'Ellen, I'm sorry. It's not your fault, it's mine.' Hugh swallowed hard enough to be audible and said 'I phoned him when he was coming to see me and he was in a crash.'
Hugh couldn't feel guiltier than Ellen immediately did for having assumed the subject was her book. She stared in renewed loathing at her blurred pallid swollen face and wondered how much it was puffed up with self-absorption. She saw a hole open in it as she set about asking 'How bad?'
'Bad.'
The hole closed, and she felt her thickened lips quiver like gelatin as they rubbed together. They parted with an unpleasant sticky sound as a preamble to saying 'Just tell me, Hugh.'
'He's not dead.'
Eventually she had to ask 'What is he?'
'Unconscious. Maybe in a coma.'
Ellen unstuck her lips again, and so did the oversized blob. 'Apart from that . . .'
'I don't know. I haven't been yet. I've only just rung the hospital.'
'When will you be going?'
'Soon as I can. Charlotte's coming tomorrow.'
From his tone Ellen could have assumed the events were directly connected. 'She's staying over,' he added on the way to blurting 'You can too if you like.'
Why should a family reunion make Ellen apprehensive? She could only blame Hugh's feelings about her, but she would have to cope with those for Rory's sake. 'I'll see you then,' she said. 'I'll ring to say what time. Are you meeting people at the station?'
'I might have to stay here. Get a cab if you don't fancy walking up.'
'Which way is it? How far?'
Hugh was silent long enough that she thought he was preparing to say more than 'You're best getting a cab.'
How could he have experienced a vision of her plodding uphill to his house, the noisome sweaty mass of her quaking from head to foot with every step? As she struggled to expel it from her mind she managed to say 'Try not to blame yourself, all right? Rory needn't have answered while he was driving. He ought to have switched his phone off.'
'I shouldn't have asked him to come.'
'Don't brood, Hugh. We'll all be together again soon,' Ellen said, which ended the call, or silence did.
Staring at her undefinable reflection didn't help her take her own advice, but she wasn't anxious to return to Mumbo Jumbjoe or visit any of the other sites. She pushed her chair back and stood up, and the girl on the balcony turned her head. She'd donned sunglasses, which obscured whether she was gazing at Ellen with sympathy far too close to dismay if not bordering on revulsion. All at once Ellen felt sick and headed for the bathroom.
Rory's portraits flanked her as she hurried down the hall. She could have thought her own painted eyes were foreseeing her present state and concealing their distress. She shoved the bathroom door open, and then she recoiled. One glimpse in the mirror, not even of her entire shape, was enough. She grabbed her portrait from its hook and carried it in front of her face to the mirror. It was almost exactly as wide as the protruding plastic frame, and so tall that she couldn't see her reflection over it once she slammed it into place. She hadn't glimpsed herself again, let alone anybody else. Nobody a good deal more than sufficiently thin to hide behind her had dodged out of sight, as she confirmed by twisting her head around so hard her neck ached. Perhaps she wasn't going to be sick after all, though she felt worse than queasy as her distended hands splashed cold water on her clammy face. She might have to deal with worse than nausea. When she recalled the veiled gaze of the girl on the balcony, she wondered how she would be able to bear stepping outside the door.
NINETEEN
'Is Charlotte in there?' Catching sight of her at the back of the lift, Glen waved a handful of papers. 'Pass these to her,' he said and called 'They're for your cousin.' Someone in the front rank that was pressing everybody else towards the walls accepted the documents, and as the doors struggled together against the mass of bodies Glen's attention drifted left of Charlotte. His eyes widened, and he reached out as if he wished he could rescue her from the crowd. Then the doors shut, though only just, and the cage packed with bodies set about ascending, so sluggishly that she could have imagined it was being dragged down and in danger of sinking into the earth. People were relaying the papers to her over their shoulders, since there wasn't space for them to turn around. Were there three pages or four? As they arrived beside her she saw they were bordered in black. She was about to take them when the person whose bones were digging into her left side did, and she noticed that his hand was covered more with soil than flesh.
She couldn't retreat even an inch. She could only watch as he transferred the papers to his other shrivelled hand so as to grasp her face and twist it towards him. When her eyes strained to look away he released her and gestured at the doors, scattering earth like black dandruff on the shoulders of the woman in front of him. The lift shuddered to a halt and the doors staggered apart. For a breath, if she had been able to draw one, Charlotte thought only darkness was waiting beyond them. Then earth piled in, flinging everyone helplessly together on the way to filling her eyes and nose and mouth. Her companion seemed quite at home in it, because his fingers wriggled wormlike through it to fasten on her hand and pull her deeper into the suffocating dark.
She fought to cry out, but her mouth was gagged with earth. She strove to free herself from the scrawny clutch, but she was pinioned by bodies that had ceased to move and the one that should have. She tried to suck in a breath, but it consisted of earth too. Was she dreaming out of utter desperation that she'd managed to produce a sound? It was feeble and flattened, muffled by distance or worse. Nevertheless it seemed to travel past the blackness, and she put all her dwindling energy into repeating it. This time it succeeded in wakening her, and she threw out her hand to rid it of the sensation of being held. It collided with a barrier in front of her at considerably less than arm's length.
There was nothing like that so near her bed, and certainly no wall. She wasn't in her flat; she wasn't even on the roof. She'd thought spending the night on the padded sunlounger would rid her of the sense of being shut in before she had to travel to Hugh's – her four rooms had never seemed so oppressively small and dim, or even slightly until last night – but she hadn't slept much. She'd kept being wakened by a smell of earth and having to remind herself that it belonged to the plant-pots by the lounger. Each time she'd opened her eyes the night sky had looked far too close, a black lid above her face. Once it had grown lighter she'd managed to doze fitfully, and then it had been time to get ready to leave. Nothing had relieved the claustrophobia that felt as if her surroundings were smaller than her head: not showering in the glass cell of the bathroom cubicle rendered nearly opaque by steam, nor walking down the narrow street overshadowed by tenements to the main road that might have seemed wider without the traders' stalls and the crowds around them, nor the bus crammed with shoppers, nor the multitude of Saturday commuters at Kings Cross. As for the train to Yorkshire, it consisted of just two carriages for a journey of over two hours. Her seat and the one in front trapped her in a space so restricted that she had to slant her knees towards the window in order to press them together. She was further pinned by the side of the carriage and by her neighbour in the aisle seat, who must have been startled by Charlotte's nightmare cry. Charlotte opened her aching eyes and turned to make some apology, but the seat was unoccupied.
It was the only empty one in sight. When had her skinny neighbour deserted it? As soon as she was seated Charlotte had closed her eyes in an attempt to ignore the lack of space, and so she hadn't observed her seatmate, she had only felt the gaunt shape settle next to her. They must have been so eager to descend that they'd advanced into the foremost carriage as a station closed around the train. It was Leeds, where Charlotte had to change.