And this is when they hear the footsteps. A crackle, then silence, then another crackle. Someone is moving gingerly through the undergrowth nearby, trying not to be heard. Each heartbeat seems to tighten a screw at the base of Daniel’s skull. Sean picks up the gun and rolls onto his stomach, elbows braced in the dirt. Crackle. Daniel pictures Robert as a native hunter. Quiver, loincloth, arrow in the notch, two crooked fingers holding the bowstring taut. The steps move to the right. Either he doesn’t know where they are or he is circling them, choosing his direction of approach. Come on, says Sean to himself, turning slowly so that the gun points constantly towards the direction of the noise. Come on.
Daniel wants it to happen quickly. He doesn’t know how much longer he can bear this before jumping up and shouting, Here I am! like Paul used to do during games of hide-and-seek. Then everything goes quiet. No steps. No crackle. Midges scribble the air. The soft roar of the cataract. Sean looks genuinely frightened now.
A stick snaps behind them and they twist onto their backs just as the silhouette springs up and shuts out the dazzle of the sun. Sean fires and the gun is so close to Daniel’s head that he will hear nothing for the next few minutes, just a fizz like rain on pylon wires.
He sees straightaway that it is not Robert. Then he sees nothing because he is kicked hard in the stomach and the pain consumes him. When he uncurls and opens his eyes he finds himself looking into a face. It is not a human face. It is the face of a roe deer and it is shockingly big. He tries to back away but the brambles imprison him. The deer is running on its side, wheezing and struggling in vain to get to its feet. A smell like the camel house at the zoo. Wet black eyes, the jaws working and working, the stiff little tongue poking in and out. Breath gargles through a patch of bloody fur on its neck. It scrabbles and twitches. He can’t bear to look but can’t make himself turn away. The expression on its face. It looks like someone turned into a deer in a fairy tale, crying out for help but unable to form the words.
Two minutes. Three. It’s weakening visibly, sinking into the cold black water that lies just under the surface of all we do. That desperate hunger for more time, more light. Whenever Daniel hears the phrase fighting for your life this is the picture that will come back to him.
Sean hoists his leg over its body and sits on the deer’s chest. He presses the end of the barrel to the side of its head and fires. Bang…bang…bang…bang…Each shot sending the deer’s body into a brief spasm. The gun is finally empty. A few seconds of stillness then a fifth spasm. It stops moving. Oh yes, says Sean, letting out a long sigh, Oh yes, as if he has been dreaming about this moment for a long time.
Fingers of gluey blood start to crawl out from under the head. Daniel wants to cry but something inside him is blocked or broken.
Sean says, We have to get it back.
Back where?
To the flat.
Why?
To cook it.
Daniel has no idea what to say. A part of him still thinks of the deer as human. A part of him thinks that, in some inexplicable way, it is Robert transformed. A fly investigates one of the animal’s eyes.
Sean stands up and stamps the brambles aside, snapping their stems with the heel of his trainers so they don’t spring back. We can skin it.
He tells Daniel to return to the lay-by to fetch the pram they saw beside the rubbish bags. Daniel goes because he needs to be away from Sean and the deer. He walks past the scrapyard. He wants to bump into Robert, hoping that he will be dragged back into the previous adventure, but the curtains are still closed and the house is silent. He removes the loop of green twine and opens the clangy gate. There is a brown Mercedes in the lay-by. The driver watches him from the other side of the windscreen but Daniel cannot make out the man’s face. He turns the pram over. It is an old-fashioned cartoon pram with a concertina hood and leaf-spring suspension. The rusty handle is bent, the navy upholstery is torn and two of the wheels are tyreless. He drags it back through the gate, closing it behind him.
It’s a trick of the light, of course. Time is nothing but forks and fractures. You step off the kerb a moment later. You light a cigarette for the woman in the red dress. You turn over the exam paper and see all the questions you’ve revised, or none of them. Every moment a bullet dodged, every moment an opportunity missed. A firestorm of ghost lives speeding away into the dark.
Perhaps the difference is this, that he will notice, that he will come to picture things in this way when others don’t, that he will remember an August afternoon when he was ten years old and feel the vertigo you feel walking away unharmed from a car crash. Or not quite unharmed, for he will come to realise that a part of himself peeled away and now exists in a parallel universe to which he has no access.
When they lift the deer onto the pram it farts and shits itself. It doesn’t smell like the camel house now. Daniel is certain that it would be easier to drag the body but says nothing, and only when the track flattens out by the scrapyard and they are finally free of the roots and the sun-hardened ruts does the pram finally begin to roll a little.
The man is sitting against the bonnet of his Mercedes, as if he has arranged himself for a better view of the second act. He has shoulder-length black hair, a cheap blue suit and a heavy gold bracelet. Sean shuts the gate and reattaches the loop of green twine. The man lights a cigarette. Lads. It’s all he says. The smallest of nods. No smile, no wave. He will recur in Daniel’s dreams for years, sitting there at the edge of whatever else is going on. Cigarette, gold bracelet. Lads.
They stand at the side of the carriageway. Hot dust, hot metal. Daniel sees drivers glance at them, glance away then glance back again. Three, two, one. The pram is less stable at speed and less inclined to travel in a straight line and they reach the central reservation accompanied by a hiss of air brakes and the angry honk of a lorry that comes perilously close to hitting them in the fast lane.
Clumsily, they heave the deer and the pram over the barrier. This takes a good deal of time and the strip of yellow grass is not wide. Police, says Sean, and Daniel turns in time to see the orange stripe of a white Rover slide past, lights and siren coming on as it goes up the hill. It will turn at the roundabout and come down the other carriageway. They have a minute at most.
Now, yells Sean, and the relief Daniel feels when they bump over the kerb of the service road and heave the pram up the bank through the line of stunted trees into the park makes him whoop. The Warrens, says Sean, panting, and they keep their momentum up past a gaggle of rubbernecking children on the climbing frame and into the network of walled paths round the back of the estate. They stop by the peeling red lock-ups and wait. No siren. No squeal of tyres. Daniel’s head pulses. He needs to lie down in the dark.
They push the pram across the parched quadrangle to Orchard Tower. An elderly lady watches them, transfixed. Polyester floral dress and varicose veins. Sean gives her a jokey salute. Mrs. Daley.