And on the main screen the various images of hospital wards around the world were repeating.
V596 IS NO RESPECTER OF AGE OR SOCIAL CLASS. SCIENTISTS ACROSS THE WORLD ARE TAKING PART IN AN UNPRECEDENTED COLLABORATION
Magnus switched channels, but they were either lost in static, guarded by test cards or running the same footage he had just watched.
‘It’s been like that all morning,’ Jeb said.
Magnus wanted to make a joke about how he would have predicted endless repeats of Frasier or Friends, but he could not trust himself to speak. He lifted the pile of clothes Jeb had brought him and took them into the bathroom, not bothering to ask where they had come from.
Magnus showered with the bathroom door ajar. The water was tepid, but he could feel it restoring him to life. Prison had given him an awareness of walls and corners, he realised, a reluctance to be contained. Perhaps if he survived he would become one of those feral men who lived alone in the outdoors. There had been one of them on Wyre. Their mothers had told them to keep away from him, but one long holiday afternoon Magnus and Hugh had taken the ferry over and ridden their bikes up to the battered caravan where he lived. The man was outside, dressed only in baggy khaki shorts that looked like they had seen good service in the Great War. He looked wild, right enough, a Ben Gunn scarecrow with lunatic grey hair and a beard to match. He had been feeding something to his dogs, but paused to give the boys a gummy smile and then raised a hand and beckoned to them. Magnus had taken a step forward. Hugh grabbed his arm and without saying anything to each other, they had jumped on their bikes and pedalled off, as if the de’il himself was after them.
Hugh had been stupid to kill himself. It was a stupid waste, a stupid, senseless waste. Death would have come around eventually and in the meantime he could have lived.
The mobile phone Jeb had taken from the dead man in the subway carriage was sitting on the bedside table. Magnus wrapped a towel around his waist, sat on the edge of the bed and turned it on. He could hear his mother’s telephone ringing, far away across land and water. For a moment Magnus pictured the old Trimphone that used to sit in the lobby, but it had gone years ago, banished by a cordless phone. His mother might have mislaid the handset. That was the trouble with these cordless numbers: you set them down somewhere and couldn’t put your hands on them when they rang. His mother could be dashing between the kitchen and sitting room right now, looking for it.
The answering service came on. ‘Hello, Mum?’ He hated the question mark in his voice. ‘Hi, it’s me. I hope you and Rhona are okay. There’s been a bit of bother down here, but I’m fine. I’m coming home. I’ll be with you in a couple of —’ The phone beeped, cutting him off. He tried to remember his mother’s mobile number and the number of Rhona’s phones, but they had been programmed into his own device. He had summoned them by typing in their names and had never bothered to commit them to memory.
‘Fuck.’
His mum was probably at Rhona’s right now, the pair of them worrying about him and cursing him in equal measure. Magnus dialled the only other Orkney number he knew by heart, his Aunty Gwen’s, Hugh’s mother. Once again it rang out and he left a brief message. Cordless phones were useless, he consoled himself. If the electricity went down they went with it. His mother would have done better to have stuck with the old Trimphone.
He rang 118 118, thinking he should phone the Snapper Bar, or perhaps even the police or the hospital, but they did not answer either and he switched the mobile off, scared of wasting its battery. Things would be okay, he reassured himself. He would get home to find them all waiting for him.
Jeb was sitting at a low table in the lobby where guests had once enjoyed an aperitif while they waited for cabs to take them to that evening’s destination. There was an unopened bottle of Highland Park and two whisky glasses on the table in front him. Jeb touched the neck of the malt gently with his fingertips as Magnus sat down.
‘I never had a problem with drink, how about you?’
‘I like a drink, if that’s what you mean.’
‘I meant if I open this bottle will you feel obliged to sup it all?’
There had been nights when he had killed a bottle and still been standing straight enough to make an assault on one of its comrades, but Magnus said, ‘I can take a dram and put the cap back on the bottle.’
Jeb broke the seal and poured two measures into the waiting glasses.
‘That’s what we’ll do then.’ He passed one of the charged glasses to Magnus. The malt smelled of snugs and peat fires, of funeral breath and late nights. It smelled unbearably of home and Magnus was forced to look away. He cleared his throat.
‘They made this not far from where I grew up.’ He wondered at his use of the past tense.
Jeb raised his glass. ‘To survival.’
Magnus echoed, ‘Survival.’
They both drank. Jeb nodded, as if reaffirming the toast.
‘When I first saw you, I don’t know why, but I thought you were a soft lad.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe it’s the accent.’
You decided before I opened my mouth, Magnus thought, I saw it in your eyes. He said nothing.
‘We’ve been through a fair bit these last couple of days.’ Jeb swirled the liquid in his glass, molten gold. This was another Jeb, no longer the sullen prison inmate or the crazed escapee armed with a ready chib. The military aspect that Magnus had noticed during their escape had returned. ‘The odds were against us, but here we are.’
‘These last days,’ Magnus said. He took a sip of his dram. The whisky stung his lips but it brightened his perceptions. He could see the five-star hotel for what it was — a folly designed to make those who could afford it feel superior. That kind of swank was in the past; they had entered a new world where the only rank was survival.
Magnus had told Jeb that he could take a measure and put the cap back on the bottle, but he wanted to drink it dry and go into battle. Let whisky be his lieutenant and his linesman. He reached out, topped up his dram and gestured the bottle towards Jeb’s glass. The other man shook his head.
‘I’m not used to it.’
Magnus asked, ‘How long were you inside?’
‘I’d done three years, most of it in solitary.’
‘So you’re either a bad bastard, or an antisocial bastard.’
‘A bit of both.’
The whisky was working on Magnus. He asked, ‘What did you do?’
Jeb’s voice was dangerously even. ‘Like I said before, nothing you need to worry about. I ended up on the wrong side of the law, just like you. That’s all you need to know.’
This was prison morality, Magnus supposed. Torture, robbery, extortion, violence of every stamp was tolerable, as long as the victims were male and over-age.
Jeb continued, ‘What I was trying to say is, I can survive on my own—’
‘Me too.’ Magnus tipped back the last of his drink and reached for a refill, but the bottle was gone. His eyes met Jeb’s.
‘We need to stay straight,’ Jeb said.
‘That’s your opinion.’
Jeb shook his head. ‘It’s like you’re determined to make me change my mind. What I was going to say is, I can survive on my own, we both can, but we stand more chance together. At least until we make it out of London and work out what’s going on in the rest of the country.’
‘Going to organise a census, are you?’ The over-patterned lounge seemed to sneer at them. Magnus wanted to take Jeb’s penknife and shred the complacent cushions, tear the curtains, stain the carpets with red wine and worse.