The Overnight (11 page)

"I put myself forward. He didn't choose me," Lorraine objects and twists around as if to confront Woody through the window. As he straightens up, tenderly smoothing the comers of a paperback, his gaze snags on Ross's and his lips move. "What does he mean, you're busy?" Lorraine requires to be told.

"Maybe you should ask him."

"Fair enough, I will."

The fog seems to greet her intention with a dance, trailing its hem over the tarmac. "Hang on," Ross blurts. "He'll be thinking of me and Jake."

"Well, that is unexpected. Why would he do that?"

"I think he thought I was giving Jake the wrong kind of hand in the stockroom. I hope you don't need me to tell you I wasn't."

"No reason to get defensive if you were, Ross. That's half the problem with the world, men not accepting their feminine side."

"The other half is women not owning up to their male part, you mean."

He knows she doesn't before he has finished speaking. His attempt at wit seems nothing more than automatic now that it's exposed; he feels as though he's being forced to perform a script for an unseen audience—the boys in the masks, perhaps? When Lorraine turns towards the fog he thinks she has the same impression, but she says "I'm going for a walk."

"Shall I come with you?"

"I wish I were riding." She mustn't intend him to hear any wistfulness; none is left in her voice as she says "There's really no need."

"I just thought you mightn't want to be alone in this."

"I won't be going far." Apparently deciding that's too much of a concession, she adds "Unless I want to."

She marches along the side of Texts to the staff car park and disappears into the fog without a backward glance. Her rapid footsteps grow muffled as if she's walking into mud. Ross can hear no other sound except the unresolved thunder of the motorway, but suppose the boys are lurking in the fog, waiting for Lorraine to see their skulls bob up from it? When her footsteps shrink to the size of pins being tapped into a board and then dwindle into silence, Ross wanders back past the bleary display window, rubbing his arms hard. He has just trodden on the READ ON! mat when the alarm begins to shrill like a bird gone blind and insane.

Woody is the first to reach him, trying while he sprints to rub creases out of the pages of a book on puddings. "Who went out?" he's eager Ross should tell him.

"I think it was me coming in. I don't know why. I didn't touch anything."

Woody types the code only the managers know on the keypad to gag the alarm. As he resets it Ross produces the comb that's all his shirt pocket contains, then empties his trouser pockets of a handkerchief and some change, not to mention a stone that reminds him of an eye asleep, which Mad picked up last week in the car park. Frank the guard watches Ross's pockets hang their tongues out and continues to look suspicious even when Woody says "Okay, Ross, we trust you. Put your stuff away and walk back through."

Ross is pocketing the stone that feels coated with fog as he ventures between the security pillars. He snatches out his hand as the alarm pipes up. A woman in a fawn coat and matching scarf and hat, who is wheeling a toddler lagged in a hooded one-piece suit of the same colour, pulls the push-chair back from entering the shop. "Please, ma'am, step right in," Woody urges and informs the toddler "I guess a goblin got into the works."

The child starts wailing either at the noise or at Woody's explanation. It sounds as if the alarm has taken on an extra note, a siren that persists once Woody finishes retyping the combination. "It's gone now," the mother mumbles through her scarf, but the puffed-up bundle of a boy or girl arches its back in an attempt to escape its bonds as she wheels it between the security posts. "Sorry," she says more indistinctly still.

"That's perfectly all right, ma'am," Woody says. "Any time you're ready, Ross."

Somewhere in the fog a woman is coughing as she runs, and someone is driving a car. There's no reason why these sounds should make Ross nervous, though the antics of the alarm do. The moment he advances between the posts it begins to screech. The toddler enters the competition, and Mad ambles over to give the child a grin of amused reassurance. "What's your secret, Ross?"

"Nothing that I know of. I don't see how I can be doing it."

"Then show me who is." Woody frowns at the keypad as the mother unwraps her mouth to tell the toddler "It's only a silly machine, look. The gentleman who sounds like the funny men in your cartoons can switch it on and off."

"Let's hope so, ma'am." Woody has to raise his voice to be heard over the toddler's solo. Yet louder and a good deal more sharply he says "Hold it, Ross. I want a few seconds before I reset it."

The step Ross was about to take hovers above the mat. What's happening in the car park? The coughs sound almost starved of breath, and he feels anxious for whoever is running about in the fog. Perhaps she's breathing the fumes of the car as well. He steps towards Woody instead of through the posts. "Can't I just—"

"In a minute." Woody doesn't glance away from peering over the hand he's using to ensure nobody can read the combination. "Try it now," he says. "On second thoughts you try, Madeleine. See if it likes girls better."

"Watch," Mad says to the toddler. "It isn't going to hurt me. There's nothing round here to hurt anyone." She takes the longest stride she can between the posts, and the alarm commences yammering at once.

As she turns to offer the toddler a laugh, the running footsteps and the breathless coughs that sound entangled in them veer towards the shop, and so does the snarl of the car. Lorraine staggers out of the fog beyond the nearest trees so fast she almost falls. Her arms are outstretched as if she's trying to dive clear of the murk. Perhaps she's wishing the shop closer than the two hundred yards or so she has to cross. Her eyes and mouth are wrenched wide, and her face is almost as grey as its background. Whatever she might want to cry out collapses into another spasm of coughs. Ross is struggling to understand why she looks backlit when the fog behind her shines more fiercely and emits a rising snarl. "That's never—" Mad says as if she hardly knows she's speaking. "That's my car."

Before Ross can shout a useless warning the car rushes at Lorraine. The windscreen is coated with fog through which he glimpses a blurred figure that looks too small to be in charge of a vehicle. He has distinguished nothing more except a swollen shapeless grey mass that must be a head when the left-hand headlamp slams into the backs of Lorraine's knees.

Something breaks—the lens or Lorraine or both. The impact flings her over the windscreen, clearing a swathe of the glass. Ross still can't make out the shape hunched over the steering wheel; the inside of the car looks clogged with fog. Lorraine sprawls on the metal roof and then, as the car swerves back the way it came, slithers off. The first part of her to hit the tarmac with a slap that sounds flattened and somehow empty is her head.

Ross feels as if everything has been stretched thin and brittle and unreal as a film: the toddler shouting "Fell down" and beginning to giggle, the mother so desperate to put a stop to this she snatches off her scarf and winds it round the child's mouth before supporting herself on the push-chair and hustling it away into the shop, Woody cursing under his breath as the numbers he types fail to hush the alarm, Mad running to kneel by Lorraine only to recoil from an expanding stain darker than the condensation on the tarmac. Then the car slews into view, its driver's door flapping wide, and Ross is terrified for both women until it rams the left-hand tree and stands nuzzling the broken stump.

As the alarm falls silent he seems to hear a huge sluggish wallowing movement so muffled it sounds buried, and then there's only the discord of Mad's abandoned car. He's no longer paralysed by the clamour of the alarm. He dashes out of the shop, and the chill of the day gathers in his stomach before shivering through him from head to foot. He has no idea how his voice will sound if he calls to Mad not to move Lorraine—not when her head is at such an awkward angle he doesn't see how she can bear it. Lorraine's body jerks with a cough, and greyness rises from her lips before they settle into a slack grimace. He wants to think she's trying to expel the fog she had to breathe in as she ran. Then her eyes appear to fill with it, and the low dismayed cry that escapes Mad turns into it as well.

When the Pinto coasts towards the back of Texts a pale mass as wide as a coffin is long seems to swell out of the concrete wall. As the car noses closer and the headlamp beams squeeze the fog brighter, the mass shrinks and splits in two like an amoeba. The halves glare at Ray like great flat blank eyes until he switches off the lights. A glow the red of diluted blood vanishes behind the car as though the fog has swallowed it in the process of catching up with him. The key rasps out of the ignition, and the cooling engine starts to tick like a clock that's growing slower by the moment. He retrieves from the passenger seat the lunch Sandra insists is the least he needs to eat, and the Mothercare bag it's wrapped in crackles as he steps onto the slippery tarmac.

Four cars are already huddled under the last two letters of the shop's name. As he sets the car alarm he stays well clear of the adjacent vehicle in case he might wake it up. He's pinching his overcoat shut—no point in buttoning it for the sake of a few hundred yards—when he has to snatch his hand away. Of course the shrill chirping is only his phone; he knows that before it finishes the first phrase of the Manchester United anthem, and why should he feel it is drawing attention to him? He perches his lunch on the car roof and drags the phone out of his pocket, together with a wad of paper tissue he used the other day to wipe little Sheryl's mouth. Dried chocolate has turned the wad hard as a pebble, which skitters across the tarmac as he interrupts the tune. "Is that you?" Sandra says.

"Who else are you expecting?"

"I thought for a moment I heard someone else. What's making you sound like that?"

In the year and a half since Sheryl was born he has grown used to being told he's doing things he's not aware of. "Like what?"

"As if you're in a basement. Deep down somewhere, anyway."

"No basement here," he says as a shiver sets him buttoning up after all. "You know you're welcome any time you want to come and see."

"When the baby's finished teething. You don't want her making a fuss when people are trying to read."

Ray wishes she would stop acting embarrassed whenever anyone hears Sheryl cry, as if she thinks it means she has failed somehow. "You still haven't said where you are," she reminds him.

"Out at the back of the shop."

"Where that poor girl was?"

The murk lurches at him as Sandra's voice does, and he wonders if he could be standing where Lorraine began to be chased by whoever stole Mad's car. The notion makes him feel as though fog has gathered in his stomach. "It's all right," he tells himself as well as Sandra. "I'm just going in."

"Have you time to drive over to Frugo for me?"

"Not much at the moment. What do you need?"

"More support tights. I've put my big fat toe through the ones I bought at the weekend. Don't bother if it doesn't matter how I look. I don't want my legs to end up like my mother's after she had me, that's all."

"You know it matters to me, and you've never looked better."

"I'd love to have seen your face when you said that, Ray."

What's wrong with having a bit more of the woman he fell in love with? He has lost count of how often he has kept that comment to himself lest she think it's a substitute for a compliment. All that matters to him is that she's still Sandra under no more padding than he has put on himself and under layers of moods that are surely just a phase of having Sheryl. "You'll see it next time," he says. "I'll go over in my lunch break. Nearly time for work."

"I don't like to think of you rushing your lunch."

"You haven't given me an hour's worth, nothing like." As he realises she could take that for a complaint, however inappropriate, he hears Sheryl start to wail. "Listen, I really have to go, and it sounds like you do as well," he says. "Give her a kiss from me and yourself one."

How is she going to do the latter? His turn of phrase leaves him feeling stupid. He slips the phone into his pocket and takes hold of his lunch bag, which is colder and wetter than he would have imagined he gave it time to be. As he hurries around the bookshop, a restless insect rustling accompanies him down the alley—the blank walls have trapped the fidgets of his package, a sound that flutters across the car park into the mass of fog. Woody is waiting in the entrance of the shop and just about raises a thumb to greet him. When Ray consults his watch he finds he's minutes later than he realised, though at least not late. "My wife called," he feels required to explain.

"Okay, well, fine" It clearly isn't even before Woody says "Sure it was your wife?"

"As sure as I am the sun's up there somewhere."

"Somewhere is right. Well, I guess you know your own wife."

Ray is about to enquire, possibly politely, what this implies when Woody says "Me, I get calls from people who aren't even there."

"I expect everyone's a bit shaken up."

"This was yesterday, before the tragedy." Woody stares into the fog as if he sees Lorraine and says "Ross convinced me I'd been called by a lady I knew."

"I take it she hadn't."

"She was pretty fierce about making sure I got that when I rang her last night. We won't be talking any more after some of the stuff we both said. I can live without feeling I've been tricked in the middle of everything else."

"You don't think Ross did that, do you?"

"He says not, and I have to believe him. It wasn't New York on the phone either, though, and I didn't do us any favours calling them to ask if it was. I guess now they think I'm worried about their visit."

As Ray steps into the building his stomach tightens at the threat of the alarm. When it doesn't pounce he glances over his shoulder to discover Woody isn't following. "Looking for someone?" Ray asks.