“I understand,” Sean said.
Salt regarded him for a few seconds longer, then jutted his thumb north again. “Let’s go.”
HE FELT LIKE a zoo animal in a new kind of viewing experience, one in which the attractions are led around a static public. Smoke and the smell of over-brewed tea hung sourly in the room. On one wall, a calendar depicted a topless woman sitting on the bonnet of a Ferrari eating melting ice cream.
Salt said, without any attempt at pointing out the owners of the names: “Robbie Deakin, Tim Enever, Lutz Singkofer, Nicky Preece, Jez Cartledge. This is... tits... forgotten your name. Steve?”
“Sean. Sean Redman.”
“Right then, I’ll let you get on. Show him what’s what. Maybe start him off on the loose wall in the bathroom.” Salt left, grabbing a fish paste sandwich from a wrap of foil on one of the men’s knees. “I’ll be back in an hour,” he called, as his boots began their descent.
An embarrassed silence fell. Sean broke it: “Have you worked together as a team long?”
“’Bout six month,” replied the man with the fish paste sandwiches. He offered one to Sean. Sean accepted. “I’m Robbie. Salty’s a miserable old bastard. Ignore him. We hardly ever see him anyway. He normally fucks off to the pub when Vernon’s not around.”
“Who’s Vernon?” Sean bit into the sandwich. It reminded him of childhood. Salty, cheap paste. Margarine on bland white bread.
Robbie said, “Vernon Lord. He’s the chief. He’s the sub-contractor. Gets us quite a bit of work. We had a guy, what was his name? Anyway, he was shite. Smackhead. So we need another. Six men is more or less right for this job.”
“Five and a half, Rob, if you’re counting Tim.” The guy who had spoken raised a hand to Sean. “All right mate? I’m Nicky. This is Jez and that’s Lutz.”
Sean said, “Lutz? You German?”
“Fuck off,” said Lutz, in a loose, Mancunian whine. “I’m from Chorley, me.”
Nicky nodded at another figure, hunched over a paperback novel. “That’s Tim. AKA Shivery Eyes.”
Tim looked up as Robbie leant over to ask Sean if he wanted some tea.
“Yeah sure,” Sean said, studying the candyfloss hair and the too-big eyes. More quietly, he asked: “What’s up with him?”
Robbie checked Tim and grinned. “What isn’t? He’s all right, Tim. Aren’t you, Timmy? All right?”
Tim said, “Sound.” His voice was low and whispery. He looked like a tuberculosis “after” picture. His eyes slow-blinked gummily, crusted with goo. A pane of spit sealed his open mouth. The breath he drew in through his nose turned to liquid in his lungs. Sean could clearly see his ribs under the fabric of an ancient Duran Duran T-shirt.
“Is he fit to do this kind of work?” Sean murmured.
“What? Making the tea and bringing us stuff from the shop? He manages that all right, mate.”
Lutz said, “Don’t worry your pretty little head about our Tim. We look after him, hey, Tim? Don’t we look after you?”
Tim shrugged. He said, “Do you like dick? More cock?”
Sean screwed up his face. “You what?”
Lutz laughed. “It’s his little joke. He asks everyone that. They’re writers. Science fiction writers. You know. Philip Dick, isn’t it, Tim? Do Androids Dream of Electric Blankets?”
“Sheep.”
“Sheep blankets then. Whatever. And Michael Moorcock. I never read anything by them, but Tim here has always got his face in a book.”
“What you into there?” Sean asked. He was frustrated. He wanted to ram Tim into the wall and ask him what he had been doing at Naomi’s funeral. None of the others had been there, as far as he could tell. Tim shifted, obviously uncomfortable with the sustained interest in his business. Sean saw now how, behind those gritty lids, Tim’s eyes vibrated and jerked like the numbered balls in the National Lottery.
“Harrison. M John, not Harry. The Committed Men.” His voice soughed out of him. He seemed to diminish under the effort.
“Good?”
Tim shrugged. “Yeah.” His bovine scrutiny of Sean over, he went back to his paperback.
“We’ll give you something simple to start you off with,” Robbie said, drawing on a pair of thick gloves. “Grab a pair of these. Over there by the door.”
Robbie took him through to what must once have been the kitchen in this particular flat. Sawn-off drains thrust through the floor like severed limbs. “Lump hammer,” Robbie continued. “Highly technical this bit... take the hammer and twat the Christ out of that dividing wall till there’s nothing left.”
“That’s it?” said Sean, shedding his jacket.
“How hard do you want the job to be, mate?” said Nicky, who had followed them through. “Listen, me and Lutz are going to make a start on the flat across the landing. Robbie’ll give you any advice you need. Want tea? Tabs? A fiver putting on Wet Dream in the three-thirty at Ascot? Tim’s yer man.”
“Right,” said Sean. “Thanks.”
He had never used a lump hammer before; he couldn’t even remember if he had ever held one. Its weight intimidated him. Aware of Robbie observing him, Sean hefted the tool, left hand gripping the end of the handle, right hand circling the neck, just under the dense block of iron. He stood adjacent to the wall, left foot in front of his right, and brought the hammer back over his head, grunting as he swung it up and forwards, at the same time letting his right hand slide down the shaft to meet the left.
“Fuck me,” Robbie said, as a quarter of the wall disintegrated. “Take it easy, mate. You’ll end up in hospital if you carry that on. Pace yourself. It’ll come down whether you give it five blows or fifty. It’s you who’s got to wake up in the morning, come in here and do it all over again.”
“I’m okay. I’m up to it.”
Robbie winked and left him.
Twenty minutes on, stripped to the waist and with sweat stinging his eyes, Sean had to stop. The wall, after that first impact, had proven to be stouter than he expected. Pock marks cratered the plaster; brick peeked through, obstinate. He had to get around the site. Make a connection.
He was about to go back to work when he heard the scratch of a shoe on the linoleum. Tim was standing there, his paperback dangling from his hand, one finger hooked inside it to keep his page. He looked at Sean for a long time, but then Sean saw how he was trying to coax some form from the wet ruin of his mouth.
“I’m going to the offy,” he said. “Peanuts. Want a beer? Salty doesn’t mind if you have the odd beer.”
Sean could think of nothing he wanted more, but he felt it was necessary to hold back a bit. If there was a weak link here, Tim might be it. His way in. And for that to happen, he had to behave differently from all the others Tim schlepped for.
“No, thanks,” he said. He didn’t wait to see how long his answer would take to sink in. He went back to the wall. Thinking about Naomi refuelled him. The bricks didn’t stand a chance.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: DEADSTRETCH
“ELI? ELI? COME on, chicken. Come on, wake up.”
Will watched her surfacing, struggling through any number of levels of sleep, or unconsciousness. Finding shallow areas, close to wakefulness, the pain set in, and he gripped her hand as hard as she gripped his.
“Where does it hurt, Eli?”
He had delicately lifted her jumper in an attempt to locate the source of the blood. A large bruise had wrapped itself around the side of her body, covering an area the size of a twelve-inch record. A small cut below her left breast had stopped bleeding and didn’t look as serious as he had feared. He didn’t know the extent of her internal injuries, if there were any. Will felt himself go weak at the thought of losing another woman, so close to him, in the space of twenty-four hours.
“We have to get you to a hospital, chicken,” he whispered. Elisabeth’s eyelids fluttered and for a moment she pinned him with a lucid, almost amused look. Then she drifted off again. Another shadow fell across her, and then a pair of small hand
s, probing and pressing.
“She won’t need the hospital. It isn’t all that serious.”
Will turned and smiled at the girl. “How can you know that? We’ll need some kind of stretcher. We need to get her on the road. Maybe we can flag down one of those helicopters.”
The girl came nearer. “There’s really no need. My father was a doctor. He taught me lots about accident victims. I know just about everything you need to know about car crash trauma.”
“Then why won’t she wake up?”
“She’s in shock. The body is just enforcing a period of calm, that’s all. She needs to rest. There’s no breaks. If she suffered any organ damage, we’d know all about it by now. She’d be dead. Just keep her lying down, with her legs raised.”
Will wanted to believe her but her reading of Elisabeth’s apparent distress as perfectly harmless was of no comfort to him. He assessed the girl again. She must have been around sixteen or seventeen years old. Freckles banded her nose. Her hair was long and blonde, but could have done with a wash. It hung limply against her shoulders. She wore a grubby white halter top and well-worn jeans. Converse sneakers. A tattoo, some Chinese symbol, made a black slash across the biceps of her left arm. Her name was Sadie. He had no idea yet as to why she was hiding out in an abandoned farmhouse. Small-talk wasn’t high on his current list of things to do.
“So okay, she’s out of the critical zone. Can we move her?”
“Why would you want to?” Sadie asked. “She can rest here. There’s plenty of food. Shelter’s good, if you find a part of one of the rooms that isn’t leaking.”
Will tried to read more from her face. He needed to know if he could trust her, quickly. But he had never been a great judge of character. “We need to get on,” he said, limply.
Sadie pouted. “Where are you thinking of going?”
“North,” Will replied. “We have to get to Warrington.”
“Nice,” she said, but Will couldn’t detect any sarcasm in her voice. “I’m heading north too.”
“Not with us, you’re not.”
Sadie smirked. “Oh really? Who’s stopping me?”
“Sadie,” Will said, in what he thought was his most authoritative voice. “We’re wanted. We’re being chased.”
At this, Sadie’s eyes widened. “Cool,” she purred. “I could help you.”
“No, really. Thanks but no.”
“You are being a total knob about this.”
Will smiled. “Am I?”
“Uh-huh. We’re both going north. What? You’re going to walk a few steps behind me all the way, are you?”
“I just think we’ll slow you down, that’s all.”
“Slow is good. I don’t mind slow.”
Will sighed. She was going to accompany them whether he liked it or not. “Okay,” he said at last. “What are you doing hiding here anyway?”
Sadie evaded the question. “We need something to carry your woman in.”
“She’s not my wo–”
“We could make a stretcher.”
They ended up lashing together some wooden planks from one of the barns. Will tied two lengths of rope to one end which he criss-crossed around his chest. Now Elisabeth could be transported, albeit roughly, across the terrain. Sadie strapped her in with more rope, wrapped with strips of cloth to prevent it from chafing her skin.
“How far are we from Warrington, do you reckon?” Will scanned the horizon beyond the radio masts. Rain was collecting there in dense blankets of cloud.
“I don’t know. Hundred miles?”
A hundred miles. Will struggled to come to terms with the situation, the ease with which they had been thrown off course. By now they should have arrived in Warrington; they might even have solved the puzzle of Sloe Heath. His gut churned when he thought that he might have been reunited with Cat by now or at least discovered what had happened to her, but instead he was faced with the insidious prospect of tramping across country for what? A week? Two weeks? How long could it take?
“We can take it in turns if you like,” Sadie said, brightly, skipping ahead. “Come on. Race you.”
The air freshened, seemed to crystallise around him as he began his journey. The scattered cars on the M1 sent thin streams of smoke across his path, turning the field and those beyond into an uncertain wilderness. It led away to a horizon that was black and bleak. He thought he might die somewhere up there, if they found neither help nor a road that might transport them more easily.
The ropes squeaked as they bit into his flesh and the stretcher began to make tracks in the soil. Sadie danced and spun in front of him. Despite everything, he had to smile.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: SUPPLE BODIES
CHEKE WAITED UNTIL nightfall to move on, partly because it seemed necessary but partly because she could see and smell and taste more. Often in the past week she had entertained the notion that, just as babies born in water have a natural affinity with it, she would realise an innate kinship with the dark. She wasn’t close enough to herself yet to establish it as fact, though echoes and hints of a previous (or parallel) existence rumoured it was true. Even these thoughts were less than solid. Once more she’d lost her grasp on who she was, despite Susannah’s shocked utterance of her name that morning. The knowledge she was being enveloped, or developed, by another presence was the only clue to reassure her that she was a different individual to the one she glimpsed in mirrors. It was a frightening ordeal, and a dying voice within pleaded for her to resist the alien intruder before, like a germ in the blood, it was digested completely. But the promise of reality was the scent of fresh blood in a pack hound’s nostrils. She lusted after it and beggar the consequences.
Around her, like wax mannequins kissed by flame, lay the people who had once been housemates of hers, though some hours had passed since she’d been able to put names to faces. Now their bodies had grown runny as soup. Simon, Susannah and Jonathan were indistinguishable from each other: a lumpen, greasy mass from which appeared tufts of hair, white knobs of bone, the odd smear of colour as a sightless eye surfaced and sank again. The how and why of her attack paled before a craving that brought her away from the window. As she absorbed this human porridge she became aware that twin appetites were being sated: basic, physical hunger but also a need for information in the genealogy of her victims. An infusion of biological codes set her limbs itching for further re-alignments, but she exercised restraint until all but their clothes had been liquefied and drawn inside her. She was able to sleep then, while she watched the night deepen, and waited for her body to relax.
Her dreams took place in a strange hinterland comprising what she as human and she as intruder recognised as home; an environment which if split into its constituent parts might prove unremarkable, but when mixed became something exciting and novel. People she guessed were related to those she had ingested flitted through her mind.
She wondered idly what the original Cheke must be like, that which was now busily being sucked away, replaced, improved upon. An image, like a mudlocked bubble, shifted from deep within, scattering these dream faces, scorching the well-known and alien streets and buildings until an oily blackness frothed behind her eyes, alive with revelation. Tissue-thin, the blockage suggested her true identity, but before her curiosity was satisfied a pain wound itself about her spine, skating brief as breath upon glass into the parts of her brain she still clung to as her own, gilding them with icy leaves which creased her into oblivion. Her own truth was not for her eyes, it would seem.
Cheke had absorbed Susannah last. She was different from any of the women with whom she had so far been in contact; glossier, more polished. Her hair was long and shiny, not prone to the knots and tangles that Cheke found worming through her own tresses. Susannah’s body was firmer, with round curves that did not dimple or crease when Cheke pressed her fingers into them. Her teeth were white and, to Cheke, almost too small to chew with; her eyes, until death spirited it away, carried an intelligent shine. Even her skin
felt vibrant. More real than the stuff that packaged Simon or Jonathan. It was tight and supple in the same moment, maddeningly so.
She enjoyed Susannah, and pushed her body to the fore as quickly as possible after she was ingested. She liked the way her breasts had a solid but pliable feel to them. She jiggled them in front of the mirror and they moved with a languor that made her mouth dry. She had found pictures of men with their mouths attached to these things in magazines under Jonathan’s bed. Eyes closed, lips working the nipple, biting lightly. Sucking. The women on the receiving end liked it, this sucking. This gentle devouring of their bodies. She had studied the way their heads were thrown back, their bodies arched to offer as much flesh as possible. Fingers laced behind a head. Teeth bared. She saw pictures too of women with penises in their mouths.
She had investigated Jonathan’s body within herself, and Simon’s too. Their penises had been thin and pale, like worms, or noodles. The guard she had absorbed at Gleave’s place was better. His penis was so thick she was unable to enclose it within the ring formed by her thumb and forefinger. She could grip it with both hands and smell its gamey flesh as she teased back the prepuce. She liked its wine-dark colouring, and the way the foreskin shifted against the inner meat as she pulled and squeezed it between her fingers. She liked its soft-hard feel, like marble enveloped in padded velvet. She wondered how it might feel in her mouth. She wondered if this was something that made a woman a woman.
She touched herself in the places the men had concentrated on in the pictures but didn’t feel anything that made her want to open her mouth or close her eyes. She felt cheated. She didn’t feel as though she were as close as she might be to finding out what being human felt like. Almost being people wasn’t enough.
What could she do though? If there were any real avenues to explore, tangible opportunities, would she follow them through? Wouldn’t it be too dangerous to expose herself like that? The thing was, for every memory or characteristic of her own that she lost, a new one replaced it, slipping so seamlessly into the mosaic of her being that it was at once incontrovertibly her. It was slowly erasing who she was, all this sublimation. But it had her now, like appetite or addiction. For each reservation about her undoing there was a fillip to be found in her enhancement. It was difficult for her panic to develop muscle: no matter the origin of the She, her mind continued to assimilate information as an I, which rendered invalid the fear of her own diminishment. There’d been a sense of maturation despite the continual upheaval of brain and brawn, the re-configuration of all she was and all she might be. Strands of her that felt attached to some pre-ordained pattern now twisted and coiled with new filaments, creating a brand new weave of destiny. Like a re-programmed computer she was suddenly, if vaguely, aware of a fresh list of ambitions, needs and purposes. These involved people she didn’t yet know, though she couldn’t work out what would happen when she found them. Hopefully, as had already happened, instinct would take over when the need arose.
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