The Overnight (13 page)

He's wondering whether the murk has smothered the sound when he hears a tentative footstep, followed by several more assured or at least more rapid, and a figure blunders into sight opposite the travel agency next door. Ray sucks in a harsh breath that tastes like grief, because the face above the muddy shoes and grey trousers and padded grey coat—a face squeezed smaller by a fat grey hood—is Lorraine's. Of course it's only a version, one bearing a moustache like a couple of yellowing brushes. Its skin is so pale and loose and wrinkled that Ray senses the man has lost a good deal of strength, but as he veers towards Ray his tired eyes try to brighten. "Are you from the shop?"

"I'm a manager. Ray," Ray says, stretching out a hand as he steps forward.

"Just one?" When Ray uses both hands to clasp his right, which he offers as though he has almost forgotten how, Mr Carey peers at Ray's gesture before submitting the faintest of smiles. "Just one manager," he amplifies.

Ray isn't sure if the smile is volunteered as an apology or a plea that Mr Carey is entitled by his situation to make feeble jokes. As Ray feels his lips shifting to imitate it, Mr Carey lets the smile drop. "Where was she?"

Ray relinquishes the cold slack hand. He mustn't point; he cups his fingers to indicate the mass of fog beyond the splintered tree-stump. "Over there," he murmurs with all the regret and gentleness the words have room for.

"Can't you remember exactly?"

"I should be able." Whether Ray would prefer not to be is another matter, but Mr Carey's melancholy feels like a suppressed accusation. As Ray glances back from heading for the scrawny grove he sees the fog thicken and close with a hungry eagerness over the shopfront. The shop has been erased by the time he's past the tree that's farthest from the one Mad's car felled; even the glow from the display windows is indistinguishable from the murk. "About here," he says, he hopes no louder than enough.

Lorraine's father is pitiably keen to join him. As Ray bows his head towards the black surface, Mr Carey paces away and halts about six feet from him. "Here?"

"About, I think, I'm afraid, yes."

"So close."

Mr Carey is gazing past him. Ray turns to see the outlines of the shop entrance and the windows drifting in and out of visibility like a mirage. Could some illusion of the kind have mocked Lorraine in her last moments? He hopes the idea hasn't occurred to Mr Carey, who says only "Did you leave her out here in this?"

"I think we thought it could be worse to move her."

"Worse," Mr Carey echoes as though sadness won't let his voice rise to a question.

"We put a coat over her and someone was with her all the time."

"Even though she'd already left us. I do know that. Thank them for me and her mother all the same."

"Won't you come inside?"

"Will I feel closer to her there?"

How can Ray answer? He shifts uneasily, aggravating an impression that the tarmac is so thin underfoot he can sense the cold dark earth beneath it. "I should," Mr Carey decides. "I'll be meeting her friends."

The sound Ray makes is neutral. Perhaps Mr Carey doesn't hear it as he heads for the shop, talking volubly now. "We kept meaning to surprise her at work. We'd have liked to watch her when she didn't know we were. Never put anything off if you can, isn't that what they say? I never understood why till now. Her mother's being looked after by her sister in case you were wondering. She'll be asleep for a while on the sedatives, that's why she isn't with me."

Ray would like some of this to mean Lorraine has a sister. Mr Carey reaches the pavement in front of Texts and halts with one foot on the tarmac. "Have you children yourself?" he seems to hope.

"A little daughter."

"Just one?"

He seems unaware of echoing his previous attempt at a joke, and Ray thinks better of drawing attention to the similarity. "She's our only child so far."

"Ours too. They grow up before you can catch your breath, you ought to realise. They're meant to, that is." His gaze slips past Ray as though to lose itself in the fog, and then he drags it back. "Would you care to see?"

"Of course, if you'd like me to."

Though Ray is unsure what he's inviting, he has sensed too much of a plea to refuse. He takes a pace towards the shop entrance to encourage Mr Carey to follow, but Lorraine's father lingers as if the tarmac has caught his shoe while he unzips a pocket and takes out his wallet. He uses a shivering finger and thumb to widen a slit in the leather and extract a photograph the size of a credit card, which he displays on his outstretched palm. It shows a small Lorraine in a white blouse and striped tie and with her hair in not quite symmetrical pigtails. Her eyebrows couldn't be higher, nor her grin wider or prouder of itself. "It was her first school photograph," Mr Carey says. "She was five."

The fog flaps closer behind him, as though the photograph has attracted it or something it conceals or is exhaling. Ray can only think he's imagining this nonsense to prevent himself from being too distressed by the photograph. "They'll all want to see it, I expect," Lorraine's father says abruptly and hurries into the shop.

Ray is afraid the alarm will play its trick. Only Frank the guard greets Mr Carey, however, by frowning at the photograph as though it's being proffered as identification. Mr Carey is too intent on heading for the counter to notice. "Were you friends of my daughter's?" he asks Agnes and Jill.

The women draw together as he holds the photograph out to them. Having blinked at it, they raise their eyes with such care that they look wary of spilling the contents of the lower lids. After a pause during which tiny violins chirp overhead like birds trapped in the shop, Jill says "That's …"

"My little Lorraine before she grew up, well, nearly did. At least now I can see she must have been with people she liked. She never told us much about her time here, but her mother was right, you don't need to say you're happy if you are. We were never that demonstrative a family." He rests his tired gaze on the photograph long enough to be making a silent wish before he asks "Was she a credit to you?"

The violins have chirped a relentlessly cheerful bar or several by the time Ray grasps that the question was aimed at him. "To the shop, I should think she was," he exclaims. "We'd all say so, wouldn't we, girls?"

"I would," Agnes says with more than a hint of Lorraine's defiance.

"And me," says Jill, then drops her gaze as though it has been tugged down by her teeth on her lower lip.

"Would you even if it wasn't true? Don't worry, it would only prove you were her friends. I'm glad her mother will be meeting you."

Jill releases her bitten lip to say "Is Lorraine's mother here?"

"She didn't want to come now she can't see Lorraine. You'll meet at the church."

"Oh yes. Sorry. And I'm really sorry about …" Each of Jill's words seems to be harder to articulate, as if they're catching on the emotion behind them, but when she says "Could you excuse me?" it rushes out like a single word.

"I'll go with her, can I?" Agnes blurts and races after her to the staffroom.

As Ray retreats behind the counter so that it doesn't appear unattended, Mr Carey says "Ladies. They're better off than us in some ways, aren't they? They don't care if they see each other having a good cry."

Ray feels as though Lorraine's father and the women have delegated him to suppress emotion on behalf of all of them. He could imagine fog has lodged behind his eyes, blurring the far ends of the aisles. Even once he has risked a blink, Mad's section still looks vaguely befogged. Mr Carey peels back his hood, releasing tuft after grey tousled tuft of hair, and turns the photograph on the counter towards himself. He might be addressing it as he murmurs "I hope it was a child, don't you?"

"Forgive me, you hope which?"

"The police said a child was supposed to be driving the car. I wouldn't like to think anyone else could be so thoughtless."

"We've had to chase a few little savages, but I pray they're not that bad."

"Are you a praying man? I used to be." Mr Carey lifts a corner of the photograph with a fingernail bitten to the quick and returns the picture of Lorraine like a stigma to his palm. "Anyway, I'd best let you get on," he says. "I'm not a customer."

Three women with a handful of romances each have arrived at the end of the rope that leads to the sign requesting people to queue there. As Ray serves them he's distracted by the sight of Mr Carey's hunt for anybody wearing a Texts badge. Each of them is shown the photograph, which is starting to put Ray in mind of a membership card that gives admission to their hearts, an unforgivable idea but one he can't entirely dismiss. More than once he hears Mr Carey murmur "church." He's bagging a wrestler's ghost-written autobiography for a track-suited man with rusty sunlamped skin and a stubby neck that looks electrical with veins when Mr Carey returns to the counter. He waits until they're alone to ask Ray "Have I met everyone?"

"Some won't be in till after lunch. The manager's in the stockroom."

"You'll have had enough of me by then. Be honest, you have now."

"Not at all," Ray says, performing a vigorous shake of his head.

"May I let you know once we've settled where and when so you can tell the rest of Lorraine's friends? I'll leave her picture if you like and you can give it back to me at the church."

"I'm sure that won't be necessary."

Mr Carey seems to grow belatedly aware of Frank the guard or of his significance. "Were you here when it happened?" he asks, brandishing the photograph at him.

Frank turns such a slow frown on it that Ray fears his lack of recognition will distress Lorraine's father. He's about to abandon his post at the counter and explain when Frank says "I was in here. Ronnie and them that came with the park, they was on patrol."

"Where would I find them?"

"In their hut, only I'd think twice."

"Why's that?"

"He heard her running and the car and never went to try and stop it. He wasn't that slow when I worked with him in Manchester."

"Out of condition, do you mean?" Mr Carey wants to believe.

"Stupid and takes forever to get where he's going. Thinks he's so impressive he doesn't need to run. Maybe it's beneath him, I shouldn't wonder."

"I think perhaps I don't want to meet him." Mr Carey lays the photograph to rest in his wallet, only for his pocket to stay clear of his increasingly shaky hand. At last he manages to lodge the wallet and zip the pocket shut, and says to Ray "Could I ask you one last favour?"

"I didn't think you'd asked me any yet."

"It's kind of you to say so." Mr Carey tries for a smile that his lips shake off. "Would you mind showing me where Lorraine left her car?"

Jill reappears from the direction of the staffroom, and a moment later Agnes wheels a trolley through the exit near the lift. "I'll let you have the counter back, Jill," Ray says. "If anyone wants me I won't be out long."

The fog has closed in. The retail park resembles a photograph blurred almost blank by sunlight or by chemicals gone wrong, with just the shopfront and its strip of pavement and a bite-shaped arc of tarmac left in focus. "I believe the car is over by the supermarket," Ray murmurs.

"Why so far away?"

"We aren't really supposed to park at the front. I expect she didn't want it to be noticed."

"By you, do you mean?"

This sounds like a sad accusation, all the harder to deal with because of its vagueness. Mr Carey leaves it behind as he hurries past Happy Holidays, where handwritten offers of travel are peeling away from condensation on the inside of the window. Perhaps he doesn't hear Ray protest "I did."

Ray catches up with him alongside TVid, where a couple are screaming at each other on the daily
Relate
show on at least a dozen televisions. Next door in Teenstuff a pregnant but otherwise skinny teenager is fingering scraps of cloth that are either skirts or blouses. In the Baby Bunting window ranks of cloth dolls with perfunctory faces seem to be watching for a spectacle to begin, while inside Stay in Touch the staff appear dissatisfied with all the mobile phones they're testing. Beyond the unoccupied properties covered with boards that are crawling with graffiti—primitive shapes and brief yet illegible words—an alley leads to the guards' long low boxy hut, in which a radio commentator's voice sounds frantic to escape a mouth stuffed with fur. Mr Carey hesitates beside the alley for a moment and then trudges onward. As the front of the supermarket looms into view, its windows displaying special offers in letters so large only the fog can defeat them, he disentangles his key-ring from a pocket and uses both hands to point the fob at a red Shogun, which acknowledges him with a beep of its horn and a wink of its lights. "It used to be the family car. Lorraine wanted it, so we gave it to her," he seems to feel required to explain, "though we thought there was too much room."

Ray's afraid Mr Carey may add that there is now, but he only climbs into the vehicle. "Thank you for looking after me," he says. "I'm glad Lorraine had you for a manager."

Ray turns his hands up in a gesture he hopes is self-deprecating rather than dismissive. He watches fog redden and grow pale as the Shogun backs away from the kerb. The headlamps appear to draw tendrils of murk while the car dawdles towards the exit from the retail park. The rear lights swell before their redness vanishes as if the place is trying to pretend a stain was never there. The drone of the engine is shrinking towards the motorway when Ray dodges into Frugo. All at once the errand Sandra sent him on feels like a reassurance that nothing has threatened their and Sheryl's lives.

He finds tights in the Household section and carries two packets united like Siamese twins to a checkout staffed by a severely cropped young blonde with TRISH pinned to the left breast of her pink overall. Clutching a Frugo bag, he hurries out to confront the fog. Can it have grown colder? He does his best to hug himself while maintaining his grasp on the carrier. The grey mass drags itself ahead of him along the pavement and lurches at him from the car park. As he passes the graffiti, a drop of condensation traces the outline of a squat discoloured figure with a smeary blob for a face. He could almost imagine that the frenzied jabbering from the guards' hut is using the daubed mouth. The unappealing notion makes him feel pursued, and once he's alongside Stay in Touch he can't help glancing back. He's in time to glimpse movement beyond a lonely parked Toyota, over which the edge of the fog is lapping—a blurred huddle of shapes ducking out of sight. They're no taller than the bonnet of the car.