‘Do you think I deliberately killed Dr Hare? Do you think that I—?’
They pulled into the station and she wished that they hadn’t arrived. Laszlo wanted her out, out of his car, his
town, his life, wanted her out as fast as he could make her go. ‘I think you have a bad energy force around you, Mrs Curtis. It’s . . . maybe making bad things happen because it’s confusing things, confusing people.’
‘What energy force? Where’s it coming from?’
He switched off the engine and unclipped his seat belt. ‘I think there is a train in about five minutes. If you hurry.’
She climbed out of the car and he lifted her overnight bag off the back seat and carried it into the station for her. ‘You have your ticket?’
She nodded.
‘That platform there.’
‘Can I ask you just one thing, please?’
He said nothing.
‘If this is how you feel about seeing the future, why have you been working with Dr Hare?’
‘Because I thought that I wanted to know,’ he said, and turned away. He stopped and half turned back round. ‘I was wrong.’
She watched him walk out of the station without looking at her again, heard the slam of a car door and the lawnmower whine of a 2CV engine, and the crash of the gears. As if he could not drive away fast enough.
It was eight o’clock in the evening when she got back to Wapping. Richard hadn’t come home yet; Helen was in her room watching television and Nicky was lying in bed, awake, looking miserable. She sat down beside him and hugged him hard, but his face did not change.
‘I don’t want you and Daddy to go away again, Mummy. It’s not fair. You’re always away.’
‘It’s only a week, Tiger. Mummy and Daddy have got to spend some time together.’ She hugged him again, and kissed his forehead. It was a cold dry night and a strong wind was blowing, nearly a gale, and the water was slapping around in the river outside. She looked down at him, and wished she could tell him the truth: that she didn’t want to go away either, that she was worried about leaving him alone, even though he would be staying with friends and would have a good time with them. She didn’t want to tell him that she was scared to go.
Scared as hell.
She told him a story, then started another one and he finally fell asleep. She went out, closing the door behind her and walked through into the living area. The phone started to ring and she went over to Richard’s desk and answered it.
‘Yes? Hallo?’
‘Sam?’
‘Ken!’ She felt excitement surging through her. ‘Ken! You’re back!’
‘How’s everything?’
‘Oh – everything is – well – it’s—’ But suddenly she couldn’t speak any more; her voice seemed to catch in her throat and her eyes flooded with tears. She began shaking, shaking so much she dropped the phone. It hit the floor and a bit chipped off the mouthpiece. She bent down and picked it up.
‘Sam? Sam? What’s up? Are you OK? On your own? Want me to come over? Want to come over here?’ he asked when she did not reply. ‘Or meet somewhere?’
‘I’ll—’ She forced the words out – ‘I’ll come over. Be there as soon as I—’ She hung up and sniffed, staring bleakly out through the window. Then she dried her
eyes and knocked on Helen’s door to tell her she was going out.
She sat at the traffic light at the edge of Clapham Common and the Jaguar’s engine died on her. She pressed the starter button and it rumbled into life again, and she blipped the accelerator hard: there was a crackling roar and a cloud of oily blue smoke swirled through the darkness around her. Haven’t taken the car for a decent run for weeks, she thought, blipping it again. It backfired with a loud bang, crackled and chucked out even more smoke as she accelerated when the lights changed, then she slowed down, turned into the driveway of the huge Victorian monstrosity of a house and pulled up behind the Bentley.
The front door opened as she climbed out of the car.
‘Ken!’ She flung her arms around him and hugged him hard, showering him in tears from her madly blinking eyes.
‘Sam! What’s—?’ He held onto her tightly and hugged her back. She broke away and he looked at her. ‘Christ, what’s happened? You—’ He hesitated. ‘Come on, let’s get you a drink.’
‘Are you alone?’
He smiled. ‘Yes. Only got back from Spain an hour ago. I rang you because I won’t be in tomorrow – have to go down to Bristol.’ He closed the front door and she followed him through the hallway, with its two suits of armour, glancing warily at the eye slits, past another waxwork of Ken sitting in a wicker chair – had he bought up a job lot? – and a ten-foot-high surreal picture of a wild pig leaping between two mountain peaks, past a juke box and into the drawing room with its minstrels’ gallery and a Wurlitzer on the floor underneath, and more big paintings, a Hockney and a
Lichtenstein and a spoof Picasso portrait of Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington by Georges Sheridan, and the roaring fire in the Adam fireplace which Ken had salvaged from somewhere or other. The television was on;
Miami Vice
, it looked like.
She sat down on a high-backed antique sofa that swallowed her up, and Ken went out of the room for a minute, then came back in with a tumbler in his hand. ‘This is a really fine malt. Islay. You’ll like it. Get it down you.’
She drank some, and then some more and it burned some of the churning out of her stomach.
‘How was Spain?’ she asked, looking down into the glass.
‘Fine. Went well.’ He lit a cigarette and sat down on the equally huge sofa opposite her.
‘I shouldn’t be here,’ she said, ‘it’s dangerous, you see – for you—’ Then the tears exploded as if a pipe had burst somewhere in her head.
Ken came and sat down beside her. She looked at him through her streaming eyes. ‘I’m frightened for you, Ken. I think you could be – I think you’ve got to be really careful.’
‘Careful of what?’
‘I have a bad energy force around me,’ she blurted.
He put his arm around her. ‘Have you had another dream?’ he asked gently.
‘Sharp antennae,’ she said, and she told him about the fall from the scaffold and her trip to Hull, told him everything that happened, and all she could remember of what Hare and Laszlo had said.
He sipped his drink and stubbed out his cigarette, blowing the last lungful of smoke up at the fresco of plump naked cherubs on the ceiling. ‘You think this Dr Hare was killed because he was trying to help you? That
his flat got smashed up by some spirit, as a warning, and because he ignored the warning he was killed?’
Sam watched the flickering flames of the fire, and nodded. ‘I’m not sure how much more of any of this I can take.’
‘You’re having a rough time of it, aren’t you? The scaffold – all this in Hull.’ He squeezed her shoulders. ‘I think we’ve got to try to take a balanced view on everything. I know it all seems horrific, but the human mind is a strange thing, Sam; we’re very susceptible. It’s still possible that a lot of what’s going on is getting over dramatised.’
‘You’re beginning to sound like Bamford O’Connell.’
He smiled. ‘Not quite as bad. I do believe you’ve had some premonitions – the aeroplane and the tube station – but the balcony is pretty iffy, Sam. This man getting run over – Dr Hare – is horrendous, but you said how dangerous that road was, that he was flaked out after a night awake and had drunk a pint of beer. We have to try to keep a balanced view, that’s all.’
She pressed her lips tightly together and said nothing. Ken leaned his head back against the cushions. ‘Or I deal!’
‘Pardon?’
‘Or I deal!’
‘Or you deal?’
‘Aroleid? That word? “Or I deal” – it’s an anagram.’
‘Or I deal? Doesn’t mean anything to me.’
He clicked his fingers. ‘Got it! “I reload!”’
‘I reload,’ she echoed.
‘This Slider – he was wearing a green motorcycling suit, and gave you an airline ticket? Chartair?’
‘Yes. The same one he gave me in the taxi after we had lunch. You know, after the Chartair disaster. I remember the seat number. 35A. And he said that I was wrong to think the scaffold was the big fall.’
Ken looked hard at her. ‘It seems that it’s more likely a bad dream connected with the disaster and your fall. You’re bound to keep thinking about it.’
‘I can accept that, I suppose. I can accept that much more easily than—’ She turned the glass around in her hands.
They sat in silence. ‘OK. So what are we going to do with you now? Wrap you up in cotton wool until the dreams all go away? Putting you in a padded cell would seem the safest for everyone.’ He grinned, then saw she was not smiling, not smiling at all, but nodding in agreement. He touched her cheek with his knuckles. ‘You’re going to be OK, Sam, you’re one of life’s survivors.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Look—’ He lit another cigarette. ‘I think you may have made a mistake dashing off up to Hull so soon after your fall.’
‘Why?’
‘This may sound hard, and it’s not meant to: I think you are panicking. You’ve got yourself into a state, and you’ve got to let yourself come down out of it. I think you need to go away. As I said last week, have a holiday. Try to forget about it all. Really relax.’
‘I’m going on Saturday. Skiing for a week with Richard. I’ve sorted everything out in the office. Is that OK?’
‘Of course. But you’ve got to relax, OK? Take a hard look at everything and see if it still looks the same afterwards – I think you’ll find it won’t.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ she said.
‘So do I. Come on, I’ll buy you some dinner – I bet you haven’t eaten. Are you hungry?’
‘Not really.’
‘You should eat something.’
‘I’ll take you. I’ll treat you.’
‘It’s a deal.’ He stood up and drained his glass. ‘Be a great Scrabble word that.’
‘What word?’
‘Aroleid. Makes a lot of words. I thought of another: Redial.’
‘That’s not using all the letters.’
‘Did your hooded motorcyclist tell you you had to?’
Sam looked at him anxiously. ‘Please, Ken. Be careful.’
They went out into the hallway and he slipped up the visor of one of the suits of armour. ‘It’s OK, Sam. I’ve got my own hooded men with slits for eyes. They’ll kick yours to pieces if he tries messing around here.’
He let go of the visor and it shut with a loud clang.
GATWICK AIRPORT.
The blue and white motorway sign with its symbol of an aeroplane flashed past.
‘Out of the way, you prick!’ Richard pressed the horn, flashed his lights, then accelerated hard as the car in front finally moved over. Sam watched the BMW’s wipers shovelling the cold February rain off the windscreen. There was a loud slap and spray from a lorry blinded them for a moment.
The same dream. Thursday night, and again last night. The fan on the ceiling, rotating, getting faster, faster. The fan she had dreamed of in the laboratory. The fan that was like a propeller. Then she would wake, shivering, in a sweat. That was all. Just that. It had stayed with her all yesterday and all of today.
She’d sent flowers to Colin Hare’s funeral. She
thought about writing a note, but in the end she’d asked them to put her name on the card and nothing else.
There was a deafening roar and a Jumbo sank down towards them. Flaps and undercarriage lowered, it passed slowly overhead and down out of sight behind some warehouses. She waited for an explosion, for a dull boom and sheeting flame; but there was nothing.
Richard braked, then accelerated again.
‘You’re driving fast,’ she said.
‘We’re late.’ He pressed the horn, angrily blasting at a car that pulled out in front of them. ‘I got a couple of bucket seats. I couldn’t get us on a schedule as everything to Geneva was booked. The whole world’s going skiing these days. ’S all right – it’s a good airline.’
‘Which one?’
‘Chartair . . . Come on, you arsehole, move over.’
Chartair.
Chartair.
She stared through the windscreen at the black blades of the wipers scything backwards and forwards.
Like propellers.
‘Do airliners have propellers?’ she asked.
‘Only small planes do.’
‘So the sort of plane we’re going on wouldn’t have any?’
‘They haven’t for about thirty years.’
‘I thought they had tiny little propellers, inside the engines.’
‘They have fan blades. To compress the air.’
Fan blades.
She heard the clicking of the indicator, and saw the turn-off ahead.
‘I wish we were taking Nicky,’ she said, ‘He’s old enough to start skiing now.’
‘Next year,’ Richard said.
Next year. Would there be a next year? ‘I feel lousy leaving him alone again. All I ever seem to do is leave him.’
‘He’ll be OK. Fine. He’s an independent little chap.’
Independent. That was what her uncle and aunt used to say about her. Their way of justifying ignoring her.
Oh you needn’t worry about Samantha. She’s an independent little girl
.
She thought of the plane taking off in the teeming rain, taking off into the swirling grey sky. The vortex. You swirled through the vortex into the void. You stayed in the void for ever.
The car slowed, then accelerated up the ramp. ‘We’re fucking late. I’ll drop you. Grab a porter or a trolley and get checked in while I park.’
She wheeled the trolley through the jam-packed departure concourse, steered it through lines of people who were queuing in every direction, so many queues they all seemed to meet together somewhere in the middle in a solid wedge of baggage and anoraks and fraying tempers. An old man was driven through them in a buggy, leaning back under his panama hat, looking around with a bewildered expression as if he thought he was in a rickshaw in another century.
Please don’t fly, she wanted to shout. Not today. You’ll be dead. Some of you. It’s dangerous today. She bit her lip. Relax, for Christ’s sake. Millions of planes, every day. Everyone flies. Like a bus; only safer.
Beng-bong. ‘Will Mr Gordon Camping please go to the Airport Information Desk.’
She saw the row of Chartair check-in counters, saw signs on the wall saying GENEVA, MALAGA, VENICE, and joined the shortest queue. Come on, come on. She looked at her watch. The queue moved forward a fraction and a man with a face like a nodding
dog rammed her legs from behind. She turned round to glare, but he hadn’t noticed and a moment later he did it again. She spun round, angrily, wincing in pain.