The Hunger Trace (36 page)

The man did not answer. Christopher was tired. He tried to speak again, but the words sounded fragile. ‘Why won’t you turn around? I just, erm—’

The man held up his hand to silence Christopher. ‘If I held you any closer,’ he said, and Christopher began to cry, because he knew what was coming. The man shook his head, and started again. ‘If I held you any closer, I would be on the other side of you.’

Christopher got down on his hands and knees and began to shiver. When he looked up, the man was gone. Nothing was left of him but the spiralled, velvety casings of the antlers, bloody inside. Christopher crawled to the end of the platform, and looked over the edge, but there was no sign of the man.

Should’ve known I’d get no answers from him, Christopher thought. Another one of his father’s sayings came to mind:
Dead men tell no tales.

Christopher wished they would. There were far too many missing pages. But maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe, if the true story of a man wasn’t known, if there was no historical evidence, then Christopher had just as much right as anyone else to make it up himself.

When he looked down, his forearms seemed to be bleeding quite openly, the rainwater brightening the colour, washing it away as more came to replace it. It made him feel weak, but not unpleasant. Christopher tried to keep his eyes open. He continued to peer over the edge of the platform, watching the world gain weight.

The door to Louisa’s cottage was open, so Adam stepped inside. He could smell spilt whisky, wet mud, and the overpowering stench of several kilos of raw meat and defrosting mice and chicks.

He found her upstairs in bed. Her lower leg hung out from the covers, thick all the way to the ankle. For a moment he felt sickened, as he sometimes did on visiting a client.

Louisa was not asleep. She turned her head towards him. ‘What are you doing?’ she said.

He stayed quiet because, in truth, he did not know.

‘When did it become okay for you to just walk into my house?’ she said.

‘I’ve quit,’ he said. ‘I’ve quit my job.’

‘At the golf course?’

‘No,’ he said.

She did not speak.

‘And I need your help for a bit,’ he said.

‘What could you possibly need me for?’

‘The lad. Christopher. He’s gone awol.’

‘No he hasn’t. He’s at his mother’s.’

‘He ran off from his mother’s,’ Adam said.

‘How do you know?’

‘He rang me.’

He could see Louisa take a moment to process that information. The world was not as predictable as she would have it. ‘That’s nice,’ she said.

He stared at her. She sat up in the bed, keeping the covers at her chin. ‘He’ll be back,’ she said. ‘How long’s he been gone? A day? It’s nothing. I’ve already had
her
ranting and raving. I don’t know what the fuss is about.’

‘He sounded weird on the phone. He takes them tablets, doesn’t he? And it’s waist high water in the village. I’m just going to drive around.’

‘Oh, I see. Yeah, of course. Why don’t you and her go and look for him together?’

‘What you on about?’ he said, feeling his temper begin to rise. He found her self-destruction childish. ‘I told you what happened. I didn’t do anything with her.’

‘Do you know what she said to me, today, at the door?’ Louisa said.

‘Do you know what you
did
? You dumped that kid.’

‘He fucking burned down my—’

‘He didn’t. He didn’t do it. Nobody did. It were an electrical fire,’ he said.

‘Rubbish. There was nothing wrong with my electrics.’

‘I spoke to the fire service. Wire and water, they said.’

She looked away. He held out his hand. ‘Look. I know you’re torn up,’ he said.

‘You know nothing,’ she hissed. ‘All I ever asked was to be left alone. I gave my life to those hawks.’

He saw his gym bag in the corner of the room, and retrieved it. He slung it over his shoulder, but then came back to sit on the bed. Louisa glared at him, but he did not move. ‘You said that one of them got out,’ he said.

‘Diamond. He’s long gone. I fed him up. He doesn’t need me any more.’

‘I thought you kept them beeper jobs on them. On their tails.’

‘I take them off every—’

But she stopped, as if receiving a jolt. Adam watched her stroke the back of her own hand, acting out some strange ritual. ‘God,’ she said. ‘I didn’t. I didn’t take it off.’

She rose from the bed, forgetting her nakedness for a moment before quickly pulling on pants and jeans and a green combat jumper. Adam stood too, nodding. ‘You’re going to come with me?’ he said.

‘No,’ she said, picking up her keys and a torch.

He followed her down the stairs. She pulled a clunky old telemetry transmission receiver from the closet, turned it on and started scrolling through the frequencies. The machine pipped. To Adam it looked as though Louisa had been resuscitated. ‘Less than sixty miles,’ she muttered. She pulled rope and leashes and her boots from the closet and put the transmission receiver into a bright orange rucksack, with the aerial coming out of the top.

‘What are you doing?’ he said.

‘Going to find my hawk,’ she said.

‘You’re fucking joking.’

‘I’m not,’ she said, quick and active now, tying back her hair. ‘You and her go off and play happy families. The boy will be home in a bit anyway so make sure he doesn’t catch you at it.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Fuck
you
. All of you.’

Adam moved in front of the door. Louisa put her hand beyond him onto the frame but he knocked it away forcefully. She held her wrist and looked up.

‘It’d be easier for you if I left, wouldn’t it?’ he said.

‘Right now, yes.’

‘You know what I mean. It would be easier for you if I walked away, so you could say,
“Adam Gregory is weak. He abandoned me. If I ever saw him again, I’d kill him.”
Same things you said about all those other folk you dumped. Because you fucking
did
fucking dump them. Christopher, me, her over the way.’

‘Listen,’ Louisa said.

‘No. You listen. I’m not giving in. I’m not having you slating me to some cunt in that pub when you know . . . when you
know
you made a mistake.’

‘
I
made a mistake?’ she said.

‘Yes, you. It’s easier to just fuck people off than to deal with it. Well. I’m not going.’ He threw his bag so that it skidded across the kitchen tiles. ‘I will look for that boy, and I will come back here. Because what happened between you and me on that first night was right. Fucking right. I haven’t felt like that since I was fifteen years old, and I haven’t felt like
this
ever. And I know you’ve got it, too. Tell me you haven’t.’

She looked at his bag, crumpled in the corner like a squeeze-box. ‘Let me out,’ she said.

‘I’m going to look for the lad. But whatever you do, you’re not fucking rid of me,’ he said, nodding at the bag. He turned and walked out, shutting the door behind him.

The rain felt cool and pleasant coming down on the raised veins of his hands, and up through the soles of his trainers. Walking out to his car, he saw Maggie outside her house, loading the Land Rover and speaking into her mobile. He had not intended to go with her, but now it seemed logical. His car wouldn’t get through the water in the village, anyway. He crossed the field. She saw him and gave a preoccupied wave of acknowledgement. Then she realised who he was and finished her phone call.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hello. Can I help you?’ she said.

‘I was about ask you the same thing.’

‘My son is missing.’

‘Aye,’ Adam said. ‘I know.’

Maggie narrowed her eyes, and then looked over at Louisa’s cottage. ‘I’m going out to look for him.’

‘I’d like to help,’ Adam said. The RAF helicopter made them both look up, imagining the worst.

Before beginning her search, Louisa sat in the darkened living room for a long time, listening to the measured pips from the transmission receiver, the red light flashing through the mesh of the orange rucksack. Her boy. Her diamond from the dust-heap.

She had waited for the sound of the Golf’s engine, and when that was not forthcoming she had looked out of the window. Clearly, they had taken Maggie’s Land Rover. Her anger faded to regret. She had practically pushed him into crossing the field to Maggie’s house.

Adam’s bag was one of those leather-look ones from the nineties, the top colour flaking away to reveal the yellowed sackcloth beneath. It was typical of him that he still had the bag he had taken to his school PE lessons, as though normal life had stopped in his teens. She picked it up, along with her own orange rucksack, and took them outside. The rain pinged off Adam’s car. It filled the drains on her roof, making the plastic creak beneath the weight. The familiar sound of rain against the mesh of the empty weatherings rang out – the regular dwellings of her birds were still perfectly untouched.

They would be looking for Christopher down in the village: the White Hart and the off-licence; the back of the Co-op where the cardboard boxes would be rain-beaten to the consistency of porridge; Foxton’s butchers where he sometimes bought a cob filled with pork and apple sauce. They would be driving further out towards the college, and the houses of his teachers and counsellors and two-faced doctors, and to the homes of people he sometimes listed as his friends when he needed an alibi for some dubious mission.

Louisa reached down into her orange rucksack and turned off the transmission receiver. She walked towards her neighbour’s land, leaving both bags behind on her front step.

They did not know his mind the way she did. She shared no blood with him, no official bond, and for much of his life they had ignored each other, but they shared a territory. She also shared Christopher’s desire to walk away – to put a flat palm up to the intricate humiliations of life with other people. This time, however, she would not let herself do that.

Louisa spent an hour in the woods, which were dark and livid in the wet. All she found were the abandoned accessories of Christopher’s childhood: a blue tarpaulin, an old tyre, a knotted rope snapped seven feet from the ground; beer cans in various stages of degradation, and a Power Ranger figurine, half-buried, with its legs in the air. Water had filled the mouth of the fibreglass tyrannosaurus, and now poured out between the teeth, as though the dinosaur was salivating.

The collapsing of sodden branches had given her a couple of false leads, but when she emerged from the trees, she did so without much hope. She sheltered for a moment beneath the diving platform, dodging the thick droplets coming down from the edge. Maybe they were right, she thought. Maybe he was in the village.

Walking back towards the cottage to get the van, she looked over at the ruins of the aviary, the black wood shining in some places like film. For a while, in the woods, she had forgotten the hollow pain in her chest, but she knew that it would never leave her for good.

She started the van and pushed off down the hill. At the end of the descent, the road swung left and ran parallel to the brook. It wasn’t until she was half a mile down this road that she remembered the den. It had been built, after all, with her own cast-off materials. She remembered the moment with David in her kitchen, the steam from her mug, the boy coming into the room. She stopped the van.

For the first time since her arrival at Drum Hill, the field was completely underwater. The flood plain was almost still, the weaving flows and currents from various sources of water barely visible on the surface. It was a broken yolk. Louisa looked across at the den beyond the brook, and bit her thumbnail. She thought of David and the boy splashing and playing in that brook when it was nothing more than a trickle, when you could see the tiny fish in there and read the labels on the discarded packaging that floated by. Now the water was lapping at the entrance to the den. And the longer she sat watching from the van, the more certain she became that Christopher was inside. If he wasn’t in the den, he was in trouble.

Then she saw the piece of clothing. It floated on the surface in the middle of the temporary lake, shiny and bloated. It was dark blue, and quite a distance from the den. Had she not seen it, she might have turned the van around and driven back across the little bridge – even though it would have taken time, time which she imagined to be running out. But as it was, the sight of the fabric was enough to make her get out of the van and run down into the field. ‘Christopher,’ she shouted. She could not have guessed the height of the flood, and she fell forward into the water immediately, smacked by the cold of it, her head going under and then coming up, the shock kicking in. She gasped, pumped her arms, and was reminded of the tingling feeling when she had fallen from her bike as a child, that numb purgatory before the pain took hold. When she regained her footing, she saw that the water was up to her chest. She called out for Christopher again as she waded towards the dark blue shape and heard her own voice, smeary and formless, echoing back from the pines. After a few more yards of slow progress, she could see that the piece of clothing contained no body, so she scanned the water, looking for any signs of movement. She was surprised by the effort it took to drag herself along, the outer layers of her body already heavy and devoid of sensation, like a granite casing.