She didn’t say anything to her husband, obviously, not even when there was another silent call that evening. He woofed, hung up, swore about bloody BT taking bloody ages to get their bloody act together. His heart wasn’t quite in it. He was distracted. She heard him upstairs later on, talking on the phone with their financial adviser, self-consciously discreet mutterings about safe havens and getting assets offshore. Aftershocks of the alien pleasure rippled around her like reminders of catastrophe.
Around noon the next day the phone rang yet again.
“Hello?”
She listened for a while as she always did by then, thoughts of everything she’d failed to say in her life passing by in a pageant of misery.
“Lizzie.”
Her world stopped.
“Hello? Hello?”
“Lizzie. Can you . . .”
The voice was faint, remote, lost. It was the silence she’d been listening to for weeks compressed into the shape of a mouth and made to move.
“Hello? Hello?” She kept repeating it like an idiot, pulling the phone closer. “Hello?”
“Lizzie. Speak to . . . Speak.”
Only two people in the whole world had ever called her by her secret childhood name. They’d come up with it because Iseult was hard for children to say and Izzy was what their parents used. Of the two, one was long dead.
“Gwen?” she said.
“It’s not . . . I can’t . . .”
She was crying again. This was the person she’d become, a dribbling, shivering mess shaken at the whim of a huge, cold hand. “Gwen,” she repeated, or tried to. “Where are you? Where’s Gav?”
“No.” The voice sounded fearfully uncertain. The silence it had come out of squeezed around it. “It’s dark. Lizzie?”
“I’m here,” she said, between dribbles. “It’s me.”
“Talk to . . . Help.”
“It’s all right, Gwen.” And it was all right, she thought; after ten unbearable weeks she had something at last. “I’m here. Where’s— Can I speak to him?”
“There isn’t— No way up. Lizzie? Lizzie?”
“Yes. I’m here. What’s wrong?”
“Help.”
“Where are you? Please let me talk to Gavin. Just for a moment.”
“Nothing’s here.”
“Is he with you?”
“No. I wish . . . I . . .”
“Please. Just a word or two.” She felt a terrible desperation. If only she could stop the stupid, stupid crying. She couldn’t hear what Gwen was saying anymore. The voice was so far away, as if the line was coming from another world. “My boy,” she said. “I want my boy.” The phone slipped out of her fingers.
That was another bad evening, and a bad night. She became convinced Nigel had turned the phone off and kept going to check it. Her pathetic struggle to get herself out of bed and on her feet woke him up each time until he more or less forced her to swallow the oblivion pills. When there were no calls the next day, she thought he must have sabotaged the line somehow. A neighbor found her trying to lift the manhole cover outside the house so she could check the wiring. She tried to get the police to trace the call, but the police had stopped talking to her. The neighbor wanted to sit in the house with her until her husband got home, and the only way Iz could get her to leave was by throwing things. She broke a pane of glass in the front window.
At about four a.m. on Sunday morning she conceived the idea of bicycling to Cornwall.
It went through her in one magical tidal glow, like the hospital morphine. She couldn’t think why it hadn’t occurred to her before. After her first attempt to go and find Gavin and Gwen had ended in a wrecked car and a fractured leg, she’d somehow fallen into the assumption that she was powerless to try again. Driving wasn’t an option. They hadn’t bought another car because, her husband said, they couldn’t afford to. Anyway she wasn’t allowed to drive. Other obvious ways of getting to Cornwall had disappeared too. By the time she was out of the hospital, all trains and buses to the southwest had been “suspended,” in the hope of interrupting the stream of pilgrims and travelers and millennialists and lunatics flowing down toward the snowbound disaster zone. She’d always thought of it as the ends of the earth anyway, and yet—she looked at the map on the computer screen as if seeing it for the first time—it was only a couple of hundred miles away. Which was nothing, really. She clicked through maps of cycle networks. She used to ride for miles, when she was young and fit. She and an old boyfriend had cycled most of the way around Finland. A whole country. How could she not have thought of it before? The idea became thrillingly tangible. It brought her a feeling she hadn’t had since the day in December when she’d at last accepted that the police weren’t going to help her, and made the decision to go and look for Gavin herself. For the first time since the demented exhilarated hours of that midnight drive, she experienced a sort of hope.
She had to wait for Sunday to pass, and then Monday as well because her husband didn’t go to work that day; there was a huge demonstration in the City and all the offices told people not to come in. The delay was useful. It gave her time to think about what she’d need, inner tubes and chocolate and wet wipes, and all the cash she could get out of the machine.
They watched the demonstration on TV together. His running commentary—why can’t he ever just watch, she thought, amazed that it had taken her nearly twenty years to notice; why can’t he ever just listen?—was all morons and fantasists and look at those people and why can’t they understand that X depends on Y and there’ll never be any A without people like me doing B and C and (when the window-smashing and the burning started) maybe now they’ll finally send the army in and sort these bastards out; but now, with the thought of Cornwall so beautifully clear in her head, she found that she was suddenly seeing everything the other way around, the wrong way: a miracle had happened, all that video footage of the massive black bird thing wasn’t a hoax, the suppressed BBC report had been the truth after all. Ruth the spotty leftie moron woman was right to say that people had to stop pretending everything could go on as it had before, the system of international finance really was a game of smoke and mirrors that would dissolve into nothing as soon as everyone stopped believing in it, and—most of all, most of all: she held this wrong thought tight to her heart as if only that warmth kept it beating—Gavin, her Gavin, had been telling nothing but the truth, all along.
18
In the morning her legs were almost too sore for her to stand. The nondescript grey stillness beyond the window of her room felt vaguely unsettling, as if the town was quietly anxious about something. She’d dreamed of her twin Iggy for the first time in ages. I entrusted you with my child and look what you’ve done. She often used to have dreams in which her long-dead twin came and took Gavin away, but this wasn’t one of those. It seemed to her that Iggy had just come and stared at her while she slept, a ghostly visitation leaving a spectral deposit of guilt.
“Bike’s extra,” the girl at the front desk said, as Iz hobbled stiffly out.
“Excuse me?”
“Ten quid.”
The girl couldn’t have been older than twenty. A boy about the same age sauntered out from the back office. They both looked nervous.
“It’s chained up outside,” Iz said.
“Still counts.” The girl wouldn’t meet her eye. “New parking fee. For bikes. We’re supposed to charge for them now. Sorry.”
“Where does it say anything about a parking fee?”
“It’s new,” the boy said, standing behind the girl’s chair and opening his shoulders a little. “Only ten quid.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Cash only.”
She shook her head and turned for the door. The boy hurried out of the office to stop her.
“Tenner and you can ride away right now. Okay?”
&nb
sp; She’d never been mugged before, let alone by uniformed employees of a large hotel chain. She was so surprised, she wasn’t sure what to do. Her husband would have blustered and threatened and tried to maintain his masculine self-respect, so she took that as her guide and did the opposite. She was uncomfortably aware of how much cash there was stuffed in her wallet as she unfolded it, but the teenage extortionists seemed more tense than she was and might well have been relieved to be getting anything out of her at all.
“For your sake,” she said, “I’m glad judgment really is coming.”
“It’s a new rule,” the girl mumbled. “Sorry you didn’t know.”
As soon as she mounted the saddle she wished she could have stayed at least a few more hours before starting, but that was out of the question now. And, she thought as she rode off, standing on the pedals because her bum was too sore to sit on, there was one advantage to being robbed: on the off-chance that Nigel had pulled some of his legendary strings and got the police out looking, those teenagers at the hotel wouldn’t be telling anyone they’d seen her.
She found the marked route out of town and headed westward until she was clear of streets, then dismounted and walked. There was a biting wind in her face and her leg felt as bad as it had the first couple of days she’d been on the crutches. Airplanes took off close by, roaring unseen into low clouds, carrying away those who could afford to flee and had somewhere to go.
At a bench she stopped and sat for a while, stretching. Having her phone turned off made her nervous. What if he rang and couldn’t find her? He’d told her that he’d come and find her one day: he’d promised. What if he came home and she wasn’t there?
She weighed it up for a while, massaging her calves and thighs, and then dug out the mobile. When she switched it on it said:
Missed call Nigel (3)
Text Nigel (8)
She switched it straight off again.
• • •
By midafternoon, little ground made, she came through defaced industrial outskirts into Reading, where she sat in a café for three hours thinking about drowning herself. She watched other customers come in and out. None of them would look at her for more than an instant. The mirror in the hotel bathroom that morning had shown her a haggard wreck. She thought the other customers all looked suicidal too, except for the mothers with small children, who, though they wouldn’t know it until too late, had a reason to go on living. Watching the children was a torture so intense, it crossed over into a perverse ecstasy.
—Mum? Do you want the rest of your biscuit?
—No, I’ve had enough.
—Can I have it, then?
—No you can’t.
—Please?
—No.
—That’s a waste.
—I told you, you can’t.
—Can I give it to the bird?
—I said no, Gav. There isn’t any bird.
That wounded look on his little face: I don’t understand what Mummy means. How could she not have grasped the meaning of that look? She’d seen it day after day. Why had she gone on saying no? Because saying yes would have meant admitting that he was ill; her little boy insane, aged four.
No wonder, she thought, that so many people had tried so valiantly to say no to all the things that had been going on for the past two months, the great black beast in the photos and the wobbly videos shot from phones, the unnatural and perpetual snow, the phantom e-mails and unaccountable glitches, all the things that by any standard of explanation had proved themselves inexplicable. And the ones who said yes instead had all driven themselves . . .
She’d joined the ranks of the mad. Whether she meant to or not. The other customers could see it, she supposed. Look, that thin woman in the corner with the hair all over the place and the crazed eyes, who’s been sitting there not doing anything for hours: she must be another one of them.
She tidied herself up a bit in the café toilet before she went looking for somewhere to stay. It seemed sensible to go disguised.
• • •
It occurred to her the next morning that this was the first time she’d had two consecutive full nights’ sleep since the hospital.
She felt, marginally, better. The aches and pains and blisters were an irrelevance compared to the gathering knowledge that she was doing something, going somewhere. She had a purpose. At the end of the day there would be fewer miles between herself and her destination.
Her bad leg was very shaky and the other one not much better, but at least the route was flat and the headwind had eased off. Brick terraces with their new infestations of weird graffiti passed by quickly, and she was soon out into those strange liminal spaces, beside tracks, under motorways, between towns, for which no use or name could be found. There were a lot of empty cans in the grass. The route took her along a puddled towpath, where some people on a canal boat cheered and shouted at her as she overtook them. Their faces were painted and they swayed like drunkards when they stood up to wave. A sign further on pointed out a connecting route to a train station. Theale, Aldermaston, Midgham. It was only half an hour from there back to the stop for her house, as though in two days she’d gone no distance at all.
She took the phone out again when she stopped to rest. The bench overlooked a pond or reservoir, a gloomy grey oval broken by islands of pebbly mud.
Missed call Nigel (7)
Text Nigel (9)
He hadn’t given up, then. It made her feel she should try to go a bit faster. If he borrowed a car, he could be here within an hour.
“Bollocks, really, isn’t it?”
She looked up to find a younger man on the path ahead, hands in the pockets of an old grey overcoat. Its collar was turned up around a grungy scarf and a light beard. He walked bouncily, in a way that made her think he ought to have a mud-splattered spaniel running along beside him. He nodded toward the phone in her hands.
“Everyone spends their life attached to those things. Waste of time, innit?” He mimed hunching over a screen and prodding with thumbs. “What’s all that about?”
“I was just thinking that.”
He grinned. In my university days, she thought, he’d have been one of those people who protested outside branches of McDonald’s. Happy vegan anarchists. Iggy’s crowd.
“I used to have one myself. You think you can’t do without it, eh? How did they get us all to believe that? Bollocks. Mind if I sit down? I’m not dangerous.”
“Be my guest.”
He sat on the back of the bench, mud-caked boots on the seat.
“Checking messages from the boss?”
“My husband, actually.”
“See, that’s what I mean.” He shuffled forward a bit. “You’re actually, you know, married, but you’ve still got to have one of those things to talk back and forth. It’s barking, when you think about it. I mean, why? People weren’t like this when we were kids.”
She smiled. “I’m much older than you.”
“Well, there you are, then. Even more so. You know what it was like, eh? I mean, you used to be able to go somewhere without, you know.” He did the wiggling thumbs again: air texting. “Trying to be somewhere else at the same time. That’s what it’s all about, when you think about it. Bollocks. Know what I did with mine? My phone?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Chucked it in there.” He waved at the pond, and laughed. “Splash. Gone. I’m serious. Best thing I ever did. Look at me. Don’t I look like a happy chappie? Don’t believe me, eh? It’s true. Wade around in those reeds and you can get yourself a free mobile. Been there since Christmas, mind, so it might not be in tip-top condition.”
“That’s the last thing I need.”
“See? You get it. I could tell soon as I saw you. I thought, she gets it. I swear, I feel a million times better since I chucked mine. You start noticing things
again, yeah?”
“Being in the moment,” Iz said.
“Exactly! That’s it. That’s good, that is. Instead of being in a little screen. I like that.”
“They talk about it all the time in yoga.”
“Oh, you do yoga.” He sat a bit straighter. “Well posh.”
“I used to.”
“Hard times, eh? Cutting back those little extras?”
“Sort of.”
“You think about what really matters, don’t you.”
“Oh yes,” she agreed. “You do.”
“That’s why I interrupted you. If you don’t mind me saying so. I could see you thinking about it.” One of his heavily nicotine-stained hands cocked finger and thumb to fire at her. “I thought, she knows what’s going on.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“It’s what this is all really about, isn’t it? That’s what I reckon. Don’t give me any of that religious stuff, eh? Sorry, no offense, that might be your thing, but . . .”
She shook her head.
“Yeah. Didn’t think so. I mean, if it’s God, right, then how come there’s no message? The whole point with God is, Here we go”—he gestured to one side—“you lot come with me to heaven”—and to the other—“you lot are fucked. That’s it. Job done. It’s black-and-white, innit? Nah. Nothing to do with God, if you ask me. Not that you did.”
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