He tossed and turned, teeth chattering, but he couldn’t relax. The thunderstorm gradually receded, but rain continued to lash the roof of the tent, soaking the field and churning up the puddles that had formed. The wind tugged so hard at the tent poles, Jonas more than once expected to be buried beneath folds of sodden canvas.
Was that someone running his hand over the tent’s outer skin? Were those footsteps he could hear? He sat up and peered out. Amorphous darkness. He couldn’t even see the motorbike.
‘Get lost!’
No footsteps. Only the wind.
Jonas lay down again.
He was lapsing into sleep. Everything was drifting away.
Voices? Could he hear voices?
Footsteps?
Who was coming?
26
He awoke because it was hot and stuffy. At first he didn’t recognise his surroundings. Then he realised that he was lying inside the tent and the sun had warmed it up.
He felt his trousers. They were still damp. He picked up his clothes and tossed them out of the tent without giving them a thought. Taking the camping stove and two tins with him, he went outside.
The sky was cloudless, but a stiff, cool breeze was blowing. The grass beneath his bare feet was still wet. He looked round. There were no buildings in sight.
From one of the rucksacks the campers had left beneath the awning he took a pair of trousers — he had to roll up the bottoms — and a T-shirt too tight for him across the shoulders. He also pulled on a jumper. The socks he found were too small, so he cut off the toes with a knife. The sandals were also too small, but they would do at a pinch.
He strolled around while the contents of the tins were heating up in a saucepan on the stove. Fifty metres away was a clump of trees. He sauntered in that direction, then thought for a moment and walked back. Something was bothering him.
He examined the motorbike.
Both tyres were flat.
He took a closer look at them.
They’d been slashed.
*
Jonas set off in search of some village or town. His eyelids kept drooping. He was so tired, he felt tempted to sink to the ground, out here in the open, and pillow his head on his hands.
He’d been walking for a good hour when he came to a house. A car was parked outside. The key wasn’t in the ignition, but the front door was unlocked.
Beyond it lay a dim passage, ‘Hello?’ he called in English. ‘Somebody at home?’
‘Of course not,’ he answered himself politely.
Without dwelling on the noises in the house, a dark old cottage full of creaking beams, Jonas looked round the rooms in search of the car keys. He quickly averted his gaze whenever he caught sight of a mirror. Sometimes, when he glimpsed himself moving in a mirror on a wall or a wardrobe door, it looked in those gloomy rooms as if someone were standing behind him. Hemming him in, even. When that happened he lashed out with his arms but didn’t move from the spot, hard though he found it not to.
He discovered the keys in the pocket of a pair of jeans. Stuck to them was a wad of chewing gum. Despite himself, Jonas almost threw up. He didn’t know why.
*
He drove, unconscious of the passage of time and heedless of the countryside gliding past. When he came to a road sign he looked up at it, made sure he was still heading in the right direction, and slumped behind the wheel again. His mind was a blank, save for the images that flooded into his head unbidden and vanished as quickly as they had come. They left no impression behind. He was empty. Wholly intent on staying awake.
He managed to skirt London to the north. As soon as he felt satisfied he was clear of the city, he pulled up in the middle of the motorway, folded the seat back and closed his eyes.
*
4 a.m. He lowered the window. It was cold and damp outside. An unpleasant smell hung in the air, like burnt horn or molten rubber. All that broke the silence was the sound of his fingernails scratching the door panel. At this hour he would normally have heard birds twittering.
When he tried to drive off the car wouldn’t budge. Then it gave a sudden lurch and sent up a shower of red and yellow sparks, accompanied by a metallic screech.
He got out and shone the torch over the area immediately around the car. And then he directed it at the wheels.
All four tyres had been removed. The vehicle was standing on its bare hubs.
Some way from the car he came upon a smouldering mound he recognised as the remains of his tyres. A blackened tyre lever was jutting from.
There was no other car in sight. It was a long way to the next service area, and he didn’t know how far it was to the next exit road. He would have to leg it back to the last one, he supposed.
He stared irresolutely, first at the evil-smelling bonfire, then at the car. He was feeling devoid of energy. It had cost him an immense effort to get this far, and it would cost him an even greater effort to get to Smalltown and back. Such a soul-destroying thing to happen.
With his hands buried in his pockets, he set off in the direction he’d come from.
*
When he sighted a secondary road and, beyond it, a village, he scrambled down the motorway embankment. At around 6 a.m. he found a car with the key in the ignition. He debated whether to eat somewhere. First, however, he wanted to get further north. He didn’t like being so near London. It was deserted, he felt sure. He would only get lost in that vast metropolis and achieve nothing.
Jonas didn’t exceed 120 k.p.h. He would have liked to go faster, but he didn’t dare. Whatever it was, the tyre incident or a premonition, he felt he would expose himself to danger needlessly if he put his foot down too hard.
8 a.m. 9.11.2 p.m. The place names he saw on signs were familiar to him mainly from his childhood, when he was still interested in football and used to read newspaper reports about the English championship. Luton, Northampton, Coventry, Birmingham, West Bromwich, Wolverhampton, Stoke — the names of deserted towns and cities. They didn’t matter to him. All that mattered to him was the remaining distance to Scotland. Smalltown was less than five kilometres from the border.
Liverpool.
He’d taken an interest in Liverpool as a boy. Not much, because he didn’t like the football club. And not because Liverpool was the home of the Beatles. But the name had such a peculiar ring to it. There were words that seemed to change as you looked at them or said them aloud, words whose meaning seemed to disappear before your eyes. There were dead words and live ones. Liverpool was alive. Li-ver-pool. Lovely. A lovely word. Like, for example, space, when it meant the universe. Space. So apt. So lovely.
England, Scotland: ordinary words. Ger-ma-ny: an ordinary word. But Italy, that was a word with soul and music. This had nothing to do with his liking for the country, it was the word itself. Italy was the country with the loveliest name, followed by Peru, Chile, Iran, Afghanistan, Mexico. If you read the words Ireland or Finland, nothing happened. Read the word Italy, and you sensed a kind of softness. It was a mellow, supple name. Eire and Suomi sounded much better than Ireland and Finland.
Jonas had often noticed that a word could drive you crazy if you read it several times in succession. You started to wonder if it was spelt wrong. Any word, nothing extraordinary, such as ‘flicker’. F. L. I. C. K. E. R. Fli-cker. Flick. Flick-er. Every word had something unfathomable about it. It was as if it were a fake that bore no relation to what it denoted.