Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

The sink was too high. She could rest her chin on the edge of it only, so she stood on the orange plastic toy crate like her mother had shown her. Now the porcelain was cold on her belly. Her dad had come home and her mother had gone downstairs to fix him a drink.

She reached up to the toothbrush holder fixed to the tiling behind the sink. The holder had a flat plastic cartoon of Snoopy’s kennel, with Snoopy and Woodstock sitting on the roof. The body of the kennel, like Snoopy, was white. The roof was red. Woodstock was a splotch of yellow. Bree’s toothbrush was red and had a little picture of Snoopy on the handle.

She squeezed a pea-sized burr of toothpaste onto the bristles and started to brush around her front teeth in the conscientious circles she had been taught. She remembered, or perhaps imagined, looking at herself in the small mirror, her short blonde hair dark from the bath and tousled and her mouth foaming.

Milk teeth, little round pearls. Soon grown-up teeth, she knew. Then what? Round she brushed. I am Bree, she had thought, looking in the mirror. Nobody else is Bree, only me. It struck her as strange. It had occurred to her that she was a person, a separate person from everyone else, that she was alone in her head – she hadn’t expressed it to herself this way, she thought, not at the time; but she could remember the feeling and it corresponded to that – and that she was moving towards something like abandonment. She felt suddenly overwhelmed, like when she was lost in the supermarket. She knew too that she couldn’t, having once had this thought, ever unthink it.

The Snoopy toothbrush holder wasn’t friendly. It was inert: just a plastic thing, a small object in a huge universe. Bree’s mother had come upstairs to find her crying disconsolately, still moving the toothbrush in automatic circles across her teeth, and powerless, with a mouthful of peppermint foam and no vocabulary for it, to explain the feeling.

She had learned to explain it later, to herself. And she had learned to distract herself from thinking about it; but it was there knocking under the floorboards in her apartment, winking at her from the back of the refrigerator, waiting for her in the closet.

She found herself goggling, occasionally, at the people who walked past her every day, wearing their haircuts on their heads and going about their business, and seeming never to have stumbled on this dreadful thought – or if they had stumbled on it, having forgotten it.

In her twenties, she had developed a recurrent half-dream: something that would creep in between her being awake and the little mischiefs of sleep starting to derail her mind. She had learned to control it with pills and rituals and work, but the dream was essentially a dramatisation of what was going on in her conscious mind. In these dreams, she died. And instead of things getting quiet and dark and receding, Bree had the sense of something rushing in on her: something that had always been there, but had been hiding – held at bay by the walls and floor and sky, by the surfaces of things. Now her protections fell away. There was a sudden undoing of reality: something unpicking the angles of the corner of the room, the sky unzipping, the floor’s tessellations of atoms untoothing and a downflooding of light.

At the same time, the sound of something approaching from a very long way off that would also somehow be just the other side of the walls: a gathering roar, which would make it physically impossible to think, but would be recognisable as it overwhelmed your ears as the sound of a million million million million individual voices – everyone who ever lived or could have lived – whispering a single word.

Bree used to wake with the sound only of her own blood in her ears, and the sheets wet, and the walls and their vertices in place.

Now the dead man was going to bring that back. Bree wanted a beer, now, very much indeed. More than she had wanted one in the many years she had been going to meetings. She made some strong coffee, took two Dylar, waited for breakfast.

Ellis told Sherman: ‘You finish the job. You finish the job, you get it back to us – you’ll get paid Noone’s bounty too.’

Sherman thought about telling Ellis to have some respect – that a man was dead – but he thought Ellis might actually get off, a little, on acting the tough guy about that, so he didn’t. He instead looked with distaste at his mobile phone.

‘What am I supposed to do with this kid? He’s a British national.’

‘You do whatever you need to do.’

Idiot. Sherman diced up telling him to shove it, but decided on balance that that could backfire badly.

He said: ‘You’re the boss. Where do I start looking?’

Ellis said: ‘He’s going west. He had an onward ticket to San Francisco. You know his car. Assume that’s where he’s going. There’s only one road he’s likely to be on. All you have to do is follow it.’

So Sherman did. But at the same time, Sherman made other precautions.

And when, the next time he called the number he had for Ellis, he heard only the long ‘bleeeee’ of a disconnected line, he put those precautions into action.

He had not been surprised. Whatever Ellis had said, things had got too hot. MIC were gamblers, and like any good gamblers, they had decided to quit while they were ahead.

Sherman remembered what, long before he had thumped him, his father had once said to him when drunk: ‘Life is hell, most people are bastards and everything is bullshit.’

‘Disavowed,’ he said to himself. ‘Hell, bastards, bullshit.’ It remained to be seen whether, to extend the figure of speech, he was one of the losses that MIC would be interested in cutting; or whether they were relying on the lumbering local law to do that for them. He didn’t intend to find out.

Don’t assume anything, was what he thought. Options open. Keep some outs.

His iPod was working again. It was playing REO Speedwagon. He thought of Davidoff, mispronouncing the name, and felt an unaccustomed anger. Davidoff had been set-dressing for these creeps, safe at their desks in front of their computer screens, totting up the numbers, playing the percentages.

Sherman dropped the car, picked up another one across town, and headed as far and as fast as he could out of this story: making time, making distance, making – as he always had – his own luck.

Alex stopped in a Motel 6, sometime after dark, and called Carey. It was past eleven, but he didn’t want to go to sleep without hearing another human voice. The phone rang once, twice, three times, and she answered.

‘Care?’

‘Hey, baby.’ Her voice was croaky. ‘It’s late. Where you been?’ she said. She said something in the background he couldn’t hear.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Just talking to someone. Wait up.’ There was a readjustment. He pictured her wriggling to lodge the phone in the crook of her neck. ‘’Sbetter. Go on. What’s up?’

Alex was leaning against the car. Now he could hear her voice, his earlier panic seemed to calm down. That guy was long gone. Carey’s voice was sleepy. He pictured her in the pyjamas she wore when she slept alone, with the phone crooked into her neck, half paying attention to the television, or yanking open the fridge, or making gestures at him across the room while she talked.

‘I’m in America, Carey.’

‘You’re what ?’ Carey spoke the second word in italics.

‘I’m here. I’m in America.’

She seemed to take a moment to take it in.

‘That’s great. I mean – where are you? What? You’re in San Francisco?’

‘No, not quite. I’m more like – I’m in Albuquerque.’

‘Albuquerque?’

‘Well, I was. Few hours back.’