“Look, I just want one night’s rest. Can’t we both pretend to be normal people who stay in restaurants and have dinner and do all those normal things just for one night? I really need to be like other people for a little while. If that’s okay with you.”
“I didn’t mean to accuse you. The thing is though, you’re right, I
don’t
know anything about you and you’ve got to see how that’s going to be a problem for me after today.”
She thought for a minute.
“Okay, how about this? Tomorrow you can ask anything you want and I promise I’ll tell you everything, explain anything I can about whatever you want to know, but tonight, no questions. Tonight, we’re just two normal people, okay?”
“Alright,” I said, “it’s a deal.”
“Good. Now,” Scout pushed her plate out in front of her, took a deep breath and let herself crumple with a tired smile. “I
really
need to get some rest.”
I smiled back.
Truce
. “So, I’m guessing it’s part of the deal I get you a room?”
“God, no,” she said, surprised. “I’ll be staying in your room.”
“Where?”
“In the bed.”
“And where will I be?”
“On the floor, of course.”
“On the floor in my own room?”
“Yes,
all night
. And anyway, it’ll be good practice.”
“Two rooms still sounds comfier to me.”
“Yeah, well, comfort isn’t everything.”
Twilight had almost given way to night when I stepped through the front door of the Willows Hotel, the last pale yellows and oranges all quashed by the deep and deepening blue.
I was on my way to find the sleeping bag in the yellow Jeep while Scout attempted to collect Ian from Aunty Ruth. I’d told her it wasn’t a smart move unless she wanted to look like she’d been self-harming but she said she wanted to give it a shot anyway.
We’ll have to get to know each other
sooner or later
, she’d said. I wanted to say,
No, really,
and explain how Ian really wasn’t a getting-to-know-you type of cat or even a casual-hello kind of cat, more a sort of whirlwind made of blades. But then I remembered how I would be sleeping on the floor while she had the bed and said,
Fine, thanks
.
I strolled around the side of the hotel to the car park, enjoying the simplicity of the evening air and, yes, enjoying the fact that all questions would have to wait until tomorrow. I was allowing myself to pretend I was normal. Just for one night.
Being so wrapped-up in these thoughts meant I got very close to the yellow Jeep before seeing the shadowy figure hanging around it, smoking.
I jumped and started to duck down, but even as I did, it was too late.
“Alright?”
I straightened up.
“Alright,” I said back.
“I’ve just finished. Got her running.”
My back muscles relaxed a little, but not very much. I walked forward, but not very much either.
“You’re from the garage?”
“No, I’m from here.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Oh.”
“John,” the man said, taking a step towards me and holding out his hand. “This is my hotel.”
“Oh, you’re Ruth’s husband.” I walked forward fast and shook his hand in both of mine, my relief far too obvious.
“That’s probably what it’s come to, yeah. Were you thinking I was somebody else?”
“No,” I said, and then, “I don’t know.”
“Hmmm,” he said. “I thought it might be something like that.” He leaned back against the Jeep’s bonnet. “Cigarette?”
“No, thanks, I don’t.” Something flashed into my head – Scout saying ‘Are you still smoking those menthols?’ More questions waiting for their answers.
“Suit yourself,” John said. “You’ll be leaving us tomorrow then?”
I slouched back against the car next to mine. “Yeah, how did you know?”
“I saw you come back with that girl today.”
I felt myself wince. “Sorry, I should probably have –”
John waved a
don’t worry about it
hand. “I hope you don’t mind me saying. You’re in a battle, aren’t you, son?”
There was a second’s silence. “Yes,” I said, simply.
He nodded. “I saw it in you, when you arrived. Ruth did too. I suppose someone will have told you about the car crash.”
“Yes, I heard.”
“Well, Ruth knows a fighter when she sees one. She’s a brave woman.”
“Yes,” I said again, not doubting this at all.
John wrinkled up his eyes and nodded, then smoked away on his cigarette for a while.
“Lots of different types of battle out there,” he said finally, standing up. “And it’s not our business which type you’re fighting. Just know that if you ever want to visit us back here, you’ll be welcome. You
and
your cat.” He ground his cigarette out underfoot and started walking back to the hotel.
“Thank you,” I said after him and he held up the back of his hand to me as he walked away, as if to say
any time
.
When I got back to the room Scout was already in the bed asleep. She’d curled tight into and around the duvet, her head tucked down away from the electric light so only an ear, the white skinny back of her neck and a single shoulder blade poked out. She shifted a little as I closed the door and I noticed her black bra strap, frayed and worn-looking against her pale back. I rubbed my face in my palms. Just like most things in this new, fast-moving world, I didn’t know very much about the reality of women.
Ian the cat slept on the pillow next to her,
purring
. His face was a big round happy smile, probably enjoying a dream about how stupid he’d made me look.
The TV was on; some third-rate soap I didn’t recognise. I switched it off and unrolled the sleeping bag at the foot of the bed. It was still early but I was exhausted. I clicked off the light, pulled off my hooded top and shorts and lay down. It felt good, not to be alone; to be part of a team, this unit of three all resting together ready for tomorrow, for something new to happen – an
adventure
. Maybe.
Scout shifted around again, her foot found its way out from under the duvet and hung over the edge of the bed at the ankle. I lay there looking up at her foot, vaguely thinking how small it was compared to one of my feet and how funny feet are generally. As my eyes adjusted to the dark I noticed something. I sat up to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. It wasn’t shadows or sticky floor dirt or anything else; it was really there. I could taste my heartbeat in the roof of my mouth.
Scout had a tattoo of a smiley face on her big toe.
What we see before us is just one tiny part of the
world. We get into the habit of thinking, this is the
world, but that’s not true at all. The real world is a
much darker and deeper place than this, and much
of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.Haruki Murakami
“Rise and shine. Come on, get up.”
I’d been dreaming of beaches. Yellow sand, ranks of white parasols, aqua blue clear-as-glass sea and huge cloudless skies. A Light Bulb Fragment dream, maybe the first I’d had in weeks. I’d been running through the surf in the cooling evening. I’d seen the lanterns of the beach-front
tavernas
drawing coloured stripes out onto dusty waves. I’d been, I’d been – already the dream was coming apart, its bright silk strands unwinding into nebulous emotions, little coloured clouds of feeling being dispersed by the movement of my waking-up mind. This is how it’s always been with Light Bulb Fragment dreams; by the time I’m fully awake, they’re gone.
I squinted up at the electric bulb.
“What time is it?”
From somewhere, Scout’s voice said, “You don’t want to know.”
I moaned and turned over but I couldn’t get comfortable – there was an urgency in my head. To my sleepy self it wasn’t an obvious urgency, more like the vague weight of a stone tucked away and forgotten at the bottom of a rucksack. My half-awake mind searched around for it. Could it be a stowaway? Something escaped, more intact than usual, from the collapsing dream? Maybe, partly; its colours matched the ones I could still vaguely sense drifting away at the back of my consciousness, but it also had the enduring mass of a real world thing. An amphibious urgency then, a something I’d taken into my dreams with me and then out again. I felt around in my head and then in a burst of shock I remembered.
I sat up.
“You’ve got a tattoo on your toe.”
“Good morning,” said Scout. “Yes I have.”
She was wearing my over-sized clothes again, rolling her own muddy ones into small packable sausages.
I put my hand up to shield my eyes from the light. My sleepy internal spirit level was trying to adjust to the sudden challenge of being upright.
“How long have you had it?”
“The tattoo?”
“Yeah.”
She looked over at me, deciding whether to answer or maybe just wondering why I would want to know.
“The first thing people usually ask is,
why have a tattoo where no one will see it?”
“No, I get it.” I said, squinting. “It’s for the toe tag in the morgue, right?”
She smiled to herself, stacking her rolled-up clothes. “Do you have a carrier bag or something?”
I told her there were a couple in the rucksack and as she rummaged through she asked me why I was so interested. I really wasn’t sure how to answer that. “It just reminded me of someone,” I said in the end.
She did a vague nod as if she wasn’t really listening or didn’t want to hear a long, rambling story about my past. I smiled to myself; she didn’t need to worry about that.
“So why did you get it done?”
“I used to think I was
so
dark and funny.”
“You?” I said. “Never.”
She turned around and gave me a look. I guessed the conversation was over. For the next couple of minutes I sat quietly, letting myself come all the way around, and watching Scout in a starey early morning sort of a way as she dug out a carrier for her clothes, then packed them all inside it. After this was done, she picked up Mr Nobody’s leather bag from by the side of the bed and passed it over to me.
“What’s this for?”
“You were asking who he was,” she said. “Unzip that side part and tip it all out.”
I looked at the bag properly for the first time. It was expensive, well made and covered in pockets and compartments. The main space was divided into two, one half more or less empty apart from a few black plastic Dictaphone fragments, the other half sealed-off behind a big brass zip.
“Go on,” she said, sitting down on the bed to watch.
I pulled the zipper and shook the contents out over the sleeping bag in front of me. Dozens of little clear plastic tubs tumbled out over my legs. They made baby rattle noises as they heaped themselves up. Some rolled off under the bed and out across the floor. I picked one up at random and read the label.
“
CONCENTRATION
. Four milligrams.”
Scout picked up a couple which had rolled past her feet.
“
REASONING
,” she said. “And this one’s
SENSE OF HUMOUR
.”
“
STYLE, EXTRAPOLATION, CONVICTION, FRIENDLY SMILE, POWERS OF PERSUASION
.” The little white pills inside each tub rattled away to themselves as my fingers disturbed the pile. “What is all this stuff?”
“Mr Nobody,” Scout said.
I looked at her.
“This is him. The closest thing to a him there was anyway. This is what was driving that body around instead of a real self.”
The pill tubs sat on my lap like a medical molehill. I searched my fingers around inside the heap again as gently as I could. It felt like a kind of autopsy.
CONCERN. SURPRISE. SUSPICION, DIGNITY.
“This is it?”
“This is it.”
I felt small, weak. “He told me a Ludovician did this to him.”
Scout didn’t reply at first, she sat padding her first and second fingertips against her thumb, two beats on each before swapping. It was a pensive fidgety sort of movement but it also seemed to be building up
to something. Like a dynamo working up a charge. “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I could have been a bit more –”
“No, it’s alright. Tell me.”
“He wasn’t really a human being anymore, just the idea of one. A concept wrapped in skin and chemicals. Your shark probably saw him as a potential rival.”
I thought about Nobody’s strange voice telling me we were both the same person then denying it later.
“A concept wrapped in skin and chemicals,” I repeated. “That sounds like a human being to me.”
Scout shook her head. “No. There’s more to it than that.”
I didn’t argue – what did I know about what human beings were or weren’t?
“So,” I said, like a big outward breath, changing the subject “where are we going and why are we up so early?”
No answer. When I looked up Scout was looking at me. I could see something warm in her face, something tucked away safely behind her default expression but still, something there, just behind her lips and her eyes.
“You’re not going to end up like him, you know,” she said.
I nodded a silent,
I know
, but I couldn’t make my eyes commit to it.
Just for a moment, like a cloud shadow racing over the ground, the warm thing inside Scout’s face went cold, not a heartless cold, more like the vague sadness of winter coastline.
“Right.” She jumped to her feet, breaking the mood. “We’re going to Manchester and we’re going underground. We need to get all this packed up and we need to be on the road in the next half hour.” She scanned around the room working times, distances, logistics out in her head. Her thinking stare moved through me once, twice and then, irritated, finally came back to settle. “Eric,” she said. “You’re just sitting there. Mush.”
5.14 a.m. and the yellow Jeep’s wheels rumbled on dark roads, its back filled with boxes of books, packed-up bags and a sleepy pissed-off Ian in his cat carrier. I’d been waiting for Scout to suggest
doing something
with Ian – checking him into some cattery or asking Aunty Ruth to take care of him for a few days, but our guide seemed to take the fact that Ian would be coming with us as a given. I was glad about that, I wasn’t about to leave him anywhere and my mind was still too drifty and loaded up with early morning stares to have any sort of argument about it. Instead, we’d just packed up the yellow Jeep, quietly and mechanically, and gone. Scout threw Nobody’s bag of pills and the book he’d sent me into the dumpster at the back of the hotel car park. I put a note and a cheque for more than the cost of my stay on the front desk as we left. It was a small relief to know Ruth and John would understand; Ian and I were shipping out to the front line.
Scout stared out of the side window. The dark trees and mulchy kerbs passed by to a steady heartbeat of streetlamps. Driving in the very early morning makes everything part of the same dreamy whole; the minds of sporadic drivers quietly washing back and forth like leaves on a wide ornamental pond.
My mind lost itself in an old tune I didn’t quite know, going round and around in the same infuriating refrain. I needed to talk to sweep the music out.
“Hey, so where are we going?”
“Hmmm?” Scout turned away from the window, coming back from wherever she’d drifted away to.
“Where are we going?”
“Deansgate.”
“I know, you said Deansgate, but I mean – whereabouts?”
“If I told you that –”
“You’d have to kill me?”
“No, but,” she shuffled around in her seat, “you’d probably say something tedious like ‘that doesn’t make any sense’ and I’d have to say ‘yes, it does because blah blah blah’ and then you’d want to go on and on about
it all the way there anyway. And when we arrived after all the pointless debate you’d have to say ‘Scout you were right all along, looks like I’m a bit of an idiot.’ So, to cut out that whole boring middle bit, I’m thinking it’s better just to keep it to myself.” She looked across at me with that smile. “For the time being.” I could feel Ian’s cat-grin from the back of the yellow Jeep. “Can I put the radio on?”
I nodded. “So, what happened to answering all my questions today?”
“Well, we didn’t set a time limit, did we? I didn’t say, ‘I promise I’ll answer all your questions within thirty seconds of you asking them’. I just said today.”
“That’s cheating.”
“It’s not cheating. It’s being clever. There’s a difference.” The radio squealed, hissed and blasted a single bar of opera before settling on the Happy Mondays. “Excellent,” Scout said, flopping back in her seat.
“You can retune it if you like.”
“Thanks, I did.”
“I know.”
Shaun Ryder’s rough and dreamy drawl rattled out of the old speakers and Scout joined in on the chorus –
Yippy yippy ya ya yey yey yey. I had to crucify somebody today
– while playing her knees like the bongos. I might well have found the most annoying girl in the world. I smiled. In spite of everything I felt fresh and alive, like an old painted door being sanded back to the wood. However annoying, the girl sitting next to me wasn’t
just another person
. Singing, drumming away on her knees, Scout was a force, a bright little energy wave moving through the dark world inside my old yellow Jeep. I wondered if anything could stop a girl who sang and drummed her knees like that.
The Happy Mondays became Fun Lovin’ Criminals who became Gary Numan who finally became the local news. When this happened, Scout said
boo
then started fiddling with the dials again.
“I’ve got another question,” I said.
“’kay.”
“How do you know all these things about me?”
“Female intuition.”
“You know I used to smoke menthol cigarettes by intuition?”
“Oh, that.” Scout turned down the radio and pushed out some air, not really a sigh, more like clearing away the crockery.
I waited.
“The thing you’ve got to remember is history sinks downwards, like a dinosaur in a tar pit. The Un-Space Exploration Committee keeps records on everyone they’ve had dealings with and lots of people they haven’t. If you so much as threw away a cigarette packet while on one of your underground adventures it’ll be in their archives somewhere. In a glass case with an identity tag probably.”
Something about this made an old industrial light flash deep in the dark corners of my mind, but it was too far back, too distant for me to trace. Giving up, I said:
“I thought you weren’t
technically
a member of the committee? If they do have a –” I felt a bit stupid saying it “– file on me, why would they show it to you?”
Scout smiled. “I didn’t
technically
ask permission.”
“I thought you might say that.”
“Of course you did. You’re not as stupid as you look.”
I turned around and raised my eyebrows at her.
“Well,” she said.
We pulled up in an alleyway next to the bins at the back of a McDonalds, just off what Scout said was Deansgate. It was still dark, still very early. The city a quiet insomnia of smog, purple skies, puddles, rubbish and white and yellow sodium. It was a time and place of cats, occasional trucks, occasional taxis and occasional spots of rain.
“This is where we’re parking,” Scout said as I clicked off the engine.
“Here?”
“Yep, it’ll be fine.”
“How long for?”
“It depends on how long it is between you arriving and you wanting to come back. I’d say –” she thought “– at least four days.”
“I can’t leave the Jeep here for four days with everything in it. I’m going to find a long-stay car park. We can walk back.”
“No, we have to leave the Jeep here. If we don’t leave the Jeep here, things can get difficult. There’s a protocol. Thing have to be done in a certain order.”
“What sort of order?”
“You don’t have to understand, you just have to do it.”
“The deal was –”
Scout made an exasperated air sound. “Alright, don’t say it.” She thought for a second. “Do you know what a Chinese puzzle box is?”
“Yes.”
“Right, well, it’s sort of like that. You’ve got to know where to apply the pressure and in what order if you want to get it to open.”
“Okay – so what are we trying to open?”
Scout looked at me. “The world,” she said.
Cities hum and rumble, they breathe out steam and smoke in their sleep and fill their alleyways with shivers. I closed the Jeep’s door and pulled my coat tight around me. Scout shivered too, hugging herself, rubbing her hands against her arms in her big army jacket and stamping her heels on the tarmac.
“Right then,” she said, “the best thing to do is gather together all the useful stuff, a few days’ worth of clothes and anything you really can’t stand to leave in the car. Travel as light as you can though, we’ve got a lot of walking to do.”
Ian watched me empty the rucksack then repack it with clothes, a sleeping bag, the light bulb tapes and books, the torch, the Dictaphones and several packets of batteries. As I did up the toggles and straps, Scout grabbed the plastic bag of food we’d bought at an all-night garage in one hand and came around to lift Ian’s carrier out of the back with the other.