Conrad Williams - Decay Inevitable

“...as yet nobody has claimed responsibility for the explosions and, although it seems unlikely from the sheer scale of the attack, police are not ruling out the possibility that the culprit is a lone terrorist...”

Sean was wiping his hands on a tea towel. Emma plucked it from his fingers and, stepping into the circle of his arms, kissed him deeply.

“Hello to you too,” Sean said, smiling, when she eventually pulled away.

“That was just a message to you, from me,” she said. “Whatever went before... it doesn’t matter to me. I’m here if you want me.”

Sean had made a stew of tomatoes, bacon, and beans. He served it up with hunks of bread and glasses of merlot. They sat eating on the floor, cross-legged, leaning lightly against each other while sleet spattered the windows and the news played out its awful theatre to them.

Later, sitting among the dirty dishes and listening to music, Emma asked Sean what he thought about the motorway bombs.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve seen nothing like it before. I mean, look at the number of cameras they’ve got out on the roads these days. And you’re telling me nobody picked up anything on them?”

“They aren’t all working all the time, are they?”

“No, but you’d think, if what, over fifty bombs had been planted, that something would have been filmed. It’s all too perfect. Nobody has that kind of luck during an operation. Nobody.”

“Well, it looks like they have now,” Emma said, absently stroking the soft fuzz on the nape of Sean’s neck.

Sean thought of the way Tim had moved his hands over the pimpled, scarred surface of the wall. He had treated it almost reverentially.

“I wish I could open you up sometimes,” Emma said, her voice changed. Nervous. Gentle. “You’re so quiet, really. You’ve always been quiet.”

She pressed against his ribcage as though, in the bones that patterned his skin, she might read something about him that she didn’t know. “In here is the real you. The you I want to understand and get to know better. I want to get under your skin, Sean. Does that upset you at all? Does that kind of talk scare you?”

They held each other until it grew too cold to remain on the floor. In bed, they watched the heat of their bodies reach out to the window and slowly draw a grey veil over the freezing railway embankment and the broken sodium lamps. It was a magical time, an immanent time. It felt like Christmas Eve, or a leaden sky at the cusp of emptying itself of snow. Sean felt the hair at the base of his spine lifting with the deliberate grace of a spider’s legs. He wanted to make love to Emma, but something was holding him back. Maybe it was maturity. At the edge of sleep, he thought he understood the secrets of the world and the reason behind too many things that were never considered in life. He stirred, his head woolly, tears in his eyes. Naomi was perched on the edge of the bed, waggling his big toe between her thumb and forefinger. The further out of sleep he came, the more insubstantial she grew, until she was no longer there. She said, as she faded from view, “There doesn’t have to be a door for there to be a doorway.”

Sean crept from bed to the window and palmed away the condensation. Outside, shadows beneath the trees teased themselves into and out of faces he thought he recognised. Some of the people he saw were long dead. Voices from his past tried to re-establish themselves in his memory but they had been gone too long for them to gain purchase. His grandfather was there somewhere, his face as grave as an eagle’s. The hooded eyes, the jut of the jaw, the thick blade of a nose. But the voice would not come.

Dwelling on all of this, he failed to remember what it had been that drew him from sleep in the first place. His toe, when he reached to feel it, was warm where the rest of his foot was cold. He trudged back to bed, arrested in his movements as he saw Emma, the bedclothes shrugged off her, the light streaming through the window hitting her arched body and giving Sean the illusion of transparency; he could see everything in her. Everything.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: DODO

IT WAS A woman. An old woman.

Elisabeth tried to shy away from the approaching figure dressed in a diaphanous nightgown and a pair of waders that sucked and squelched in the mud surrounding the caravans, but the old woman was making a beeline for her.

“Don’t bother hiding, sugarsweetie,” she said, in a voice that suggested she was bored by her quarry before she’d even been exposed to it. “I’ve got eyes like you wouldn’t believe. Like a shitehawk’s eyes, my eyes.” She gargled laughter and reached out a hand, hauling Elisabeth from behind the fuel tanks with astonishing strength.

“Now,” she continued, “if you want to get away from here with the skin on your back in one piece, you’ll close any or all of your holes and come with me. Sharpish.”

Elisabeth wasted no time. She hurried after the woman as she returned to the caravans. She had no choice. If she didn’t acquiesce, the woman would out her and that would be that.

“Where’s your man friend?” the old woman asked, shooing her through the door of a tiny caravan that listed so prominently to one side that Elisabeth had to put out her hands to stop herself from toppling into the wall. Candles in ornate glass holders spilled nervous light across the cluttered cabin and drenched the air with a hot, animal smell.

“He went looking for Sadie. We heard her earlier.”

“Maybe you did. But the silly bastard will get himself killed. We have ourselves sentinels in this little camp of ours. We need to watch ourselves all the time. Not popular our lot. We’ve had attacks before. Caravans burnt down. We have to protect ourselves.”

“I’m sorry,” Elisabeth said. She was at a loss as to what to say but felt she had to fill the gaps fed to her by the old woman. “What’s your name?”

“We’ll put our cosy faces on when I get back. I have to look for your hero, don’t I? Stay here. Don’t open the door.”

The woman wound a scarf around her throat and went outside. Elisabeth closed her eyes and pressed the heels of her hands into them until motes of colour spattered across her inner vision. A ginger cat swerved through the legs of the chair and sat by her feet, lack of interest spreading its features into a yawn. Elisabeth reached for the cat but it batted her hand away and turned its back on her. Around her, the caravan seemed to draw itself in, as though it were expelling breath. The fidgeting shadows started a headache behind her ears. Paintings of sullen men in burnt umber and cobalt absorbed the light. A bookshelf described a faint grin across the wall under the weight of triple-stacked volumes. The furniture was spindly and unwelcoming; it might have been antique for all Elisabeth knew.

She went to the window and teased apart the curtains, wishing she had been strong enough to repulse the old woman at the fuel drums. Ten minutes had passed since Will left her. That all was silent outside ought to have encouraged her, but it did not. The featureless dark sucked at her eyes.

Elisabeth, suspicious that the woman might turn her in, grabbed a stubby knife from the kitchen area and hid it under her jumper. The cat rubbed at her ankles now that she was near food but Elisabeth ignored it. She was geeing herself up to leave when the door flew open and Will ducked into the caravan, holding Sadie by the arm. The old woman brought up the rear. Will was smiling. Sadie looked tired and cold. Blue hoops hung beneath her eyes.

“Sorry,” she said.

The old woman poured water into a kettle. “I’ll make you tea. I’ll give you sandwiches. But then you must leave.”

Elisabeth said: “What happened?”