‘I may have the sweats but I’m not so desperate I need your help.’
This time the varnish was the pale blue of a Mediterranean sky. It spread across the floor like a promise of summer. Stevie jerked open the changing-room door and slammed it behind her. The sound of the producer’s laughter followed her down the corridor.
The lights that normally illuminated the car park were out. Stevie stood for a moment on the back steps of the studio, letting her eyes adjust to the dark, thinking of Joanie, alone in her nest of tubes and wires. Joanie had a sweetness that made people want to please her. She would have managed to persuade Rachel to go to hospital. Stevie wondered if she should go back and try again, but stepped out into the gloom of the forecourt, her pumps silent against the tarmac. Tiredness and the shock of Rachel’s attack had chilled her. She took a silk scarf from her jacket pocket and wrapped it around her neck.
Alone with Rachel, in the brightly lit changing room, it had seemed as if they were on the brink of the world’s end, but now she could see a chain of car headlights driving along the motorway in the distance. A plane passed overhead on its way to Stansted or Heathrow. She stopped and watched its landing lights blinking until it slipped into the darkness. Stevie took a deep breath and smelt freshly mown grass. She was alive in a world where people still cut their lawns. She let out a long, shivering sob of relief. She would go back, tell Rachel that they had both succumbed to mass hysteria and persuade her to go to hospital.
As Stevie turned to retrace her steps she glimpsed a figure, dark against the blackness. A hand reached out and grabbed her satchel. Stevie snatched it free and ducked his blow, hooking the bag’s strap over her head, stringing it fast across her body. She spun in the direction of her Mini and ran, reaching into her pocket for her keys, but her assailant was swift. He caught her by the shoulder. Stevie dug her elbow backwards, aiming at the vulnerable point in his stomach, letting out a yell that stayed in her throat, sudden and airless, held there by a pair of strong hands twisting her scarf tight around her neck. Her heel made contact with her attacker’s shin and he swore: ‘You fucking bitch.’ Her kick seemed to spur him on. He wrapped his arm tight around her neck and leant backwards, still gripping her scarf. His free fist slammed into her solar plexus and he lifted her from the ground, taking her weight on his chest and raising her up, Stevie realised, so that he could let her drop, and allow gravity to do the work of breaking her neck. She kicked out again, but he had levered her free of the range of his body and her legs pedalled uselessly in the air. Her face was touching his. She felt his breath, warm and ragged, close as a lover’s. Wool bristled against her cheek and she guessed that he was wearing a balaclava. She wanted to pull it free, but her hands were intent on scrabbling against his arm, desperate to tear his grip from her throat.
The muscles in her legs were screaming. Stevie kicked out again, summoning all the stamina wrung from years of spin classes and Pilates sessions. White spots flashed on her retinas. She bucked and buckled, hearing the man’s heavy breathing, knowing that he was growing tired too, and that her only chance was to unbalance him and bring them both down. She was losing consciousness. The laptop battered against her groin and she wished she had surrendered the bag rather than fastening it around her body. She had survived the sweats only to die for Simon’s secret, without ever discovering what it was.
Stevie hit the tarmac hard. The man’s weight was upon her and she wriggled like a netted fish, struggling to pull herself loose. Someone was shouting in a language she didn’t understand. A boot hit her in the ribs and something gave, but she knew somehow that the kick had been meant for her assailant. Stevie grabbed the balaclava, dragged it off the man and rolled free of the fight. She scrambled to her feet. One of her shoes had got lost in the struggle. She tore the other one off and threw it at the man on the ground.
Jirí was on top of him now, putting his fist into her attacker’s face. The security guard’s body interrupted her view of the man, but she got an impression of broad, pale features beneath a shock of bright hair. Jirí looked up at her, ghost-white in the dark, and shouted, ‘Run!’ Stevie held on to her battered ribs and made for her car, pressing the key fob in her pocket, sobbing with relief at the electronic beep that told her the doors were unlocked. Someone was shouting behind her, but Stevie didn’t look back. She scrambled behind the wheel, locked the door and fumbled her keys into the ignition, swearing at her own clumsiness. The engine caught. Stevie shifted the Mini into gear, reversed out of the space and skidded across the car park, turning the headlights to full beam.
The security guard was alone on the tarmac, clutching his bloodied face and trying to get to his feet. Stevie swerved around him and caught her attacker in the shaft of her headlights. She saw his face, his open mouth and panicked eyes, and knew she had never seen him before, but that she would recognise him again. Stevie pressed her foot hard on the accelerator, hearing the engine whine as she ripped through the gears. ‘Fucking bastard.’ Her lips moved but her throat was raw, and no sound came out. The man was zigzagging now, trying to evade the beam of light. Stevie lost him for a second, fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck, and then caught his dark shape running across the grass verge that edged the car park. She bumped the Mini over the kerb and slammed on the brakes as the perimeter fence loomed in front of her. Stevie’s chest hit the steering wheel and she swore again, a spray of spit and invective, as she saw the man scale the railings that secured the station and boost himself over the top. Her assailant gave one quick look back at her and then he was gone.
Stevie had no memory of switching off the engine, or of leaving the car, but she was outside. Her hands were gripping the metal bars of the fence, and she was staring through them at the empty road beyond. The grass was wet against her bare feet, her satchel still strung across her body.
‘I’m sorry, he got away.’ Blood and saliva thickened Jirí’s accent. She turned and saw him standing behind her. His nose was bleeding and blood drenched the front of his white shirt. He raised a hand to his face; the other clutched his cap. ‘Are you okay?’
‘He was trying to kill me.’
‘It looked that way.’ The security guard turned away, spat into the grass, coughed and spat again. Stevie found a tissue in her pocket and passed it to him. ‘Thanks.’ Jirí dabbed at his face but the tissue was too insubstantial and he untucked his shirt from his trousers and used its hem to wipe off the worst of the blood. ‘What is he? A jealous boyfriend?’
He made it sound as if such things were only to be expected.
‘No,’ Stevie said. ‘My boyfriend’s dead.’
Jirí shook his head. The blood was still leaking from his nose and he dabbed at it again with his bloodied shirt. His uniform trousers were too wide for him and he had belted them tight to take up the slack. Stevie said, ‘I need to go.’
‘That man, did he kill him? Your boyfriend?’
The threads of car headlights still glimmered in the distance but they no longer seemed reassuring. It was three in the morning, yet they were queued along the motorway as if a mid-morning rush hour had been stalled by roadworks.
‘No, he was unwell.’
Stevie thought Jirí would ask whether Simon had fallen victim to the sweats but the security guard merely looked at the ground and said, ‘I am sorry.’
It was quiet in the car park after the shouts of the fight and the roar of the car engine, but the smell of petrol still hung, dark and chemical, in the air. It reached into her lungs, and then slipped down to her belly, evoking a memory of long car rides and travel sickness. Stevie bent over and threw up in the grass. Jirí took a step backwards.