The Unblemished (21 page)

The map is beginning to fascinate him. He wonders why it was
that Rohan Vero was so eager to give it up. It folds around his
thoughts when he is resting, like clingfilm around broccoli, settling
itself into every niche of his mind as if it were custom-made for him.
The grid is still there, pulsing away behind his perception. His hand
does not bleed quite so much now, perhaps because he is understanding
the map's impulses to be read. Those impulses had made
themselves known in the illusion of rotting hearts on his bedroom
floor. You learned to get over that quickly. You recognised what was
real and what turned out to be quirks of the map. The patterns on his
hand shift as he moves through London searching for Vero. The map,
as yet, is not helping him locate the man. It's an extraneous element;
it has nothing to do with the real purpose, which he has come to
recognise as the city subtly changes.

Lights are going out all over the capital. Roads that were long links
between the hubs of what had once been isolated villages, long ago,
are being truncated. Kentish Town Road is cut off before it is
underway at Camden, where the overland railway bridge has been
brought down on to the tarmac. Haverstock Hill is blocked at the
junction with Prince of Wales Road. The Euston Road now ends at
the Euston Underpass. A black melange of broken concrete and glass
takes over from there, running all the way to St Pancras. There are no
cars, no buses, running on this version of London's streets any more.
They have been abandoned at the points where their journeys were
curtailed by upheavals unlisted in the
A–Z.
Figures inhabit them,
perhaps treating them as shelter from the cold, more likely using them
as urban camouflage from which to launch attacks. Each night, the
city sloughs off more and more of its logic and accrues the shadows
and rot, verdigris and mould, lonely cold places where trouble can
spawn. The city is slowly being cut off from the links that might
take people away or bring help in. It is drawing its limbs into a
shivering heart, like a flower thrown on to a fire. It is dying. It is
waking up.

Bo's map delineates these new twists and turns to the roads before
they materialise. In the darkness, he waits on the floor of the flat,
hearing the groans and creaks as his town realigns itself into a place
this breed can understand. The city is regressing; the city is becoming
the disease that is spreading through Bo's body. He feels this when
he's ventured out at night. He feels that he's the only solid part of the
street, and that all else is liquid, unstable. He feels himself skimming
through it, touching everything around him tangentially, like the tips
of the feet of a waterboatman on a meniscus. Dribs of his
surroundings sometimes catch on his hair, his clothing; he feels it
tease away from the fabric of what appears to be real, a minute
wrenching out of true, a needle drawn through a blob of paint: traces
trail behind him for a span.

In the morning, the streets revert to their original status. They
correspond to the orange and white lines of his street atlas. He feels
safe going out during the day, but the roads he walks along feel faked,
a mock-up on a Hollywood soundstage. The traffic is an animation.
The people who cleave to the pavements are soulless marionettes
shifting jerkily under an invisible puppet-master's strings. The lights
that come on and go off are too measured, like a pre-programmed
security system. Everything seems too precise, too controlled. For the
first time he realises that thousands are relying on him; he is the finger
that can slip the knot for them, allow the strands to come loose, to
bring freedom to an oppressed race. He sees how he works outside
any imposed realm. His world doesn't know, or care a fig, about the
strictures of architecture or science or society.

And then Vero's haggard face rises out of the optimism and shows
him the map's bonus features. His misery, his desperation, can he see
any of that in his own face? He doesn't know because he hasn't
looked in a mirror for weeks.

He retreats from the allure. He sees it for what it is. It's his own
death sentence. It's London's own Holocaust. There's still enough of
himself burning to be able to back away and fight.

He wonders where Keiko is now. Who she might be with. How she
might be making love with that taut, supple loveliness of hers. She
could make a kiss feel as though it were enveloping every part of your
body when it was just your lips that were being touched. She could
help him, he was sure of it. She could help him before it killed her.

He stares back at the floor as acid tears stream down his face.
Keep
fooling yourself with that one
, he tells himself,
if it helps you any.

'Vero!'

He regrets the outburst as soon as it's out. He shouted the name
so hard that his throat is sore, and the silence around him carries a
heavy, muffled tang, as if it were insulted. Dogs bark in the street. He
hears a gang trilling and screaming as they run through the darkness.
The map pulses behind his eyes, growing all the time, the number of
people requiring assistance diminishing, the number of deaths and
warehousings increasing.

Little corners of London are being turned into larders.

She kept her eyes dead ahead, concentrating on the beams from the
headlights as they pushed through the light fog on the motorway.
Nick had turned on the radio, some jazz station filled with noodling
muted trumpets and shivering drums. She hated jazz, hated its lack of
structure. It was lazy music, she thought, but it was somehow suitable
now, a confused, rambling soundtrack to her life. In her mind,
though, utter clarity, at least regarding one thing. London. She must
get Claire down to London.

Nick had flashed her down on the country road out of Southwold.
She had wanted to laugh out loud and scream hard enough to blister
his face as he asked her where she was off to.
Are you okay?
he had
asked.
Is everything tickety-boo?

I just saw a man up to his arms in Ray. My daughter was almost
taken from me. We could have died. Am I all right? Yeah, fair to
middling. Mustn't grumble.

Acid-blue light was roiling around the deepening colour of the sky
behind his head. She liked the image. The marriage of blues, his face.
She liked his face very much, she decided, despite his dumb questions.
She was happy to see him and happy too that he had offered to take
her; there wasn't enough chivalry in her life. She was dead tired. The
thought of driving any kind of distance made her feel sick.

'What about your car?' he asked her. She'd parked it in a lay-by.

She shrugged. 'It doesn't matter. It's for the best that I get rid of it,
actually. The people who want me, they know what kind of car I drive.'

'I'm just sorry you had to trade Italian pizzazz for this Swedish
bucket.'

'Beige too,' she said. 'There ought to be a law against beige.'

'I think there is now. But there's a beige amnesty. If I hand this car
in within thirty days they won't prosecute. To hell with it, though. I'd
rather be a fugitive.'

'Claire –' she said.

'She's sleeping.'

She looked at him, at his soft, amiable features. He resembled a cat
that has just eaten its fill and found the best spot by the fire.

'I might kiss you,' she said, her voice all wrong, the words filled
with holes.

'I might let you.'

He was regarding the ugly bite in her jeans. Blood was coagulating
around the torn edges like gleaming rubies.

'You've got a nasty gash,' he said.

'How would you know? You haven't seen it yet.'

That stung a laugh out of him, which suddenly turned to a
grimace.

'What?'

'I just pulled something in my back,' he said.

'Christ, look at us both. A pair of infirms.'

'I'm very firm, thanks. Speak for yourself.'

The drone of the car cut through their banter. Shock caught up with
her. She began to shiver so violently that her feet began to stamp into
the footwell. Nick turned the heating up high and after ten minutes
pulled into a lay-by in view of the level crossing at Darsham Station.

'You'll need a stitch or three in this beaut,' he said. 'Not to
mention a tetanus shot. But this will do for now.' He reached behind
the passenger seat and pulled out a first aid travel pack.

'Were you a Boy Scout?' she asked him, her teeth chattering
against each other so violently it ruined the words.

'I'm not being forward or anything, but you'll have to pull those
down.'

Together, with much hissing and groaning on Sarah's part, they
eased her jeans down over her hips. The bite was surrounded by a
bruise. Nick washed the bite with bottled water, then wiped it dry
with some gauze and drew fresh cries from her with an antiseptic
wipe. As best he could he closed the wound with four butterfly
sticking plasters. He pressed a dressing on top of that and wound a
bandage around her thigh.

'You look gorgeous,' he said. 'Anything else hurt?'

'No. You bastard.' The pain had stung tears from her, but she
managed to smile at him.

They were quiet for a while, but the tension in the car became so
great that she had to open the window. 'We need to go,' she said. She
was staring at the rear-view mirror so hard it was as if she were
willing the thin man to be there.

'Where?'

She couldn't answer.

'What happened?'

She told him and, as the details grew worse, her voice became
more fluid, more relaxed. She wondered if danger was what she
needed to make her feel anything like normal.

'Jesus, Sarah, we have to talk to the police. They have to –'

'No.' And then she said it again. And again. And suddenly she was
screaming the word at him until her voice was cracking with the effort,
her sight blurred with tears and confusion. She darted a look at Claire,
appalled that she had forgotten her daughter, but she slept on, her
thumb in her mouth.

Nick sat with his hands resting on the steering wheel, staring
ahead at the level crossing. A large articulated lorry came thundering
over it from the opposite direction, its cabin surrounded by highpowered
lights. Sarah caught a glimpse of two large bare arms
holding a steering wheel, a nameplate that said MACCREADLE. A
Manchester City pennant. And then the lorry was slamming past
them, rocking the car in its slipstream. She felt she should flag him
down, implore him to turn back, stay away from the coast where
danger awaited. But she knew that was no longer the case. The thin
man would be coming. She could almost see the wraith that was his
shadow presaging his arrival.

'Claire has ... a condition. There's something seriously wrong.'
She could tell by the way he was looking at her that Nick was
sceptical. But he didn't make any challenge. Instead, he reached for her
hand. 'I'm sorry,' he said, flatly. 'I didn't know.'

'She has a lump. It's ... I worry it might be cancer. But we need
to get her to a surgeon. It needs to be removed.'

'Surely you should have done something about it before now.'

She felt a flare, but swallowed against her anger. 'I only just found
out about it,' she said. 'It's been difficult for us,' she said. 'I thought
maybe it would be all right, but Claire ... she's been behaving oddly.
I'm worried she might have some kind of attack. Epilepsy, catatonia.
I'm scared that if I take her to hospital, and she needs to be kept in,
I'll lose her. I've just felt that it was more important to get away. But
you can run away for so long. After a while, it seems to turn into
running towards. But now, this lump. It's out of my hands, almost.'

She saw uncertainty in his eyes. She guessed he might be ruing
chasing after them, and wishing he was instead back in the hotel,
polishing glasses.

Sarah said, 'You stop for too long and everything catches up with
you. I don't know. That's how it seems to me. Anyway. I need to get
it out of her. I need to find a specialist.'

'London, then?'

'Yes. Claire thinks so too. I wish it didn't have to be. But yes.'

He started the car and revved the engine, but this attempt to
disguise his sigh – which fell from him like a collapse – failed.
Just get
us to London
, she thought, her mind filled with glistening red.
Nothing else matters.

The fog didn't look as though it were likely to lift. As they pushed on
along the A12 it thickened around the car, gradually erasing the
surroundings until only the headlights were picking out any detail,
and that nothing more than the colour of the bitumen, the burnished
grey snake of the crash barrier at the centre of the road.

She tried to sleep because it was late and she didn't want to be any
more muddy-headed in the morning than she was no doubt going to
be. Nick was unable to take the car much over forty miles per hour.
At this rate it would take them another two or three hours to reach
London's outskirts. Every jolt in the road knocked her awake. She
kept expecting to see something clinging to the windshield, leering in
at her with eyes that couldn't be focused on because of the busy, oily
black hair tigering its face. Either that, or the car going into a violent
roll down an embankment. She winced at the fresh memory of the
fight with the thin man and pushed her thoughts elsewhere, but Claire
was at the end of every trail. The car was suddenly too small for her.
She needed to stretch her legs. She needed a drink and something to
eat. She needed to behave like a normal human being for a little while.

'Nick,' she said, 'my leg's really hurting. You're right. We need to
find somewhere to stay. We're not going to be able to do anything
when we get to London. Not tonight.'

He nodded. Smiled. He switched off the jazz and took the
Colchester exit off the dual carriageway. He found a Ramada hotel at
the junction with the A120.

She wondered, as he parked the car, how many of the female staff
and visitors to the Southwold hotel he'd whisked off here over the last
few months. She allowed herself to be led through the entrance door
where he signed them in as Mr and Mrs MacCreadle. The receptionist
didn't try to hide her concern for Sarah's bloodied jeans and asked
how she had done it.

'I trapped it in a restaurant door,' she said. 'Ten stitches.'

The receptionist sucked air through her teeth at the lie and slowly
enunciated the word 'compensation', putting some emphasis on the
final syllable. Sarah asked her if she had any painkillers. The receptionist
took a box out of her own handbag and handed one of the
blister packs over.

'Nice one,' Nick said as they caught the lift. 'She upgraded us to a
bigger room. We should use that ploy again some time.'

Sarah hardly noticed the supposed opulence of the room once
Nick closed the door behind them. She took a couple of pills, washing
them down with a swig from the complimentary bottle of water. She
lay down on the busy pattern of the counterpane and switched on the
TV. Paying no attention to it, she kicked off her boots and carefully
eased out of her jeans, jumper and T-shirt. She realised Nick was
looking at her, and she supposed she oughtn't to be surprised. She
was topless, wearing only a pair of black knickers. She was too tired
to care about the scars on her arms, her stomach.

'I'll take that kiss now,' she said, as she dropped her head to the
pillow. By the time he knelt down to offer it, she was already asleep.