Owls are actually very stupid birds, but when something moves! That’s when evolution does its thing.
Chugger chugger chugger goes the boat.
“You want to swap?” asked Neila. “You must be freezing.”
“I’m all right, but thank you.”
“More tea. Peppermint or ginger?”
“Peppermint, please. How far are we now?”
“A few more hours. We’ll moor on the edge of town give me a shout when you see…”
jerking back to reality, Theo reads as the sun comes up, another three quid for another hour, he reads and this is all that there is to be done now this is all that…
At 8.45 a.m. he found it.
An unsent email, sat in the drafts, no address at the top.
Dani wrote it twenty minutes before she died.
She’s your daughter. Save the mother. Go home.
Theo stared at it for a while, then shut down the computer, walked to the nearest cashpoint, took out all the cash he was allowed, pushed his credit card down the nearest drain and went to find a train home.
Knave of coins, the Devil (inverted), the Priest, seven of wands, three of coins, the Fool, three of cups, king of coins, the Hanged Man (inverted).
Neila said, “I don’t like the word ‘mister.’ It’s weighted down with this idea, this baggage like you say ‘Mr. Smith,’ and there’s this idea isn’t there in your head immediately of what Mr. Smith must be because the word, the gender identifier, it imposes so many cultural ideas about strong and right and reliable and…”
Theo made pasta with spinach and mushroom sauce.
“…once stopped at customs—this was when I could afford holidays—and they said ‘We are going to search you’ and I asked why. They didn’t give me a reason, but they took me to the men’s room. The men’s. I was so… I said I’m not… And I begged them I was crying I was just—but what the system says matters more and I…”
They ate in silence, counting down the hours until the morning. Low brick houses, white window frames, roads without trees, pawnbrokers, betting shops, a bit in the centre of town for the parents to take their kids shopping for £1 water pistols and a pot of paints that the baby would eat in the car back home. A theatre, abandoned, squatters sleeping in the place where the fly bars once had been, cardboard mattresses laid across metal beams and in the musty, mousy warmth of the orchestra pit.
“I don’t ask anything,” Neila mused as they sat together by candlelight. “Loneliness is a state of mind. You have to want something, to be lonely. You have to need some sort of reassurance, someone to tell you that this is who you are. I’m not lonely. I don’t want anything. I don’t need anything or anyone to tell me that… you know that, don’t you? You know that’s how I…”
They held hands, watched the fire melt.
Theo said, staring into flames, “There’s a place where the words stop. She did this and it was… and then we stop. It was terrible. It was barbaric. It was beautiful. You understand. And we do. We know. Our lives exist in many different, contradictory states, all at once. I am a liar. I am a killer. I am honest. I am fighting for a good cause. I am burning the world. We want things simple, and safe, and when they aren’t, when the truth is something complicated, something hard, or scary, we stop. The words run out. Everything becomes…”
Sound died on his lips. A dead place where he once thought he had the answers and where now he isn’t so sure.
“It’s how it happens, of course. The worst of it. Not ‘My neighbour has been taken to be burned alive, their house stolen, their children dead and I am so, so scared to speak of it.’ Just ‘They went away. Just—away.’ And we smile. And everyone else is as scared as we are, and knows what that smile means. Is grateful that you didn’t make the terror real. Thankful that you haven’t caused a stink. Because it would hurt… someone. Someone who isn’t a stranger would get hurt, if we ever managed to speak the truth of things. If we ever had the courage to say what we really think, even if it destroyed who we want the world to think we are. Who it is we think we should be. There would be too much pain. So we say nothing. Things just… trail away into a smile, which everyone understands and doesn’t have to mean a thing. We are grateful for that silence, for the thing that can’t be expressed. To fill it would be a terrible thing.”
She put her head on his shoulder, and they sat together a while longer, waiting for the morning.
At 8.45 a.m. Theo perched on a stool on the prow of the Hector, a hot mug of tea in his hand, watching the sky.
At ten minutes past nine the man called Markse appeared, walking around the bend of the towpath, hands free at his sides, coat open, head up and eyes bright.
He didn’t slow when he saw Theo.
Stopped in front of the boat.
Smiled.
Said, “There you are. Shall we?”
Theo nodded once, stood, folded the stool neatly against the wall of the cabin and followed Markse into the morning.
Two and a half hours later he returned, hands buried in his bulging pockets, chin tucked into his chest, and said, “Sorry about that. I have some pastries, if you’d like one?”
She had a cherry Danish. He had an almond croissant with margarine. Afterwards, they refilled the water tank and sailed north, towards Nottingham and the Trent.
Chapter 42
The man called Theo bought a ticket to Dover.
He paid in cash, a baseball cap covering his eyes, head turned away from the CCTV camera above the desk.
The ticket seller exclaimed, “If you use a card and register with our reward traveller scheme you can save up to 15 per cent on every trip you make with a value in excess of—”
“No, thank you.”
“Do you want to receive our special offers for—”
“No.”
“How about buy one get one free on our latest range of—”
“No.”
Her face fell, and sulkily she pulled the handle that spun the small metal plate that gave him the tickets.
He took the slow train.
It ran once every two hours, and was standing room only for non-gold-club-membership passengers. Sitting on bags was not allowed; it constituted a health and safety violation. Music played faintly, a soul-numbing assault on reggae. He stood head down, eyes up, avoiding the security cameras in the creaking, stinking carriage as it rattled south. Metal grates on the windows offered limited protection against the ragers, the children and the wild women who haunted the edges of the tracks as they chugged out of Blackheath. Condensation from the breath of the passengers, elbow to elbow, dripped waterfalls off the inside of the glass. Outside Sevenoaks three children stood on the tracks, staring, staring at the driver, daring him to mow them down.
The youngest child held a bicycle wheel in her right hand; the eldest carried a baby. The driver accelerated towards them, as he’d been trained to do, and they did not move, and did not move, and did not move, until at the last minute, in a breach of all guidelines, the driver slammed on the brakes, knocking people in the carriages to the floor, indignant screams and shrieks; one woman twisted her ankle, another man dislocated his shoulder as he grabbed, and missed, a handrail.
The driver put the brakes on too late, but that didn’t matter to the children—they’d done enough, they’d won their victory, and they scampered away delighted as the train picked up speed again and waved at the passengers inside the secure carriages as it rattled by. A couple waved back.