The One Safe Place (7 page)

He needn't feel boxed in by the three-story houses so long as he'd lost his pursuer. He edged the Volvo forward past a parked Daimler so as to have room to turn around. He was easing his car across the middle of the narrow roadway when the Peugeot skidded around the corner and screeched sideways to a halt, blocking the road.

Don was aware of gripping the wheel and poising his foot on the accelerator pedal and awaiting his opponent's next move and feeling so absurd it almost paralysed him. Did he really propose to try to drive through whatever gap the Peugeot would leave as it came for him? Didn't only stuntmen attempt that kind of trick, even in movies? Then the fumes spurting from the exhaust pipe of the Peugeot faltered, gave a last black belch and died. The driver had switched the engine off.

They were in another kind of movie now, Don thought, the kind where whoever outstared the other at the showdown won. "Do your worst, Red-eye," he murmured, keeping his lips nearly still—and saw the driver fling open the door and climb out of the car.

"You're not disabled," Don said. He felt outraged and yet guilty, as though he'd brought the situation on himself by his earlier sly comment. The man stalked toward the Volvo, scratching his cheeks with nails as blackened as his stubbled chin, dragging at his face to expose more of the veins of his eyes and wrenching his mouth down. He let go of his face, having rendered it sufficiently hideous, as he reached the Volvo and commenced pounding on the roof.

Don stared at the flattened silver skull of the man's belt buckle, at the way his clogged navel winked beneath the ragged hem of his Adidas T-shirt, and waited for the pounding to subside. When he heard the roof begin to give, however, he lowered his window a couple of inches. "Are you likely to get tired of that pretty soon, do you think?"

Eight thick fingers clamped themselves in the gap, and the man's face descended into view. It looked to be suspended from its brush of dyed black hair that was shaved more or less clean below the tops of the ears, the weight of the cheeks having settled around the weak chin, pulling down the lower eyelids, which appeared to be collecting moisture like some kind of pinkish vegetation. The window turned grey with breath like an embodiment of the sluggishly menacing voice. "What you fucking say?"

"I said, would you mind removing your hands and yourself from my car?"

The face jerked closer—close enough to show Don a greenish denizen of the left nostril emerging and withdrawing with each breath, like a snail from a shell. "What you talking in that fucking voice for?"

"I rather fear it's the only one I have. Now if you could—"

"Supposed to make you sound like a hard man, is it? Come out and I'll show you how fucking hard you are."

"I believe I'll take a rain check. I don't like repeating myself, but I really would ask you to—"

The face was almost against the window now, and Don heard the glass creak as the fingers hauled at it. "What you mean taking people's fucking numbers?"

Don was tempted to admit he hadn't, except for feeling that the revelation might lose him some advantage he wasn't even aware of. "What would I mean by it, do you think? If you damage that window—"

"Give it here."

"Not an option, I'm afraid. Now will you please—"

"Give it fucking here."

As much as anything it was the ponderousness of the interruptions which made Don feel trapped, hence increasingly angry and reckless. "I don't suppose it ever occurs to you that you may have a problem with monotonousness of language? This has been fun of a kind, but now if you'll excuse me—"

He'd had enough. He was already late for picking up his family, and now he had to find his way home. A touch of the button would run the glass up against the man's fingers, and when he snatched them out Don would drive away. Then, perhaps having read Don's intention in his eyes, the man shoved himself away from the Volvo so forcefully that Don saw the glass bend inward. "Thank y—" he said, but this time it wasn't the voice that interrupted him. The man had pushed his leather jacket back and snatched an object out of the waistband of his jeans to point at him.

It wasn't a gun, Don tried to think, at least not a real one, not one that was loaded, not here in Britain. But the man's eyes had become as indifferent as the metal hole lined up with Don's face, and with a lurch of awareness which made his head and stomach feel like gaping wounds, Don knew the threat was no pretense. He saw the man slide back the top of the weapon to expose the muzzle and place a bullet in the chamber. "Get your arse out here," the man said, "or I'll blow your fucking head off."

Don's legs were trembling. If he slammed the car into first gear to drive past or even at the man, he was bound to stall the engine. If he didn't try to escape, if he got out of the car—Everything around the black hole of the muzzle appeared to be growing darker and heavier and motionless, paralysing his ability to think. Then there was movement, though for a dismayingly protracted few seconds he was unable to grasp what it was. The man who had been poking at the sycamore from his balcony had appeared beyond the Peugeot, frowning at it, and now he saw the gun.

Don's hands clenched and unclenched on the wheel. He was struggling not to point out to the gunman that he was being watched, because what might he do to the witness? Yet if he thought he was unobserved—The man with the stick hesitated and fled, almost quietly enough. A single rap of his stick on the sidewalk swung the gunman around just in time to see him.

He aimed the gun with both hands, and the whole of Don's chest seemed to fill with an agonisingly held breath. In a moment the witness was out of sight, but before Don could exhale, the gun was pointing at his forehead. He saw the hands tense on the weapon, and the man narrowing his eyes to focus on the target, and the street appeared to brighten as though to give Don a last look at the world. Then he heard the slam of a front door, and the man jabbed the gun into his belt and lurched toward him. "Don't even fucking dream of giving anyone my fucking number."

He was at the Peugeot in three loping strides. In what seemed to Don to be no time at all the black car bumped one front wheel over the sidewalk and was replaced by a cloud of fumes of its color. Don leaned his forehead against the windshield and closed his eyes. The glass, and the wheel in his fists, and indeed the entire car felt softened and quaking. He swallowed a few times, having remembered to breathe, and fumbled for the button to lower the window before concluding that he was probably not about to be sick. He panted for a while, then raised his head and his wrist to consult his Mexican Rolex. "Got to go," he said indistinctly. "Late."

He groped for the ignition key until he noticed that the engine was still running, and eased the Volvo gingerly around to aim it back the way he'd driven into the trap. He cruised to the bend in the street at no more than ten miles an hour, trying to decide whether to turn left or right at the end. He'd just come in sight of the sycamore when a police car crowned by flashing lights blocked the junction ahead.

"Too late, guys. Could have used you a few minutes ago," Don said, lifting his hands anyway in an appreciative gesture, and was dismayed to see how much they shook. Then all four doors of the police car sprang open and stayed that way, each releasing a policeman. The driver had a megaphone, which he aimed at Don. "Keep your hands where we can see them," it boomed, "and get slowly out of the car."

They were showing Marshall himself again. His ears stuck out too far, he thought, and his father's smile kept appearing on his face. Several hairs had sprung up on top of his head to greet the world, and he couldn't believe how often he turned to his mother as though to interrupt her with a question like someone half his age; every time he saw himself do so he felt his face grow hotter. Here came the woman who would threaten to split his mother open, at which point Marshall found that though he'd told Mrs. Lewis he didn't mind her playing the tape for the class, he did.

Why had the program makers left that part in when they'd edited out so much else? Perhaps his face was betraying how he felt, because Mrs. Lewis hit the fast forward button on the control in her hand, so that the mauve-helmeted woman scurried up to his mother and gabbled at her until Marshall squeaked in protest like a mouse in a cartoon, which provoked some titters from the class but which at least was preferable to having his classmates hear what had been said to his mother. The teacher released the button, and Marshall said "—allowed to see movies in America I can't see here."

"Who lets you see films in America?"

The presenter hadn't said that so immediately, nor only that, unless Marshall's memory was rewriting the encounter. "The state, I guess," he watched himself say beneath his wagging sprout of hair. "Just because it's rated R doesn't mean you have to be seventeen to see it, but here it's rated eighteen and I'm supposed to wait six years before I can watch it again."

"No age restrictions on what you can see and read in America. Any comments? Yes, with the glasses, no, the other glasses?"

"You didn't say there were, were, weren't any restrictions," Tom Bold said from his desk next to Marshall's.

"I said more stuff, but—"

"Keep your observations for the end if you will," Mrs. Lewis said in a high quick voice which Marshall gathered was a consequence of being 
Welsh. He felt that smile twitch his face, as it did whenever he was embarrassed. "How can we stop it?" the capering presenter said.

"They're scared of nothing any more," a man shouted, his nose appearing to squirm with emotion, thanks to a flaw in the videotape, "we've got to bring back fear."

"You can't have a society without fear," said a woman with an even less stable nose.

"We spend our lives being scared," her friend declared. "It's time they did."

"Kill a few, then they'd be scared."

"Capital punishment. Is that the answer?" the presenter said, the flaw in the tape causing him to perform an impromptu bellydance. "We'll be back after the break." His place was taken by an ad for South African produce accompanied by a rich dark voice. "Cape fruit," it said, "tastes like—freedom," at which point Mrs. Lewis switched off the tape to a chorus of protests from the class. "None of that, now," she said briskly. "Quite enough to talk about there. Who's got something to say? Travis?"

She wasn't trying to discomfort him, she was only doing her job. He suspected she wasn't even aware of looking poised to dart at whomever she spoke to or of the way her greenish eyes flashed in her sharp pale uncooked face, impatient for the next victim. "I was only saying I said more than you saw me say," he said.

"Seemed to me you were given a good chunk of time. Or misrepresentation, is that your complaint?"

"I guess."

"Don't be too ready to credit everything you see on the news or read in the papers either," Mrs. Lewis told the class as though bringing to a close a story with a moral. "Away with Travis's grievance now. Let's just see how many of us have experienced violence or know someone who has."

Marshall folded his arms on the desk-top etched with inky initials, but couldn't prevent his hand being tugged up by the sight of so many raised around him. Mrs. Lewis's head was nodding, pecking at the number of responses. "Nearly the lot of you," she said. "Not you, Lynch? There's lucky. Let's hear from... Flynn."

Ben Flynn hunched his shoulders so as not to flinch from her pounce. "Last week in pee ee Mr.—"

"We don't call that violence, anything a teacher does," Mrs. Lewis said with finality. "Travis, you're anxious to talk today. What is it this time?"

Marshall was keeping his hand up only because he still wasn't entirely sure how these things were done in England and hadn't noticed that the other hands had sunk. "Something that happened to you, we want," the teacher insisted.

"Not to me, to my dad."

"Family will do."

"Some guy nearly made him crash his car and then he chased my dad and pulled a gun on him."

"A guy is what we put on a bonfire. I expect your father must have thought he was back in America," Mrs. Lewis said, apparently by way of encouraging Marshall. "He wasn't shot, was he?"

"No, only the—the person with the gun got away before the police came, and when they only found my dad they thought it was him."

"With the gun."

"Right, and when they heard him talk they did."

"How was that, now?"

"Because he talks like me. American."

"I'm sure it couldn't just have been that, Travis, if I know our police. He's not in custody, is he?"

"He might have been, except the person who called them came to tell them it hadn't been my dad."

"Might have been's nothing and nowhere. So have they caught the culprit?"

"They've only just put his description in the paper."

"Fancy that. Now there's a question worth discussing. Haven't the police to make mistakes like everyone else? Shouldn't people be supporting them instead of trying to show them up? Yes, Wisdom? No, you certainly may not. Heathcote?"

"My dad's a security guard and he got put in the hospital by four men in a street full of people because nobody did nothing to help him."

"He must have had plenty of help, then."

"No, nobody did nothing."

"That's what I say. You're telling us he got plenty of help."

"No, miss," Billy Heathcote persisted, and Marshall's frustration with both of them was too much for him to contain. "He means nobody did anything."

The teacher trained her gaze on him. "I'm well aware of that, Travis."

"Then why—"

Her gaze seemed to be poking more words out of him. He manufactured a sneeze to cut them off, but when realism demanded that he bring it to an end she hadn't blinked. Then a bell rang to announce the end of lessons, and he felt as though it was letting him return to his corner at the close of a bout, not that he'd ever been in one. But Mrs. Lewis appeared not to have heard it, and didn't look as if she would take any notice of a referee.

He was saved by the slam of a desk lid. "In a hurry, are we, Manning?"