28
Paul sounded bemused.
‘We’ve had a letter of complaint’ he said.
Wilf groaned. It wasn’t the first time. Pedants pointing out a wrong date or a misplaced accent; hikers complaining about an ambiguity in a routemap. Paul generally sent an apology and a book voucher and hoped they’d go away.
‘What is it this time?’ asked Wilf.
‘Nutter, I think. Or a group of nutters’.
‘A group? What do you mean—a tour group?’
He heard Paul sniggering into the phone. ‘Who knows? There are five signatures, anyway’.
Paul read out the names, overdoing the mispronunciation.
‘Apparently’ he said ‘you’ve trodden on some ethnic sensibilities’.
Wilf felt queasy.
‘How in hell—’
‘Page eight-five’ said Paul. Wilf could hear him flicking through the book.. ‘According to them—oh. Oh dear…’
‘What? What?’
Aggie appeared from the kitchen and screwed her face at him, and Wilf said,
‘The new guide, page eighty-five’.
Aggie was still levering the book from its shelf as Paul read out the offending sentence:
‘”There’s no reason to linger in this barren and ugly settlement, where the only landmark of note is the newly built mosque, which looms oppressively over beetle-browed houses”…’
Paul stopped. Aggie stood before Wilf, reading in silence. Wilf tried to remember the place he’d described, but it merged with a succession of other places that had formed a backdrop to his bleak mood.
‘I should have caught it.’ said Paul ‘I don’t know how I missed that’.
At the same time Aggie’s face jerked up from the book.
‘Oppressive!’ she said. ‘Beetle-browed!’
‘The houses!’ insisted Wilf. ‘I meant the buildings!’
Voices hit him from both directions, winding in a gabble round his head. He heard Paul say,
‘It’s the last thing we need, mate—that sort of attention …’ and Aggie’s precise, condescending enunciation: ‘It’s the implication, Wilf. It’s what lies behind the words’.
Wilf sprang from his chair, leaving the receiver to dribble Paul’s tinny protests over the arm.
‘I described what I saw’ he protested to Aggie. ‘I did exactly what you’re always telling me to do. I told it like it was. It was shitty, it was boring, it was grim—’
Aggie’s mouth closed into a thin, short line. She was still holding the book open between them. Wilf advanced close enough to feel its edge against his chest. He said,
‘It’s no good telling me to say what I see, then changing your mind if I don’t see the right things’.
She didn’t answer. She didn’t give him hell. She shut the book, turned and went back into the kitchen. From the receiver behind him came four clear words:
‘Is everything all right?’
Wilf snatched it up.
‘Yes, yes, everything’s all right. Except Aggie now thinks I’m some kind of bigot’.
‘OK, Wilf. We’ll sort it out.’
Everyone was treating him like an idiot, like a wayward child. Paul said,
‘I’ll write back, pour a little oil. Soon fixed.’
Wilf replaced the receiver and went to the doorway of his galley kitchen. She had her back to him. She must have sensed his presence, because she half-turned her face, and said:
‘I don’t really know you at all, do I?’
Wilf said:
‘Don’t be so dramatic. I’m not some—’ then started again. ‘Houses’ he said, feebly. ‘I was talking about the houses. They had low roofs. I thought it was a good description. They’re only buildings’.
She carried on washing dishes, putting each one on the draining board with curt emphasis. Wilf waited. He could tell she was thinking, building up to something. Then suddenly she spun round, leaned her hands against the sink edge and said,
‘What did you think of Hisham?’
He blushed to the roots of his hair. He wasn’t expecting that one.
‘What do you mean, what did I think of him? He was—I don’t know. I don’t know the man. He seemed—nice’.
She watched him, assessed the shades of red washing over his face.
‘He gets a lot of shit, you know’ she said.
‘Not from me. What sort of shit? Not from me, he doesn’t’.
She pursed her lips for a second before carrying on. Containing her emotion. She said,
‘After the bomb—he was picked up. Questioned. They implied all sorts of things. They even tried to make out Naima was the bomber. Can you believe that? His own sister blown to … ‘ She stopped short. Her throat was working, but she kept her eyes on Wilf. After a while he said, quietly,
‘They panicked. I expect that’s what it was.’
Her voice rose. ‘Oh, yeah—and went for the first beetle-browed darkie they could find, that’d be right’.
‘Aggie…’ Wilf could feel his own tears welling, now. She noted the crack in his voice and looked down, fishing in her pocket for a tissue. ‘Aggie, I’m not some neanderthal racist thug. Is that what you really think?’ He flapped his arms helplessly. ‘I just wrote something stupid, that’s all. I was in a bad mood. Worrying about you’.
She stood there for a few moments, bowing over her tissue, her zigzag hair swaying. Then she blew her nose, straightened and sighed.
‘Ah, I know’ she said, softly. ‘I know that. I just miss Naima. That’s all’.
29
Half-a-dozen yellow-jacketed police officers formed a bored chorus-line on the opposite pavement. One of them was tinkering with a camcorder. Wilf looked up the street with mild curiosity before sprinting up the fire stairs, but could only see a cluster of young men in anoraks.
Paul was outside his office, talking to the woman with angular hair. He continued the conversation while monitoring Wilf’s progress along the carpeted corridor.
‘You’d better take a look’ the woman was saying as Wilf approached, and she set off past him with scissor strides, wrinkling her eyes as a time-saving substitute for a smile. Paul was passing a biro through the fingers of one hand, twisting and twisting it—a trick that had always impressed Wilf, whose own hands were square and clumsy.
‘See any kerfuffle outside?’ asked Paul.
‘No…just a load of police. What’s that all about, then?’
Paul stopped juggling the biro and began walking, slowly, up the corridor, beckoning Wilf to accompany him.
‘What’s it about?’ asked Wilf again.
The corridor ran along every wall but one. They strolled the width of the building, passing gossips at the drinks machine, a muted argument between two employees at a desk, a woman folding herself too obviously over a private phone call. They reached the side overlooking the street. Tall windows lined this wall, and already three or four office workers were loitering with their files and polystyrene cups to watch the events below. A chant rose up from outside, its rhythm clearer than its words. Wilf and Paul leaned against the smoky glass and peered down. Placards had appeared, and Wilf saw upturned faces and fists and open mouths.
‘These, Wilf,’ said Paul ‘are your new fans’.
It took Wilf a moment to understand. Then he took two shocked steps away from the window.
‘What? You’re kidding! What? This is about our guide? You’re kidding!’
The other observers regarded him with interest.
‘I never offended anyone’ insisted Wilf. ‘I meant the buildings. You can’t offend a building.’
Outside, a burst of heavy traffic drowned the chants; then its rhythm returned—’bam-bam-bam! Bam-bamma-bam!’
‘What are they saying?’ asked Wilf. Paul craned his neck and read from a placard:
‘Respect … Our … Can’t see it. Stand still!’ he murmured at the demonstrator. ‘Faith. Respect Our Faith’.
‘I do respect their faith’ whined Wilf. ‘I respect everyone’s faith, for Christ’s sake! I meant the buildings!’
Paul smiled smoothly at the rest of the office spectators.
‘Storm in a teacup’ he assured them. ‘Handful of whingers. It’s nothing’.
Gradually they lost interest and returned to their tasks. One of them nodded at Wilf’s rainjacket as he passed.
‘Cool kagoul’ he said.
Back in Paul’s office, Wilf sat in a daze. Paul propped himself on the edge of his desk and said,
‘Have some coffee. And take off that kagoul—cool as it is’.
Wilf battled with the jacket, hauling it over his head, and ended up with his jumper round his neck.
‘Why don’t you get one that zips up the front?’ asked Paul.
‘For God’s sake, never mind my kagoul, what’s going on out there? I thought you’d written a letter—?’
‘Yeeees … well, I don’t think it’s anything. I really don’t . Long as they haven’t drummed up any local media. It’s a flash in the pan’.
They had a half-hearted discussion about their forthcoming project. Paul said,
‘I’m playing a blinder on this one, Wilf, old mate. Trusting that our little incident in the war zone will have brought you to your senses. But if you don’t think you can keep Aggie on a leash, I can always give her a new writing buddy …’
‘No’ said Wilf. ‘No need for that. She was so shaken up by the whole thing, I doubt she’ll wander off the beaten track again’. He’d been doodling in a notepad balanced on his knee. The jagged line he’d started in the margin became a row of fangs. He added, ‘She doesn’t mean to go looking for trouble, Paul. Whatever you might think’.
‘Possibly not’ said Paul. ‘But she can lead us there, nevertheless. So—first sign of Aggie going awol again, I want you right there, closer than her own shadow, keeping tabs. Clear?’
Wilf nodded.
Paul said,
‘Honestly, Wilf, mate, I’m putting my career on the line here. No more fannying around, no more slip-ups—focus on the job in hand. OK?’
Wilf shifted in his chair.
‘What about all this?’ he said sheepishly, jerking his head in the vague direction of the protest.
‘Flash in the pan. Like I said, as long as there’s no media interest …’
The door opened and Ginny’s geometric haircut appeared.
‘Telly’ she said, and sprang sharply away from the resulting commotion.
Down on the pavement, the placards had converged around an unwieldy-looking camera on someone’s shoulder and a large, furry sausage on a stick. Individual voices vied with each other as they clamoured to put the same case. After a while the circle broke and a slight young woman came into view, issuing instructions to the camera and sound men. She disappeared in the direction of the building’s entrance and the chants cranked back into life. Across the office, a phone rang, and shortly afterwards a receptionist was at Paul’s elbow, employing a discreet, waiting-room manner.
‘Paul, there’s a Felicity Chetwin from Southerly News downstairs, wants to know if she can have a few words’.
Paul did up the top button of his shirt.
‘I’ll be right down’.
Wilf said,
‘You’re not going to talk to her?’
‘Better for me to do it, don’t you reckon?’ said Paul dryly.
Wilf attempted a laugh. ‘This is ridiculous! It’s so petty!’ He had a fleeting memory of being told off in school assembly: the boiling shame of hearing his name broadcast across the hall. Paul was already on his way to the lift.
‘Anyway’ he said, ‘I’m a visual advantage.’
‘Except when you open your gob and sound like Prince Charles’ complained Wilf. The lift doors opened and Paul stepped in. He opened his hand, inviting Wilf to join him.
‘Do you want to do it?’
Wilf shuffled his feet and put his hands in his trouser pockets.
‘Thought not. Stop bollocking on, then, and leave it to me’.
By early afternoon the protestors had drifted away. Wilf lingered in Paul’s office, eating crisps from the snack machine and demanding updates of the online news every 15 minutes. He found himself hoping for a more dramatic story—an armed raid, maybe. A terrible accident. God forgive him, a bomb—anything to keep his name and his grumpy comment out of the limelight.
‘Maybe we could recall the unsold copies’ he suggested ‘and pulp them’.
Paul clicked at his keyboard.
‘No need to overreact.’ He looked Wilf up and down. ‘I’m sure it’s safe to go now’ he hinted. ‘They’ve all gone home’.
His phone rang.
‘Hi’ said Paul, then: ‘Yes, he’s still here. Yes, I know. Nothing to worry about. I’m sure of it’.
A series of chirrups escaped from the receiver. Wilf knew it was Aggie. He saw a change in Paul’s expression.
‘Oh Aggie,’ said Paul. ‘I wish you hadn’t. What did you tell them?’
Aggie was indignant. As she insisted to Wilf later that day, she’d agreed to speak to Felicity Chetwin to put things into perspective.
‘Paul’s oil-on-water routine is all very well’ she said, ‘but if people are going to call you a bigot you’ve got to answer back’.
‘So you told her you’d been into the war zone’.
Aggie’s hand chopped her sentences into emphatic chunks.
‘To show we care. To show we’re interested. To show we’re not just complacent, head-in-the-clouds, pocket-guide hacks’,
‘To show you’re not, you mean’, mumbled Wilf. He chewed at his ragged thumbnail. Aggie subsided onto the sofa. They were waiting for the local evening news.
‘We’re a team’ she said.
The main headline was the closure of a local hospital department. Then a story about smashed bus shelters. A pet rescue. A royal visit. An exhibition of unusual umbrellas. A feature about arson, highlighting a spate of attacks on schools. More alien abduction theories. Wilf began to relax. Just before the weather report, in the round-up, three animated faces appeared, crowding the lens. ‘Protestors have accused a local publisher of “crass insensitivity”’ droned the newsreader, conveying the quote-marks with a slight change of emphasis. Wilf’s pulse gathered speed. A glimpse of the guide’s front cover, with its bold lettering and arty montage of desert rock, gaudy market stalls and grinning children.
‘A spokesman for Sitwell Publications apologised to the demonstrators and said no offence had been intended’, said the newsreader, already putting aside the piece of paper she hadn’t consulted.
Aggie said,
‘Well, that wasn’t too bad. Paul will be pissed off he didn’t get on screen’.
Wilf thought: at least they didn’t mention my name. His breathing slowed. He said,
‘I’m such a bloody idiot’.
Aggie slithered across the sofa and wrapped her arms around his stomach.
‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘aren’t we all?’
30
Paul reconsidered their next commission. He decided to put their trip on hold, until everything had settled down. He promised Aggie there was no question of toning down the Cutting Edge Guides or silencing the author’s voice. No way.
‘This is a winning formula’ he said. ‘I have no intention of changing it. But we’ve come to a natural pause. A breathing space. Let’s take some time to think about the next round of titles. You two will be first on the list, as soon as we’re ready to go again’.
He gave Wilf a job cobbling together new editions of the Sitwell’s Bargain Day Trips books. Wilf was stuck behind his computer, snipping and swapping blocks of old text, updating prices and admission times, deleting the occasional bankrupted attraction and writing wide-eyed descriptions of new theme parks. Ordinarily he’d have been crawling up the walls. But with Aggie there his attitude to the house began to change. She filled his tiny courtyard with pots of flowers and herbs. Once he used to open the back door to a cracked square pocked with next-door’s cigarette butts and smelling of bins. A scribble of ivy up the wall had been the only suggestion of green. Now there was a sweet and spicy fog seeping into the house between the hinges. He was constantly surprised by new eruptions of shade and form: silver and blue, lavender and buttery-yellow, hovering in stalks and clumps and bawbles over terracotta squares and cylinders and bowls. The kitchen, which had been a space for storing tins and making toast, now bulged and shone with ingredients: flour, ground coffee, raisins, fruit as bright as a child’s painting, peppers, different varieties of cheese, bottles of vinegar and oil and sauce glinting alchemically along the shelves. Aggie spoke to the neighbours. She was shocked to find that Wilf didn’t know their names.
‘How long have you lived here?’ she demanded.
Soon she was on friendly terms with Charlie, the retired squaddie next door, and with Petra and her teenage twins on the other side, and Brigid and Carl two doors down, and Patrick and Shai and Lin and Viktor, who all lived in the house converted into flats. She brought Wilf tittle-tattle about new parking restrictions and what the people on the corner were doing to their attic, and what a scandalously dire state the flats were in. She was working at a sandwich bar in town until the commissions picked up, and she chatted to her customers too, and filled Wilf’s house with scenes and conversations from other lives. Wilf had a metal front gate, which had always struck him as pretty useless. It opened onto a foot of territory between the pavement and his front door. Most of the gates on his row had long since been removed or lost, but his was still there, rusting away on the frontier of his patch. Aggie loved it.
‘I don’t know why,’ she said. ‘It’s releasing the latch, and then clicking it shut—it’s like pulling up the drawbridge’.
Wilf resolved to give the front gate a fresh coat of paint.
He still liked to spread out his maps, but nowadays they were a recreation rather than a plan of action. Aggie bought him a vast Peters Projection map of the world. He carpeted the living room with it one evening and moved barefoot along its edges, surveying the ragged globules and drips of land.
‘It’s like looking down from space’, he said, with satisfaction. ‘One day they’ll make real-time maps; you’ll be able to open them out and see lights going on and off, and tides changing, and coasts flooding…’
Aggie stood over him, pressing her chin lightly on his shoulder.
‘Imagine, though’, she said, after a while. ‘We’d see it all, and be so helpless.’
The world to Aggie was a place of calamity. From space she would see the network of flares and exploding warheads, and the lesser sparks of unrest in between, as fire and violence careered through the shanty towns and sink estates and licked the edges of the suburbs and centres, just out of sight of the theatre-goers and tourists.
Wilf looked up at her.
‘It’s not all so terrible, Ags’.
She leaned forward to kiss his cheek, and they almost toppled onto Africa.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m no more use to anyone on the ground than I would be in space. I’ve found that much out, haven’t I?’
But she sounded cheerful enough.
31
A damp Sunday afternoon. Wilf was sitting at the computer in the second bedroom, which he used as an office. He’d been reading an e-mail from someone called Francis Blackwell, the new manager of a stately home in Yorkshire. Wilf had asked for up-to-date information about a small zoo in the grounds. ‘Unfortunately’, Francis Blackwell wrote, ‘the previous occupants failed to appreciate the outlay involved in feeding and maintaining their stock. As a result Manor Zoo has ceased trading’. There was a paragraph about Mr Blackwell’s plans to convert the house into a country hotel, and then an unexpectedly touching postscript:
‘PS: Most of the zoo’s inhabitants have moved to new homes. Only two lions remain and await transport to a Kenyan reserve. I sometimes hear them roaring at night’.
Wilf had pushed his chair away from the desk, rustling through a layer of discarded papers, and was pondering the image. His head was throbbing from the effort of reading the screen through the stark light from the window. Aggie was always telling him to draw the curtain, but Wilf hated to work in the dark. He liked to remind himself, every now and then, of the courtyard garden and the bland activity just visible beyond—a child on her toy tractor, pedalling furiously along the pavement away from her grandfather’s warnings; an old woman bowing over the handle of her four-wheel shopping trolley … Through Aggie he’d learned to love these ordinary little journeys that passed to and fro like recurring passages of music. He was watching the old woman’s slow progress. Thinking about the lions, roaring across the empty enclosures, and Francis Blackwell listening in his stately room. He was thinking: I must tell Aggie about that. The child on the tractor veered round the corner and her grandfather broke into a trot. The old woman was about to go out of his sight, behind next-door’s plum tree. He could just see the tartan shopping trolley, broken into a mobile mosaic by the branches and leaves. She trundled out of his frame. Then she flew back into it. It seemed to Wilf, afterwards, that this happened before anything else, while the day was calm and unaware: the old lady taking off and flying backwards into a hedge, dragging her shopping trolley after her. Only then did the rest of the world catch up. A solid, tidal wave of air slammed Wilf in the back and rammed him and his office chair into the desk, shovelling the computer, keyboard, books and papers into a heap against the wall. Wilf became aware of two things at once: pain slicing across his stomach, and a crackling and spattering of falling debris outside. In that aftermath of sound he realised that another, deeper noise was subsiding, a noise that had come from within him, from the innards of the planet itself. The computer faltered and tipped half onto its side. Wilf saw the e-mail from Francis Blackwell, still perched undisturbed on the screen. He saw the word ‘roaring’. He eased himself back from the desk, wincing, and released a downpour of papers onto the floor. The keyboard slithered after them and hung by its wire. Wilf crouched over his pain and moved to the window. The glass was intact. Unscathed. A stray shard of something hit the glass like a gunshot and Wilf leapt away. Now he could hear smaller, external sounds: screaming. A landslide from downstairs: one of his shelves was spewing out its contents. Wilf began to recognise sounds of crisis from countless disaster films and cop shows. He heard himself playing the part: calling his lover’s name.
Where was she? He tried to remember as he plummeted down the stairs. The party wall bulged under a hideous crashing in the next house. She’d called up before slamming the front door: I’m just off to—what? Where? He should remember. He usually did. Wilf’s knees buckled at the bottom of the stairs. Everything he owned was dumped on the floor. He dragged the front door open. For an instant the street looked normal, as if everything had happened in his head. Then two people ran past, one stooping protectively over the other, holding a coat over her shoulders. Wilf saw another door opened, a face ancient with shock. There was a thick, scorching smell. Screaming. And an extravagance of sky. Two doors away, Brigid and Carl’s house had been halved, compressed into a triangle of brick and wood and descending dust. Beyond it there was a plan of a house, a sketch of rooms and a scattering of furniture—beds, a bath—in the road and back garden. Wilf stood clutching his stomach with both arms, trying to understand this absence. Someone was grabbing at his arm, trying to drag him, shouting something about ‘another one’. He heard his own voice again, raucous and strange:
‘Aggie! Aggie!’
Brown water was welling at his feet. He let himself be pulled away, but his call continued:
‘Aggie! Aggie!’
His brain struggled to recapture her voice, only half an hour ago: I’m off to—
Where?
They took him to a local primary school. In the school hall, dazed people sat on miniature plastic chairs. Somebody was sobbing. Wilf was shivering. He had a blanket round him. He saw a woman with a livid gash across her face and blue wood splinters in her hair, and realised after a while that it was Brigid. Others were squatting around a person lying full-length on the floor. One of them looked up and said,
‘Where’s the ambulance?’—and was interrupted by the far-off keening of a siren.
Here and there mobile phones chimed and squawked and twanged. One played ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Wilf wondered where his phone had ended up. He heard a man say,
‘Was it a bomb?’
And then a hand pressed his shoulder and another voice said,
‘It’s OK, it’s OK, we’ll find her’, and he assumed that the magpie’s caw in the background was actually him, still chanting her name.
At some stage Wilf must have been taken to a hospital. All that must have happened: all the business of getting to his feet, walking to the car park, being helped aboard and swerving in and out of traffic, but he had no memory of it. One minute he was in the school hall, breathing floor-polish vapours, and the next he was sitting in a white corridor sharp with antiseptic and rapid feet. A woman in the next seat was saying,
‘Don’t you worry. Maggie will be all right’.
He tried to sit straight and was instantly pulled double again by a stabbing in his gut. He tried more slowly, coaxing his muscles through every stage, until he could see the woman’s face. She had a horsey face, prominent upper teeth and a wild nest of grey hair. He probably should know who she was.
‘Is Aggie hurt?’ he asked and the woman blinked guiltily.
‘Oh, no, I mean to say—I don’t know. But I’m sure she’ll be absolutely fine’.
He frowned, trying to make sense of her, and she added:
‘I expect they’ll see you soon. They had to take the emergencies first. They’re very short-staffed. I think they’re bussing doctors in’.
Will cranked himself further up and his stomach throbbed in protest.
‘What was it?’ he asked.
The woman opened her mouth and raised her hands to convey her perplexity, then whispered:
‘Someone said they thought it was a bomb’.
She waited while a trolley was jangled past, then continued, shaping every word with wide exaggeration:
‘At number forty-two!’
Wilf let the information seep through his confusion.
‘Forty-two? The flats?’
She nodded frantically and the nest of hair wobbled from side to side. A recollection shut Wilf’s abdominals again like a trap.
I’m off to see Viktor.
Was that what Aggie had called up the stairs? Off to see Viktor at number forty-two. Wilf retched, but his insides were too cramped to vomit. Ignoring his convulsions, the woman leaned forward to bring her speculations to his ear.
‘I thought to myself, well, that’s where all the foreign lot live, isn’t it? I mean to say, I’m not being racist or anything, but you don’t know, do you? I mean, the street’s so different now, you don’t know what anyone’s up to, and it makes you think, that’s all. I mean, were they messing about with chemicals or something? You just don’t know’.
Having let her theory off the leash she noted the tight whine coming from Wilf’s throat.
‘Are you all right?’ She half rose, searching the corridor for help. ‘I’m sure they’ll come soon, dear. You’re in shock, that’s what it is. Someone will see to you soon’.
32
‘Is anyone dead?’ persisted Wilf, straining to rise from the trolleybed. ‘Have they said who’s been hurt? Can you ask about Aggie MacLean?’
The doctor let his questions evaporate and conducted his own, one-sided conversation in a professionally hearty tone, as he pressed and prodded.
‘Just relax a little please—that’s right … Does that hurt? Ok,. let’s have a little look-see over here …’
And so they went on, each following the script of a different play, until Wilf was dismissed.
‘No real damage there’ pronounced the doctor, fussing at a sink in the corner. ‘You’ll be a bit sore for a while. Maureen will take you to the visitors’ room for a nice cup of tea’.
Wilf was led out by a honey-voiced nurse, still droning his questions. He felt like a drunk taken in at the vicarage. In the visitors’ room two police officers, a man and a woman, were asking questions of their own. A few people shawled with blankets stared into their tea and offered dazed accounts. One of them broke off to greet Wilf.
‘Right, son? You fit?’
It was Charlie, the army man, looking more flushed and animated than Wilf had ever seen him.
There was a TV in the corner, showing a property programme with the sound turned down. Wilf sat in a soft chair with hard arms, and watched the beach-side villas and ugly interiors, and a well-endowed girl giving earnest advice to an overweight man in shorts. The windows on one side of the room looked onto a brick wall. On the opposite side was a partition, half glass, showing a procession of slow patients and quick staff. Wilf was left to drink sweet tea while the interviews went on: the low rumble of questions and the counterpoint treble of baffled, excited replies. Presently the policewoman who’d been sitting with Charlie got to her feet and approached Wilf.
‘If you don’t mind, sir—’
‘Aggie MacLean’ said Wilf. ‘Do you know what happened to Aggie MacLean?’
The police officer fished in her pocket and produced a tissue, and Wilf understood that he’d started to cry.
They were taken back to the school for the night. Too dangerous, they were told, to return to the street. The school kitchen had been opened and volunteers drafted in to make egg and chips, which the refugees ate at half-size tables in the canteen. A large and jolly woman poured endless cups of tea from a huge urn and sang ‘Where Did you Get that Hat’ tunelessly at the top of her voice. Wilf was quieter now. The pain in his stomach had receded to a not unpleasant ache. He drank the tea, enjoyed its heat and overbrewed meatiness. He watched the canteen door, and waited. Conversation hummed around him in lazy swarms, occasionally breaking into individual sentences.
‘At least three or four. I’m sure of it. That house was always full’.
‘They’re saying it was a bomb’.
‘How long will it take, d’you reckon? I need to feed my cat’.
‘I hope they don’t serve these chips to the kids. They’re sodden’.
When the tea had run out and the singing had stopped they all got up, scraping their little chairs back, and trooped into the gym, where sleeping bags and blankets had been laid out in ranks. There was a drifting towards the toilets. Queues formed along a wall decorated with a giant octopus and a whale. The toilet bowls and sinks were fixed for a five-year-old’s convenience. From one of the cublicles Charlie swore and yelled:
‘Someone might have to come and get me. It’s that far down I might never get up again’.
The atmosphere grew light-hearted. Most people seemed to have tracked down their stray loved ones. As they settled for the night there was a brief flurry of mobile calls, hushed and hurried now that a couple of younger children had been bedded down. After a few giggly exchanges silence fell. Lying in the semi-darkness, Wilf tried to reconstruct Aggie’s journey.
‘I’m off to see Viktor’.
Bang of the front door. Through the beloved front gate. Striding up the street to number 42. Ringing one of the six bells by the door, standing as she always did, impatiently, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, then raising her smile as the door opened.
‘Viktor! Hi! What are you up to?’
‘Oh, just messing about with explosives—come on in!’
Ludicrous.
Another scenario:
Through the beloved front gate. Changes mind, off down the street to the bus stop and into town. She liked town on a Sunday—less crowded. Quick—catch that bus, hop on and get out, get away from the devastation to come! Wilf opened his eyes. The wall was ribbed with wooden climbing ladders. A thick green rope swayed idly in and out of a slab of light from the high windows.
‘I don’t really know you at all, do I?’
That was what she’d said. And she was right. They didn’t know each other in the least. This fiction they’d concocted—the garden, the cooking, the neighbourly chats and petty routines—what did that mean? Nothing. It was just what normal people did, until their cities fell.
Movement and muted voices. A buzz of traffic. A loud burst of commentary abruptly muffled as a car door shut. He must have slept. His stomach didn’t hurt any more, but he could feel every bone in his back. Four words were circling his brain, seemed to have been there forever: I’ve lost her again.
The hubbub grew as children began to wake and jabber, and someone embarked on a laugh that collapsed into a phlegmy cough.
Aggie said, ‘Better grab the loo before the queue starts’.
‘Mmm’ said Wilf. He was annoyed. Why couldn’t she get up first for a change?
Reluctantly he pulled himself into a sitting position. She’d hogged the blanket, too. Recollection punched him hard and he doubled over on top of her.
‘Steady’ she said, and her voice dragged against her throat. ‘We’re in a primary school now. No funny business’.
He stayed slumped over her and she didn’t try to move him. After a while she said,
‘You’re OK’—more an instruction than an enquiry.
‘I’m OK. Where were you?’
‘I told you. Me and Viktor went to the garden centre’.
The garden centre swam back into Wilf’s memory with all its glorious metal shelves of pots and compost bags and ghastly model hedgehogs. She’d promised to help Viktor do up their garden. Well, it was done good and proper now. Laughter welled in Wilf’s chest and as it gathered force she turned her head with an effort and complained:
‘Stop shaking’.
She told him off for not contacting her, for being hurt, for being in the house when it happened. She berated the police for cordonning off the street, the hospital for discharging him, the world in general for sending her on a wild goose chase after Wilf. She said,
‘I didn’t know what to think. First Naima, now you—I didn’t know what—’
She let rip about Viktor’s landlord—‘cheap, vicious, evil scum’. She said it was a bloody miracle noone had been killed.
‘They’ve been saying for months that place was a death trap’ she said. ‘Those gas fittings were downright primitive. Wilf, will you stop? There’s nothing funny about it’.
33
‘I can’t believe it’ said Aggie again. ‘Can you believe it? I can’t believe it’.
She worried at the cuff of her jumper, trying to pull it down under the sleeve of her jacket. Wilf held her bag and let her rant on, stoking up her temper.
‘Seven hours, they kept him there, asking him stupid questions. What newspapers he reads, what charities he supports. I mean—! Seven hours! What possible reason—?’
She unzipped her bag while Wilf was holding it and fished around for her car keys.
‘It was a gas explosion’ she said. Wilf spoke to the top of her head as she ferreted deeper into the belly of the bag.
‘Nobody’s actually, officially said—’
‘Everyone knows’ she snapped into the bag. ‘It was the dodgy gas. It was the cheapskate landlord. But oh, no, Viktor’s got an accent, Viktor’s got dark hair and dark skin, Johnny Foreigner up to no good again …’
She surfaced with a bunch of keys shivering from her finger.
‘Same old story. Here we go again. The whole world’s gone stark staring mad’ she concluded, and grabbed the bag, tucking it under her arm.
‘Keep the car doors locked’ warned Wilf ‘and don’t park on the street. Are you sure I can’t come with you?’
The flicker of her eyelids quashed that idea. Aggie kept her flat as a last remaining portion of private space, even now that their funds were dwindling. It was her bolthole, she said. A place to be too quiet or too loud. Sometimes she went there to work, or to read. Once a week she nipped down to check any post that hadn’t been readdressed. Wilf always offered to go with her and she always refused. He’d urged her to put the place on the market, but after the accident she had a ready reply:
‘If this house falls down’ she pointed out ‘we’ll need somewhere else to go’.
Wilf held the front door open.
‘You won’t be too long, will you?’
He could see the side of her jaw working as she surveyed the weather and buttoned her jacket.
‘Look’, she said. ‘I know it’s not the smartest area in town, but it’s not Armageddon’.
‘Just be careful’ he said. ‘There are all sorts hanging round that block’.
‘Ooh, all sorts. Anyway—’ she planted a kiss on his cheek as a comma—’I’m thinking of selling the car. It’s just another way of them keeping tabs on you’.
‘Them …?’
Before Wilf could tease her she’d taken the single step to the front gate. As he shut the front door he heard an exchange of greetings. It was three weeks since they’d cleared the rubble and declared Wilf’s house safe, but there were still a few workers on site and Aggie knew every one of them by name.
He heard her return and came out of the office. She was standing in the hall, still in her jacket, bag drooping by its straps from her hand.
‘What’s up?’ he asked.
Her face was shadowed with worry. He started downstairs.
‘What is it? Are you OK?’
‘Yes’ she said dreamily. ‘It’s the flat—’
‘You haven’t been burgled, have you? I told you to get an alarm—’
She shook her head.
‘Not burgled. I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘It’s weird. I think I’ve been … searched’.
Wilf laughed, then stopped. He sat halfway down the stairs. She made a movement with her shoulders, like someone recoiling from unwelcome attention.
‘Stuff’s gone. Stuff I know was there.’
‘What kind of stuff?’
‘Disks’.
‘What’s on them?’
‘Nothing. One of the guides. And something else—someone’s used my computer’.
Automatically Wilf tutted. ‘I’ve told you about leaving that computer there. Why don’t you—’ He gripped the stair rods to bring himself back to the point. ‘How do you know?’
‘Some files that were on the desktop—they’ve been opened. Since the last time I was there. I could see—’ she raised her voice against Wilf’s sceptical scowl—’from the date’.
‘What files?’
‘Nothing! Jesus, Wilf, what do you think, secret codes or something?’ A thought buckled her onto the step below his. ‘Maps’ she said. She sounded awestruck.
‘Maps?’
‘I’d been looking things up for the next guide.’
‘What guide?’ Wilf repeated the question, ridding it of the suspicion in his tone. ‘What guide? We haven’t got another guide’.
‘No, but I wanted to pester Paul about it. Give him some ideas. I just did some research…’ She ran her fingers through her hair, leaving it standing on end. Wilf said,
‘What kind of research?’
She spoke away from him like a guilty child.
‘On the net’.
Slowly she began to unbutton her jacket, then gave up halfway through and sat back against his legs.
‘Aggie, what do you mean? You’re not authorised.’
He felt the reflex of irritation in her shoulders.
‘For God’s sake’ she started, checked herself and resumed sulkily. ‘There are ways and means. The Bloggers’.
Wilf released his grip on the bannister and examined the white weals it had left on his palms.
‘They’re an urban myth, aren’t they?’ he said.
‘That’s what the authorities would like you to think. But they exist, well and truly.’
‘Why the hell would you join The Bloggers?’ snapped Wilf, before he could stop himself. ‘What are you doing, looking at porn?’ He was trembling with anger.
Aggie shifted round and put her arms on his lap.
‘It’s not all about sex, you know. That’s yet another government lie’.
‘Never mind government bloody lies, Ags’ said Wilf. ‘Why were you sidelining the official web? You can always use Paul’s computer if you need to—’
‘Wilf’ she said, suddenly sounding like a child, ‘this is scary. Those files are full of notes, statistics—’
‘What about?’
‘You know—economy, political system, major routes—all the usual. But they’re going to think—’ her eyes widened—’My God, Wilf—if they can pull in Viktor, just for being born somewhere else—’
A wobbly outline appeared through the glass in the front door and the letter box exploded. They both screamed. Perplexed eyes peered through the slit and a woman said,
‘Sorry to startle you’,
as her leaflet advertising garden tools wafted onto the doormat. Aggie’s scream became a hysterical giggle. When it subsided she sat there panting, for a moment, then whispered,
‘What should I do?’
Wilf sat forward to put his arms around her.
‘Don’t work yourself up’ he said. ‘You’re jumping to all sorts of conclusions. And anyway, even if the G-men have been reading your private files, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You haven’t done anything wrong’.
34
Paul called.
Paul called.
Paul called.
Wilf jabs at the tiny button on his phone and the words roll past in their cheery, patronising font. A flashing receiver nags him in the top right-hand corner and at last he submits and rings his voicemail.
‘Wilf, mate, can you give me a ring? Quick progress report? I’ve had the photographer round and he needs to talk to you about his itinerary. OK? You’re well on the way now, yeah? Give us a bell when you can.’
Wilf resumes his trawl through the calls and text messages. All from Paul. All except one. He hasn’t listened to that one for weeks. He’s afraid that listening to it might wear it out, like rain on a rock. But today he indulges himself, selecting it with care, wary of blundering onto the wrong key and wiping her out altogether.
‘Hi, it’s me. Wilf, I’m OK. I’m sorry. I’m fine. Don’t worry. I’ve decided to … lie low. I’ll be in touch soon. I’m sorry.’ Then the hesitation, first in her voice, then in the signal, and then it cuts off. Wilf always goes on listening anyway, squeezing the phone to his skull, hoping to catch another word, a goodbye, floating in the dead air.
The way she said ‘lie low’—like a joke, audibly fenced off with irony. He imagined the self-deprecating turn of her mouth as she spoke. She was ashamed of herself—he knew that. Ashamed of the paranoia that had mounted day by day after that trip to her flat; of not keeping in touch with Viktor after his police interview; of crossing the street, without warning, or ducking into shops, or suddenly changing direction, convinced that she was being followed. She gave up her job at the sandwich bar, but disappeared for hours on end all the same. When Wilf asked her where she’d been she just said ‘here and there’. A nail bomb went off outside a bank in another town—a maverick, they said, not really a terrorist; a loner. It happened in the early hours, and there were no casualties, apart from a lot of office-block windows. But Aggie became unbearable after that. She claimed there were strange noises on the phone line. She stopped calling the nursing home in Glasgow where her mother was subsiding into senility, afraid that she would somehow guide ‘them’ there to cause trouble. She drew the curtains in daylight—Aggie, who loved the open air, imprisoning herself within his walls, behind the wretched front gate.
‘I should clear out’ she said, pressing herself against Wilf’s back in bed. ‘Or they’ll be after you, too’.
‘No they won’t’ mumbled Wilf. ‘They’re not after anyone’.
‘Yes, they’ll target you, Wilf—guilt by association.’ She said, ‘We’re sitting ducks, living here. The only house on the street. We might as well paint a bloody great target on the wall’.
‘What do you think’s going to happen?’ rasped Wilf. ‘It’s not Day of the Jackal, Ags. You’ve done nothing wrong. Nobody’s coming to get you’.
He felt the mattress dip as she rolled away. He said,
‘Look. Paul will come up with a new title for us soon. We can be out of here and onto the open road.’
‘You think they’d let us leave the country? First ID check we come to, it’ll be all systems go.’
‘Oh, Aggie …’ sighed Wilf. ‘Don’t exaggerate’.
Sitting on Gwennie’s box-room bed in Hestyn, peering into the liquid light of his mobile, he tells himself Aggie’s on the open road now—sleeping under hedges, using invented names, living another life, maybe in another part of the world. He doesn’t know, of course—not for sure. There are times when he has other visions: Aggie bundled into a car, slammed into a cell. But he reassures himself every time, remembers Paul’s response when he played him the voicemail, remembers the long, soundless, resigned sigh, and Paul saying,
‘Well, we always knew it might happen. Slippery as an eel, our Ags. Bound to wriggle free in the end’.
Yes—that’s what she’s done: wriggled free. Wilf likes that idea. He clings to it. She’s only lying low, and sooner or later she’ll rebuild her faith in the ordinariness of life, and she’ll come back.
There’s a brisk tap on the bedroom door and the phone dances in Wilf’s hands.
‘Sorry!’ lisps Martha Crick. ‘Didn’t mean to make you jump. Mr Stokes is here to say goodbye.’
Wilf regains his grip on the phone and presses a button to douse its screen.
‘Yes, yes, thanks, I’m on my way’.
Lambert is waiting in the hall. Gwennie hovers in her apron at the kitchen door and Martha Crick, having followed Wilf downstairs, pauses a few steps up and plants her huge hands on the bannister to watch the fond farewell. Lambert leans his walking stick against the wall so that he can take Wilf’s hand in both of his own.
‘Wilfred’ he says, ‘I am privileged to have made your acquaintance’.
‘Well, the feeling’s mutual’ says Wilf. ‘Thanks for all your help’.
‘I do trust and hope’ says Lambert ‘that your guidebook will enjoy adulation and success’.
Wilf’s hand squirms. He says,
‘And I trust and hope your wishes for Hestyn—’ before he can say ‘house’ Lambert’s fists close tighter, squeezing Wilf’s knuckles so hard that he has to bite his lip.
‘Thank you’ says Lambert. ‘Thank you, dear boy’.
There’s a pause. Nobody moves. Wilf wonders how long he’s got left to get to the station. Eventually Gwennie clears her throat and says,
‘There you are, then, Mr Stokes. We’ll have to let him go’.
Wilf is seen off from the front door by all three of them. As he hoists his backpack onto his shoulder he hears Lambert call:
‘Keep in touch!’
Bloody hell, he thinks. I’ve only been here three days. But he’s quite moved, nonetheless.
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