Three Moments of an Explosion (25 page)

“What do you want me to do?”

“You’re Charlie’s best friend. You’re the last person—other than those two, if you count them—who spoke to him.”

“Jesus,” she said. “Are you going to ask me to try to
get through to him
?”

Delingpole drove Tova through unpleasant towns and industrial estates in the belt beyond London to acres of scrappy countryside wedged between brownfield sites. There were police cars and an ambulance. Tova saw Dr. Allen and Derek waiting in its back. She waved and Derek responded.

A slope of dock leaves and nettles, a barn slumped on a hole where it lacked a wall, leaning over the darkness. In the middle of the gap was a chair. Officers in stab-jackets were setting up equipment, muttering into their radios. As Tova approached, she saw several of them report her presence.

“There?” she said.

She sat and wrapped her coat around her and shivered while the police team fussed and attached leads to a microphone braced before her. A cold wind raced past her, smelling of tires.

“So they’re in there?” she said, nodding toward the thickets and tangles of trees at the bottom of the slope she faced. Someone turned on an arc light as if in answer and the green shone.

“Turn that the fuck off,” someone else shouted, and was obeyed.

A senior officer squatted in front of Tova.

“You’ve been briefed then?” he said. “You know what to do?” Tova nodded and the man walked immediately away.

“You nervous?” said Delingpole.

“Should I be?” said Tova.

“No. Break a leg.” Delingpole patted Tova’s shoulder and backed away. “Kill the lights,” Tova heard her say. “We’re ready.”

One by one the police around her withdrew from sight. They turned off their torches and killed their radios. Tova sat alone and watched the evening progress, the line of vegetation blacken into shadow on shadow. There was a glow in the distance, some town, she supposed, but as the minutes passed this little patch of wild land was quite dark.

She sat alone. “Charlie,” she said. She leaned back, startled, at the crackling boom of her own staticky voice from the loudspeakers, blaring into the night and the trees. “Charlie. You must be starving and you must be freezing and Jesus, mate, you must be sick as a dog.”

What if he
did
come?

Tova heard bats and thought the word “
pipistrelle”
with pleasure. She knew the police and the doctors were close but she felt alone, without fear. Wind pushed the trees around. She could see nothing.

“Charlie, come on.”

The sky was cloudy and though there must be a moon or half-moon it was struggling to break through. Tova’s eyes were adjusting. She saw motion.

A figure emerged from the dark landscape.

A thin man, sketched in outline, his legs buckling with each step, treading toward her with jerky strides, swaying under something misshapen.

Tova’s heart beat hard.

The man started to jog up the hill. He stumbled and righted himself. He shed clots of matter from what he wore. Tova tried not to rear back in her chair as he approached.

With loud snaps, floodlights shone on the gorse. The man froze.

Pinioned in the beams, he twitched. Police officers walked into the edge of the light.

“Alright, mate,” they shouted, and, “Come on now, Charlie.”

“That’s not Charlie,” Tova shouted.

It was the other man, Neil. He was naked and much thinner than he had been. His skin was lesioned. He hunched, then hesitated and stood up again.

Tova stared at what he wore.

It was nothing like a crocodile, not like any animal’s head at all. It was formless, a pile of crawling, dripping, dark dough. It smeared him. In the cold glare she could make out the ruins of scales. Rot had done away with a long section of the snout and she imagined it drooping over several days, bad reptile comedy, dropping off in a clot in the car-park of some small post office.

Tova stood. She approached him. Neil stood still as she and behind her the officers came toward him. Tova heard one of them retching. Someone shouted, “Hazmat!”

She could smell him. An incredible reek. She could see worms on his shoulders. She did not think they were the little tentacles but the worms of rot. She imagined she could hear the elongation and turf-like split of the fibers in the meat he wore as it stretched. The police surrounded Neil, who stood, blinking and uncertain, on the slope. Officers in yellow overalls, goggles and surgical masks, came toward him.

“Jolly good, Neil,” one of the figures said through the mask. Tova realized it was Allen. “We’re just going to give you a hand.”

He did not resist as they picked and scooped the flesh from his face. They dropped each handful, each fragment and moldering hunk into a specimen container. Derek wiped the ooze from Neil’s face with some antibacterial astringent.

“There we go, mate,” he said. “There we go.”

Neil’s features appeared. His eyes were wide and his mouth gaping. He looked like a little boy.

“Can I … is there anything to eat?” he said.

“There we go, mate,” Derek kept saying.

“I’m tired and this was … I had to come in.” Neil pointed again and again at the remnants of the flesh he wore. “I wasn’t going to stay out,” he said.

“There we go. You’ll be alright.”

Neil was hungry and confused and ripped up from days of running through barbed wire and thorns, and he was infected and mildly feverish, but in all, Derek said, he was healthy. Surprisingly so.

“He says he doesn’t remember anything. I believe him, honestly. Nothing except for a few bits and pieces, like sleeping in some old garage. For some reason that stuck with him.”

“What about the others?” Tova said.

“He doesn’t know.”

“But they were like a pack.”

“I know. When the head rotted badly enough he must have sort of wandered off.”

“Is he going cold turkey?”

“No. I think maybe because it moldered off him, it’s like the addiction did too.”

The police did not ask Tova to try again.

Two days after Neil came out of the Essex wood, Simone walked naked and bleeding from a dog bite into a local radio station. Her face was foul and wet but the cow had completely decayed off her. She told the receptionist that it was time to come home.

Tova was impatient and hopeful when the manager of a small shop found the remains of a decaying pig’s head outside his delivery entrance. There were no filaments within but that meant nothing, those fingers of intrusion being always momentary and contingent, always vanishing without evidence or remainder between intrusions. But the meat turned out not to be decayed enough to plausibly be Charlie’s. It transpired, when a threatening letter appeared, that the grotesque delivery was an Islamophobic intimidation against the owner.

Tova continued to hope, even when a coast guard helicopter snatched two seconds of footage of a nude man climbing the cliffs of the east coast. The camera swung too wildly and quickly to see whether he wore anything on his head, or whether he was ascending or descending.

Neil and Simone appeared together on a talk show. Neil was tongue-tied and seemed to resent every question.

“I suppose what everyone’s really wanting to ask,” the interviewer said, “and I mean this completely respectfully …” She paused while the audience laughed nervously. “I do! Shut up, you lot! What we’re interested in is
What were you thinking?
” She interrupted the renewed laughter to continue. “And I mean that literally. As Dr. Bob was pointing out earlier, it’s common in these situations … you may not even
know
what you were thinking. We’ve all seen the footage. So do you have any memories of that time?”

“You know, it’s odd,” Simone started to say.

Tova switched off.

Two days later she went to Simone’s flat.

“You don’t know me,” she said. “I’m a friend of Charlie’s. Mr. Pig’s.”

“How did you get my address?” Simone said. She was wearing smart dark clothes.

“Electoral rolls.” Tova was lying: Derek had given it to her. “I’m the one Neil came out of the woods for. Can I come in?”

Simone served coffee from a smart machine.

“You don’t know where Charlie is,” Tova said. She did not allow herself to turn it into a question.

“I do not. Do you believe me?”

“I believe you. What was it like?”

“Wearing the head?”

“No. Being on the run. All three of you. I know you say can’t remember but there must be something. If there wasn’t, how could you be writing about it?”

“You heard about the book then?”

“Of course I did, everyone has. Look.” Tova leaned across the table. “I know what happened to you was … No one asks for that, I get that.”

She imagined rot and the insects of decay in her eyes and mouth.

“I know you don’t know where you went when, or what you did, and blah blah. Look … I don’t even care if you
are
bullshitting, honestly. No, seriously, good on you, I don’t care. What I’m asking, though … I know Charlie, and I saw how he was when he put the thing back on, and I saw how he was running around, and I know he wasn’t finished, that there was more to come.” She spoke in a big rush. “And then I see Neil now …”

“Oh, poor Neil,” Simone said.

“Right. Poor Neil. He’s sad, isn’t he? You know when he came out?” Simone stared at her. “I saw him first, I told you. And I saw his face. I think he misses something.” Tova met Simone’s eyes. “What was it you were looking for?”

Simone went to the kitchen window and did not answer.

“Did you find it?” Tova said. “Or was it the head, just the head, that was looking for something? I’m not here to give you shit, I swear. I just want to figure out what’s happened to Charlie.”

Simone turned back and met her gaze. “He’s dead, don’t you think?”

Tova would not look away. “That’s what the police think.” Exposure, disease, accident, his body lying uncovered. Pig meat and human meat commingling as death broke them down.

“But you don’t?” said Simone.

“I don’t know.” They were both silent a while. “You miss something about it too, don’t you, though?” Tova said.

Simone shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Can you miss something you never found?”

“Sure,” said Tova.

Simone sniffed a little laugh. “OK then. I remember …” She grasped at nothing with her hand, again and again. She looked into her garden. “I remember feeling like it was almost there. Almost. I didn’t get it.” She shrugged. “I know Neil definitely didn’t.”

“Are you saying Charlie did?”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“Seriously,” Tova said. “It’s not like I’m asking for much …”

“You don’t even know what you’re asking, or how much you’re asking for,” Simone said, abruptly, loudly. “I don’t
know
what happened to Charlie and I don’t know if he got what he was looking for or what that was and I don’t know where he is. OK? Is that alright?”

Tova picked up her bag.

“I’m wasting your time and you’re wasting mine,” Tova said. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” Simone said. “Don’t be such a child.” They watched each other. “Look,” Simone said carefully. She pursed her lips and made a decision. She beckoned to Tova with her head to one side. “I’ll show you something.”

On the left of her garden lawn was a wide, raised flower bed from which protruded ragged blooms. The bushes were battered. “I haven’t cleared them up,” Simone said. “Obviously.” She pointed into the mud. “I mean, would you?”

The stones were kicked aside. A ceramic flowerpot was broken. There were tracks in the mud and through the bushes, where roots had been kicked up. The earth was wet and the marks were smudged but Tova could make them out. Overlapping fat predator claws and split hooves.

“There are no cattle prints,” Simone said. “But then I suppose here I am.”

Tova ran her fingers lightly through the marks of reptile talons, the mud grooves of pig feet. “Hey,” said Simone, “don’t mess those up.”

“Claws,” Tova said at last. “No cow hooves, but claws.”

“I know,” said Simone. “Maybe a bit of Neil didn’t come back. Not as wet as he seems, that one.” Tova said nothing. “This is the second time. Two days ago.”

“I don’t have a garden,” Tova said. “I don’t even have a window box.”

Simone nodded very gently. Wind pushed the leaves aside like something rummaging through them and Tova heard the laughter of someone in an adjoining garden. The tracks went through the garden and she wanted to walk their route, putting her feet and hands in them like a child.

“If anything does come,” Tova said, “there’d be no sign. Maybe it already did come. I wouldn’t know.”

“Maybe,” Simone said. “All right. Well, that’ll be why it’s here then. Rather than at yours.”

Tova stared at her. “Oh fuck you,” she said.

After a moment Simone said, “I think you should go now.” Her voice was carefully level.

Tova could not drive. She was wondering how much it would cost her to hire a car to take her back to the shack on the hillside.

Simone leaned out of her front door as Tova stamped away.

“Do you even know why you’re angry with me?” Simone shouted.

“Oh, I’ll figure something out,” Tova said. She considered what she needed to bring, how long it would take her to get where she was going. “Don’t you worry.”

THE DUSTY HAT

I have to talk to you about the man we saw, the man in the dusty hat. I know you remember.

Stop for a moment. I know you have a thousand questions, starting with
Where have I been?
What I want to start with is the man in the hat.

I was late to the conference. I’d had to stay in to watch a builder squint at the cracks in my outside wall and across my kitchen ceiling, cracks that had been there for a long time, ever since I moved in, but that started to spread about a year ago and were making me increasingly uneasy. And then the journey across the city was slow as a bastard so I arrived after the start and tried to creep quietly into the lecture hall but everyone stared at me while I made my way to the seat you’d saved for me. I muttered something apologetic about subsidence. You mocked me
sotto voce
for being a bourgeois homeowner. I told you to hush and tried to pay attention.