Simon Clark - The Fall

And just wait until you see the stud in the tongue , Sam thought. That will really blow your socks off.

In the back seat, clutching his cloth cap in both hands, Thomas gave a sharp shake of his head, obviously suspecting that this was a hallucination. He squeezed the arm-rests experimentally, looked round at the interior of the car, then stared out of the window at the meadow flying past at a dizzy rate.

‘This road engine travels at a greater rate than I could have imagined,’ he said in a small voice.

‘We’re doing almost 40,’ Sam called back over his shoulder. ‘Just wait until we hit the road, then I can really open her up.’

‘Open her up? Then it will only take a few moments to reach town?’

‘If it’s a clear run I can make it easily in five minutes.’

‘Five minutes. Dear Lord… dear Lord…. at one mile a minute that means you will be travelling at 60 miles per the hour. That’s impossible.’

Zita looked back over her shoulder. ‘Best wear your seatbelt.’

Thomas’s look of bemused innocence intensified. His mouth hung open as he looked round for the seatbelt… whatever that might be.

‘Here, let me.’

Zita knelt upon the passenger seat facing backwards; quickly she fastened the seatbelt across the surprised man.

‘When you want to release the seatbelt, just press this button firmly. Okay?’

‘Okay. Very okay.’

‘The countryside’s changed a hell of a lot,’ Zita said as she strapped herself back in. ‘All those crappy electricity pylons have gone.’

‘And look at the fields.’ Sam nodded. ‘Look how small they are.’

‘And all those hedgerows and trees. It looks like a different country.’

On the main road Sam took the car up to 60. He’d expected the roads to be like rutted cart-tracks, but if this was an average example of an 1860s road, then they were pretty good. The carriageway didn’t consist of blacktop. There were no white lines, or any camber to speak of. Instead the road was a broad strip of dazzling white. Probably limestone chippings rolled down until they formed a hard, flat surface. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, he noticed the wheels were kicking up a hell of a lot of dust. To anyone watching the car pass by it would look as if steam was rising in a plume from its back.

He concentrated on the road. It didn’t have curves so much as sharp elbow-crook bends. It had been designed for foot and horse, not for a 1999 Range Rover that was easily capable of hitting a hundred on a good stretch of late 20 thCentury road-tar.

As with the 1940s roads there was a goodly amount of horse dung. The car’s big tyres zipped through this with a slish-slash sound.

His arms and shoulders began to ache from the tension of gripping the steering wheel so tightly. He realised also that the car was turning the heads of people walking along the road. And in contrast to the 20 thCentury habit of walking at the side of the road on pavements, most of these people walked in the middle, expecting to encounter nothing faster than a horse-drawn mail coach. Sam made free use of the horn, yet still he had to steer a zig-zag line to avoid flattening astonished locals, who watched open-mouthed as the metal box on wheels roared down on them.

‘Good Lord,’ Thomas repeated over and over in the back. ‘Good Lord… The saints protect us… Oh, good Lord…’

‘Thomas,’ Sam called without taking his eyes off the road. ‘Sing out which road to take when we get into Casterton.’

‘Yes… I – Oh, good Lord…’

Sam weaved round a horse drawing a cart piled high with cow hides. The horse reared between its shafts at the sound of the car.

‘Oh Lord, don’t frighten the horses, Sam. Don’t frighten them.’

‘I’ll try not to.’ He laid off using the horn and eased down the speed a little. But the fact of the matter was that he wanted to get to the Middleton household as fast as possible.

So Carswell thinks I’m crazy , he told himself. But they could save a life here. In any day or year that was important in itself. But, again, he realised here was an opportunity to show that humankind weren’t passive victims waiting for the Grim Reaper’s scythe to cut them low. They could build hospitals, train doctors, develop medicines. And sometimes, God willing, they could slap Death in the face and send it on its way with its tail between its legs.

‘Watch out for the geese!’

He braked at the sound of Zita’s warning. There, waddling in front of the car, were a dozen fat geese being driven along the road to market.

‘How far to the Middletons’ place?’

‘A mile, a little less.’

‘Damn geese.’ He honked the horn. The geese honked back. Carefully, he eased the car forward, pushing a path through the big birds.

Beside him, Zita had taken a paperback book from the briefcase and was riffling through the pages. He noticed that her hands had begun to shake.

He guessed it was one of Dot Campbell’s textbooks from the time when she’d been a nurse. ‘What does that say about diphtheria?’

She read aloud: ‘An acute bacterial infection primarily affecting the nose, throat and larynx. Death results from the growth of a membrane across the throat that chokes the child. And it says here it can be cured with penicillin.’

‘God bless you, Sir Alexander Fleming.’

‘The problem is it doesn’t give any dosages.’

‘So we don’t know how much to inject into the boy?’

‘No.’

‘But is it possible to OD on penicillin? It’s not as if it’s a narcotic, is it?’

‘Search me.’

Sam glanced at Thomas in the rear-view mirror. He was concentrating hard on the conversation, and though he probably didn’t understand it completely he caught the gist. ‘You think you can treat the Middleton boy?’

‘We’re going to try, Thomas. We’re going to try.’

Thomas nodded, his expression tight with worry. ‘Then we really must hurry. If I’ve been called he won’t have much time.’

‘You’ve got it.’ Sam accelerated into town, He was concentrating almost every shred of nervous energy into getting the car through the narrowing streets in one piece. Even so, he noticed the buildings were lower, and everywhere there were little cottages, looking like children’s toys that had been gathered up in great handfuls and tossed higgledy-piggledy around the town centre.

A pall of smoke from domestic fires painted a grimy streak across an otherwise perfect blue sky.

Sam noticed Zita staring too. Women in long skirts walked briskly along the street carrying absurdly large shopping baskets. Every man in sight wore a hat of some kind. The working classes had soft brown caps while the professional classes favoured high top hats that were such a shiny black that they made him think of black liquorice. The hats were complemented by frock coats from which could be glimpsed the starched cuffs and collars of shirts that were a dazzling white. These were sharp-dressed men, no doubting that.

And everyone was hurrying, too. So much for the myth of past ages being slower, less stressful, more relaxed. The town centre was hustling and bustling like any modern street in New York, London, Paris, Rome – you name it. This was like an ant heap that had been prodded with a stick.

They were hurrying busily, that was, until they saw the car. Again he was conscious of people stopping to stare at what must have appeared to them a monstrous contraption roaring through their safe little market town.

Sam had to keep the speed down to 20 now to avoid people who simply walked out into the road to stare at the car.

At that moment he wanted to yell at them to shift their butts out of the goddamn way. A mental image of the boy lying feverishly in bed, drowning in his own sputum, suddenly sizzled its way into his brain as savagely as a red-hot cattle brand. He could almost hear the hiss of air through the boy’s throat as the diphtheria membrane sealed the airway shut.