Decay Inevitable

THEY ALL DIE on me, Will thought. I try my best to care for people but it doesn’t mean anything to anybody.

He and Joanna had left the house when the fire became too stifling. They thanked Luke and asked if he wanted to go with them.

“Go where?” he asked, not unreasonably. “There is nowhere to go. It’s all the same. All different types of badness. The same old badness dressed in different, horrible clothes. What’s the point?”

The point for Will was to not let the child’s melancholy infect him. But here it was, stringing out visions of Catriona, Elisabeth, Sadie, and now Joanna, all those who had gone with him and paid the price for it. He had fucked up. He remembered now, wanting to die, knowing that he might be able to make a difference from within, knowing that Catriona waited for him somewhere magical. He had lived like a clown. And now he couldn’t even die properly.

“I don’t know what happens to time here,” he said, as he and Joanna skirted an inky lake that bore awful salty deposits at its edges that resembled claws and faces stretched into different masks of pain. “Maybe it’s condensed or spun out.”

“I don’t know how long I’ve got,” Joanna said.

“Maybe it isn’t all that bad,” Will reasoned.

“I have to remember,” she said. “I have to, otherwise, I’ll die without knowing how I died. How tragic is that?”

“Is it? I’d rather not know.”

Joanna sat on the ground, brushing away the twigs that resembled fingers in rigor mortis, and the tiny leaves that were like desiccated eyelids. “My husband, Harry, God, what if he’s here too? I don’t remember if he was with me. What if he died?”

“Then you won’t be going anywhere. Shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean–”

But Joanna had ignored his tactlessness. “The last thing he said to me... I can see his face, he looked concerned. And then the flapping all around me.”

“Birds?”

Joanna shook her head. “Fabric. Like someone airing a bedsheet, but all around me, as if I was trapped in a bed while somebody was making it. Silk. Lots of billowing silk. And freezing. I was freezing my tits off.”

“You were sailing, maybe?”

Joanna snapped her head up at him. “No. Not sails,” she said. “Parachute.”

JOANNA’S RELIVING OF her sky-diving trauma helped Will in the remembering of his; a kind of trickling down of horror. He flinched as he remembered the barrel of the police rifle empty its contents into his head. It was as if he could follow the trajectory of the bullet enter his temple. It hadn’t taken his life, though. Just his senses. He fingered the bizarre, proud crater now, and saw how what he’d seen as the coquettish angle of Joanna’s neck had been caused by something far more awful.

“I need you to do something for me,” he said. “If you go back. If you get out of here and you’re okay.”

“God, I hope so.”

Will held on to her hand, almost desperately. “Remember this. I want you to find me. And help me to die.”

“But I couldn’t!”

“Please. You must. I need to die. I have nothing but that. I want nothing but that.”

It took hours to persuade her but in the end she agreed. Perhaps her relenting, or the forceful way in which he had put his argument, had helped to colour the scenery; either way, it had suffered more erosion. It was as if the heat of his need had scorched away layer after layer of rock and rubble, a gradual onionskin weathering, until everything was level, sanded, clean.

“What now?” she asked. Her exhaustion had manifested itself in the papery cracks around her mouth, the stone and glass that had filled her eyes. Her voice was the lonely shifting of wind across sand.

Will said, “We have a train to catch.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: CONTRABAND

THERE WAS A mini riot kicking off in Blackwood Crescent. The police had set up a cordon and would not allow Sean and Emma to pass.

“What’s going on?” Emma asked, trying to see further along the street. An armoured police van was parked on the pavement.

“Families at war,” the police constable told them. “Are you all right, mate? You look like you’ve just been caught up in something like this.”

“I’m fine. Look, my gran lives in there. Let me through, will you?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“I’m a copper too. Down in London. Here’s my warrant card.”

He showed him the defunct credentials that Sally had sent back to him, and the police constable sucked his moustache into his mouth. “Met, eh? Good pay down there is it?”

“You get by,” Sean said, giving him a grin.

“Danger money, isn’t it, though?”

Sean nodded in the direction of the police van. “You say that, but...”

“Aye. It happens all over, I suppose. Go on then, before my sarge catches me.”

Sean clapped him on the shoulder and he and Emma slipped through the cordon. He led her down a narrow walkway parallel to the main road. Tough-looking men and tougher-looking women watched their progress, tight-lipped from bedroom windows and back gardens. Dogs barked at them from behind every gate.