He found a coat in a wardrobe, wrapped the ribbon-faced woman in it. He put her carer in the recovery position, eyes still open, that didn’t seem right that wasn’t normal that wasn’t
took the car keys
held the woman gently under the arm
led her away.
A car in the staff car park.
A little Nissan that smelled of chips and sporty deodorant.
He put the woman in the passenger seat, and she didn’t object.
He sat in the driver’s seat, turned the engine on, and the moment he did the radio came up, far too loud, a Michael Jackson number, he turned it off quickly lest it upset the woman, and she didn’t seem to care either way.
There wasn’t a barrier to smash triumphantly as he drove out of the car park, and the woman on the ticket desk didn’t look up from her mobile phone as they passed, which Theo found a little disappointing.
Chapter 53
He parked the car on the edge of a town whose name he couldn’t find. Sodium light shot up the spire of a red-brick church. A large shop selling light fittings resembling mallards and soup bowls painted with puppies’ faces cast white light out of its long windows onto the street. A fish and chip shop was still open, selling mushy peas with English mint, beer-batter fish, and chips three-times cooked in duck fat. Theo looked at his face in the mirror, and saw bruising and a long cut from a stranger’s ring.
The woman slept.
He drove on.
Four miles from the Cotswolds border he saw the first sign: POLICE SEARCH IN EFFECT. EXPECT DELAYS.
He pulled off the road into a farmer’s field, where a herd of fat-bellied cattle regarded him suspiciously for a while before forgetting and returning to the business of eating the wet winter grass.
The woman was still sleeping.
Theo watched her a while, and wondered what the hell he’d done.
Washing his face in a brook.
Somewhere upstream there was probably a dead sheep or something, so he didn’t drink the water, just washed the blood away, which upon consideration was probably worse.
When the emergency fuel light came on, he drove the car to the edge of a ten-house village built around a small manor house that now hosted poets’ retreats. He shook the woman awake gently. Her eyes opened slowly, the pupils shrinking down tight as light met her face. Her gaze fixed on him for a moment, confused but steady. Then she said, “I need socks.”
Theo licked his lips. “Okay. I’ll see if I can find some.”
“Thank you,” she replied, and closed her eyes, and went back to sleep again.
Theo walked into the village.
Found a house with no four-by-four parked outside.
Tried the front door.
Found it unlocked.
Went inside.
Climbed stairs of soft cream carpet, leaving muddy boot tracks behind him.
Brushed past the pictures of family friends and family cats.
Used the toilet, because it was there, washed his face in hot water, found it sensational, wondered if he should have a shower, decided against it.
Found the bedroom. Stole some socks, trousers, shirts—armfuls of the stuff, he didn’t even know why he took so much.
Shoved it into plastic bags that he found in the kitchen, in the cupboard that held the washing machine.
Helped himself to bread and last night’s roast chicken, saw that this was a family who kept their ketchup in the fridge rather than the cupboard but seemed to just leave mayo standing wherever they wanted—odd that, very odd. He was at a loss to understand.
Walked back towards the car.
A curtain twitched, but he kept walking, a man with nothing to hide, and no one shouted, and the wind pushed the fallen leaves through the narrow cobbled lanes.
Chapter 54
They hid in an old stone hut where once the shepherds had tended their flocks, and which now only the kids and the teenagers used, the bored ones from the village come to drink beer and smoke pot and maybe try this sex thing.
Theo laughed despite himself as he kicked condom packets and crunched-up aluminium cans out of the way, remembering for a moment a night with Dani on the beach, cries of “Ow it’s really cold is there more blanket… my bum’s gone to sleep!” At the time it had been as close to magic as his teenage brain could really…
…but now it was something else and for a little while Theo chuckled silently as he laid the old woman down on a bed of stolen clothing, resting her head out of the wind, and as she slept, he put two pairs of socks on her feet and, having nothing better to use, another two on her hands, to keep her fingers from going blue.
For three days
“For three days,” mused Theo as they stared down at the ice encasing the Hector, thin for sure but even thin ice could do so much damage, “or maybe it was only two? I think that perhaps it was…”
For maybe only two days
They hid in that stone cottage on a hill.
Theo drove the car as far away as he could, abandoned it in a field when even fumes wouldn’t keep it moving, walked back along the paths. That took nearly four hours, and when he returned it was dark and he was cold and soaked to the skin, not by rain but by a falling dampness on the air that made him shiver uncontrollably. The woman was awake, watched him arrive with the setting sun fading behind his back and said simply, “Come here.”
He’d lain down on the bed of stolen clothes, and she’d pulled a stolen blanket over him, and held him tight, and soon she was shivering from the cold that radiated off his soaking clothes, and after a while they were both warm, and Theo slept, and so did she.
The next morning she threw up and couldn’t hold even dry bread down and squatted behind the hut and shouted at him not to come near her, not to look at her, and for a while he hid behind the stones and covered his ears as she heaved and shook and choked and spat and coughed orange liquid out of her nose. The act of vomiting made her bowels go too, her bladder her…
And then she called, “Pass me some clean clothes—don’t look!” and he passed her some clean clothes and didn’t look, head turned down to the grubby earth, and she changed in the cold and returned wearing the clothes of a woman much younger and far fatter than she and without a sound lay down beneath the blanket and waited for Theo to lie down too, so that she might take some of his warmth, which before she had so preciously given.
And she slept.
And sometimes, but not very often, Theo slept too.
Until one evening, probably on the second maybe on the third day, a group of kids appeared at the door of the hut and stared, confused, bewildered, to find it inhabited, and muttered amongst themselves, for they had meant to come here and do such naughty things as open bottles with their teeth and maybe dare each other to touch their own vaginas or penises or something truly dangerous like that and it was going to be…
But here were two people, a man and an old woman, lying on a pile of filthy clothes and it was obvious to the kids that these were intruders, interlopers, bums, because even the most intrepid walkers of the Cotswolds Ways used licensed glamping sites.
So they muttered amongst themselves and scuttled back to the village, and one—the second-biggest and most brave—threw a stone at Theo that bounced off his shoulder, and Theo woke and saw the child, and the child shrieked and ran away.
Theo shook the woman and whispered, “We have to go we have to go there were… we have to go…”
And the woman opened her eyes wearily, and saw the shadow of the children running down the hill and grumbled, “Very well.”