Jim Crace - All That Follows

“A lot of difference,” she says. “No, really. Mighty-mighty major much.” Her self-confidence is unassailable.

“Like what? I mean … I wanna know, is all.” He’s talking Texan now.

“So, for a start, like …” She hesitates, holds up a hand, and spreads her fingers to count off the differences she’s made. “No one was hurt because of him. And that’s maybe — well, probably — because he was bearing me in mind.”

“Protecting your eye and tooth.”

“My dad had hostages, but he didn’t fire a shot. Not one. Except, you know, to make a point. A warning shot … when they were chasing him. He didn’t fire a single shot at anybody . The family walked out of there unscathed.” Leonard raises an eyebrow. Unscathed is not a word he always likes to hear. “Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking,” she continues. “Only unscathed physically. Really shaken up inside, of course. Did you hear, though? The man said they’d all been treated really well, you know, like it was almost fun, a break from work and school. The woman even put on weight, she reckons.”

“All that sitting around, I suppose.”

“All those pizzas!”

“And you? What difference has it made to you?”

“To us? To me and Dad?”

He nods. That isn’t what he means.

“I’m not sure yet. I’ll let you know once I’ve been and visited. If he’ll let me visit him. See what he says. I tell myself he’s where he has to be. It’s not my fault. It worked out for the best. For everyone.”

“And you specifically? You could have ended up inside. Conspiracy. Wasting police time. Wasting taxpayers’ money.”

“I could have shared a cell with Dad. Back to prison for his gal. I was born inside, you know? I’m quite a lag.”

“Be serious. Admit that it was risky, at least.”

Now it’s her turn to raise an eyebrow. She mimes a yawn. “I’m seventeen! This is the sort of thing that daughters do.”

“You might have been fined. You’d not be laughing then.”

“Well, I suppose. But yes, it’s weird. They only read me the riot act. It wasn’t even scary. Mum could’ve done worse. She has done worse.”

“And that was it?”

“They issued me with an official police caution. Like a school certificate. Passed with distinction, entrance-level conspiracy. I’m going to frame it and hang it on my wall.” Her smile seems to have doubled in width since she cut her hair. “I might kidnap myself again and go for degree-level conspiracy. Disappearing is a piece of cake, and fun. Ask Celandine.”

“She’s Swallow these days.”

“Smart move. Smart girl.”

“What now?”

“Want another one of those?” Lucy clicks the side of his glass with a fingernail.

Leonard shakes his head. He’s feeling light-headed already. And uncomfortable. The yard is filling up with smokers. He’s been pointed out and recognized, he thinks. “Let’s move.”

“Okay. So what do you say now? Take to the Curb with me?” she suggests. “Let’s go and shake our fists at the limousines. For Dad.”

Leonard looks up at the sky. It’s mild and still. No hint of rain or wind today. Francine will not be home till late; she has taken the afternoon off school and is meeting her daughter, on the neutral ground of a gallery bistro. Their first encounter in the flesh since April 24 last year. Francine has taken a bunch of lilies — a womanly and mature gift, not motherly. He can almost sense their tears, their cautious bickering, their boisterous relief at being back in touch. Their house is empty, left alone to its wedges of light and shadow. The burglar alarm is set. He has no convincing reasons to go home just yet. “Why ever not?” he says; it is the second time that Lucy has occasioned him to use this phrase and take the risk. “Let’s Take to the Curb. Yup, Lucy Lucy, do it now.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“You’re right. It’s no big deal,” he says. “But we can’t all be bigdeal firebrands, can we? Still, I guess we should at least stand on the pavement and boo.”

She gets up to take his wrists and pull him from the bench.

It’s best to go on foot, even though it is more than two kilometers from the pub yard to the nearest point of contact with the curbside vigil. The first part is eerily familiar. It’s been walked before, by both of them. Here’s where they first met, just down the road from his parked van, his walking shadow clipping her heels. They have to deviate a bit, dipping down a side road, to take their final look at Alderbeech. There’s nothing on the waste ground now except the tire-marked, turmoiled earth, peg holes where the marquees were erected, and an urban construction notice, announcing that in two years’ time there will be modern landscaped maisonettes here, “Affordable Family Opportunities.”

The street itself is daytime quiet: a pair of cats disputing on a wall; a plumber’s van; a bouquet of lost balloons deflating in the clutches of a sorbus tree, now stripped of leaves. There is no longer any interest in the hostage house. The family has sold their stories, and they will even sell the house and move out west when they grow tired of all the fuss. There’s not a single moving car for the moment, even though Alderbeech is a twenty-minute walk away from the vigil and traffic could move freely if it wanted to. Starting five hundred meters to the south, the police have closed and coned most of the townways. The route between the airport and the Reconciliation Summit has become a Security Exclusion Zone. The first of the sixteen heads of state should be arriving by now and being collected off the runway by their bulletproofed limousines and the motorcycle outriders. The world is watching, alerted by the arrest of the Final Warning cell to the possibility that there could be a shooting or a bomb.

The pavements grow busier as Leonard and Lucy turn away from Alderbeech. They are not exactly thronged with protesters yet, but there are several groups striding purposefully in the same direction as they are. They give the normally unassuming streets the thrilling kind of rationale that Leonard remembers from his teenage years, when he was always there — part of the gathering, though not at the front — for any demonstration of the left. His walk, then and now, assumes a resolute and cocky swing. It says, Get up off your arse like me, and we will change the world. He takes his sun cap out and pulls it down over his hair. It’s not that he feels cold. He has decided that the cap can make him brave. Lucy links her arm round his. “Oh, boy, you look so bloody weird,” she says. “Leonard, Leon … No, I’m gonna call you Unk, okay?”

The first part of her “genius plan” once Leonard “chickened out,” she explains as they approach the comrades at the curb, was to cut her hair. She knew “a scalping” would make her almost unrecognizable. Any photograph they had of her or any description that the police might issue was bound to emphasize her mass of thick and bouncy hair. So before she walked out of her mother’s house, she took the scissors to herself and “hacked away,” only keeping one thick lock for use in her kidnap communiqué.

“If those boneheads had had the brains to look inside the compost bin, right under their noses in our kitchen, they would have found a wodge of it,” she says, pleased with herself and her good luck. Then all she had to do was to take the train to Exeter and call “a really solid friend” who had a flat where she could “throw her stuff — for as long as it takes.”

“I told you, didn’t I?” she says. “Come on, admit it. I promised three days, three days max. And that’s exactly what it was. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Job done.”

“I hear the message. I didn’t prove to be your really solid friend, okay? And, yes, yes, yes, you were correct about everything. You’re such an unbearable little genius,” Leonard says, looking straight ahead. “It wasn’t Francine, you know. Not only Francine, anyway. It wasn’t just a woman thing. I had my own doubts as well.”