His parents had told him that there were people called “strangers,” and that they might offer him a bag of sweets, or a ride in their car, and that he should always say “No, thank you,” but somehow, that afternoon, he forgot everything he’d been taught. Oddly enough, it was the woman’s harshness that drew him across the pavement. She didn’t make the slightest attempt to be friendly, let alone seductive. On the contrary. If he couldn’t be of any use to her, she would have to find somebody else, and he could see that thought annoyed her.
“I wondered later,” Trevor said, his eyes wide now, “whether she might have been nervous, you know?” He paused. “I mean, what if I was one of the first?”
At this point, Billy still wasn’t quite sure what Trevor was talking about, but he decided not to interrupt.
Trevor went on. When he stopped at the kerb, the woman told him that she was lost. Did he know the area? He nodded. Good, she said. If he would just get into the car, maybe he could show her the way. Once again, there was no subtlety in her approach, nothing remotely clever or ingratiating. He asked her where she was going. He called her “Miss.” Instead of answering, she cocked her head, appraising him, and then said something about him looking bright as a button: if he couldn’t help her, she said, nobody could. Only then did he feel a flicker of misgiving. It was because she had flattered him. The hardness, the impatience — they were believable; they seemed real, and he trusted them. But the flattery felt different, like something shiny that wasn’t actually worth anything. So why did he get into the car? He didn’t have an explanation. It still puzzled him, even today. Round the front he went, her made-up eyes tracking him across the windscreen. When he reached the passenger’s side, the door was already open. All he had to do was climb in and pull it shut.
“Give it a good slam,” the woman told him. “We don’t want you falling out now, do we?”
Trevor looked away into the room. “Fuck,” he murmured, then reached for his drink and finished it. He poured himself another glass, right up to the brim, and held the bottle out to Billy, but Billy shook his head. He’d had enough.
“It was so quiet,” Trevor said. “I don’t remember any noise at all.” He paused again. “No, wait, that’s wrong. Once, on a bend, I heard a motorbike. That was him, of course. He was following.”
Only now did Billy understand what Trevor had been telling him, and he leaned forwards in his chair, clear-headed suddenly, as though all the alcohol had drained out of his body. “So you saw him too?” he said.
Trevor closed his eyes. “We haven’t got to that bit yet.”
They drove on for a while, and the woman kept her eyes fixed on the road. She braked, she indicated; everything was so normal that he forgot what he was doing there. Then he came to. She hadn’t asked him for directions; she hadn’t spoken to him at all, in fact. He glanced at her, and it wasn’t her nails or her hair that he saw, but her blunt nose and her jutting chin. Any glamour there might have been had gone, and he was beginning to suspect that something might be wrong.
“I thought you were lost,” he murmured.
The woman didn’t seem to hear him.
Some time later, he said, “You haven’t asked me which way to go.”
“We’re going to my gran’s house first,” she told him. “I forgot my gloves.”
She parked in an area he didn’t recognise. It looked poorer than where he lived. Rubbish was blowing about: bubble-gum wrappers, pages from the paper, plastic bags. On the roof of a nearby house a TV aerial quivered. It was windy out that day. He brought his eyes back down. A brown bottle rolled across the pavement, then stopped and rolled the other way. He remembered the sound of that bottle with such clarity that it might have happened half an hour ago. But it was thirty years now, thirty years…
“Come inside for a second,” the woman said. “Come and help me find those gloves.”
He knew what she was up to. She was trying to make something that was actually a chore sound like a game — grown-ups were always doing that — but she wasn’t very good at it. There was no warmth in her voice, no sense of adventure or intrigue. He thought he’d better play along, though. If he didn’t she would only get cross.
She came round to his side of the car and opened the door, then she took him by the hand and pulled him out. She hadn’t used his name, he realised. She hadn’t even asked him what he was called.
“My name’s Trevor Lydgate,” he said. “What’s yours?”
“Imagine,” Trevor said, putting a hand up to his forehead. “Imagine if she’d told me. Not that it would have meant anything to me. It wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone, not then.” He laughed a precarious laugh, high and thin, and then continued.
Her hand still gripping his, they walked along a path next to a white fence. Her gran’s house was on the corner, at the end of the row. The woman opened the front door and pushed him into a narrow hallway. A cigarette-machine was fixed to the wall. He caught sight of his face in a chrome panel. He looked like someone pretending to be Trevor Lydgate, and had to turn away quickly because it made him feel strange. There was no sign of the woman’s gran. Maybe she’d gone out. He heard the motorbike again, much louder this time, and glanced over his shoulder to see where it was, but the woman was blocking his view. She seemed bigger now she was standing up. She seemed to fill the hall. As he tried to look past her, she gave him another push.
“They’re probably upstairs,” she said.
The gloves, she meant.
Up they went. Him first, her following behind.
She took him to a small room at the back of the house. There was hardly any furniture, just a two-bar electric fire and a single bed with a bare mattress. There was no carpet. Only boards. On the mattress was a Kodak camera. The curtains were drawn, but light from outside filtered through the flowery material, enough to see by. On the floor were some magazines, with men and women doing things to each other.
The woman nodded when she saw that he had noticed them. “Have a look, if you like.”
He shook his head.
She seemed to have forgotten all about the gloves. She was just staring at him, and there was greed on her face, and also a kind of pride, an expression that he didn’t understand until much later.
The air in the room was motionless and stale, and smelled of something vaguely familiar, but private, secret. It was a smell he knew, but not too well, and he couldn’t quite identify it. Mostly, he was trying not to look at the magazines.
“It’s cold in here,” the woman muttered, and she bent to plug in the electric fire.
A door opened and closed downstairs. He heard footsteps in the hall. The woman’s back stiffened, as if she were anxious or fearful, and that was when he panicked.
The next few seconds were hard to piece together. What he saw wasn’t continuous. It came to him in vivid fragments. Flashes and splinters. As though the film of his life had been slashed to ribbons and then taped back together. He didn’t really know how he managed to get away. There were times when he found it impossible to believe. There were times when he thought he must have been in that room for longer, but part of him had shut down, blotting those bits out. There were times when he searched his body for traces of the things they must have done to him. There were times too when he felt that he might still be in there, and that all this — he waved a hand to indicate the room, the hotel, and everything outside and beyond — all this was just fantasy or wishful thinking.
The woman was bent over, by the fire. He moved suddenly and fast, slipping past her, even though she was between him and the door. She let out a cry, as if, in attempting to escape, he had hurt her. Her hand clawed at him, but he eluded it. Then he was on the landing. A yellow wall, music coming from below. Through the banisters, he saw somebody walking up the stairs. A man. Head lowered, the man hadn’t noticed him. Trevor rounded the corner and hurled himself down the stairs so hard that he knocked the man off balance.