Loss of Separation (33 page)

Those footsteps. Something is going on. I hope it's something to do with all water that's coming down steps. Even through walls I can hear thunder. It's been going on for days, it seems. Going away, coming back, like dogs in the street that can't leave their own mess alone. Maybe they're getting ready to move me somewhere else. The amount of walking around makes me think that they live in street where there are lots of houses. They are putting together plan, maybe. How to do it without someone seeing. How to make it look normal. What if they roll me up inside carpet? Or put me in suitcase? I don't think I would be able to cope with that. I'll fight. As soon as they remove handcuffs, I'll fight.

The footsteps finished their busy little circuits above then began, slowly, to descend. Little impact splashes, and the water coming a shade faster through the gap at the bottom of the door. What was chasing it pushed that barrier open and stood for a moment assessing Tamara in her bed. For a moment, she thought it was Paul, that the footsteps had been the choreography of violence, the skip and shuffle of cut and thrust and counter; that he had bested the evil that kept her here. But then the figure came out of the shadows, flicking on the light, and it was The Man in his orange fish mask, that snorkel hood with its matted lining of fur pulled over his head. Something was different. She could hear his breathing, fast and ragged, and this she had never heard before. And why that pause, where there had never been one before? As if he were gathering himself. She felt her heart jolt and a voice inside her tell her that this was it. There was to be no release from these cuffs, no moonlight flit between hideaways. She'd take the roll of carpet now. She'd gladly leap into the open mouth of a suitcase. She fought against the shackles, her voice in her chest shocked from her at each jerk of the chains. Whimpers and wails. She was able to snatch enough breath to try to scream but it wouldn't form in her throat and the pathetic sound fell dead in the room, unable to get beyond the metres of packed soil, and the churn of falling water. The Man came to her and reached behind her. An extendable lamp on a mobile base, like nothing she'd ever seen before, was raised over her head. It was alien-looking. Five dimpled glass circles were punched into a flattened plastic sphere. He flicked a switch and it was as if the sun had exploded into the room. She flinched from it. The light was almost physical. She could feel it scouring every wrinkle and crease of her skin. It opened up the squalid little room in which she had spent so much time and turned it into a different place. All shadow had been excoriated. The Man became something more than he had been. It was as if all that had gone before was mere figment; that her true nightmare was beginning just now. She noticed fresh detail. The unstitched thread in the seams of his coat. The spores of blue mould on the back of his gloves, like slow explosions of ink on blotting paper. The stain of something recently eaten, drying to an ochre smear on the sleeve of his arm.

'Bud'laska,' she said to The Man. 'Please. Ni... ni, bud'laska.'

The Man ignored her and moved to the curtain. The fight went out of her. She was frozen now, needing to see what was behind it in order to be able to go on, to decide how next to lose her mind. The Man struggled to draw it back; mould caused the plastic ties to hitch along the rail, but eventually he dragged it to one side and she could see a trolley beneath, covered with a dirty teacloth. The Man kicked off a brake on its castors and began to wheel it towards her. There were no smells of good food now. No warming cup of tea, or hot milk.

He set the trolley next to her and picked up the white board from the end of the bed. He scribbled on it for a moment, then held it up for her to see.

I'm sorry.

He peeled back the teacloth, and now she was able to scream after all. She screamed long and hard until the cold fire from the needle he'd jammed in her arm seized her brain and started switching it off. She was falling into oblivion trying to remember what she'd seen on the trolley, the most dismaying version of Kim's Game she had ever played.

scalpel

clamps

bone saw

pliers

cable cutter?!?

But it was what was missing that scared her most. She tried to ask, but it was beyond her. The question drifted in her mind while darkness closed around it.

No needles. No catgut. Nothing to sew me back together...

Chapter Seventeen

The Surge

I stole an ambulance. I don't suppose it matters what kind I took, but in the end I plumped for one of the rapid response vehicles - a Zafira - the ones with yellow and green checks on their side. There were two of them parked askew in the parking zone reserved for emergencies. The keys had been left in one of them. I switched on the sirens and the lights and I sliced through the roads of Ipswich until I hit the A-road that would take me home. It felt less bad, somehow, stealing that car, rather than one of the proper ambulances, despite the mass of state-of-the-art kit, the life-saving gear in the back. What made me feel worse was the unopened sandwich on the passenger seat; something no doubt grabbed by the driver to tide him over until the end of his shift. I didn't improve my guilt by raking it open and wolfing it down. I didn't even like cheese and pickle, but I was hungry beyond tasting. I drove through what I thought was the Suffolk countryside, but it could have been a world of water. Rain beat against the roof and the windscreen, trying to get in. Across exposed bridges the wind felt as if it were lifting the car. I couldn't see well enough to dispel the fear that was exactly what was happening. Only the occasional sign, lit up through the slashing rain, and the cats' eyes in the road kept me from going off in the wrong direction, or leaving the road entirely. I missed the junction, shrouded by trees on the right, that would have taken me on to the B road to the village and had to do a blind U-turn in the carriageway. If anything was coming the other way I'd be dead meat. But there were few people out this evening. Only the idiots and the desperate.

I did take the car off the road down here. Right at the point where I had been maimed by the Defender. It was nothing serious. I was doing maybe 25 and misjudged the bend in the road. Both front tyres bounced into the kerb and I stalled it, mashing the bonnet into a hedge. I was able to reverse back on to the road without any problem, but it brought back memories of the hit-and-run and I was barely able to summon the strength to sink the accelerator once I'd got the engine going again. I concentrated hard - one of the headlights had been smashed in - and took the car steadily along the dipping, swerving road, past the school, past Breydon, and on to the mini-roundabout that marked the beginning of Southwick proper. Before reaching the main access route into the village, I turned right and drove past a pub and a junk shop, on to a more narrow road that led through the golf course. There was a sudden flurry of movement within the ribboning rain, avocets perhaps, and then it was just the rain again, and the futile sweep of the wipers trying to shift it from the glass.

You can't access the harbour by car at this point. There's a barrier blocking the way. Once I saw the gleam of the padlock I killed the lights and the engine and tried to fasten the shape of the old mill to the uneven black mattress of the marshes stretching out beyond the sunken lines of the river and the illuminated rise of the village. But there was no way through the white noise. I got out of the car and braced myself against the assault of the weather. The lighthouse was sending a pathetic beam out to sea. Lightning arced across the clenched fists of cloud, as if some diabolical being were throwing up a great enclosure of barbed wire to hem in the village. I spotted the mill within that flash, like a twisted, rusting bolt jammed into a rotten plank of wood. I'd begun to suspect it existed only in my mind. I opened the boot and sifted through the cases of medical supplies. I pocketed syringes, needles and two phials of morphine. I took some scalpels too, although they felt grossly unwieldy in the meaty traps of my hands. I took a waterproof LED torch from the glove box. There seemed to be nothing else that might help me, either to save life or to snuff it out. Stretchers, bandages, splints. A defibrillator. Fastened down with straps was a white tank of oxygen and, but for its green diamond warning sticker, it looked like my leg after I'd woken up from coma: pale, inflexible and swollen.

I ducked carefully under the barrier and struck out along a cindered path. The river had silted up over time, choking the waterway and limiting the traffic that could use it, but the high tides had swollen it to the point where it was close to breaking the banks. It trembled, right on the brink. I could hear the crash of the surf as it tore up and down the beach. This place was like a strange, landlocked island. I felt both exposed and isolated; the creeks, marshes and reed beds stretched out around me for miles, but there was nowhere to go if it flooded. You'd have to rush to get in a boat or face a drowning out in the wilderness.

From a distance, the fish huts were invisible against the night. The only clue to something standing there was the slight dip in the strength of the wind as the conglomeration of old wooden walls and roofs acted as a break against the weather. I squinted into the night, training the torch on the path, and tried to remember where Charlie's fish hut was. If I found that, there might be a clue as to where Jake's hut was positioned. Intermittent pulses of lightning helped. Here was a stack of yellow trays bearing Charlie's initials, punched into the plastic with a bradawl. A rusted horse shoe nailed side on to make a C above the door. His boat flashed at me alongside a wooden landing stage.
There's Gratitude for you.
His stamp everywhere.

I knocked on the door. It was locked from the outside, a padlock hanging from a bolt. Music was playing inside, but the sound was all wrong. With my ear pressed up against the wood, the melody sounded far off, though indisputably from somewhere within. Muffled by a blanket, perhaps? He must have forgotten to turn off his radio before leaving.

I was about to move further along in what would no doubt prove to be a protracted bid to identify Jake's hut when the lightning came again and I saw my shadow cast against the wall. But my shadow was carrying a torch, not something long and thin, like a spear. I switched off the torch. Back in darkness, I could feel my ears tingle as I strained for something beneath the rage of wind and rain. I pressed myself against the wall of the hut and gripped the torch. I shifted to my left and heard a strange sound, something I'd never heard before. There was a kind of pneumatic
socking
noise, and a shrill, high-impact concussion of metal against stone, maybe centimetres away, where I had been standing not seconds before. Had I been shot at? I felt my bladder give way at the thought, and I staggered further to my left. The sound of something being forced against resistance, something catching. Loaded. I kept moving. At one point the wind fell away for a moment, perhaps because I was shielded in this position from the worst of it. I heard footsteps, slow and deliberate, and I watched the gleam of a harpoon dart slide out from the edge of the wall, followed by its long, silver shaft. I waited until I saw the gloved hand gripping the stock and, ducking underneath the point, switched on the torch and shone it into the face of my pursuer.

I swore when I saw it, giving away my position to him. He swung the harpoon down towards me; I was almost on my knees. I lashed out with the torch and caught him across the top of the shin. Something give there, like the shell of an egg under a spoon. I heard the harpoon as it was triggered again and felt heat explode through the right side of my body. I was on the floor, up to my elbows in water, mud and grass in my mouth but I managed to drag myself towards the fence and got through, losing my jacket in the process. He was splashing after me but there were no more shots; maybe he'd run out of harpoons. I could hear his breath ragged behind that staring mask. The eyes of it stuck in me like a hook; I couldn't shake away the shock of it, despite seeing it for less than a split-second. Bulbous and glassy, sunk into what looked like a swollen pile of orange grease, a black mouth agape, nonplussed, blank, emerging from a matted fur hood. I kept that nailed in my mind, that and the pain, which was good and fresh, distracting me from the old, insipid pain that had been slowly dragging me down. I knew about pain. We were old friends now. So tight you forgot how to say goodbye. I wondered how much of it I needed to experience before it finished me. How broad my threshold now.

Water was pouring over the sides of the river bank. The tide could clearly be seen now in a body that had rarely ever felt it before. I almost drowned on that incline: water kept crashing into my face and down my throat. I wasn't strong enough to lift my body above it. I kept having to arch my neck back to get some air. Whenever I did that, I felt a coming apart in my gut and wondered if, where I'd been shot, parts of me were escaping. It threatened a grey out; I could feel it shrouding me. I felt weak and queasy.

Lightning again. His shadow again.

He was closer that I'd given him credit for. He was standing over me, one hand on his knee, trying to keep what was left of it together. The point of a harpoon was grazing the back of my neck. Through the storm and the crash of my own breathing, I could hear his, stifled and harsh behind the plastic.

'Tamara,' I was trying to say. An appeal. I was coughing up seawater - what I hoped was seawater - and trying to hold up my hand against the harpoon, but my back was in spasm. 'Jake, please, I'm begging you.'