You’re not like any sign I’ve ever seen.
Her hand appeared as a slow blur to my left and came to rest on the back of my neck. It was my turn to go still. I waited to see what she would do next.
At that moment footsteps sounded on the walkway outside. I was hoping they would go past — there were plenty of rooms beyond ours — but they stopped and somebody knocked twice, firmly. Odell’s hand tightened in my hair. She wanted me not to move. The knocking came again, harder this time.
‘Open up.’
We lay on the bed, our faces turned towards the door.
‘I know you’re in there.’
It was the manager’s voice — the man who had served us in the bar downstairs. He rattled the door-knob, then swore under his breath. There was another silence, during which nothing happened. Finally his footsteps receded.
Odell levered herself upright. Without looking at me, she tucked her T-shirt back into her trousers, then bent quickly and did up the laces on her boots. She sat for a moment with both hands braced on her knees. She shook her head.
‘We’re going to have to leave,’ she said.
She put her coat on. Picking up a heavy glass ashtray from the top of the TV, she went over to the door and listened, then she opened it and peered out. Bag in hand, I stood behind her. Though it had stopped raining, I could hear water everywhere, dripping and tapping. The cars parked near the supermarket glistened. Out of the air came the quaint, exotic scent of petrol.
I followed Odell along the walkway to the stairs. On the first floor we tiptoed past the door that led to reception. Then down another flight, to street-level. We paused in the shadows. There was nobody about. Odell placed the ashtray on the ground at the base of the wall, then darted across the alley and into the carpark where she crouched between two cars. I was only seconds behind her.
Halfway across the car-park, we looked back. The manager was standing at the foot of the stairs. His paunchy upper body faced out into the night, but his head was turned to one side, the nose lifted, predatory. As we watched, two men joined him. I would have been prepared to bet that one of them wore crocodile boots. Stooping, the manager picked up the ashtray. He seemed to examine it for a moment, his chin tucked into his open shirt-collar, then his arm swung sideways and the ashtray landed further up the alley, a dull ringing that sounded like a hammer being brought down on an anvil.
We moved towards the service station, keeping our heads below the car windows. Still doubled over, we skirted the forecourt, its pumps lit by a fierce mauve-white glare, and ended up against the side-wall of a bar. Half-smoked cigarettes, the smell of urine. A used syringe. Odell put a hand on my arm. Her gaze had fixed on the row of motorbikes that stood outside the bar. They looked oddly muscular, their bodies gleaming in the sultry light. She told me to stay put until she gave me a signal, but when the signal came I was to move fast. I leaned against the wall, my eyes on the hotel entrance. The men had vanished. There was only a yellow rectangle now, divided into horizontal segments by the stairs. How I wished we hadn’t left that room on the third floor. I hadn’t known what was going to happen next and, if I had interpreted Odell’s behaviour correctly, nor had she, but the uncertainty had been fertile, exquisite — a kind of pleasure in itself. Who could say where it might have led? And then that knock on the door, that voice, and the whole situation had been instantly dismantled. I wasn’t sure how something so unlikely, so delicate, could possibly occur again. I turned to see where Odell had gone. She was loitering beside a bike that had a naked woman painted on its petrol tank. The woman was on fire. Beneath the flames that licked at her thighs were the words Burn Baby Burn. Swinging a leg over the saddle, Odell reached sideways and down. I heard a sudden snarling, deep and guttural. Before I could work out how she had done it, she was motioning to me. I hurried over and fitted myself behind her.
The next thing I knew, we were on the main road, doing fifty, her hair whipping against my cheeks. I felt I was following her through a forest, branches springing at me from the darkness.
When I opened my mouth, it filled with wind.
We joined the motorway. The traffic thinned to nothing. It was late now, almost two in the morning. From time to time I glanced round to see whether anyone was coming after us — the men from the hotel, the bikers from the bar — but the road stayed empty. It all looked too close back there, somehow, as though everything we were running from was just over our shoulders.
Thirty miles from the capital, we took a slip-road up to a roundabout. As we crossed the bridge over the motorway, I saw a cluster of single headlights to the north. I removed one hand from Odell’s waist and pointed.
She could have accelerated. By the time the bikes passed by, we would have been long gone. Instead, she braked and shifted into neutral. She switched off the lights, but left the engine turning over. When I thought about it later, I decided I would have done the same. It was something to do with trying to pinpoint the whereabouts of our pursuers. If it had been left to my imagination, I would have been unable to rid myself of the conviction that they could appear at any moment.
I could hear them now, their engines blending into one low growl. Would they be able to see us from down there? Would they even think to look up? Had it occurred to them that we might be watching? Apparently not. One by one, they flashed beneath the bridge. The bikes registered with brief but visceral force, like a series of punches. Then they were beyond us, heading south.
They might not have been after us at all, of course. They might have been another motorcycle gang entirely. I watched their tail-lights sink rapidly into the night — a handful of red berries dropped in dark water.
There was a click as Odell shifted into first. For the next hour she took less obvious roads and kept to the speed limit. I had my arms wrapped round her waist, and my upper body was moulded against her back. We both shook with cold. Parts of me felt as if they were plated with metal.
Finally, at half-past three, we rode into the city centre — Thermopolis at last — the shop windows all lit up but nobody around, the bike in low gear, its engine popping and crackling in the eerie, incandescent silence.
‘I’ve got another story for you,’ Odell said. ‘It’s the last one.’
We had checked into the Hyatt Regency, on a special weekend rate. Lying in bed with the curtains open, twenty-seven floors up, I could stare out into a forest of concrete, glass and steel. Office lights were left on throughout the night in what I imagined to be a deliberate configuration. Only people who worked in high finance would be able to decipher their true meaning. Odell lay beside me, fresh from the shower, a towel wrapped turban-style around her head. How would I survive without her stories? How would I survive without her?
An hour earlier she had joined me at the window. Between two towers we could just make out the river, identifiable only by the absence of illumination. Beyond it lay the murky, suicidal boroughs of Cledge. Given the east-facing aspect of our room, we hadn’t been able to see the Red Quarter, but it was there, behind us, no more than a mile away. ‘Not far now,’ Odell had murmured. Though I knew what she was saying, I couldn’t agree. The distance I had to cover seemed bigger than ever. Crossing a border illegally was daunting enough — I hadn’t forgotten those Yellow Quarter guards — but what if I succeeded? What would happen then? When I whispered the word ‘home’ to myself, I felt panic, a swirl of vertigo.