The Unblemished (4 page)

Some night
, he thought.
Some hangover.

At the foot of Oxford Street, the Marble Arch gleaming pale white
in the morning sunshine, he breathed in deeply and said: 'Okay.
Okay.'

There was no house. A deep, brittle part of him had known this
would be the case all along, yet it still came as a shock to find that
motorbike couriers, black cabs, white vans and endless cars were now
racing over the spot where the house had stood the night before. He
looked down at the sodden, scarlet handkerchief. He remembered the
sound of his boots as they moved across the short gravel driveway
and the feel of the door beneath his fingers. He remembered the
sound of the door swinging open, a well-oiled sigh.

He remembered –

The frantically motile sheet of black insects like a million dead eyes
sucking in his image on the doorstep, a blackness that is absolute,
intimidating. A disarming blackness. He takes a picture. Greased light
reflects off a billion compound lenses, a million commas of chitin.
Fractals of metallic green and blue and black glint and dance, prettier
than they ought to be. The flies sweeping like a curtain of beads
against his face, rushing into his mouth. Impossibly, driven by the
crazed impulses of a dream, he steps inside, the flies shifting to
accommodate him and, without being able to see more than a
millimetre in front of him, he knows that every room in the house is
crammed with insects. He smells their mealiness. The drone fills his
head so completely he believes it might never release him when finally
he leaves, or is allowed to leave. This thought propels him to turn and
flee, but he can no longer see the way out. The crawling all over his
scalp. The tickle of chitin against his skin as insects find a way into his
clothing. Fat, slow flies, close to death, flying in erratic trajectories,
bursting against his face. He can't open his mouth to scream for fear
of allowing more of the filthy things to invade him. When he believes
that madness or death are his only releases, and he feels himself
sinking to the floor, suffocated by the massing of the insects, they part
and he falls through them into a space. No floorboards coming up to
meet him. Just the withered, naked body of a man – is that you,
Rohan? – who is peppered with punctures, his flesh drained to the
point that it resembles the colour of lard. The soft tissue of his face so
wasted that his teeth seem to have grown through the puckered hole
of his mouth, giving him a smile that couldn't possibly have been there
at the moment of his death. He lands on the corpse and it disappears
in a great plume of dust around him at the same moment that he hears,
like an echo gradually amplified, the sound of chewing. And then there
are words caught up, couched in the chewing, a skilful rolling of meat
around a tongue spilling myth and meaning, but he can't work out
what is being said.

He remembers –

Nothing more.

His eyes scoured the area, as if determined to find some remnant
of the house to prove to him that it was something more than a
hideous dream fuelled by a night of excess. Or Vero might have
slipped him a Mickey Finn. Nothing would surprise him now.

All that happened was that the traffic grew in volume and became
snarled at the corner, and the pedestrians tutted and swore at him as
they found him blocking their path.

He turned to leave and felt something with his tongue, tucked
between his teeth. He worked at it on his way back to the tube, some
stray shred of meat from the previous day's dinner, perhaps, and the
thought made him hungry for breakfast. At the mouth of the tube
station, he dislodged the morsel and picked it off the tip of his tongue
with his finger.

A fly. Mashed and mangled, its head gone.

The world went away from him again, but in an infinitely more
manageable way. Bo put out his hand to stop himself from falling and
jarred it against the wall. He leaned over and vomited copiously, so
hard that he saw black spots dancing behind his eyes. But once the
straining and the retching were over and he was aware of the sounds
of disgusted pedestrians avoiding him, he saw that the black spots
were more fly corpses studding the brown gruel of his own waste. He
staggered away down a side street and breathed hard until he thought
he had a grip on reality once more. He craved Keiko's warmth, her
cat eyes, the softness of her lips on his neck:
There, there
, he could
almost hear her whisper.
There, there.

He bought a bottle of water and drained it before returning to the
tube and buying a ticket to Kilburn. He sent Keiko a text before he
sank to the platform:
brkfst, hny? my trt. xx

The train wasn't long in coming, but it was busy, and he had to
stand all the way. His thoughts were a pendulum between Keiko and
the house and by the time he had reached his stop, he was determined
that he would never get as drunk as that again. To lose control was to
risk everything, and he had too much to live for. But in thinking this,
he knew that booze could not have had such a profound effect on him.
He felt he should be tested for narcotics, but it was an empty impulse.
Something inside him had opened itself to this moment. Something
inside him understood what was going on, and welcomed it.

Now that his involvement with the house was over, the world
rushed in to fill the vacuum. He felt better as he reached Kilburn High
Street, but suddenly realised, as he passed through the ticket barriers,
that despite the fact that nobody else had got off at his stop and the
platform was empty, he was being followed.

Sarah Hickman was trying to find a radio station that might carry
some news of her crime. She had been driving for hours, risking
the M6 all the way from Preston. Though she had seen a number of
police vehicles, the traffic had been sufficiently busy to allow her to
blend in and anyway, Manser would hardly have guessed she would
steal a car.

But Manser was not stupid. It would not be long before he latched
on to her deceit.

She had a cigarette going, and the window was open slightly
despite the cold, so that the smoke would stream out. Claire was
asleep in the back, or dozing at least – she never seemed to sleep
deeply much these days, if at all – and she didn't want her daughter
breathing in her second-hand fumes. She'd determined to quit, but
this intention was one of a great many things that had somehow
become irrelevant in her life now. Few things mattered, and they were
of such crucial importance that focusing on them made everything
else seem pallid and shallow at this ungodly hour, as she fled Preston.
Crucial things that, along with the cigarette she wasn't enjoying, were
helping to keep her awake as the odometer slowly rolled off the miles.

Get some money (steal it? or risk stopping at an ATM and
exposing our location?).

Dump this car and get something else soon?

Claire. What the fuck is
wrong
with her?

Where the hell are we going?

Who is Gyorsi Salavaria?

Gyorsi Salavaria.
The name – she had heard her daughter murmur
it in her sleep – meant something to her but she couldn't understand
what, or why. A name like that oughtn't be too difficult to check up
on, but she was afraid to do so. She was uneasy around computers
and suspected that feeding the name into one would again alert others
to her whereabouts. Her paranoia was such that she had taken to
using her own plastic cutlery with which to eat meals, which she then
destroyed, to prevent her DNA from being readily available. She slept
with a hat on, to stop hairs from transferring to the pillows. She did
not look anybody in the eye. She had read somewhere that this
reduced a potential recognition by up to eighty per cent.

Claire's response to all this was uniform: she bore the glazed
expression of the drunk, of the junky, of the terminally ill. It was the
bored expression of a teenager taken to extremes. When Sarah
attempted to talk to her, she played hermit crabs and wouldn't return
until she was hungry, or darkness had fallen. She became something
new at night. Sarah had watched her change one evening, unfolding
from her prone position on an upturned milk crate in the disused
factory they had been camping in, slowly filling with animation like
colour introduced to a pencil sketch. She was no more responsive to
her mother than she was during the day, but something clearly found
her 'on' switch once the light began to fade. Sarah had wanted to ask her
about drugs, but she was obviously clean; they were in each other's
pockets twenty-four hours a day and Sarah would notice if there was
any snorting or smoking or needlework taking place. Trying to talk to
Claire only caused her to withdraw. Especially when she asked her
about Oliver, her boyfriend. Something had happened on their little
jaunt. An argument, a fight, something more. She flinched when Sarah
mentioned his name. Sarah wondered if it was over; certainly Oliver
had not attempted to get in touch, although he had had the chance
before they took to the road. She supposed it was enough that Claire
hadn't attempted to run away. And it was not as if there weren't things
that she should be turning inwards to escape from.

Claire had suffered greatly over the past months. Her routine had
been torn from her; a cosy cycle of family and work and Oliver and
swimming and half-heartedly learning to play the guitar. Her father
was dead now, and the only constant in her life was her mother. It
wounded Sarah when she saw in her daughter the frank expression
that this was not enough.

As the traffic thinned, and night closed in on the motorway,
Sarah's panic grew. She was convinced that their disappearance had
been reported and she would be brought to book. When a police
Range Rover tailed her from Walsall to the M42 turn-off, she almost
sent her own car into the crash barriers at the centre of the road.

Desperate for cover, she followed the signs for the A14. Perhaps
she could make the 130 miles to Felixstowe tonight and sell the car,
try to find passage on a boat, lose herself and her daughter on the
continent.

'Are you all right back there, Claire?'

In the rear-view mirror, her daughter might well have been a
mannequin. Her features were glacial; her sunglasses formed tiny
screens of animation as the sodium lights fizzed off them. A slight
flattening of the lips was the only indication that all was well. Sarah
bore down on her frustration. Did she understand what she had been
rescued from? Sarah tried to remember what things had been like for
herself as a child, but reasoned that her own relationship with her
mother had not been fraught with the same problems.

'It's all okay, Claire. We'll not have any more worries in this
family. I promise you.'

The motorway unravelled beneath the wheels. The car was
temporary comfort, she knew that, and it would need to be ditched
before too long. For now she could enjoy it. Yet through the warmth
and the snug feel of the leather upholstery, her mind sought the
reason for their upheaval. Malcolm Manser. She hadn't wanted to
think about him, but he was relentless, even when not there in person.
She had been trying to recall her relationship with Claire's father, an
innocent time, yet he invaded it like a stain. He filled all of her
horizons, an albino's dreaded sun.

She had met Andrew in 1989 in the Preston library they both
frequented. A relationship had started, more or less, on their hands
bumping each other while reaching for the same book. They had
married a year later and Sarah gave birth to Claire not long after.
Both of them had steady, if unspectacular, work. Andrew was a
security guard and she cleaned at the local school and for a few
favoured neighbours. They eventually took out a mortgage on their
council house on the right-to-buy scheme and bought a car, a washing
machine and a television on the never-never. Then they both lost their
jobs within weeks of each other. They owed £17,000. When the law
centre they depended on heavily for advice lost its funding and closed
down, Sarah had to go to hospital when she began laughing so hysterically,
she could not catch her breath. It was as Andrew drove her
back from the hospital that they met Malcolm Manser for the first
time.

His back to them, Manser stepped out in front of their car at a set
of traffic lights and did not move when they changed in Andrew's
favour. When Andrew sounded the horn, Manser turned around. He
was wearing a knee-length, nubuck trenchcoat, black Levi's, black
boots, and a black T-shirt without an inch of give in it. His head was
hairless save for a sculpted black beard. His Ray-Ban Randolphs
allowed the merest glimpse of his eyes, hooded but alert, like
something reptilian. From the trenchcoat he pulled a car jack and
proceeded to smash every piece of glass and dent every panel on the
car. It took about twenty seconds.

'Mind if I talk to you for a sec?' he asked, genially, leaning against
the crumbled remains of the driver's-side window. Andrew was too
shocked to say anything. His mouth was very wet. Tiny cubes of glass
glittered in his hair. Sarah was whimpering, trying to open her door,
which was sealed shut by the warp of metal.

Manser went on: 'You have 206 pieces of bone in your body, fine
sir. If my client, Mr Anders, does not receive seventeen grand by the
end of the week, plus interest at three per cent a day – which is pretty
bloody generous if you ask me – I will guarantee that after half an
hour with me, your bone tally will be double that. And that yummy
piece of bitch you've got ripening back home. Claire? I'll have her.
You test me. I dare you.'

He walked away, magicking the car jack into the jacket and giving
them an insouciant wave.

Shortly after that, Sarah discovered that her husband was injecting
himself with temazepam, using needles shared with friends from the
pub where he spent most evenings. She forced him to quit and took him
to be tested for HIV. When they received the results Andrew set himself
on fire in the car that he had locked inside the garage. By the time the
fire services got to him, he was a black, twisted shape in the back seat.
Set himself on fire;
Sarah refused to believe that. She was sure that
Manser had murdered him. Despite their onerous circumstances,
Andrew was not the suicidal type. Claire was everything to him; he'd
not leave this world without securing a little piece of it for her.

Now she spotted the flashing blue and red lights of three police
vehicles blocking her progress east. She turned left on to another A
road bound for Leicester. There must have been an accident; they
wouldn't go to the lengths of forming a roadblock for her, would
they? The road sucked her deep into darkness; on either side wild
hedgerows and vast oily swells of countryside huddled up to them.
Headlamps on full beam, she could pick nothing out beyond the
winding road apart from the ghostly dusting of insects attracted by
the light. But Sarah felt anything but alone. She could see, in the
corner of her eye, something blurred by speed, keeping pace with the
car as it fled the police cordon. She took occasional glances to her
right, but could not define their fellow traveller for the dense tangle
of vegetation that bordered the road.

'Can you see that, Claire?' she asked. 'What is it?'

It could have been a trick of the light, or something silver reflecting
the shape of their car. Maybe it was the police. The needle on the
speedometer edged up to 80. They would have to dump the car
somewhere soon, if the police were closing in on them.

'Keep a look out for a B&B, okay?' She checked in the mirror;
Claire's hand was splayed against the window, spreading mist from
the star her fingers made. She was watching her hand intently. Or she
was watching something else. Sarah swallowed against the thin spike
of steely cold fear that moved through her skin, raising it. It suddenly
seemed as though Claire was waving.

On the long, serpentine road that leads into Southwold off the A12,
Sarah twice saw shapes that weren't actually there, at one point
actually taking the Alfa Romeo on to a high-sided verge.

Exhausted by the long drive, she parked in front of a butcher's shop
in the small square at the heart of the village and wound down the
window. A broad wedge of glaring sodium from the lighthouse slid
across the roofs and fled to sea. Her heart still seemed to be beating at
twice its normal rate after dodging roadblocks back in Leicestershire.

Claire's eyes were large and glassy in the rear-view mirror. The
only clue to her consciousness was in the faint glimmer of the silver
chain around her throat, which picked up the beat of her heart.

The soft hiss of the tide came to Sarah over distance like breath.

She had no idea how far from the beach they were, or what time it
was: the dashboard clock was on the fritz, only ever reading 7:04 or
7:05 depending on the whim of some gremlin in the circuitry. What
now? At least she felt safe: this place was so charming it might
actually wither away and die should Manser come anywhere near it.

She wondered if the hotel just a little way back on the left was still
open for business and might give them a room for the night. She
cleared her throat gently and watched Claire for any reaction.

'Chick,' Sarah said, 'we'll go and get a room, yeah? Have a good
night's sleep in a nice bed for a change. Okay?'

Claire licked her lips again. She said, 'Blood.'

'Come on, Claire. Come on.' Sarah delicately shooed her
daughter out of the car and put her arm around her as they took the
few steps to the hotel entrance. She tried not to recoil at the thinness
of her shoulders or the hot, shivery feel of her skin, too soft it
seemed beneath her light V-neck pullover.

She cupped her hands and peered through the window of the hotel.
Save for one weak bulb spinning a yellow band across the bar, the
lights were off. A member of staff was standing, arms folded, talking
to a man sitting on a stool, his back to the door, both hands slowly
turning a large white cup on the counter.

She knocked gently on the glass and both men looked up at her.
The man on the stool drew a finger across his throat and she
swallowed hard against the blasé way he mimed so violent a charade.
Perhaps something in the way she looked attracted the barman to the
doors. She could see the other man pulling a face, imploring him to
ignore her.

'We're closed,' the barman said, looking up and down the street,
then at Claire, before returning his attention to Sarah. He had an
Australian accent. 'It's late.'

'How late? What time is it?'

The barest shape of a frown ghosted across his face. She guessed it
was a strange question. Everyone knew what time it was. Everyone
had access to it. 'It's after one,' he said.

She said, slowly, 'I really need a room.'

The barman, whose name was Nick, could only offer her part use
of his own room, which was given to him off season for a huge
discount.

'If it's off season, then surely the hotel can't be full.'

'That's right,' Nick said, with a hint of irritation.

'Then why can't we have a room to ourselves?'

'You'll have to pay premium rate.'

'I can do that.' She could see where this was going. Some other
time, some other place, she might have let herself be persuaded to
spend the night with him. He was young and attractive and Lord
knew she could do with a little affection, a little fun. But Claire
needed looking after and, although she never got enough of it, sleep
was the most important thing to her now.