The Unblemished (15 page)

A pub on the left, the Lord Nelson, was the last building before the
world dropped away to nothing. Although she couldn't see the sea,
she knew it was there; it sucked what light there was out of the sky,
creating a dark band, like a huge no entry sign. She called for Claire
again and Nick reached out, held her arm.

'Are you all right?' he asked. 'I mean, stupid question, I know,
but ... do you want to wait here?'

'No,' she said, and shrugged herself free, pushing past him, down
the steps to the shingle.

'Claire!' The wind made a mouse of her voice. Minute, pale tiles
of light showed her where the rebuilt pier reached away from the
land. Behind her, strange smudges of orange hopscotched away, as
far as she could see. She turned to Nick, his torch beam picking holes
in the darkness.

'Night-fishing,' he said, when she asked him what it was. 'We can
talk to them if you like.'

Her exhaustion and fear tossed up awful images, her brain would
not stop with its terrible games. She saw herself pulling back the flaps
of one of the fishermen's tents to find someone baiting a hook with
slivers from her daughter's face. Downwind from Nick she called for
Claire again and let the name turn into a howl of pain. She screamed
it all out until she felt dizzy, sick, better. She was turning to follow
Nick back towards the tents when she saw a flicker of white.

At first she thought it was litter, a page from a newspaper or a
white carrier bag caught in the stones. But its movement was too
controlled, she believed. She approached cautiously.

'Claire?' she called, but again the wind nipped in and shredded her
voice. She turned away from the force of it and her hair bracketed her
face; sensation came back to her skin. She waved to Nick, shouted his
name, and the beam of his torch swung her way, picking a route
through the shingle towards her. She turned again into the teeth of the
weather and stopped walking. She desperately wanted to establish
whether the restless shape was her daughter but the persistent play of
shadows bothered her. It was like looking at an omen, of something
due. Sarah didn't want to be confronted with something she didn't
understand. She was worried that what was up ahead might be
nothing more than the denigration of her own mind. Nick could
confirm or deny that for her. Unless he too was an invention. She felt
like laughing. At any moment, all of this – the beach, the sea, the
village – would unravel, revealing her to be sitting in a chair wearing
restraints, grinning through a haze of tranquillisers.

Nick arrived by her side, his breath steaming out of him. He
smelled good, of clean sweat and too much wine. She liked the gently
hollowed area beneath his cheekbones, the soft, boyish sweep of his
jawbone, the cheerful curve of his chin. Bed hair that no amount of
brushing could tame. She felt suddenly attracted to him, and simultaneously
appalled that she should allow her carnality any headway
when her daughter might be in jeopardy.

Nick was staring into the same anarchic spot on the beach as she,
which was, in one way, a good sign, but only served to heighten her
anxiety about Claire. She felt herself moving forward, impelled by a
decision she had apparently come to in some ancient part of her that
didn't listen to reason or sense or in fact anything inspired by the
brain at all. This was a chapter in her life that needed animal
responses. All that mattered was protecting her baby, whom she still
loved to the point of distraction. It didn't matter that she liked to eat
spiders. It was a trifling matter. Hadn't she herself had a habit of
eating worms and soil as a child? Claire could be a mass murderer of
disabled children for all Sarah cared; her love transcended anything.

Nick was saying something to her now, but all she could hear was
the slow beat of the tide against the stones. The arc of the beam from
the lighthouse became something too intense to look at; it slowed, as
if affected by the treacly rhythms of the ultra-black ribbons winding
themselves around that penetratingly still white heart. Every pulse of
acid-white light illuminated the lovely ruin before her as it collapsed
and reassembled itself, like wounded tissue knitting itself well again
at supernatural speed.

Claire's face swam out of it, upturned, gilded, rapturous. She was
rising and falling, like breath made solid. She was moving as though
beneath the thrusting body of a lover.

Sarah cried out and sensations swarmed back into her. She ran to
her daughter as Claire, startled from her reverie, fell back against the
shingle with a sickening crunch. She was still smiling when Sarah
reached her, Nick's torchlight flashing crazily across the stones, and
her daughter, as he rushed to keep up.

Her lips were black, the teeth behind them stained too, as if she
had been eating licorice. Sarah scooped her up in her arms, immediately
aghast by the weightlessness of her, and picked her way
unsteadily back to the road at the top of the beach. The noises Nick
was making coalesced into sense again now that she had Claire safely
back in her arms.

'We should call an ambulance, don't you think? She's in her
pyjamas. She could be suffering from hypothermia.'

'No. She's fine.'

'She is not fine. She could be in shock. Shock is a killer.'

Sarah made his voice go away, simply turned down the volume and
allowed her own thoughts to provide an obscuring clamour. Once she
had reached the road, she sat Claire down on a bench outside the
Nelson. The silence here, guarded by sleeping buildings from the
asthmatic sea, was shallow and wrong. She felt threatened, as if
whatever had detached itself from Claire were still in close proximity,
perhaps watching them, looking for an opportunity to steal in again
and whisk her away.

Claire could not sit up unsupported; she lolled her head against her
breastbone and smiled drunkenly. She turned sportive eyes upon her
mother, but the pupils were dilated, beyond the capability of focus.

Sarah shrugged off the sweater Nick had given her and wrapped it
around Claire.

'We have to get her back to the room,' she said. She hooked her
arms under Claire's armpits and waited for Nick to grab her feet. He
had stopped trying to argue with her.

She felt a swelling beneath her fingers; Claire hissed and writhed
when she palpated it. 'What's this?' she asked, but her daughter
wouldn't, or couldn't, answer. Sarah brushed away Claire's flapping
hands and tugged back her nightshirt. The flesh was blue-grey under
the streetlamps. The lump was a tight, neat ball of shadow rising out
of her skin. It was hot to the touch. 'Claire,' Sarah said. Her voice
contained no weight. 'Baby, what is the matter with you?'

They puffed and cursed as they carried the girl back to the hotel,
despite her lack of weight. It was as if, in swearing, in pretending
Claire was an awkward piece of furniture being shifted from one
place to another, they could manage the insanity of the evening more
adroitly. But the charade was forgotten when they moved into the
light of the hotel lobby and colours – specifically the red smeared over
Claire's mouth – came back to their world.

A dream. The strangest dream. Instead of being asleep and seeing
everything as though still awake, this was the other way around.
Surely it was. Bo was awake, and seeing everything from within
dreamland. He had better be. Oh Christ, he had better be.

A flat tyre on the Ninja. A determination not to let the enclosed
spaces, his new fear of people (what was that called, in the great
dictionary of phobias?) cow him.
Push your chest out. Flex some
muscle. You are as good as, if not better than, any of these fuckers.
Stalking hard these cold London streets he thought he knew so well,
and yet all of the shadows and shapes seem so alien to him now. The
cold is like something he could peel off the air; layers of it fasten to
him, slowing him down, turning him sluggish.

At Russell Square tube station he sinks gratefully into the heat of
engines, diesel and crude body warmth. The slam and clatter of ticket
barriers, sliding doors; the blur of legs, the expressionless choirs of
monotony. The sway of carriages as the tunnels sheathe the train.
People who don't know each other, don't want to know each other,
moving in concert, a sexless fuck rhythm. A coming to and sliding
away from.

Where are you going?
He doesn't know. He bought a ticket, he
boarded a train. North or south. It doesn't matter. This is a dream.
The dream will sort itself out.

Only somewhere between stations, a foot lands against his and the
pain rockets him out of that cosy, seductive illusion. This is
real.
The
people around him are
real.
He looks at them: the seven in his half of
the carriage, sitting primly on the vomit-patterned upholstery.

Directly opposite, the man with the grey hair and the grey trimmed
beard. The tanned skin. A copy of the
Financial Times
and a worn
leather briefcase. Blue suit. Red tie. Speed-reading.

Next to him, the slacker chick, mid-teens, an expression of
boredom or disdain never far from her features. Wide green eyes, a
little nub of a nose, lips plastered with gloss. Smack of gum. Eyes
fastened on the tube's route above your head. Converse sneakers.
Jeans way too long for her legs, hems rotten and ragged from
dragging in the dirt. The gleam of a stone in her navel. Pale-blue
Babydoll T-shirt and a black woollen cardigan, sleeves stretched,
clenched into her palm by ragged nails dotted with chipped black
polish.

Next to her, a forty-something Chinese woman in a smart green
trouser suit. A clutch bag held neatly between the fingers of both
hands. White earphones. Eyes closed. Listening to what? Classical
music? A Podcast? Minutes from some medical symposium? A
laminated badge hanging on a chain around her neck. Her face on it,
smiling. Her name, Linda Ho.

Next to her, a skinny black man in a plain white T-shirt, sifting
through a handful of photographs. Big, bright smiles now and then.
Clean-shaven. Blue jeans with creases ironed into them – oh dear.
Black, no-name trainers.

Opposite skinny, three away from Bo: hard to tell. A glimpse of
blonde hair and a sharp profile. Too much make-up. A Dan Brown
novel. Her funeral.

Two from Bo. Hard to tell. Long legs in red jeans. Doc Martens.
A shimmery black silk shirt. A furled Burberry umbrella.

Next to Bo. In the window you can see the reflection of a man in
his late sixties, early seventies. His hair salt-and-pepper, combed
neatly, perhaps trained with a little Brylcreem or Dax. A beige
raincoat buttoned up to the throat where it frames a neatly knotted
green woollen tie and a white shirt. Tired collars, slightly grey. Highly
polished shoes nevertheless showing their age. Eyes on his shoes,
perhaps thinking the very same thing. He looks Germanic.

Somewhere between stations, something odd happens.

Bo looks away, contemplating his own shoes, the deep rind of dirt
in the half-moons of his nails.

And.

The prickle of self-consciousness. He knows, for a fact, without
looking up to confirm it, that everyone in the carriage, every last
fucking soul in the carriage, is
staring right into him.

He looks up, trying not to appear too spooked, too shit-pant
fucking terrified, and Linda Ho is still enjoying her recording, her
eyes closed. Black guy is still grinning at his snaps. World-versus-me
teen is stretching and winding apple-flavoured Bubblicious around
her little finger, her eyes following the Piccadilly Line's rich-blue
slash on the map through the belly of London ... but there's the
electric feel in the carriage of eyes having been averted at the last split
second.

Bo looks away and again their eyes, as one, swing back on to him;
he feels the weight of their stare, their eyes peeled back, hot on him,
intent, searing. Unblinking. The scrutiny of the desperate, the
ravenous. He knows it.

He looks up and maybe this time he catches grey beard at it, just for
a second, the lunacy and ire packed into those insane eyes.

Somewhere between stations, the train judders to a stop and the
lights go out.

Bo sits in the ticking, tutting blackness, the soft slither of panic
piling up against his open mouth and the dead weight of his heart.
The darkness is so utter that he can't even see the gleam in a single
eyeball that is straining his way. He feels a claw grip his knee and he
yelps, getting to his feet, stumbling away into the well between doors.
Unsure, after all, if that was a claw, or somebody's jaws closing
around his leg. He reaches down and tries to wipe away the feeling.
His hand comes away wet. He backs into another body standing by
the doors, but there had been nobody there a moment ago.

'Sorry,' Bo whispers.

'It's all right,' something whispers glutinously back, something
whose breath is hot and heavy with decay.

The moment stretches out, like the gum the girl has been twirling
around her fingers. The hostility in the carriage is as palpable as the
heat. Vomit climbs in his throat. The feeling of imminent violence is
so strong he's flinching, although the blows never land.

A fretful, excoriating few minutes later, the lights splutter into life,
and for a split second Bo feels the heat of everyone looking at him so
powerfully he believes he must be burned by it. And he blinks, and
the train judders into movement, and the woman with the Burberry
umbrella is picking a label off the sole of one of her new shoes, and
the Germanic guy is folding his hands over each other as if he has a
fan of invisible cards he doesn't want anybody else to see. Nobody is
looking at Bo. It's as if he doesn't exist, such is the lack of interest in
him.

He gets off at Hyde Park Corner; nobody raises their head to
watch him go. But through the window as the train departs, he feels
the weight of a hundred maniacal stares. He walks up to Marble
Arch, where he first saw the house of flies. The same old gyre of
traffic. The same old buildings. One of London's black pockets, the
air thick with souls, the ground forever boggy with blood. Execution
ground. A fine place for the house, a fine address for the original map
reader.

Everyone he sees, whether they be jogging the perimeter of the
park proper, queueing at the Odeon cinema, or swinging around the
roads in taxis and buses, gives him different levels of attention. But
they give him attention. For the first time, the new muscle within him
flexes and a glimmer of understanding runs with it. He grasps the
possibility that a map does not necessarily have to be drawn on paper.
He gathers that other people's interest in him might be due to
something deeper than the cut of his clothes or the style of his hair.

So then, if I am a map, what secret country do I represent?

He wakens into cold, a sour taste in his mouth, the soft, blurred
images melting away. A dream after all, but so gravid with truth that
it might as well have happened. He digs the heels of his hands into his
eye sockets, trying to grind away the unbearable feeling that his life
has been replaced by some robotic devotion to servitude. His
frustration becomes amplified. Who is he in thrall to? When will they
reveal themselves?

A part of him suspects, as he rises from his damp sleeping bag, his
breath turning to ghosts in the cold back bedroom, that they already
have.