Love Story, With Murders (29 page)

He hands them to me, but I can’t put them on. That’s not me being tactical or obstinate or anything else. I simply can’t co-ordinate my movements.

I think there might even be tears in my eyes now, but not real ones. Not like when I was thinking of Buzz and my family. Just eyes watering with the cold.

I find myself being
lifted by the two men. Bundled into my clothes. Hamish holds my arms behind me, twisting unkindly, while Olaf does up the buttons on my coat. They lift me into the car. I
press myself into them as they do so. Wanting to snatch any glimmers of warmth from their bodies.

They’re not returning my clothes to me to keep me warm. The clothes wouldn’t be sufficient to protect me on a night like
this, even if I had any body heat left to conserve.
They’re just setting the stage for this final act.

I don’t object. I prefer having my clothes back.

And it’s close now. My death is close. Olaf was right. It’s a kind death, in a way. You expect a lot of things from dying. Coldness. Stillness. Silence. Pain. What you don’t
expect is this great clumsy stupidity. A blanketing idiocy.
Brought about as blood retreats from the inessential organs – like the brain – to the only two things that ultimately matter
right now. Heart and lungs. I don’t know which of those two things fails first. I only know that I won’t be conscious when it happens. Any pain I’ve felt is receding now.
I’m too cold for that.

I’m so cold, I hardly feel the cold anymore.

I say to Olaf, forming
my words as carefully as I can, worried that I’ve already lost the power to form coherent syllables, ‘Please. Go. Now.’

He studies me. He’s Swedish or Norwegian, I assume. Knows his snow, anyway. If he has had any military experience – more than likely in a professional killer – he’ll have
done plenty of arctic survival training.

He knows hypothermia. Knows the passage to death. He’s
looking to make sure that I am on a path from which there is no return.

And I am. In his expert eyes, I am.

He says, ‘Okay.’

He and Hamish walk off back to their car. They are leaving me here to die.

I’ve spent more of my life with death than almost anyone. Not the shoot-bang sort of death. I haven’t had Lev’s kind of life, not even Buzz’s. I
don’t know exactly what my father got up to in the dark days of his past, but I haven’t had his kind of life either.

All the same, for two years as a teenager I lived with death. It wasn’t
something external for me. Not something encountered on the point of a gun, the tip of a blade. It was internal. I
didn’t confront death, I
was
dead. I lived it. That doesn’t make sense to people who haven’t been where I’ve been. To the tiny handful of those that have –
well, there’s no other way to describe it. We have been dead: lived it and breathed it. Some very few of us even survived
it.

You don’t encounter something like that and emerge again normal. For long years after I was no longer officially sick, I still saw death’s yellow teeth grinning at me from every
corner, every shadow. Those years, in some weird way, were even worse than the ones that came before. I found the struggle for life harder than being dead.

That struggle does, now, abate. This year, in the
arms of my beloved Buzz, I have sometimes known what it is like to live without struggle. Sometimes almost without fear. But I’ve never
thought I would plant my flag permanently on Planet Normal. That planet is not my own. I might perhaps acquire papers permitting residence, even naturalisation, but its gravity – its soil and
atmosphere – will always be alien. They will never be mine.

Until maybe now.

I’d never thought about it before, but there is no more powerful statement of being alive than the business of dying. Plenty of lifeless things have the power of motion. Crystals grow and
viruses replicate. But to die – actually to die – that’s an honour only granted to the living. The cost of admission.

And I’m about to be so honoured. The stupid thing is, I
feel
honoured.
Insofar as I retain any sensation at all, I have two things in my head. The love I have for Buzz and my
family. And the stunning assurance that I am truly alive. I couldn’t be dying if I weren’t. I don’t want to die, but a strange way this is the best moment of my life. Something
precious. Something longed for. There are worse ways to die than this. Many worse.

I’m too fuddled to think
anything quite so clear, but these thoughts hang there in the middle distance like the golden background on a Chinese painting. Gently illuminating. Not
interfering.

Which is just as well, because I’m not planning to die.

I roll over onto my back in the driver’s seat and lash my booted feet at the window. Not once, repeatedly. I can’t coordinate my movements at all well, but there’s
something in
the abruptness of the action which seems to work for me. The first few times, I achieve nothing. Then I do. I don’t even realise that I’ve broken the window until I lash out a couple
more times and can’t even find the window. It’s gone.

While I’m in the position I’m in, I grope for the levers that release the bonnet and the petrol cap. I pull them both.

Then I roll over
and forward to find a splinter of glass – only to find nothing usable at all. The stupid, stupid window is made of safety glass. It’s crumbled into a million tiny
granules. None of them are usable as a cutting tool.

I stagger back to the rear of the car. I’m not thinking any of this through. I’m just acting out the plan I made as I was standing, dying, in the snow.

Open the back. It
takes me several goes but I do it. Buzz’s spare petrol can sits in the way of the little hatch that protects the tyre irons. I heave the petrol can out onto the ground
behind, fumble the hatch open, and grope for the tyre iron. I have to do all this by moonlight because there is no other source of light. But I know where the tyre irons are: they’re where I
keep my cannabis.

Leaning against
the car all the way, I stumble back to the broken window. Feel for the wing mirror. Find it. Smash it.

The mirror, the little darling, shatters beautifully. Long, dangerous shards, reflecting starlight. I take the most daggerlike of those shards and start ripping up the seats. Foam rubber bursts
forth.

It’s hard getting it out. I keep failing. My shard breaks and I have to find another.
There is blood on my hands. Blood everywhere. The stitching on the seat resists my cutting. And
everything I do is done through this dull soup of stupidity.

Somehow, though, it happens. Beautiful sheets of foam rubber. I get the first out, stuff it up the inside of my coat. Then, because my technique has improved, get more foam from the other seats.
Enough to stuff down my back, down my
trousers. Anywhere I can, I stuff it in. I wrap foam over my head. Tie it with the belt from my coat.

None of this will stop me dying, I know that. The slow leaking of heat from my body is still happening, but not as fast. When Olaf and Hamish left, they drove up to the top of the hill, to get
back onto the road proper. But they’re pros. They won’t have left immediately. They’ll be parked
there, looking down.

They’ll want to be sure I don’t magic fire from somewhere, don’t summon the airborne cavalry using a microtransmitter hidden in the sole of my boot. But then, once
they’re confident that I’m done for, they’ll leave. Exit the crime scene as swiftly and noiselessly as they can. Start to build an alibi in some other part of the country
altogether. I don’t know how long
they’ll watch me, but I need to outlast their watching.

When I’ve done all I can to insulate myself, I force the car bonnet open. There is still some residual heat in the engine block. Not much, and I lie over it pulling my arms and legs in for
whatever warmth I can find. In the old days, drovers caught out in the snow would sometimes get through the night by sheltering in the opened guts
of newly dead animals. Forget the smell, feel the
warmth. I’m the same. Sheltering in the guts of my Peugeot. For the first time in what seems like an eternity, I can feel my midriff. It’s cramping with cold, but that’s better
than no feeling at all.

I find myself daring to think the unthinkable.
Go on, Griffiths. You’ll get through this
.

I need to keep alert. It would be all too easy
to drift into unconsciousness.

I try chanting to stay awake. Counting up to twenty, then back down again. Listing all the people I know, all the people I love. Some of my words are out loud. Most, I think, aren’t. My
tongue is made of wood. My cheeks are walls of bone.

I try to notice whether the engine is still warm, whether it’s still giving me any kind of sustenance.

Weirdly,
I think I have an advantage over ordinary people in all this. They’re so used to having their sensations arrive in the regular way, they wouldn’t know what to do under these
unordinary circumstances. But these cloaked and unreliable feelings are what I’m used to. The world I’ve lived in. Figuring out how to manage them, how to make decisions despite the
fog, is my own particular expertise. My
sphere of excellence.

I last as long on the engine block as I can. When I can’t any longer count up to ten, not even in my head, I realise it’s time for the next phase.

If Olaf and Hamish are still on the hill waiting for me, I’m dead.

If they’ve gone, I’ve got a chance.

I go back to the boot of the car. I’m shocked to find that I can’t walk. Not at all. I have to hit my legs to
find out if they’re there or not. I have some stupid idea in my
head that they’ve fallen off. I can’t feel myself hitting myself, but somehow my brain catches up with reality and I stop worrying. In any case, I don’t need to walk. Crawling is
fine.

I get to the boot. The little tyre iron hatch. Find the little tin that contains my joints and a cigarette lighter. Somehow, on the third or
fifth or tenth try get a joint in my mouth.

That’s the easy bit.

Cigarette lighters – cheap, disposable ones like mine – are hard to use. You need strong fingers and a clear action to get a light. My fingers are weaker than milk and I live in a
world where I think my legs have fallen off.

I try I don’t know how many times to force a light.

Can’t do it.

Summon all the concentration
I have. All the will. All the effort.

Nada. Nothing. Sweet fuck all.

Mostly it’s that my movements are just too uncontrolled, but I think my hands are still bleeding from the glass. They are slippery with blood. My fingers aren’t strong or adept
enough to turn the serrated double wheel of the lighter. I am dying because I can’t turn that wheel.

Think, Griffiths. Think, bitch
.

And I do. I change my grip, press the wheel into the fake-wool interior of the boot and roll it along.

Flame.

Instantly flame.

Because I’m so excited, I drop the lighter and it goes out immediately, but I know what I’m doing now. Three or four more goes and I get it.

Flame. Blue-yellow. Steady. Life-saving.

I light my joint.

I want to do more than that. Want to press my
face up against that beautiful steady light. But I’m in control now.

This time I don’t even try to walk. Just edge round on my knees, leaning up against the side of the car to the petrol cap. It’s hard work getting the petrol cap off, but I just lit a
lighter. A petrol cap is child’s play.

I take the joint out of my mouth and throw it into the petrol tank.

There is a tiny gap of
time in which absolutely nothing happens. One of those relativistic moments, where my clock is running at warp speed and the rest of the universe seems to be locked in
super slo-mo. Just me. A car. A frozen snowfield. And a hillful of nothing.

Then it changes.

There’s a
woof
of flame, so hot and intense I’m stunned by its arrival. I jerk instinctively back from the blast, but find I
can’t. My cheek has frozen fast to the side
of the car. For some seconds, the flame is still not merely pouring from the tank opening, but actually jetting, flame-thrower-like. I’m still wrapped like Michelin Man in foam rubber and I
can hear and feel the bubbling crackle of the foam as it burns back toward my hair. I rip my frozen cheek from the car. In other circumstances, I think it would have
been a painful thing to do.
Right now, I feel nothing at all.

And then – I’m free. Standing in the glorious heat of my burning car. Still utterly hypothermic. Still much more frozen that not. But, for a few magical minutes, I am not getting any
colder. I can feel the texture of the air change. It becomes alive, expansive. The torrent of flame is no longer just confined to the petrol tank.
The car itself has begun to burn. Seats. Matting.
Paint. Lining. I stand much too close to the delirious flame and simply welcome its presence. Its consuming, destructive, life-giving presence.

I don’t know how long I stand there, but my returning brain kicks back into gear. My hiking boots are still in the back of the car. I try to rescue them. Make one attempt and am pushed
back by the
density of the blaze. Try again and come away with one boot.

I think the other’s lost.

I’ve already thrown the spare petrol can into the snow, but I shift it farther away to protect it.

As I do this, I realise that my coat is on fire. I’m not sure how that happened or even how long it’s been burning. I fall over and roll in the snow until it’s out. I
can’t feel any pain. There is
a huge hole in the single best survival garment I have, but I’m still winning this particular game.

Or I assume I am. I do take a moment to look back up the hill. Looking by firelight now as well as moonlight. If Olaf and Hamish had seen this, they’d be back for me now, wouldn’t
they? And the hill is empty.

I’ve only the cold to battle now. Hamish and Olly are long gone.

So for a
while, I just relax. Explore my burns. Embrace the heat. I can feel its crackle changing my skin. Like when you bring your hand close to a grill. Intense, but good. I try hard not to
set myself on fire again and seem to perform that task without further hiccups.