The Count of Eleven (29 page)

On Sunday afternoon he was back on that stretch of motorway. As he drove up the ramp at junction 14, towards a sky like an inverted sea inhabited by a single glinting fish, Laura said “Do you think we’ll ever get a car?”

“Why, are you tired of Old Faithful?”

“I just feel a bit sick sometimes. Maybe it’s riding in the front, or the pet rolly smell.”

“Perhaps we could fix up a seat in the back,” Julia said.

“It wouldn’t be safe,” Jack told her. “Don’t we all quite like riding in the front like this? We won’t be together for ever.”

“You don’t have to say that,” Laura protested. “You’ll bring us bad luck.”

“I’ll do my best not to,” Jack said, driving around the ample roundabout at the top of the ramp and taking the Helsby road. “And I’ll see what I can do about the petroleous smell.”

“You made that word up.”

“How much do you bet?”

“Everything we’ve got.”

“Then we’ll have nothing, because you’ll find the word in the dictionary if you look it up.” When Laura glanced at him, hoping he was joking, he said “It’s a good job I didn’t take your bet.”

Traffic lights halted the van at the edge of Helsby, and Jack patted her hand. He wanted her and Julia to share his optimism. Though he hadn’t yet been able to contrive himself the chance to visit any of his addressees since meeting Enid Bellows, his encounters with her and with Gavin had left him with a lasting sense of Tightness. Returning to Helsby wasn’t just a celebration, it was a way of proving to himself that he and the family had nothing to fear.

When the traffic lights released him he drove into the village, over the bridge where the road forked, up The Rock. Today the verge was loaded with cars, and guests were arriving at a barbecue in one of the elevated gardens as the blond children who he’d seen watching the horse ran to greet them. Jack almost waved, but of course the children hadn’t noticed him the first time. He felt invisible, and all the better for it, as he drove to the top of the road.

He was turning left when he caught sight of Stephen Arrod’s house. It looked disused, and somehow darker than the rest of the sunlit landscape. All the curtains were drawn, and the chimney seemed bereft of smoke not that Jack would have welcomed the sight of smoke above the house. He saw the Kops tripping over their hoses as a blazing puppet pranced frantically, and hummed a snatch of the Ritual Fire Dance to dispel the images before they came any closer. Even once they’d vanished he didn’t feel relieved until he had parked the van where he’d left it last time and was making for the stile rather than for the downward slope.

Beyond the stile a path led through a small wood that sounded like a generator. The hum of bees faded as the path emerged into the open and wound upwards over limestone slabs bristling with gorse. A scrap of blue paper pinned to a large fern unfolded its wings and kept fluttering ahead of Jack. The path smelled of grass parched the same colour as the dusty earth. The undergrowth buzzed as if it was primed with miniature alarms, set off and then silenced by his approach. “Try and count the grasshoppers,” he said mischievously to Laura.

When the path climbed to a plateau Jack walked to the edge and let the distance come to meet him. Beyond the insects racing on the motorway, flames hovered like earthbound souls of the industrial landscape. Further out were models of the Liverpool cathedrals, two bridges which he could have placed across the Mersey at Runcorn with a finger and thumb, the brown mass of Warrington fretted with roofs. “Welcome to the Count’s domain,” Jack murmured.

“Whose?”

He hadn’t expected either of the family to hear him, but Laura had. The Count of Eleven,” he said.

She sat on the jagged flat edge, Julia grabbing her shoulder to steady her, and dangled her legs. “Who’s he when he’s at home?”

“I suppose you could say I am. That’s what my name adds up to.”

“How do you reckon that?”

“J is the tenth letter of the alphabet, A is the first. Add them all up and see what you get.”

She was silent for a time. Julia sat beside her and plaited stalks of grass while Jack scrutinised the horizon, which looked sun bleached Quite soon Laura said “Not eleven.”

For a moment Jack felt dizzy and too close to the edge, as though a support on which he was relying had been snatched away. He stepped back quickly. “Of course it does.”

Laura shook her cropped head. “Seventy-four.”

And what do seven and four add up to?”

“Dad.”

He wasn’t sure whether she was admitting defeat or thought he was cheating. “Laura and Julia add up to it too,” he said.

She seemed to ponder that, then said “We’re really thirteen.”

“I certainly hope not,” Jack said, feeling it was safest to sit down. “Where do you get that from?”

“It’s what Orchard adds up to.”

She was right, of course. Though he was seated he felt more precarious than before, as if all his calculations had been erroneous. “None of our full names does,” he said, ‘and Orchards doesn’t either.”

Julia lay back and sighed. “Does it matter? I’d quite like to get away from numbers for a bit.”

“You can,” Jack said, and lay back too, but not for long. When sunlight kept swelling behind his eyelids like an impatient fire he said “Anyone coming for a walk?”

Julia murmured a sleepy refusal, and Laura said “I like it here.”

He was happy to walk by himself, he wanted to walk off his doubts. He picked his way along the stone edge, gazing down at houses which looked as if he could trample on them. Laura’s discovery needn’t trouble him, he thought; if anything, it proved he was on the right track, since he had instinctively prevented her from adding up to thirteen. “Trust the count of eleven,” he said to himself.

His walk brought him to a burned patch of the hill. It ran alongside the path for about twenty feet, an irregular plot of blackened earth strewn with ash. Several beer cans crumpled by the fire lay in the midst of it, near a bunch of charred stubs protruding from the earth, the remains of a bush. He stood and stared at the vandalised patch. When people felt themselves to be meaningless, he thought, they were capable of anything. He imagined how the bush had looked, flaming orange in full daylight with the unassailable conviction of a dream, or blazing in the twilight as if it marked a region between waking and dream, or illuminating the hillside at night, rousing the bushes around it to dance. He gazed until the smell of ash scratched his throat and the stubs began to resemble burned fingers, and then he turned quickly and hurried back.

He was almost in sight of Julia and Laura when someone hailed him. “Where’s the rest of the family today?”

If he should recognise her, he didn’t know from where. She was wearing a purple track suit, a straw hat and sunglasses, and carrying a straight black stick. Her vague familiarity seemed like an omen, but of what? “Over there, I hope,” Jack said, pointing ahead.

She came tramping down through the ferns as Julia and Laura waved to him. When she reached the main path she leaned on her stick and raised her sunglasses like a visor. “Where’s the baby?”

She’d seen him on his way to visit Stephen Arrod. He felt as if she and his family had trapped him between them, isolating him in the relentless sunlight. He had to answer her he mustn’t let any of them suspect that he had reason to hesitate but Julia was quicker. “Here she is,” she said, hugging Laura.

The woman cut down a swathe of ferns with her stick and stared hard at Jack. “Not her. The baby in the pram.”

“We haven’t had one of those for years,” Julia said.

“He knows what I mean,” the woman said, still facing Jack, and demanded of him “Weren’t you up here the other day with a baby in a pram?”

“Would you try and wheel a pram over this terrain?”

“Someone did,” she insisted. “And if it wasn’t you ‘

“If it wasn’t me it must have been someone else.”

“Someone with less sense,” Julia added.

The woman poked the scythed ferns with her stick and eventually turned to her. “I could have sworn I’d seen your husband with a pram quite recently.”

“Not unless he’s got a second family hidden somewhere.”

“Or a little niece or nephew.”

“Not even one of those,” Julia said. “We’ve just got us.”

The woman bowed over her stick and gazed at Jack as though she was determined not to move until she recalled where she had previously encountered him. She opened her mouth, looking almost sure of what she was about to say -perhaps that Jack had been taking a neighbour’s baby for a walk. She pursed her lips instead and jammed the sunglasses over her eyes before trudging towards the woods, slashing at the undergrowth. “Sorry to have bothered you,” she called as an afterthought.

“What was up with her?” Laura said.

“People get stranger as they get older.”

“As you can tell by looking at me,” Jack said.

Julia threw a handful of grass at him. “Maybe she saw you somewhere when Laura was still in the pram.”

Jack sat on the edge for a few minutes to ensure that they didn’t meet the woman on their way to the van. He felt he’d learned something today on the hill. The feeling persisted as he drove home, and lingered as he lay in bed. It seemed entirely benign, no reason for him to lie awake.

In the morning Julia learned that she hadn’t been short listed for the job regarding which she had been interviewed at the hotel. She had resigned herself to the possibility in advance, and Laura was doing her best to seem resigned too. “Only thirty-three days to Crete now,” she said.

Jack realised she was being cheerful, but he felt as though she was telling him to be quick. Belatedly he realised why the woman on the hill had seemed an omen. He’d learned from their encounter that even if people looked straight at him they didn’t see a criminal; he was invisible because nobody could know what he meant to do. Thirty-three days, he thought: what could be clearer? It wasn’t just time enough, it was like hearing the Count undertaking to finish his labours before he and the family left for Crete.

Jack came downstairs looking for his briefcase. He couldn’t go to work without that, he thought; he couldn’t do the job. Of course he knew not to ask Julia where it was, and in a few moments he remembered that it was still in the back of the van; where else would it be? He was opening the front door, intending to wait on the path until she was ready to go, when she called “What do you think about this in the paper?”

“What?”

“Come and see.”

He closed the front door with his heel and used the impetus to send him towards the front room. Julia was sitting on the couch, holding the local newspaper, which she folded inside out and then in half horizontally before passing it to him, one finger indicating a paragraph. “What do you think?” she said again before he’d had time to look.

It was among the job vacancies. COMPUTER TUTOR, the heading would have said, except that the typesetter had spelled the last word ‘tuter’. The job required applicants with a knowledge of financial management and word processing, and it was at a college in Withens Lane, no more than fifteen minutes’ walk away. “Should I give it a try?” Julia said.

“Definitely. I’m amazed you’re even asking.”

“But they say they’d prefer someone with a teaching degree.”

“You earned one of those at Rankin’s.”

“That isn’t what they mean.”

“Then it should be. Anyway, you won’t know unless you try, will you?”

“Do you think I should write to them now?”

“I do. And while you are I’ll go for a stamp.”

“For a tramp, you mean.”

“Vagrants have enough to put up with without me going for them.”

Julia groaned and waved him away, and he walked to the news agent which sold postage stamps. “We’ve thirteens and sevens in now if you want some,” the news agent said.

“I’ll take one of each.”

She seemed to feel rebuffed, as if she had put herself out on his behalf, and so he bought half a dozen of each; the encouragement she’d given him was worth at least that much. Like the woman on Helsby Hill, she’d shown him that he needn’t be afraid of anyone who remembered having seen him. By the time he strolled home Julia had written her letter and sealed the envelope. “What did you put?” he said.

“Myself on a piece of paper.”

“I’d like to see anyone try and reduce you to that.” As he gave her the stamps he said “Maybe you shouldn’t tell Laura you’ve applied for another job unless she asks.”

“Why?”

“Just in case, and I mean just in case, she might be disappointed.”

“There’s that,” Julia admitted, and looked askance at him, the thirteen penny stamp resting on her tongue. She picked the stamp out of her mouth and smoothed it onto the envelope. “If she has to be we’ll let her show it, won’t we? She’s at one of the times of her life when she needs to let her feelings out, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You aren’t afraid of yours, are you?”

“No, not at all.”

“No need to be,” she said as if she thought he wasn’t being entirely honest with her. “Well, let’s send me off to try my luck.”

On their way to Birkenhead she posted the letter in King Street, where Jack had bought and subsequently donated the pram. Less than fifteen minutes later they were at Charing Cross, a five-armed star of shopping streets. “Shall I buy you some trunks?” she said. “I should think even you might learn to swim in Greece.”

“Fish and chips do, but it isn’t worth more than a couple of quid to find out.”

“You just have to learn not to be scared of water,” she said, jumping down as the traffic lights changed.

Jack followed the most direct route to the motorway and was there in eleven minutes, feeling as though nothing could stop him. When the motorway rose towards Ellesmere Port he had a sense of not being there to be seen. Today was his day off from the library, and he meant to make at least two visits. Past the merging of the motor ways he raced along the stretch where a thirteenth junction would have been, and left it at junction 11. Though the next exit would have been closer to his first destination, this one seemed too good an omen to waste.