‘Thanks, Derek.’
‘Don’t thank me, I’ve not done anything.’
The line died abruptly and Stevie was left alone with the sound of birdsong. She sat there for a moment, watching the sunrise turning the tops of the high-rises pink. They looked mystical, like giant standing stones deposited there by some cosmic ancestor. She wondered if there would ever come a time when people would marvel at the civilisation that had created such giant structures, and ponder on what they had been trying to express.
Eighteen
A wind was rising and Stevie could hear the cord of the window blind tap, tap, tapping against the pane. She had kicked the covers off in the night and a chill had crept into her bedroom and across her body. She reached out blindly and pulled the covers up. Tap, tap, tap, the sound of plastic hitting against glass. She knew she should get up and close the window before the storm arrived and rain blew in, but she was wearier than the dead, and sleep kept towing her under. Tap, tap, tap. Stevie looked towards the sound. The blinds were raised, the window closed. Simon stood on the other side of the pane, his face pale and slack, his index finger tapping against the glass.
He mouthed, ‘Let me in.’
Stevie made to move, but then she remembered that he was dead and floating miraculously outside her third-floor window.
‘No!’
Stevie’s head shot up. She was still in her car outside the police station. Tap, tap, tap. She looked groggily at the passenger-side window and came face to face with a young woman.
‘It’s my Nan.’ The woman’s voice was muffled, her features absurdly close. ‘She’s not well.’
Stevie rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. The woman was still tapping on the window, an insistent rhythm. Her short nails had been tipped with French-polished falsies, a few of which remained.
‘You’ve got to help me.’
The stranger’s pupils were tiny. She was strung out, though whether it was from fear or something more chemical, Stevie couldn’t be sure. She lowered the window an inch.
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘I don’t know, do I? I’m not a doctor. She needs to go to hospital.’
It was a scam, Stevie was almost certain of it, but a small sliver of doubt niggled at her. She took her bag from the well of the passenger seat. There were three tens and a twenty tucked inside her purse. She slid the tens free and posted them through the gap in the window to the woman.
‘Take a taxi.’
‘The lifts are off. I need help to get her down the stairs.’
The key was still in the ignition. Stevie started the engine.
‘Ask a neighbour.’
‘None of those bastards will help me.’
The woman had tucked the money into the pocket of her jeans. Her fingers were back at the window, not tapping this time, squeezing through the gap, trying to force the glass down.
‘Let go.’ Stevie pressed the button to raise the window again, but the woman’s hands were in the way and it refused to close. She looked around for something to swat them with. All she could find was the ice scraper that had sat in the pocket of the driver’s door since last winter. She waved it at the woman. ‘I’m telling you to fuck off.’
‘Language.’ The woman was laughing now, a crazy sound, cutting through the dawn, but her fingers were persistent and the window shifted a little beneath their pressure. Stevie rapped the invading knuckles with the ice scraper and the woman shouted, ‘That fucking hurt.’
Stevie took off the handbrake and let the Mini roll slowly back, but the woman was tenacious.
‘Don’t be like that.’ She hung on, laughing more wildly now, as if this were some game between the two of them. ‘You’ll have me hand off.’
‘Let go.’
Stevie rapped at the fingertips again with the scraper, harder this time, and saw one of the false nails detach and land on the passenger seat.
‘Stop it.’ The woman laughed. ‘It hurts.’
And then suddenly a second pair of hands was inserting itself between the car roof and the window, trying to prise them wider apart. Stevie couldn’t see the person’s face, just a stretch of T-shirt and tracksuit bottom, a Nike logo. These hands were broader, with patches of hair on their fingers. The window started to give. The woman fell back laughing, leaving the man to it.
‘You’re for it now,’ she hooted. ‘Boots will get you. You should have ran me over.’
Stevie put the car in gear and drove towards the road. There was a bellow of pain, a sound of something dragging and a scream of protest from the whey-faced woman, but Stevie kept her eyes on the view ahead, and her foot on the accelerator.
When she glanced through the side window a mile or so down the road, she saw familiar streets through a smear of blood. It was only a smear, Stevie reassured herself; much less than there would have been had she severed one of the man’s fingers. She kept the window down the fraction she had already lowered it, letting the cool air hit her face, hoping it would be enough to keep her awake until she got home.
The pavements had the blighted look they took on after a heavy weekend, littered with the remnants of fast-food feasts and stained with piss and pakora sauce. Stevie stopped at a red light and a cleaner carrying a bucket and mop crossed the road. The cleaner’s hair was concealed beneath a dark blue headscarf, her clothes covered by a neat tabard. It was hard to believe there could be anything seriously amiss in a city where such women went calmly about their business.
The traffic lights flashed and then shifted to green. Stevie drove on slowly. There were other cars on the road now and she rolled the window open wider. This was one of the intersections of the day, when too-early-to-work businessmen and women crossed paths with the last of the staggering-home crew; the time when those easing themselves into the day, the early-morning joggers and sippy-cup-coffee crew, shared the streets with night workers and the beginning-to-come-down-from-whatever-had-kept-them-up-all-night crowd.
Stevie felt her eyes grow heavy and turned on the car radio. A farming programme was on, the presenter interviewing a scientist about the likelihood of the virus crossing species. We all remember the panic surrounding the H1N1 virus commonly known as bird flu. The fear then was that the illness would pass from birds to humans. Are you worried that this current virus, which has been christened V5N6, might infect cattle and other livestock?
Stevie turned off the radio and stopped in front of another red light. A shoal of cyclists slid to a halt around her car. For the first time in ages she noticed the variety of the people, the assortment of skin colour and styles that had secretly delighted her when she moved to London. A pink-faced man in a business suit and cycling helmet put a hand on the roof of the Mini and leant insolently against it. Some other day she might have unlocked the handbrake and rolled gently forward just for the pleasure of seeing him wobble, but instead she gazed at the miracle of him: his crumpled fawn suit; the red sock revealed by his rolled-up trouser leg. She glanced up at his face and saw a white cotton mask stretched across his mouth and nose.
On the other side of the road the proprietor of a Turkish café flung a bucket of hot, soapy water across the pavement in front of his shop and began sweeping it into the gutter. Shelf stackers were busy unpacking boxes inside the Tesco Metro. The sun was fully up now. The warmth of it on her face seemed to soothe her grazes. The lights changed again. Stevie let the cyclists dash ahead. She kept her eyes on the road, reached a hand into the glove compartment, found her sunglasses and put them on.