had a caravan up here, though he was rarely to be found inside it.
Once it was an ancient, nameless thing on blocks, painted institution-green, its door half hanging off and the roof not that secure. Then it was an Elddis, not new but neatly made, holding together against the weather and Luke’s contemptuous mistreatment. Something must have happened to that, I thought; he wouldn’t have changed without cause, and little less than a total disintegration would be cause enough.
But changed he had. Luke’s new home was an Airstream from America, a long gleaming silver bullet of a caravan, all aerodynamics and riveted aluminium, more plane than wagon except that it lacked the wings...
Ouch. Not a good thought, that, around Luke. I had no evidence that he could read my mind, but likewise no evidence that he couldn’t.
“Yes,” he said, dealing only with what I’d said aloud, thank God.
“How’d you get it up here? Friendly farmer?” The rough track would have been no problem, an Airstream could take any amount of banging about, but Luke had no way of towing one himself.
“No,” he said, “I lifted it.”
And didn’t explain how—on his shoulders, like Atlas? Hanging from a rope while he flew above, like a helicopter carrying a tank?—and
obviously didn’t want to, for all my curiosity. It had taken me a while to learn, back when I was a curious and fascinated teenager, but he loathed talking about those talents and abilities that marked him out, what powers had come with him in his great transition.
So there we were, seemingly two young men facing each other across a quiet fire, and neither one of us keen to talk about what the other wanted; but he was Luke and I was Jonty, and so of course I talked about the loss of my natural world, so very much less than his.
o0o
Or started to, at least. Didn’t get very far.
“I had a car smash,” I said. “Apparently. I don’t remember a thing about it; but that’s not all that’s gone, that’s the least of it. I can’t remember anything from the last couple of months, and I’ve done so much that’s strange, but I don’t know why. Listen,” with a wry little chuckle, first time I’d managed to laugh about this or any of it, “I’ve even got married, Luke, would you believe it? Not to Carol, either...”
He nodded. “I know.”
“Do you?” What, was he omniscient after all? “How?”
“You told me.”
“You mean—you mean I’ve been here? Recently?” And, at his nod, “When? Exactly?”
“Six days ago,” he said, exact enough for anybody.
I counted back in my head, then did it again on my fingers for confirmation. “Was I driving a green sports car?”
Dispossession Page 11
