‘So, what brought you back?’
‘I got homesick. I ended up hating everything about my life there. The jobs were terrible, the places I lived in were worse. I spent five years doing that, and every day ground me down a little more. So I found a boat that would take me back, and went and saw Michael.’
‘You knew him from before?’
‘Yeah,’ Alex said. ‘He used to be a friend. A good one. Back when I lived with Mum and Dad, he worked at our local church. Called himself Mat back then. Michael Anthony Tilton. Then he went travelling. When he got back, he took that job in east London, and I noticed small changes in him — like, he never talked about his family any more, and he got uncomfortable when I still called him Mat. Andrew was changing him too, I suppose, just not with the drugs and the torture and the fear. I went and visited him at the church a few times before I disappeared. The last time was just before I killed Al.’
‘That was when you bought the birthday card in the box?’
He nodded.
‘Why did you go to Michael after you came back?’
‘I thought he would know what to do. I thought I could trust him. I couldn’t go to Mum, because of Dad. I couldn’t go to John, because of his job. Kath wouldn’t have understood. None of them would have. I thought Mat might. So, he made a few calls and arranged for me to be driven up to the farm. They were fine for a few hours. Took my picture, talked to me, told me everything would be okay. But do you know what they did after that?’
I shook my head.
‘They knocked me out. I turned my back on them once, and they knocked me out. And then… Then they tried to take my memory away. I could feel my body pleading for the drugs, but I had some fight in me. I managed to cling on to something. And so, even in the darkest times, I could see the outline of the people I loved. Could hear things Mum had said to me. See places I’d been with Kath. I used that as strength, to help me get out of there.’
‘Do you know how they faked your death?’
He nodded. ‘They used Simon.’
‘Simon was supposed to be you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘We had the same blood type. I remember that from when Simon and I used to give blood at uni. That made it easier to disguise the fact it wasn’t me in that car. And I think maybe Andrew and the others on the farm… they liked the symmetry of it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, one friend making the ultimate sacrifice for the other.’
Based on what I’d found at the farm, I imagined Alex was right.
‘Simon had been on the farm for a few months. They’d fed him drugs — but he’d fought them. He fought back against the programme. He pushed down the terror he felt at everything that was going on, and he pushed back at them. But in the end he pushed back too hard. One night, when one of the women came in with his meal, he launched himself at her. He beat her so badly she lay there until morning in a pool of her own blood.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘There was a girl with me in the room with the rings. Rose. She was drying out when they put me in there. She wouldn’t speak at night, because of Legion. She knew, at night, he watched us. But, in the day, before she started to disappear into the programme, she would talk a little and tell me things she had heard. And Simon was one of the things she heard…’
Darkness. And then light. Hands grab at him and pull him out of the boot of the car. Cool air bristles against his skin as he’s dropped on to a patch of grass. A foot comes down and pins him to the ground. He can feel wet mud against one side of his face and the last weak rays of evening sunlight against the other. Fields and a dirt road stretch out in front of him, and an old Toyota is parked further down, rope attached to its underside.
‘So, they killed him in that car crash.’
‘Yes. When I saw him, when I watched them take him away on that leash, it was the day after he beat that woman. I could smell the petrol on him right from the other end of the corridor. It was only afterwards, when I found out I was supposed to be dead, that I realized why — and what they did to him.’
‘They used your teeth.’
Alex left one hand on the wheel and peeled back his lips with the other. He placed a finger and a thumb on his two front teeth. And pulled. The teeth came away.
They were all false.
‘One of the women on the farm used to be a dentist. They put my teeth into Simon’s mouth, plied him with so much alcohol he could hardly stand, and doused him with petrol. Then they led him out of that farm on a leash, and drove him nine hours down to Bristol, so it looked like I’d been close to home the whole time. Simon was supposed to be me.’
Through the windscreen of the Toyota he can see a car close in front. Maybe only three or four feet away. The two vehicles are attached by a length of rope.
Everything in the car smells of petroclass="underline" the dashboard, the seats, his clothes. He glances at the speedo. They’re still accelerating. Sixty. Seventy. Eighty. He tries to move, but can’t. He looks down. His arms and body are paralysed.
Suddenly, there are headlights up ahead.
And something pings.
There’s the brief, grinding sound of metal against metal, like a clasp being released. Brakes squeal. Then the car in front veers left, the rope trailing behind it, swinging across the road.
A horn blares.
Simon desperately tries to jab at the brakes, the insides of the Toyota swimming in the light from the lorry. But his feet don’t move. Not an inch.
And then there is only darkness.
Alex pulled into a parking bay at a train station about a mile from my house. I gave him enough money to get a ticket, and some more so he could get wherever he needed to go. He climbed out of the car and shook my right hand.
For the first time I glimpsed the wounds in his fingers.
‘It’s ten o’clock, Alex,’ I said.
‘I know.’
‘Why don’t you just stay at mine?’
‘I’m still on the run,’ he said. ‘I think the less time you spend with me, and the less you know about where I’m going, the better it is for you.’
He got ready to go, but then turned back. He ducked his head inside the car again, and stared at me for a moment.
‘Do you know what the last thing you hear is?’
I looked at him. ‘Last thing before what?’
‘Before dying.’
I knew. I’d heard it myself when I’d been bound to the cross.
‘The last thing you hear is the sea,’ Alex said, and nodded as if he knew I understood. ‘Waves crashing. Sand washing away. Seagulls squawking. Dogs running around on the beach. If that’s the last sound I hear in this life, it won’t matter to me. Because I like that sound. You know why?’
I shook my head.
‘It reminds me of sitting on the sand, in a cove in Carcondrock, with the person I loved.’
After that, he turned around and disappeared into the crowds.
48
I didn’t want to go home, so I stayed the night in a motel across the street from the train station. The woman booking me in glanced up a couple of times at the dried cuts around my cheeks, at the streaks of purple and black on the side of my head, but didn’t say anything. As I limped to my room, I could see her reflected in a thin strip of glass by the elevators. She was looking again. My body was exhausted, and a dull ache coursed through my system, but the cling film had helped to quell some of the pain, even if the injuries to my face were more difficult to hide.