Peter May - Runaway

He gripped Maurie’s arm a little more tightly and the two old men met each other’s eyes. Maurie searched Jack’s gaze, almost as if he had divined his friend’s thoughts.

Jack said, ‘I want to know what happened to her, Maurie. Before you die. You owe me that.’

But Maurie just turned his eyes back towards the embankment where they had huddled, cold and frightened, in the dark all those years before, and said, ‘I owe you nothing, Jack.’

They drove into Leeds city centre shortly after nine o’clock on that brilliantly sunny spring morning. The GPS took them by circuitous suburban roads, past parks and gardens filled with cherry and apple blossom, into the centre of town. Fifty years ago, the mills had poured their bile into the rivers, and belched their filth into the skies. People had lived and worked and died in serried rows of dilapidated brick terraces, or in the new council housing estates that had promised so much and delivered so little. Or in the failed social housing experiment that was Quarry Hill. It had been a city then on its knees, cowering beneath a leaden sky that rained tears of acid.

Like a bad dream, that Leeds of fifty years before had vanished in the morning light of this spring day in 2015. New roads swept through the heart of it. Shiny, twenty-first-century glass and steel structures rose brightly into a blue sky. Dismal industrial canals, where barges of coal or cotton once plied their trade, were transformed now into arterial waterways for pleasure-seekers. Expensive boats cruising past wine bars and restaurants fashioned from former warehouses. A transformation. A veneer of affluence and success, tarnished only by occasional glimpses of some rotting brick factory in a half-concealed backstreet, cracks opening on to a hidden past that lurked still, despite appearances, somewhere not far beneath the surface. Fleeting memories of the bad dream.

‘Edward Street,’ Jack told Ricky. ‘That’s where we parked.’

And Ricky punched it into the GPS.

It seemed to Jack as if buildings had been demolished to make way for a car park along the north side of Edward Street. But it had been so dark in 1965, the gap might have been there then, too. A bomb site perhaps, damage inflicted during a wartime air raid. The official car park was full, but they found a space on the street, and Ricky helped them get Maurie out on to the pavement. Jack leaned heavily on his stick, supporting Maurie’s right arm, and they made slow progress into Lady Lane and down to the roundabout that was now called the City Centre Loop.

They hadn’t gone more than ten yards when Maurie stopped. ‘Where’s it gone?’

And they all looked down the street towards the loop. Fifty years before, the skyline had been dominated by the huge sweep of Oastler House. It was no longer there.

‘Where’s what gone?’ Ricky said.

And as they made their slow progress to the foot of the road, Jack told him about Quarry Hill Flats. But when they got to the roundabout it was clear that the entire complex had gone. Off to the right was a block of flats and the square brown building that housed the West Yorkshire Playhouse. And somewhere beyond it were the BBC and Leeds College of Music. A concourse of concrete and glass rose up on the far side of the loop, where Oastler had once stood, and wide steps led up to a walkway that ran east beyond a line of tall, spring-green trees, leading to a vast edifice that dominated the skyline perhaps even more than the flats had done before it. On its roof, a strange structure of silver columns and spheres rose to a spike that pierced the bluest of morning skies.

Jack had the disorientating sense of having just landed on another planet.

They stood under the monkey-puzzle trees at the foot of the hill, and Ricky tapped the screen of his iPhone.

‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Quarry Hill Flats. Demolished in 1978 due to social problems and poor maintenance.’ He looked up. ‘That huge building there is called Quarry House. Home to the headquarters of NHS England, and the Department for Work and Pensions.’ He chuckled. ‘Apparently, it’s nicknamed the Kremlin.’

‘Aye,’ said Dave, ‘so they just replaced one Stalinesque monstrosity wi’ another.’

‘Let’s get some breakfast,’ Jack said.

They found a French-style café on Eastgate and ordered coffees and croissants, sitting at a tubular steel and glass table in the window.

But Maurie refused to eat anything. ‘I’ll just throw it up,’ he said.

Faces streamed past in the sunshine on the other side of the glass, and Jack had a very powerful sense that he and the others were not even visible to them. Phantoms from another century haunting a future world. Maurie looked so ill that Jack began to wonder if his old friend would actually make it to London. All he had ordered was a glass of water to wash down his heart pills and painkillers.

Ricky’s phone rang, as it had done several times already that morning. Jack watched his grandson’s face as he looked at the display.

‘It’s Dad again.’

On an impulse Jack reached out and took the phone from him. ‘Here. I’ll talk to him.’

He touched the green answer icon and put the phone to his ear before Ricky could stop him. And he spoke before his son-in-law could get a word in.

‘Look, Malcolm. Just stop bloody bothering us, will you? We’ll be back in a few days. And none of this is Rick’s fault. You can blame me. I twisted his arm to give us a lift to London. I’ve only borrowed him for a few days, and I’ll bring him back safe and sound. So, in the meantime, will you please just FUCK OFF!’ He hung up and thrust the phone back at Ricky. ‘Sorry for my French.’

Heads in the café turned towards them, and Ricky blushed with embarrassment.

‘I need to go to the loo,’ Maurie said suddenly.

Jack looked at him and saw that he was the colour of ash. ‘You take him, Rick.’

‘Me?’

‘Aye, you. We’re going to have to share this around.’

‘I need to go now!’ There was urgency in Maurie’s voice.

Ricky sighed heavily before heaving himself out of his seat to help Maurie to the door of the toilet at the back of the café. Jack turned and watched as his nephew squeezed into the little toilet with the old man. Although he shut the door behind them, there wasn’t anyone in the café that didn’t hear Maurie retching. And when they came out again Ricky was, if anything, more ashen than the old man. He glared at his grandfather.

Ricky and his elderly companions made their way back up Eastgate, past the Red Sea Restaurant and Cash Converters, to an alleyway that led back through into Edward Street. They were halfway along the street before they realized that the Micra was gone.

There was a moment of disorientation when Ricky said, ‘The car’s not there!’ Panic rising in his voice.

And Jack said, ‘No, we must have parked it further along.’ Even though he didn’t think they had.

‘No, it was here,’ Ricky said.

The space between the white lines seemed painfully empty, and none of them could quite believe it.

‘We’ve made a mistake. We must have,’ Dave said. ‘We’re in the wrong street.’

But it was Maurie who shook his head. ‘We’re not.’ He looked grim, and infinitely weary. ‘All my stuff was in it. Wallet, the lot.’

‘Mine, too,’ Dave said, realization dawning suddenly that if the car wasn’t there, then someone had stolen it — and all their things with it.

‘I’ve only got a tenner in my wallet, and some loose change.’ Jack fished it from his back pocket and opened it up.

‘At least you’ve got a credit card.’ Dave jabbed a finger at it.

Jack pulled a face. ‘Way past its limit.’