Thieving Fear (23 page)

By the time they came to change trains Ellen felt as if she and Hugh were reverting to childhood. They'd been reduced to playing a word game, competing to produce the longest word by adding a letter at each turn. Go, god, goad, gonad . . . Hugh had won that round and quite a few others by creating a plural while Ellen did her best not to resent his nervous triumph; she was supposed to be the writer, after all. She had even let him finish off the list of be and bee and beer and beery with begery, though she'd hoped his tentative lopsided smile had shown he meant it as a joke. Once they'd agreed they could rearrange letters the rounds had gone on longer, in some cases almost long enough she forgot why they were playing. At least the contest was preferable to I Spy, their solitary game of which had reminded them that neither liked to look towards the windows, not to mention around the carriage in search of anything hidden. I, in, inn, nine, linen, linnet . . . She'd baulked at letting Hugh turn this into entitle, though he'd seemed proud to have finally lit on the word. Now it was a question of how precarious an item he would find to stack on top of me and men and mean and meant and mental. She might have pointed at her mouth to suggest aliment if that wouldn't have risked touching her rubbery lips with a spongy finger. 'Mentaly,' Hugh said at last with some defiance.

'You win,' Ellen said and shut the lids of the moist bags of liquid that were her eyes, because the high walls of a railway cutting had conjured two reflections of her out of the dark.

When the train coasted to a halt she didn't open her eyes. She wasn't going to be tricked into glimpsing her reflection, even by the stench of clay and worse that drifted into her nostrils, presumably from herself. The train lumbered to a second halt, and Hugh murmured 'Liverpool.' Only the notion that she might force him to touch her and pretend again that he could bear it made her look.

Under an outsize clock magnifying ten to three in the afternoon the station concourse was crowded, but everyone seemed too preoccupied to notice Ellen, unless they'd seen her and weren't anxious to repeat the experience. Hugh poked a button to summon a lift to take him and Ellen underground. As the doors opened, a small broad square-faced man topped with a handful of parallel strands of grey hair limped towards them, brandishing a Cougar bestseller,
Just Be You
. He followed the cousins into the lift and then retreated, waving the paperback as if miming a vigorous farewell, though Ellen knew he was fending off her appearance and her stench. 'Forgot something. You go on,' he said and stepped back.

Hugh's attempts to keep a reassuring gaze on her made her say 'Don't waste your time on me, Hugh. We both saw that.'

'We heard him too, didn't we? He had to go back for something.'

'He didn't fool me, so don't try. He was being polite, like you.'

'Maybe he was claustrophobic. It says it's for eight people but they'd have to be squashed in.'

Rather than demand whether he had in mind the amount of space that clammy misshapen Ellen was occupying, she said 'No, it was me.'

'Maybe you're right, but not the way you think. You've put on too much.' Hugh's gaze jittered but didn't veer away. 'It's even getting to me in here,' he said.

His honesty was less welcome than she must have been determined to believe. As the lift crawled downwards she felt as if they were being dragged into the earth. 'So you've agreed with me all the time,' she told him.

'I haven't, Ellen. What do you think I said?'

'You tell me. Go on, make yourself clearer.'

Patches of his face had begun to look raw, the way his brain might feel for all she knew. 'Too much . . .' he repeated, waving his hands as if to send away the remainder of the phrase.

'Finish it off. One more word.'

'Smelly.'

While she had invited directness, she couldn't have imagined he would be so cruel. The doors drew back, revealing a tiled corridor that led to the underground platform. A thin shrill echo mocked her as she said 'We don't need anyone to make me feel worse. You're doing fine.'

'I don't understand,' Hugh pleaded as he chased her out of the lift. 'What am I meant to have done?'

Ellen thought she glimpsed her reflection in the white tiles on both sides, a pallid writhing like the antics of a massive grub. Hugh's presence at her heels was quite as unappealing. 'Don't you know what you're saying?' she enquired, not even over her shoulder. 'Haven't you any sense of that either?'

'I said . . .' She heard his footsteps pause as his voice did, but she wasn't waiting for him. 'Smelly,' he said and hurried after her. 'That's what you used to call perfumes.'

It was true, but how could she be sure that he hadn't been inadvertently accurate? She trudged to the end of the corridor and along the platform to the nearest trio of mud-brown plastic seats embedded in the wall. 'Just leave me alone for a while,' she said, and when his eyes began to flicker with panic 'Sit by me but don't say anything till I want you to.'

He left a seat between them when she took the furthest. She couldn't tell whether he was respecting her wishes or simply loath to sit closer. A board above the platform announced that their train to West Kirby was due in four minutes. The digit yellow as a warning on a traffic light twitched and diminished, and Ellen was reflecting that it was also the colour of cowardice – of her apprehension about the journey – when a figure emerged from the tiled corridor. It was the man with the book.

He must have caught the lift as soon as it returned to ground level. He hadn't even bothered to pretend that his imaginary errand had delayed him. Perhaps he'd hoped Ellen would have departed. He aborted his expression as he noticed her and trotted hastily past. 'Don't,' Ellen muttered as Hugh opened his mouth. Beyond the man another board subtracted a minute, and she heard the rumble of the train.

She could have thought the boards were taunting her and Hugh. At best they felt like an extension of her mind, determined to postpone the outcome of the journey. The train slowed as it wormed into the light, naming West Kirby in yellow letters that scuttled across a strip above the driver's window. Hugh jumped up as if he felt the need to demonstrate eagerness, then seemed at a loss until Ellen wobbled to her feet. As they boarded the train, so did the man with the book.

At least he stayed out of their carriage, which meant they had it to themselves. Ellen sat facing away from the driver and the man. She preferred not to watch the train burrow into the tunnel – it was a little too reminiscent of groping inside the cliff – but instead she felt darkness advancing at her back. The train raced under the river to Birkenhead, and had stopped at two more stations when the doors between the carriages rattled open to admit the man with the book.

Ellen tried to ignore him, especially for fear of alerting Hugh. He seemed disagreeably fascinated by the progress of the dark outside the window, unless he was doing his utmost to disregard Ellen's reflection. The man behind him apparently felt required to explain the change of carriages, however. 'Smokers,' he complained.

Hugh twisted around to catch him wrinkling his nose and waving the book like a fan. 'Hugh,' Ellen warned, but too late: he'd grabbed the back of the seat to swing himself into the aisle as he demanded 'Why were you doing that again?'

The man shut the door and squatted on the seat to its left, planting the book on his lap. 'I'm sorry?'

'Never mind being sorry. Just tell this lady why you didn't get in the lift.'

'I don't want to hear it, Hugh.'

'She doesn't want to hear.'

'She does really, and I do. What was wrong with it? You can say. We need you to.'

'I said I dropped something and had to go back.'

'You said you forgot it before.'

'Forgot it or dropped it. Same thing.'

'No it isn't. We know about words,' Hugh said and jabbed a finger at the book. 'She specially does. She's going to be published by them.'

'Is that right?'

While Ellen wasn't certain that the question was addressed to her or indeed to anyone, she said 'I hope so. Hugh –'

'First time I've met a writer. I suppose you have to be different from the rest of us.'

'Better, you mean,' Hugh said. 'So what did you drop?'

The man's face had begun to compete with his for overall redness. If Ellen were writing the scene she might have described this as the colour of a pair of traffic lights warning her to stop. Meanwhile the man was saying 'What do you care?'

'I care a lot,' said Hugh, not quite turning towards Ellen, who would have responded that he cared too much about her – that he was as helplessly trapped by it as he was making her feel. 'We don't think you left anything behind,' he said. 'We think you just didn't want to get in.'

The man's gaze strayed towards Ellen and retreated, no more hastily than she could blame him for. 'Think what you like,' he said.

'It isn't what we like, it's the truth.' Hugh clutched at the seat across the aisle with his free hand, though the carriage was steady enough. 'Why couldn't you get in?' he insisted. 'And don't say you're claustrophobic. We know someone who is.'

'Too much disinfectant.'

Hugh shook his head or swivelled it from side to side. 'Too much . . .'

'They must have sprayed in there to cover something up. I'm surprised you could breathe.'

'Then how did you manage to come down in it?' Hugh enquired in a kind of unwilling triumph.

As Ellen saw the man's lips stiffen she succeeded in parting her own. 'You're right,' she told him, and the reflections that were wadded against the windows mouthed it. 'There was something that ought to be covered up.' When Hugh gave her a defiantly unhappy look she said 'Sit down before you forget where we're going.'

Her cruelty silenced him, though for some seconds he appeared not to know how to resume his place. She couldn't help by touching him, but she was at the very edge of her patience by the time he abandoned his handholds and shuffled to face her before subsiding opposite. The small squat man had already failed to lose himself in his book, which he laid on the seat next to him. Ellen stared at Hugh hard enough to keep him quiet – almost hard enough to distract her from the grotesque reflections squashed against the windows by the dark. She was peripherally aware that the small man alighted at the last of the underground stations, even if she didn't glimpse him as the train moved off. His departure seemed not to have left the carriage as empty as it ought to be, an impression that worked on her nerves until she realised 'He didn't take his book.'

'Shall I get it for you?'

'Just stay there, Hugh.'

He wasn't ready to abandon his compulsion to help. 'About him, you know, I was only trying –'

'And could you stay quiet as well? You've said considerably more than enough for a while.' When he made to speak she added 'Otherwise I'll be telling you where to go and leaving you to it.'

She wondered if he might take this less as a threat than as an opportunity to protect her, but some aspect of it hushed him. He gazed at her as if he didn't know where else to look, which left her feeling trapped inside her flesh, peering out of the blurred mass of her face. The onslaught of sunlight as the carriage emerged from the tunnel was some distraction, though it aggravated her clamminess – and then she noticed something else. 'It's gone,' she said.

Hugh's gaze seemed focused on reminding her that he was forbidden to speak, and so she lurched past him. 'His book,' she said, not having found it on the seat or on the floor. 'It was there.'

'I wouldn't know. You said I had to sit.'

Ellen felt as if, having intensified her sense of her condition, the man had snatched away the possibility of a Cougar book. The train had halted at a station for nobody visible to board before Hugh said 'Maybe he's showing us what he can do.'

'What do you mean?'

'Maybe there wasn't a man at all.'

Was this a desperate attempt at reassurance? It simply left her feeling more unsure of herself. If she concentrated on the horizon, where the edge of the slate of the sea cut into a heavy black sky, she could imagine that the train was scarcely moving. There were very few stations to go, and soon the train swung away from the water, and there were none at all.

A man with a rucksack over his left shoulder stepped back as she dumped herself on the platform, and she almost believed he was only making way for her and Hugh. She stumped past the unstaffed booth and the end of the platform into the little booking hall, where she turned on Hugh. 'Where are you proposing to get your spade?'

'I must have been thinking we could borrow one from the house. There'll be a shop, won't there?' he came close to pleading. 'Let's ask.'

A solitary taxi was at rest outside the station. Once Ellen made for it he succeeded in reaching the driver's window. 'Excuse me, do you know where we can buy a, gardening equipment, sort of thing?'

The large tattooed man inclined his shaven pate in a lazy sidelong nod. 'Should be some in the next road.'

'Can you take us?'

'It's not that far,' the driver protested, then glanced askance at Ellen. 'Are you going on anywhere?'

She felt referred to rather than addressed, and left Hugh to say 'You could wait and take us to Thurstaston.'

'Helping the rangers, are you?'

'I expect so,' Hugh was sufficiently thrown to tell him. 'I'll sit in front, shall I, Ellen? You can have the back.'

At least this let her sit as far from the driver as she could. Nevertheless he lowered his window all the way as he started the engine, and didn't ask whether she minded the breeze that fluttered her old nightdress, peeling it away from her moist flesh only to paste it more uncomfortably still. He turned left off the main road and immediately left again, which brought them in less than a minute to a hardware store next to a wine bar. 'Do we both need to go in?' Hugh said.

'I take it you're asking me to.'

'I'll give you the money if you can.'

She wondered if the driver thought this sounded like a bribe; it felt absurdly like one. 'Don't go digging in your pocket,' she said. 'We're both out of work.'