Charlie drove off, did another slow circuit of the park. He felt let down, decided to look in again at the pub, just in case.
An hour later he was still there. He hadn't found Cliff but had got into conversation with a fellow he'd known at primary school when they were eleven.
Still reddish-blond and freckled, Eddie McPhee was not much bigger than he had been then. Charlie towered over him. He was an apprentice jockey at a local stables. For a good two hours before Charlie met up with him he had been drinking vodka and orange and Charlie decided now to join him. He was very noisy and argumentative, but so slight and pallidly childlike that none of the fellows he picked on thought it honourable to hit him. The worst they did was tell him to get lost and walk away, which made him all the madder. After his second vodka Charlie found this extraordinarily amusing.
He remembered Eddie as a kid who couldn't spell and was always getting whacked across the palm with a ruler. He had grown up cocky and sure of himself. This surprised Charlie but impressed him too. He began to feel happily light-headed, then elated, then affectionately grateful to Eddie for having at this point reappeared out of his primary-school years to take him on a long loop backwards that he might otherwise have missed.
“Remember that bastard Hoyland?” Eddie shouted. This was the wielder of the ruler. “Remember Frances Jakes?” She was a girl who, at twelve, had had the most enormous tits. I'm really enjoying myself, Charlie thought. Too bad about Cliff.
When the pub closed, he redeemed his overcoat from a bar stool where he had abandoned it and offered Eddie a lift back to the stables on the other side of town.
It was after midnight, and cold. What he was aware of, as they rode between the houses down deserted street after street, was the closeness of the stars overhead and the distance between his hands on the handlebars of the bike and his head, where it just managed to stay put at the top of his body. This made the business of keeping the bike upright— and steering it through space with the cold night air pouring over them, and the bitumen, with its starry sheen, ribboning out before and behind — a skill that for all its familiarity approached the miraculous. If anyone was looking down from up there, he thought, how amazing all this must look. And us too. How amazing wmust look!
“I'm fucken freezing,” Eddie shouted in his ear, crouched behind the wall of his back.
“Yahwee!” Charlie shouted in return and, aiming at the stars, he jerked the bike upwards so that for a moment they sailed along on one wheel.
He woke,feeling stiff and sorry for himself, as the first light was coming. His head was heavy, still thick with sleep, his mouth dry. He couldn't think for a moment where he might be, swaddled in the bulki-ness of the greatcoat, its collar round his ears.
There was a sharp ammoniac smell. Ah! Eddie! The stables.
He saw the wooden walls of the stall then. Sat up in straw. Heard the snuffling close by of horses.
Eddie, in thick socks and greyish longjohns that sagged at the knees, was already upright, pulling a sweater over his head. “I gotta go,” he explained.
“I'll go with you,” Charlie told him and got to his feet.
Eddie sat to pull on his boots. Charlie discovered he was still wearing his.
They staggered out into the pearly light, unbuttoned, and standing side by side took a good long piss, watching it stream and puddle between the pebbles in the yard. Eddie hitched up his pants and went back inside. Charlie walked up and down, hands deep in the pockets of his greatcoat, which was still unbuttoned, his head and shoulders drawn inside the collar, hunched in on the warmth of himself. “Jesus,” he hissed.
He couldn't believe how cold it was out here. There was a bluish frost on the paddock; on the fence post, where it had split and hardened, a glint of ice.
“Here,” Eddie said when he reappeared, "give us a hand with these.”
He was weighed down with a load of gear. Charlie allowed him to heft a pouched bag over his shoulder that weighed a ton. He released a hand from his pocket to steady it. They went out of the yard, where the CZ rested against the fence, and down a gravel drive beside a slip-rail fence towards the highway. Other figures loomed up in the misty light.
“Is it always as cold as this?” Charlie asked.
Eddie had almost disappeared under the load he was carrying. “Yair. You never fucken get used to it!”
They came to a T-junction. There was no traffic. Horses were being brought up in a long line; silvery shadows in the misty half-light, their hooves making a hollow sound on the bitumen. They might have been packhorses setting out across a continent. Charlie was reminded of a troop of soldiers — or was it Indians? — out of some black-and-white movie. Something unfamiliar anyway, not part of his world. Yet here it was, and routine to Eddie, who was grumping along at his side. Just another Sunday morning.
If I hadn't missed Cliff last night, and the girls, Charlie thought, I wouldn't know all this was here. How much else was there, he wondered, that he wouldn't have time now to discover?
He felt a little cloud of doubt, of depression, puff up in him. But just then the sun broke through, touching the grass on either side of the road, and with its sudden warmth came a strong earth smell, comfortingly dark, along with the rankness of the horses.
He dumped the bag. “I should get going,” he said.
Eddie, standing beside him at the fence, was absorbed now with what was happening out in the paddock.
“Yair, good,” he said in an absent voice. “See you round.”
He continued to stare out into the distance.
Charlie, standing for a moment, felt the pull of Eddie's absorption. In a world. In work. There was so much liveliness in the way the horses pranced about, proud and full of themselves and their power, the air blowing white from their nostrils, light rippling on their coats. When he turned and walked back briskly to where the CZ was parked, he felt in himself some of the energy they moved with, the touch of coming warmth in the air, the beginning excitement of realising that this was it, it had arrived. The day.
At home he showered, got his few things together.
He was very much aware, in a sentimental way, that these would be his last moments, for a while at least, in this room.
It had been his for the whole of his life. Its view, into the branches of an old liquidambar, was one of the first he could recall, the luminous green of star-shaped leaves in the early-morning light that went gold then rusted at the end of May, then crisped and yielded to a faint line of hills; bluish, but sometimes with the red of the sun behind them, and a flash as it was sucked down and disappeared behind their blackness.
He stood now looking out over the sill. There was just an instant when it struck him — repeating an episode from a conventional Boy's Own story — that he could still climb over the sill, grab one of those branches, swing to the ground ten feet below and be away. But where to? To Josie and the limbo, the dangling interim, of a series of safe houses?
He turned back into the room. He had slept here virtually every night of his life for almost twenty years. Seven full years that would make in all, of being laid out here in a state of suspension, colouring its darkness with his dreams. Its walls bore the record, meagre as it might be, of the dedications and brief enthusiasms of his passage — it too seemed brief — from childhood to wherever he had arrived at now of imperfect manhood. When he closed the door on it, it would remain here, complete to a point, while four thousand miles away the same body that had trusted itself each night to unconsciousness, and done its daily push-ups here on the polished floor, and sat at the desk sweating over the binomial theorem and making its way through Sons and Lovers and the Iliad and War and Peace, would be putting itself through a new set of experiences, as yet unimaginable, which it might or might not at last get back from.