Num8ers (17 page)

I clocked her number. Fifteen, sixteen years to go. Would she see her son again, or would it be fifteen years of missed birthdays, lonely Christmases? I tried not to think about it — not my problem.

“Tell you what. If you left a number, I could ring for you, after you’ve gone,” she said. “I could ring after a couple of hours, tomorrow if you like, just to let ’em know I’ve seen you and you’re doing OK.”

Spider nodded. “Yeah, yeah, that’d be cool. Give us time to be on our way.”

“I’ll get some paper and a pen.” Rita hauled herself back onto her feet.

I leaned forward over the Formica table. “Are you crazy?” I hissed.

“What?”

“Giving her your nan’s number?”

“Like she said, she can ring tomorrow, when we’re long gone. It’s sound.”

I didn’t say anything, just pushed the paper across the table toward him.

“What…?” he started to say, then he saw the picture. “Oh, shit.”

We both looked toward the counter. Rita had her back to us, feeling around under a pile of paper for a pen. I tucked the newspaper into my coat, and, without speaking, we picked up our bags as quietly as we could and got up out of our chairs, trying not to scrape them on the floor.

I looked back when I was by the door. Spider was still by the table. What the hell was he doing? He reached into his pocket and got a couple of fivers out of his envelope.
For Christ’s sake,
I wanted to scream,
we haven’t got time for that!
I eased down the door handle and pulled, praying that there wasn’t a bell about to betray us. It was OK, and I slipped out, Spider close behind me now.

“Don’t run, Jem. Just walk. Keep it cool.”

We were only a few feet away when we heard Rita’s voice coming out of the open door. “Where did…? Wait, come back!” We quickened the pace.

“Don’t look back, Jem. Just keep going.”

I didn’t need to look back. In my mind’s eye, I could see her standing in the doorway for a while, watching us disappear, then turning back, picking up the five-pound bills, and holding them in her damp hand as she sank down into a chair. Breathing heavily in and out, thinking of us, thinking of Shaun…until she realized the newspaper was gone, put two and two together, and reached for the phone.

The town’s High Street was full of police informers. Every passerby was a pair of eyes and a mobile phone. While we’d been isolated in the country, I’d started to think we were just getting paranoid, that it was all in our heads, this need to run and hide. My picture on the front page of the paper told a different story. It was real. They were all out to get us. Walking along the road, it felt like it wouldn’t be long now. Even in a sleepy little market town in the middle of nowhere there were hundreds of people out and about: people who watched the news, went on the Internet, read newspapers.

Another thing was bothering me. Try as I might not to meet people’s eyes, I couldn’t avoid them all, and there they were again: people’s numbers. Telling me stuff about strangers, handing me their death sentences. I wanted to walk around with my eyes closed, to blot the numbers out. I didn’t want to be reminded that everyone around me was going to die. The reason was walking beside me, holding my hand. Spider. For the first time in my life, I had someone I wanted to keep hold of. The date on the paper — December 11 — was like a slap in the face. Only four days to go.

“Listen,” he said urgently. “We’d better buy some supplies quickly and then find somewhere to disappear. We’re too obvious here.”

He wasn’t kidding. There may have been a few people walking or driving along who were lost in their own thoughts, not paying us any attention, but everyone else was clocking us. I guess we were a pretty odd sight: two scruffy kids, one ridiculously tall, the other looking like a midget beside him. And I guess my hunch in the car had been right: Most of them didn’t see a black man from one year to the next. There were certainly no other black faces around today. It was like one of those programs on TV, only in reverse — you know, where some white guy goes into an African village and the kids rush up to him, touching his white skin and feeling his hair. Except no one was rushing up to us. They looked at us and looked away. One woman, coming toward us on the sidewalk, glanced up quickly and then made her kid walk on the other side of her, away from us. And I thought,
Sod you, whatever we’ve got, it’s not contagious, you stuck-up cow.

We found a convenience store. Spider unwrapped some ten-pound notes from his wad of money and sent me in. I grabbed stuff as quickly as I could: a few chocolate bars and bags of chips again, yeah, but also some sensible stuff this time — water, fruit juice, cereal bars.

The store, squeezed in between an antiques shop and a greengrocer’s, smelled stale. It was packed from floor to ceiling with snacks and drinks, newspapers and magazines, loads
of porno ones. It was like a little bit of London parachuted into the middle of nowhere. The guy behind the counter was reading a newspaper as I went ’round choosing. You could tell he was watching me.

I put the stuff on the counter. There were cigarettes behind him, so I asked for half a dozen packs, and then I spotted something else: three or four flashlights huddled together on the shelf. I bought two, and the batteries to go with them. He put the stuff in a couple of bags, watching as I fumbled with the money.
He knows,
I thought as I stood there.
He knows.

He took the money. “Ta,” he said in a gravelly voice, like his vocal cords had been shredded by fifty years of smoking. Then, as I turned to leave, he called out. “Here…”

And I knew the game was up. What was he going to do to us? An old git like that couldn’t stop me, could he? I kept walking.

“Hey, you!” he shouted louder. I turned ’round. “You forgot your change.”

I went back and took it from him silently.

Outside on the street, I gave Spider one of the bags to carry, and he grabbed my free hand in his. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

We ducked into a side alley between two shops. It twisted and turned, behind houses and past some vacant lots, then out onto a canal towpath. We followed it along for a bit. A wall sprang up on the other side of me, and a train rattled past beyond it. We came to a tunnel. The path was narrow—
a damp, cold, curved wall on one side, a railing on the other to stop you from falling into the canal.

Spider let go of my hand. “You go ahead. I’ll be right behind you.”

It was difficult to see where you were treading, and my ankles kept twisting on the uneven path. Halfway along, I started to really lose my nerve. A figure appeared at the end I was heading toward: a big, dark shape blotting out most of the light. I looked over my shoulder, expecting to see someone behind us, too — it was a perfect place to trap someone — nowhere to go, no one to hear you scream.

It was OK, though; the way behind me was clear apart from Spider. Not a trap after all, just a bloke walking along the canal.

We came toward each other in the dark. I wasn’t sure he’d even seen me; he just kept coming toward me in the middle of the path, like he was going to barge straight through me. He was silhouetted against the disk of light at the other end, his features blotted out. As he got nearer, I thought,
He’s black, that’s why I can’t see much of his face in here.
Then he got within twenty feet or so, and I saw with lurching horror that his face wasn’t black — it was blue.

It was blue and crawling with tattoos.

I swiveled around.

“Run, Spider! Run, run, run, run!”

He caught the terror in my voice, didn’t question me, just turned, and we ran. I could hear Tattoo Face behind me, heavy
steps on the crunching gravel, breath rasping in and out of his lungs. It was so narrow in there, our bags were catching on the wall and the railing.

Spider slowed for a second, and I drew level with him. “Ditch the bags, Jem. Leave them there.”

I dropped what I had and he let me get past, then he threw the bags he was carrying back down the tunnel, straight at Tattoo Face. Even as I ran, I could hear the guy grunting, trampling plastic and cans under his feet. We were out into the open air now, belting back along the towpath the way we’d come only a few minutes before. We’d slowed him down with the bags, but not by much. He was a big bugger, but he could shift. I didn’t want to look behind, but I couldn’t help it, and when I looked over my shoulder, he was bearing down on us like a bulldozer.

“Here!” Spider grabbed my arm and hauled me off to the left. We ran down a rough slope until we reached another path, feeding off the main one. It led to a railway bridge: grim black riveted metal covered in graffiti. “Come on!”

We clattered up the steps. As we hurtled across the bridge, a train passed underneath us; must’ve been an express, because it blasted through, filling my ears with the sound of high-speed metal. It masked the noise of Tattoo Face’s footsteps, but as we started to go down the steps on the other side, I could feel the vibration of the bridge as he thundered across. He was right behind us.

The bridge opened onto a street, terraced houses one side,
railway the other. Houses meant people — surely he wouldn’t kill us in front of witnesses. Would he? I started yelling, screaming as I ran, “Help! Help us! Call the police! Help us!”

There was no reaction. Either the houses were empty or people, hearing the noise, just sank deeper down into their sofas, turned the TV up a bit louder.

Spider wheeled around. “What you doing? Shut up! We don’t want the police. We just need to get away. Come on!”

“He’s going to kill us, Spider! We need help!” Did a curtain twitch? Was somebody watching us now?

“I’m not going to kill you!” Tattoo Face’s voice rang out along the street. “I just want a nice little chat, kids, that’s all.”

I looked back over my shoulder. The big guy had stopped running. He was standing in the middle of the street, bent forward but looking up at us, hands on his thighs, puffing and blowing. He was struggling to get his breath, but he kept his eyes on us the whole time. Of course, I saw his number. I’d seen it before, at the party. 12112010. Four days before Spider. The same date as the newspaper I’d picked up earlier. Today.

There wasn’t just adrenaline running through me now — this buzz, this awareness, shot through my veins like the first hit of the most powerful drug in the world. What did it mean?

Whatever was going to happen next, Spider would get out of it alive, and Tattoo Face wouldn’t. Of course, I didn’t know about me. Maybe Spider would be the only one to walk away….

Spider and I had stopped running, too. We both faced him in the street and then looked at each other, not sure what to do.

“What do you want?” Spider called out to him.

“You know what I want. You’ve got something that doesn’t belong to you. Something a friend of mine wants back.”
The money.
“We can talk about it, nice and civilized-like. No need to make a scene of ourselves.” He was walking toward us now, slowly. I could hear the blood thudding in my ears as he kept on coming. Then, to his right, someone opened a door. A middle-aged bloke, holding a big dog by its collar.

“What’s going on? “ he shouted out.

Tattoo Face stopped and turned toward him, held up both his hands. “Nothing. Bit of a domestic, that’s all. My son here’s in a spot of trouble. I just need to help him sort it out. You know what it’s like, don’t you? Kids!”

The guy looked at him, trying to suss him out. “Do I need to call the police?”

Tattoo Face smiled. “No, mate. It’s nothing like that. We’ll sort it out.”

While they were talking, Spider leaned down and whispered, “Back away.” And so, slowly, we edged down the street. Then, as they seemed to be ending their conversation, we turned and started to run again, fast, really fast, legs pumping away like mad.

“Oi!” He was after us again, but we’d got a good start now. We booked down the street. Spider was ripping off his jacket.

“What you doing?”

“Here.” He flung it across the top of the spiked railings to our left, then cupped his hands for me to put my foot into, and almost flung me over. I landed awkwardly, twisting my knee. Spider pulled himself up the other side, crouched on the top, and then jumped down. He grabbed his jacket off the top and helped me up.

“OK?”

I nodded, not wanting to admit how much it hurt.

“Come on, then,” he said, and set off, scrambling down the embankment.

I tried to follow at a run, but it was agony. I dropped down on all fours and sort of scuttled along, taking some of the weight on my hands. Spider looked back.

“What the hell are you doing?” He was down at the bottom of the slope now, by the side of the track.

“I’ve hurt myself. My knee,” I said, wincing as I tried to stand up on it.

“Why didn’t you say?” He started back up toward me, but I heard a thump behind. Tattoo Face was over the fence.

Panicking now, I scrambled toward Spider. He lunged forward at the same time as I was literally lifted into the air, scooped up by a big muscled arm wrapped ’round my waist. There was something cold and hard against my throat. That bastard had pulled a knife.

Spider tumbled forward, then froze, like a sprinter waiting for the gun. “No, no, man. There’s no need for that. Put
the knife away. Come on, we can talk. We can talk about this.”

“We don’t need to talk anymore. You need to give me the money, and I’ll let your little friend go.”

Spider got to his feet. Tattoo Face tightened his grip on me. I could hardly breathe. To be honest, I’d been so surprised when he’d grabbed me that I’d just hung there like a doll; now I struggled in his arms, until he dug the blade farther into my neck. “Don’t come any nearer.”

“No, no, it’s cool.” Spider backed away. He was down on the tracks again.

“Spider, just give him the money.” My voice didn’t sound like mine.

He looked at me for a second, his face a picture of agony.

“I can’t, Jem. This is our future. You and me. This is a hotel room and a big double bed. It’s a pint or two in the pub, and fish and chips on the pier. How can we have that, how can we have all that, without any money?”