The Last Voice You Hear (22 page)

Those bags lay at his feet, and the expression he wore was one of blank absence: she might have been a door, a shoe, a missing sock. He wore a wide-brimmed hat from which water fell in a steady stream, and a thick black overcoat which reached his knees. The bushes behind him looked about as alive.

Zoë stood upright and faced the road ahead. The rain was heavier than ever, and without a coat she’d stick out like a leprechaun. She turned back to her new companion and saw that his gaze had shifted to the knife in her hand, and his face altered at last, as if whatever signal he was receiving had been blocked. He stepped back. That’s great, she thought. That’s just great. This is where I am now. This is what I’m about to do.

‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ she said.

He didn’t answer. This did not necessarily indicate agreement.

‘I’m really really sorry,’ she said. Her voice had a metallic quality, as if it were being processed through something useful but soulless: an electric tin-opener, perhaps. If she could pretend that’s all she was – a single-purpose tool, empty of volition – it would be easier to forgive herself afterwards. ‘And I promise I’m not going to hurt you. But I need your coat. I need your hat.’

He was shaking his head, she thought at first, but no: he was only shaking. And still she was holding the damn knife, and it was hard to see in this light, but it might have blood on it, it was highly possible he could see blood on it, and no wonder the poor fuck was shaking: it’s hard enough finding shelter in this life without some knife-wielding bitch stealing the only things keeping you dry –

Enough!

‘I’m sorry. But I need them now.’

And God help her she waved the knife.

She must have closed her eyes for a second, to stop seeing what she was doing, and when she opened them he was taking his coat off – not unbuttoning; it wasn’t buttoned; probably didn’t
have
buttons – but slipping his arms free, bundling it up, handing it to her; his blank face with an extra wrinkle now; another little mark left by the world. Just when you think things can’t get worse: meet Zoë. It’s always possible I deserve to have cancer. And now he was removing his hat, and shaking water from it. She took the coat and pulled it on. It stank. (And didn’t have buttons.) The hat stank worse.

What she was thinking was
This is so easy. . .

He stepped back, looking wetter already. Without somewhere to go he’d be drenched in minutes, and if he had somewhere to go to, why was he here? Thoughts Zoë pushed away, like she tried to push the next one away, but couldn’t: it had wormed into her, and wasn’t going anywhere. I’m sorry, she said again, then realized she hadn’t spoken. ‘I’m sorry.’

He might have nodded.

‘But, look . . .’

Feet clattered on the road behind them, but when she turned it was a couple flashing past en route to pub or restaurant or taxi . . . Somewhere dry, where they always let you in, unless you were desperate.

‘But look, I need money.’

He might have tilted his head to one side. Maybe she did. A matter of perspective. And maybe the whole damn world shifted on its axis: little fucking point in making an opera out of it. ‘I need money,’ she repeated, her voice harder. ‘A tenner. Five, even. Whatever, I’ll find you and pay you back. Ten times over. But I need it now.’

If there’d been something to hide behind or crawl under instead of doing this – a blade of grass; a stone – she’d have hidden, she’d have crawled. But his gaze had dropped to the knife again, and her grip on it tightened without apparent intention on her part. He reached into the pocket of what had once been somebody else’s jeans. If he’d speak, she thought, if he’d say
anything
, if he’d tell me to fuck off, tell me he’d die tonight without his coat and hat, I’d give them back and take my chances. I would rather face three men with guns than live through this again.

She didn’t look at the coins he handed her; just stuffed them into the pocket that used to be his.

‘I will find you,’ she said.

He said nothing.

‘I will.’

He said nothing.

She turned, pocketing the knife. There were steps up to the road. At the top she looked back, as if to underline her promise, but he’d gone, of course, with his laundry bags; had melted into the shadows of a bad world that had just got worse.

A left turn took her towards the city centre. Beyond the junction she hopped a bus heading north: coins from her new hoard paid the fare. The driver wrinkled his nose as she boarded, but that was mild compared to drowning her. At the back, Zoë sat staring out. This rain wasn’t giving up any time soon. Nothing you wanted to be out in without coat and hat. Survival, though, meant prioritizing. Survival meant forgetting what was done and concentrating on what came next. She had no plan. She had little idea of what was going on, except that the possibility that it concerned Alan Talmadge had receded, unless there was a conspiracy; unless there was a whole raft of Talmadges out there, enraged she’d cottoned on to them . . .

. . . The shakes were setting in. The warning was deep in her bones. Her arm, where he’d kicked her, was still buzzing: she didn’t think it was broken, but he hadn’t done her any good . . . This, though, was dwelling on the past. What she needed was a plan.

The bus pulled up outside Borders. She counted her money: a little over nine pounds. For some while, she’d kept a thousand pounds’ fuck-you cash taped in a recess behind her kitchen sink, but this would have been as handy if she’d mailed it to the moon. One of those three would be watching her flat. She’d have to be an idiot to return there, but they didn’t know she wasn’t an idiot. It was possible they held conclusive proof that she was. So nine pounds, which would barely get her out of the county. She needed food; she needed shelter. There were only so many places you could go to demand such treatment.

And all of them, she needed soon. These shakes, her bruises, all the rough treatment: they’d knock her off her feet. This, too, was what survival meant: knowing when to lick your wounds. She needed her car, was what it came down to. She didn’t have her car keys, but that was the smaller problem: if she had her car, everything else she could cope with.

She stepped off at the top of St Giles and cut through the churchyard, where the ghost sheltering under a tree was another poor soul with nowhere to go. Hallucinating was one thing; entertaining sentimental versions of winos another: get a grip. Desperate to stop and rest, to buy cigarettes, she forced herself on: down Little Clarendon, into Jericho. Her brand new hat, she wore over her eyes. Her bruised old eyes, she kept fixed on the pavement. If the bastards found her now, there wasn’t a lot she could do. She was used up. All she had left was her inner Zoë, who was good at the voices, could be pretty fucking caustic, but wasn’t much use when it came to bonework.
You’re a mess
she encouraged now.
If you have to run, you’ll
get five yards.
Brilliant. Thanks.
Remember where you parked
the car?
She remembered.

At the corner, she waited. If it had been her, she’d be watching the car. She’d know the car was useless without keys, and she’d know the keys were in the leather jacket she didn’t have any more, but still: if it had been her, she’d have been watching the car. Because there might be spare keys. And while there weren’t, in fact, spare keys, there were other ways of starting cars, and Zoë knew one.

I think we should learn to hotwire
Joe had said once.

(He’d been watching a TV account of life in Blackbird Leys.)

Yes, Joe. Why?

But
why
wasn’t Joe’s favourite question. Either you thought something or you didn’t. What he thought was, they should learn to hotwire.

To give him credit, he’d learned; or had found someone to teach him, which was close enough for jazz. The kid had spent most of a Saturday with Joe; equally bemused, Zoë reckoned, by the fact that somebody was paying him for this, and that the same somebody had the exact grasp on essentials as a goldfish. At last, she’d joined them.

‘Show me,’ she’d said. ‘I’ll show him later.’

Ten minutes, and the kid was on his way.

Okay. You can show me later
Joe had said.

She never had.

. . . The longer she stood, the colder she got. It was now or never. She made her move.

With a piece of brick plucked from a skip, she smashed her car’s window. Sliding into the seat, feeling glass crunch beneath her, she had to trust her hands to do her remembering. Closing her eyes did not make this easier. When she closed her eyes, she was flicking a coin at a big man’s eye . . . She opened them. Sometimes, ordinary days turned into shortcuts through hell. Her hands were frozen to the bone, and rain on the windscreen blurred the world to a celluloid cliché. It was her inner Zoë came to her aid; who let go the rain, the dirty streets, the chances of anyone watching, and grasped the task in hand:
It doesn’t matter
who you’ve hurt
she said, joining the wires as a long-ago boy had directed. The engine sputtered to life.
You didn’t
ask for this. All you need do is live through it.
When Zoë put her hands to the wheel, they were her own again. For a moment, she wanted to rest her head, let the car’s motion fibrillate through her like a giant life-support system, but no. Rain heaved at her neck, and she turned to close the window she’d broken. How stupid was that? she wondered, redirecting her attention to escape, as an arm snaked through the same broken window and slammed her head back against the seat.

‘You are so. Fucking. Mine.’

But she wasn’t. She was already pushing the door with all the strength she had left; it struck her assailant hard enough to break his grip. As he stepped back swearing she slammed him with it again. This time he slipped and hit the pavement. Before he could get to his feet the door was closed and the car moving. The first thing she hit was the car in front; the second, the one behind. It was possible she was shouting. The man was on his feet now, and had his hand to the window as she pulled into the road; with luck, the ridge of broken glass lacerated his palm. He yelled, but she was gone. The third thing she hit leaped out from between parked cars at the corner. The Sunny shuddered as it sideswiped him, but kept the road nicely. She forgot to indicate before turning. There was no approaching traffic, so this was not important.

It was nice to know the old skills hadn’t deserted her.

Before she reached the roundabout on the main road leaving the city, she pulled into a layby to lose the broken glass. She had a nearly-full tank of petrol; she had nine pounds in her pocket. In the glove compartment was a three-quarter pack of low tar cigarettes she’d bought by accident. None of this was brilliant, but it was a vast improvement. Smoking held the shivers off was the theory, though when she coughed, it racked through her like she was a wardrobe full of empty coathangers. Once the glass was mostly at the side of the road – that familiar urban sight: the jewelled carriageway – she drove on. She knew where she was going, even if she had only the vaguest idea of how to get there. Whichever way you looked at it, that was more of a plan than she’d managed in weeks.

When she looked back on that drive, it was like seeing through a broken mirror: everything fragmented, refracted; the only constant, a bright swift procession of cars zipping by on urgent business. She had the dim idea the radio was on, but all it broadcast was broken bits of news from another time:
on a housing estate in east London.
The body has been identified as that of a twelve-year-old . . .
taken off the field last night after apparently being struck by a
hurled coin. A spokesman for the club said . . . no leads at the
present time. Charles Pars . . .
Light had abandoned the sky, and the world had no limits. It was an endless stretch of darkness she was condemned to drive through for ever, or until her mind and body gave out, and surrendered to the deep.

This is a very good roadmap of the British Isles. We keep this
under the passenger seat.

That was her inner Zoë, unless it was Joe. Or maybe it was Sarah Tucker, still telling her what was what. Whoever, it got her where she needed to go, or might have done, if it hadn’t failed her eventually: either new routes had been built, or she was too exhausted to fathom the arrangement of the old ones. Off the main roads, everything became complicated. Hills appeared where they had no business. Zoë was good at mapreading. Joe had mentioned this often.
You are good at mapreading,
he’d say.
Cartographers are frequently rubbish, though. They make mistakes,
you end up lost
. When she reached her fourth-last cigarette, she got out to smoke: very near her destination, or possibly nowhere near it at all. Before lighting up she climbed a five-barred gate to pee behind a hedge, and startled a dozy sheep. Every bone in her body ached. This road disappeared at the top of the next hill. It was a small, disappointing road, too narrow for comfort, and far removed from the brash, confident motorways she preferred. When she’d finished smoking she sat for a moment on an uninformative stone post by the roadside, and dozed. Silence jerked her awake. It was past five. The sky was grey, but in a hurry. The car wouldn’t start.

Any other morning she’d have sworn to raise the dead. Here and now, it was just the next thing happening. She hugged herself, then ran a hand through ratty, filthy hair. Shutting the driver’s door, she reached through its broken window to depress the lock: this struck her as a funny thing to do, though not enough to make her laugh. She should take the map with her. Yeah, right. Before cresting the hill, she reached a right-hand turn sheltered from view by a very old tree. On the principle that, when navigating a maze, you kept your right hand to the wall, she turned.

This lane dipped further. It was lined by ditches either side, and by trees the other side of the ditches, and heading down it she picked up speed. Slowing down was not an option. Events created their own momentum. She would reach the end of this lane, and when she did, she would decide what to do next. This might be anything, though smoking her third-last cigarette was the clever-money favourite. The lane levelled at a cattle grid, one bar of which was pitched wrong, and tripped her. Zoë broke her fall with outstretched palms.