Decay Inevitable (38 page)

Now it was Emma’s turn to shake her head. “No. There’s a hill. We both dreamed of it many times when we were children. I think it must have been around the time of our initiation.”

“Then find the fucking hill,” Pardoe said. “We don’t have for ever. I’ve had reports already of leaks in a number of places. The first in this country have occurred. We’re mopping up, but we’re missing quite a few.”

“How long do we have?” Sean asked. “Before it gets serious?”

“Oh, it’s already serious. But we’re holding our own for now. I’d say that in three days’ time, if we haven’t done for de Fleche, then the breakdown will be more pronounced. Think floods instead of leaks. Think of the sky rotting. Think of the ground falling away as you walk. It’ll be grade-one chaos. A free-for-all, with the dead at the head of the queue.”

They took this in, trying to wipe away the effluvia from their clothing.

“And this news,” Emma remembered. “What’s going on? What was so important?”

Pardoe studied a nail and took his tongue on a tour of his teeth. He slid the nail in between his incisors, digging for a speck of food. Emma and Sean waited, used by now to Pardoe’s theatre. “Your friend Will,” he said, finally.

“What about him?” Sean asked.

“He’s had a bit of an accident.”

D
RINKWATER WAS QUICKER
and more fancy on his feet than his bulk suggested. Will lunged with the pike but he was too slow, and Drinkwater ducked easily out of the way. Overbalanced, Will hit the edge of a chair with his shin and started to topple over. If the chair had survived the fire without damage, it might have floored him, but the arm came free at the moment of impact and Will was able to right himself, turning to defend the attack that Drinkwater had already initiated. A knife flashed in his hand.

Drinkwater was fleet, but he was stupid, relying on brute force and lots of noise for his offensive. Will was intimidated, but not to the point of freezing. He swung the pike around as Drinkwater reached out to slash him and lanced the biceps of the bouncer’s right arm. Having hooked him, Will dragged him around in a wide arc, and then, at speed, jerked back on the weapon and watched Drinkwater disappear over the backs of some of the chairs while about half a pound of his muscle flicked up into the air.

Will turned quickly in time to feel the fist of the second bouncer pile into his jaw. He staggered back, driving the back end of the pike into the shredded, scorched carpet beneath him. It skidded for a short while, and then caught in a series of cracks, inviting Kynaston to impale himself upon it as Will fell hard onto his back. But the bouncer was smart to the trick. He sidestepped the pike and batted it away with his forearm. Will changed his grip, holding the pike horizontally as Kynaston dropped on to him. He managed to lodge the handle under Kynaston’s ribs and tilt backwards, vaulting the bouncer over his head.

He was dimly aware of applause in the background, of Sadie clapping wildly, before Kynaston was back on his feet and rushing him again. Will feinted to go to his right and checked left, unbalancing Kynaston sufficiently to allow Will enough space in which to smack the blunt end of the pike across the bouncer’s jaw. He heard a splitting sound and Kynaston’s parted chin began bleeding profusely. The bouncer was preoccupied with keeping his face together with his hands, and backed off as Will approached.

“Enough,” Sadie called. She was standing over Joanna with a Zippo in her hand, flicking the wheel with her thumb.

The bouncers regrouped, their injuries already on the mend. Fibres of muscle knitted themselves across the gouges in Drinkwater’s arm; Kynaston worked his jaw as the skin zipped itself up over the rent in his chin.

Sadie kept the wheel turning, rasping sparks against the fuel nozzle. When it caught, the flame roared a foot into the air. Then she would extinguish it and begin again. With her other hand, she played with the fuse on the stick of dynamite in Joanna’s mouth. “When I play at mean motherfuckers,” she said, “people stay hurt.”

Will moved towards Sadie, but she drew another flame from the Zippo and kept it burning, wafting the flame towards Joanna’s face, a slow grin blossoming, made grotesque by the tremble of light against her skin.

“Don’t,” Will said. The thought of his being responsible for another woman’s death turned him ice-cold inside. His heart, once so warm, once so full of hope, was now little more than a hard twist in his chest. When it beat, it spelled out the names of Catriona and Elisabeth. They were scar tissue on the tired, cold chambers. He didn’t think there was room enough for one more without it stopping altogether.

“I thought you said you’d never seen her before. She meant nothing to you.”

“She doesn’t,” Will said, but his voice told her otherwise.

“You have to learn,” Sadie said, soothingly. “You have to know that I’m in charge around here.”

Was it the light sucking the colour and the firmness from Joanna’s skin? Her cheeks hollowed out. Her hair lost its shine. She settled more completely on the wasted limbs of the dead man in his chair. She opened her eyes and turned to him, ignoring the indignity of the TNT jammed between her teeth and tucked into her cleavage. She smiled at him around the stick and winked. She nodded. She was gone.

“You missed your chance,” Will said.
Did she die, or was she pulled back?

Cheated of her display, Sadie lapsed into a shrieking fit. She swore and stomped and burned the unfeeling flesh of Joanna’s husk. She promised Will a thousand million years of suffering. She screamed at him until his face was pitted with her spittle. But he didn’t hear a single word. He was watching Joanna’s face sag on the bone, failing in seconds. At one point, just before the top half of her body crumbled away from her spine and made a nonsensical dustpile on the floor, he thought he saw a spiral of light lift from the centre of her chest: a fine necklace catching the light as it was removed by a lover’s careful hands.

And then the bouncers moved in at Sadie’s behest to show him how well their injuries had healed.

I
N A HOSPITAL
room in east London, a woman’s eyes fluttered. Sitting beside her, her husband put down the book he was reading and leaned across the bed. Around them, well-wishing cards crowded the tables and the windowsill. The amount of cards, the various colours of hope, could not shake the husband’s belief that his wife was as good as dead. He had decided, when the week was up, that he would switch her off. She wanted it that way. They both did. The ventilator had been breathing life into her for five days. It could not fix the warp of her spine, the crushed vertebrae, the jigsaw puzzle of her ribs.

Her eyes opened.

The husband ran to find one of the nurses. She told him to relax, then gently pushed past him and closed the door on the bedroom. A short time after, there was activity. A great deal of it.

“Joanna,” he said, his voice staggering over the word, as if he had never said it before. “Joanna.”

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-
N
INE:
T
HE
H
ILL

T
HEY MADE LOVE.
The Negstream shivered into view. They went in.

It was still daytime. A raw wind funnelled down the street, stripping the soporific warmth of climax from their bones.

Sean said, “Pardoe found three leaks this morning. They had passed through overnight and were walking down a Newcastle street. They killed and ate a dog. They didn’t have much clue as to where they were or what they were doing, thank God, or it might have been a lot nastier. Pardoe said that he spent most of last year tracking down what the police had thought was a serial killer. It was just a very clever leak who developed an appetite for young women. He took seven before Pardoe caught up with him and sent him back home. They found some of the bones in an old skip near the public tip. He had been living there. Or dying there. Whatever.”

Emma looked tired. Her eyes were developing raccoon-like rings and her lips carried a grey tinge that had nothing to do with the flat, colourless light here. “How long, do you think, before there’s a flood?”

“Pardoe reckons two or three days, but he looked a bit white while he was saying it. I reckon we’ve got around twenty-four hours. Give or take.”

“Give or take a minute?”

Sean laughed. Emma was still strong, despite the attritional nature of crossover. The Negstreams caused no immediate wear and tear on the body or the mind; rather, it caused a gradual stripping-away of the body’s defences. Sean was managing with the erosion for the time being but Emma appeared to be feeling the full brunt of its subtle violence. She was being steadily dismantled, softstripped from within. Sometime soon he would reach out to touch her and she would implode, like a fractured china jug handled by a clumsy child, or the shell of a condemned building battered by the wrecking ball.

Seeing Will hadn’t helped. Thin and pale in his hospital bed in high dependency, he had been surrounded by machinery and nurses. The police were nearby too, guarding him from vigilantes who wanted to mete out some rough justice to a man who had used a young girl as a hostage. Maybe they were also on hand to make sure he didn’t make a miraculous recovery only to bolt. That didn’t seem to be an option to Sean as he had looked down at the other man’s bandaged head. Serious tissue loss, a doctor had told him. Which was a fancy wrapping for
half his brain was blown away
.

A nurse had come in to wipe Will’s face and check his IV was feeding the right amount of saline into his veins. The slackness of his skin as the swab cleansed his lips and eyes had made Sean’s back creep. It was as if Will was dead already but his body didn’t know how to play the part.

They had promised him that they would visit him again, but Sean doubted he could hear their pledge.

At the end of the street they came upon a park that, for a moment, filled Emma with enough hope for a little sunshine to return to her demeanour. But there was no hill to be found in the park, just a pond with water so still and black it resembled a polished slab of ebony. Sean hugged her for a long time in an attempt to lift her out of her disappointment.

“We have to go at this a different way,” he said.

“Doggy style?” Emma asked, her voice muffled by Sean’s jacket.

“No,” Sean laughed, closing his eyes and breathing deeply the scents that clung to Emma’s hair. There was apple in there, and honey. And good old-fashioned I-want-you-till-I-die pheromones. Not for the first time, he wished this was somebody else’s problem and he could get on with unwrapping Emma’s various layers, getting to know the woman who meant so much to him. It had been a long time since he felt so committed, so clear about what he wanted. Being with Emma was like sucking a strong mint: she cut through all the dross in his head and found the little part of his brain that said
yes
all the time.

“I think we have to try to remember how we found the hill when we were children. I know it came to me so easily sometimes, it was as if it was hanging around behind my eyes, just waiting for me to shut them.”

Emma nodded in his arms. “I know. I can still smell what the grass was like. It was always midnight on the hill. There were always people walking around. They seemed lost but they gave off this indestructible air.”

“Who else but the dead can be indestructible?” Sean asked.

“Maybe we should find a hill near Warrington. Maybe that would help.”

“At night.”

Emma moved away from him. “Yes, at night. We should take a picnic. Kids’ food. Comfort food. Try to find a way back to a time when we were young. When we didn’t have to worry about anything.”

“We could go to Hill Cliffe. There’s a pretty little cemetery there. And a good view of Warrington. You can see the parish church and the detergent factory–”

“How lovely...”

“–and Fiddler’s Ferry power station. You can see the old clocktower in the centre of town, at Market Gate.”

“I’ll make us jam sandwiches, that really sweet, seedless stuff. And margarine. On cheap white bread.”

Sean closed his eyes and smacked his lips. “Mmm-mmm!”

“And Monster Munch,” Emma suggested.

“Pickled onion flavour?”

“Of course.”

Sean opened his eyes and frowned. Something was going wrong. The sky had bruised a little and the air had grown chillier. Looking at Emma was like looking at someone through unwashed gauze. Her edges had softened; there was a smudgy gleam to them. He reached out for her and told her to close her eyes, to lie back on the grass with him. She didn’t question him. Her breath, excited and hot, told him all he needed to know. His heart was pounding.

Emma said, “And I’ll bring some of those cheese triangles...”

“Ugh, I hated them,” said Sean, remembering the flavour in his mouth, the sludgy texture. “But I liked sweets. Sherbet fountains and moon dust.”

“Okay. We’ll get some. And comics.”

“
The Beano
and
The Dandy
.
2000 AD
.
Look-in
.”

“
Twinkle
,” Emma said.

Sean shrugged. “It’s a whole different world to me, all that girl stuff.”

“Didn’t you have a sister?”

Sean shook his head. “Naomi was always into whatever I was into. Football, war comics. Bollocks like that.”

“Shall we take some toys to the hill?” Her hand in his grew damp; the dewy grass moved through their clothing. The air turned heavy with moisture. Something was happening to the ground at their backs. It felt as though they were being gently tilted.

Don’t open your eyes
, he sent to Emma, hoping that she’d get it.

I won’t, I won’t
.

“I preferred Sindy to Barbie,” she said, squeezing his hand.

“I had an Action Man with rubber hands and eagle-eyes. Proper hair. Not that plastic moulded shit you get these days. I had a Six Million Dollar Man too.”

“In a red track suit?” Emma was getting so excited it sounded as though she were being pumped with helium. Other voices were joining theirs; deeper, more sombre, less urgent. They were far away, a susurrant shifting. Getting closer.