“Hi,” said a female voice, far too brightly for the hour, whatever hour it was.
“What time is it?”
“It’s, um, hold on a sec… it’s quarter past midnight.”
“And you are?”
“I’m pissed.”
Sean rubbed his face. “Emma, is that you?”
“Yep. Guilty. Sorry, did I wake you up?”
“Just a little. What do you want?”
“To see you.”
Sean flicked on his bedside lamp. The room leapt away from him; shadows lengthened on the walls. “Emma. It’s late. I’m up early for work in the morning.”
“I wanted to apologise.”
“What for?” The taste of yesterday’s beer was thick in the back of his throat, as was the bitterness that had filled him listening to Vernon, pretending to be impressed. Pretending to be drawn to him.
“I remember you from school, okay? I just pretended not to because… well, because of the embarrassment of it all.”
“You don’t have to explain to me, Emma.”
Panicky now. On the verge of tears. “Can I see you? I won’t take up much of your time.”
Thinking of Naomi. How he should have helped. How he could have been there for her. In time.
Sean said, “Where?”
BRIDGE FOOT WAS still busy at this hour. The nearby nightclub was a circus of lurid costumes and loud people emboldened by alcohol. Sean drew the collar of his coat more tightly around him as women in scant dresses and men in shirt sleeves wrestled over cabs or queued at a portable burger bar. It was strange to be on the street at this hour without the compulsion to sort out disputes. They sold ties at the burger bar, for hapless individuals who turned up at the club hoping to be let in but had failed to take note of the dress code. Inscrutable bouncers stood like footballers in a wall defending a free kick. They muttered into headsets that left their hands free to beat the shit out of drunken punters.
Traffic weaved around him. Under the bridge, the Mersey was sacrament-black. He watched it coursing thickly away, wondering idly how many bodies had been cast into it over the years.
“Hi.”
Emma was still a little drunk. Her face was bleached by the flares of sodium and neon, her lips slashes of grey. She was wearing a V-neck sweater and a pair of cargo pants. The tip of her nose was moist.
“Let’s go and find us a coffee,” said Sean.
They walked up Bridge Street to the town centre. People were flooding through it in various stages of inebriation. One of the big chain pizza restaurants was still open and the waitress wasn’t bothered that they didn’t want to order any food. By the time their coffees arrived, the town centre was emptying and Emma’s eyes were having trouble focusing.
Sean said, “You been at anything other than the bottle tonight?”
Emma giggled. “A little draw, that’s all.”
“Sounds like you spoilt a perfect evening to be with me.”
“Icing on the cake, Sean.” She reached out a hand to pat one of his. “You remember Gill Chancellor?”
Sean nodded. He had had an awful feeling that this meeting might deteriorate into some maudlin retrospective, but now that it was happening, he didn’t mind all that much. “She used to be good at athletics, didn’t she? High jump.”
Emma started laughing uncontrollably. “Any kind of jump, more like. She turned into a right old bike.”
“Why do you mention her?”
“She used to fancy you. But you never noticed.”
Sean sipped his coffee. It was surprisingly good. “You should have told me.”
“I might have done, but you were traipsing after some other girl all the time. It was funny. You looked like you were being led around on an invisible leash. We’d see this girl, Naomi, and we’d look at each other and say something like, ‘Three seconds,’ and three seconds later, you’d walk by. You were like one of those Bisto kids.” Emma cracked up again, but the laughter was a little less shrill. The coffee was helping.
Sean finished his cup and sat back. He didn’t feel ready to talk to Emma about Naomi, but it felt as though the shape of the evening was being taken out of his hands. Emma was moulding the substance of their night together. She kept flashing him glimpses of it, and though he couldn’t recognise what she was aiming for, gradually form was emerging, to the extent that, by the time they had paid the bill and returned to the street, the reason for her need to see him had become clear.
“Naomi was killed, not that long ago,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you that. I know you were close to her once.”
Sean put his arms around her and started to laugh.
“Cry all you like, poor thing. You poor, poor thing.”
“I’m not crying,” Sean tried to say, but now he could see that she was right. He was crying. He was crying as though his life depended upon it.
They went back to Emma’s flat. She drew him a hot bath that smelled of vanilla. While he was soaking, she entered the bathroom and handed him a Bloody Mary. Then she sat on the toilet, unashamedly gazing at his body in the water while she rolled a joint on the back of a fashion magazine. It felt like the most natural thing in the world. After a short while, she unshowily began to undress, dropping her clothes in a pile. Then she lit the joint and got into the bath with him.
“You don’t mind, do you?” she asked, when the water had settled.
THEY LAY IN bed together, but they did not make love. Sean sensed a bruise in Emma’s life somewhat like his own. Fresh, painful and discolouring everything that made her who she was. Perhaps her impingement on him was a way in which she could begin to help the bruise heal. Her voice was too tiny, too innocent for the words it contained. “I think,” she said. “I think I’ll go back to work tomorrow.”
“What do you mean, work?”
“You know.”
Moonlight made a slow swerve across the white walls of her bedroom. The deep, resonant tick of a grandmother clock climbed the stairs to him from the hallway. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder and in sleep she burrowed closer into the warmth of his body. He felt a breast spread languidly across his ribcage. Her heartbeat was rapid and fluttery. He wondered if she was feigning sleep; it didn’t matter.
Into the dark, he talked about what he had found that day in London. Whether Emma was asleep or not, by the time he had finished talking, his shoulder was wet where her face met it. She never asked him about Naomi again and he never offered any more information about her. But over the coming weeks, they would both learn more about Naomi than they could ever have hoped, or feared, to discover.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: DOOM LOOP
IT MUST HAVE been the dust from the explosions causing the riot of colours as the sun fell towards the Derbyshire hills. Mist layered the fields surrounding the shattered motorway, thickening by the minute. For miles, the ribbon of road sported knots of destruction where bombs had detonated. Carrying Elisabeth had protected him against the cold, but now he saw how Sadie was walking with her arms crossed, her jaw set rigidly. It would be night soon and the temperature would plummet.
They had travelled perhaps three or four miles, that was all. Will was exhausted. Twice he had had to stop to make repairs to the stretcher. It would not hold up to much more of a battering. But maybe it wouldn’t have to. Elisabeth was regaining some of her colour and had woken up a few times, the first in order to be violently sick. Hopefully, if she rallied quickly, they would be able to improve their progress.
“Can we stop?” Sadie asked.
“That’s just what I was thinking,” said Will.
A church spire was visible above a clutch of trees, about a third of a mile to the east of the motorway. Will set off for it. As they moved into the canopy’s shade, a thick burring noise reached to them from above. Three stubby aircraft with squared-off wings scooted low over the motorway, picking at its ruined length, and the areas around it, with powerful searchlights.