We had been wrong in the film, I thought. We had focused on the mental state of the Man too much, to the neglect of the physical. We hadn’t known about legs like lead and ankles swollen to giant puffballs. I had long ago shed my socks, and would have had as much chance of forcing my shoes on again as of flying.
We hadn’t known the abdomen would become agonisingly distended with gas or that the seat belts would strain across it like hawsers. We hadn’t guessed that the eyes would feel like sand paper when the lachrymal glands dried up. We had underestimated what dehydration did to the throat.
The overwhelming heat battered all emotion into numbness. There was nothing anywhere but pain, and no prospect that it would stop.
Except, of course, in death.
In the late afternoon an elephant came and uprooted the tree the giraffe had browsed from.
That should be allegorical enough for Evan, I thought confusedly. Elephants were the indestructible destroyers of the wilderness.
But Evan was miles away.
Evan, I thought, Evan... Oh God, Evan... come... and find me.
The elephant ate a few succulent leaves off the tree and went away and left it with its roots in the air, dying for lack of water.
Before dark I did write a few more sentences. My hands trembled continually, and folded into tight cramps, and were in the end too weak to hold the pencil.
It fell down on the floor and rolled beneath my seat. I couldn’t see it, or pick it up with my swollen toes.
Weeping would have been a waste of water.
Night came again and time began to blur.
I couldn’t remember how long I had been there, or how long it was until Wednesday.
Wednesday was as far away as Charlie and I wouldn’t see either of them. I had a vision of the pool in the garden with the kids splashing in it, and it was the car that seemed unreal, not the pool.
Tremors shook my limbs for hours on end.
The night was cold. Muscles stiffened. Teeth chattered. Stomach shrieked to be fed.
In the morning, the condensation on the windows was so heavy that water trickled in rivulets down the glass. I could only, as ever, reach the small area near my head. I licked it weakly. It wasn’t enough.
I hadn’t the energy any more to open the window for a change of air: but cars were never entirely airtight, and it wouldn’t be asphyxiation which saw me off.
The inevitable sun came back in an innocent rosy dawn, gentle prelude to the terrifying day ahead.
I no longer believed that anyone would come.
All that remained was to suffer into unconsciousness, because after that there would be peace. Even delirium would be a sort of peace, because the worst torment was to be aware, to understand. I would welcome a clouded mind, when it came. That, for me, would be the real death. The only one that mattered. I wouldn’t know or care when my heart finally stopped.
Heat bullied into the car like a battering ram.
I burned.
I burned.
Chapter Sixteen
They did come.
When the sun was high, Evan and Conrad came in the station wagon. Evan stampeding about in a frenzy of energy, waving his arms about, with his hair sticking out crazily and his eyes too hot for comfort. Conrad, puffing slightly under the droopy moustache, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief.
They simply walked up to the car and opened the door. Then they stood still. And stared.
I thought they were unreal; the onset of delusion. I stared back, waiting for them to vanish.
Then Evan said, ‘Where the hell have you been? We’ve been searching the whole bloody park for you since yesterday morning.’
I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t.
Conrad was saying, ‘My God, my God, dear boy, my God...’ as if the needle had stuck.
Evan went back to the station wagon, drove it across the grass, and parked it alongside the car I was in. Then he scrambled into the back and unclipped the red ice box.
‘Will beer do?’ he shouted. ‘We didn’t bring any water.’
Beer would do.
He poured it from the can into a plastic cup and held it to my mouth. It was cold; alive; incredible. I only drank half, because it hurt to swallow.
Conrad opened the left-hand door and sat on the seat beside me.
‘We haven’t a key for the handcuffs,’ he said apologetically.
A laugh twitched somewhere inside me, the first for a long time.
‘Phew,’ Evan said. ‘You do stink.’
They saw I couldn’t talk. Evan poured more beer into the cup and held it for me, and Conrad got out of the car and rummaged about in the boot. He came back with four short lengths of strong wire and a roll of insulating tape, and with these he proceeded to set me free.
He stuck the four wires into the barrel of the handcuff lock, bound the protruding ends tightly together to give a handle for leverage, and began to turn. The makeshift key did a grand job. With a lot of swearing and a couple of fresh starts when the wires slipped out, Conrad got the ratchet on my right wrist opened.
And who cared about the other? Ii could wait.
They unclipped the seat belts and tried to help me out of the car, but I had been sitting in the same restricted position for over eighty hours, and like concrete my body seemed to have set in the mould.
Evan said doubtfully, ‘I think one of us should go and find a doctor.’
I shook my head decidedly. There were things I wanted to tell them before the outside world broke in. I felt jerkily under my thigh for the papers I had written, and made writing motions with my hands. Conrad silently produced the gold ballpoint he always carried, and I shakily wrote on an unused corner of brown envelope, ‘If you do not tell anyone you have found me, we can catch the man who put me here.’ And as an afterthought, I added, ‘I want to do that.’
They read the uneven words and stood wondering, almost literally scratching their heads.
I wrote a bit more. ‘Please put something over the wind-screen.’
That at least made sense to them. Conrad draped the front of the car with a heavy groundsheet which effectively brought the temperature down by ten degrees.
Evan saw the plastic bag hanging from the steering wheel and pulled it off its rubber band.
‘What the hell is this?’ he said.
I pointed to the still undrunk mouthful of water lurking in one corner. Evan understood, and looked completely appalled.
He took the written pages out of my hand, and read them. I drank some more beer, holding the cup with trembly fingers but feeling life flowing back through all the dying channels with every difficult swallow.
He read right to the end and handed the pages to Conrad. He stared at me with stunned speechlessness. An unaccustomed state for Evan. After a long time he said slowly, ‘Did you really think Conrad or I had helped to leave you here?’
I shook my head.
‘And you can cross off poor old Clifford Wenkins, too, because he’s dead. They fished him out of the Wemmer Pan on Saturday afternoon. He went boating, and drowned.’
The news took a while to percolate. I thought, no more stuttering, no more damp palms, no more nervous little man... poor little nervous man...
I lifted Conrad’s golden pen, and Evan gave me one of his ubiquitous notebooks to write on.
‘I’d like to lie dozen. In the station wagon?’