Part 29 (1/2)

”But you did. You thought it was so important you rang us back. You'd seen something, you said.”

”Just on some videos I took home. People fighting instead of what was meant to be on them.”

”I'm with Woody,” Connie says.

Rather than inform Connie she wishes she were, Jill asks Gavin ”Why did you want us to know?”

”It seemed like there had to be something wrong. Two people that lived, I don't know, forty miles apart brought them back.”

”I'll bet they were the same sort of tape, though,” Connie says. ”Do I win?”

'They were both concerts. So?”

”You check and see if they weren't released by the same company. It'll have been a glitch when they were copying the tapes.”

Jill doesn't know whether she remains unpersuaded 364 364. because she prefers not to agree with Connie. Gavin's faceless silhouette in the mirror has fallen silent. She's willing him to take issue with Connie when he sits forward. ”This looks like it could be it.”

The road is doubling back on the curve she has just negotiated. As the lit patch of fog extends itself more dimly through a gap in the left-hand hedge, Gavin says ”The phone was down somewhere like that.”

Connie lifts a hand towards Jill. ”I see it. There it is.”

Jill doesn't know if Connie is imperiously gesturing her to stop or even considering a grab at the handbrake. When she halts the car just ahead of the gap she enjoys imagining that the pedal underfoot is part of Connie. She narrows her eyes at the track leading away from the road. It's either bare churned earth or tarmac encrusted with mud, and the object in the fog to which it meanders could be a wide tree-trunk chopped off about seven feet from the ground. ”I don't think so,” she decides aloud. ”Would you drive along anywhere like that in this?”

”If it got help to some people who need it,” Connie retorts, ”I certainly would.”

Jill doubts it, and steers the car into the gap to clarify her objection. The blurred object by the track grows no clearer; indeed, the fog appears to be gathering around it, which may be why its outline seems less regular than a phone box ought to be. Jill lifts the headlamp beams to it, but this only blinds her with fog. She squeezes her eyes shut to find she's so tired that she begins to see images that Gavin's description must have put into her head, of people fighting savagely and sinking on if not into the earth. She gropes to dip the headlights and opens her eyes once they feel ready for use. Now the shape ahead reminds her of a totem pole, though of course she isn't seeing the rudiments of faces starting to materialise, one piled on top of the other. ”I'm sorry,” she says, ”I'm not happy going any further.” 365 ”Maybe Anyes isn't too happy right now either,” Connie says. ”We don't know that, do we? Mad and Jake may have sent for help.”

”And they may not have. All right, let's vote whether we drive to it or I've got to end up muddy. Gavin?”

”You want us to be democratic now, do you? It's not long since you were acting as if you were in charge.” As Gavin's hand begins to waver in the mirror, Jill continues ”No point in voting. We aren't driving, I am. It's my car. If you don't like it you can get out and walk, but don't expect me to hang around.”

She's confused by the delight that her speech seems to intensify, because the glee doesn't feel like hers; it feels as if it's closing in. It confuses her so badly that she imagines she sees the tree-trunk or the object that resembles one twitching with eagerness. ”It isn't even a phone box,” she tells Connie. ”Go and look for yourself if you can't see that.”

”Will she wait while I do, Gavin? Could you make her, do you think?”

He disagrees with one or both of those, mostly with a yawn. They can give Jill all the arguments they like, but it's her car. She jerks it into reverse and swings it out of the gap, sc.r.a.ping the front offside wing on the hedge. As the headlamp beams veer away from the field, she seems to glimpse the object in the fog splitting like an amoeba and the topmost segment hopping or collapsing onto the earth. How tired must she be? Not too tired to drive, which she does in the midst of a frustrated silence like a lack of breath. Then Gavin yawns again, perhaps at the spectacle of yet more fog oozing backwards over the same wet black patch of road and dragging itself through the hedges. Gavin,” Connie almost shouts, ”for the love of I won't say it will you stop that wretched yawning all the time.”

For once Jill agrees with her, but has to grin when 366 Connie yawns furiously. ”You're doing it as well,” Gavin points out.

Amus.e.m.e.nt hasn't finished tugging at Jill's lips when a yawn forces itself between them. ”It's you,” Connie retaliates. ”We weren't till you came. Keep it to yourself, can you? We've enough problems without not being able to stop doing something.”

”Tell me how I can help it, then.”

Her answer is another enraged yawn, not the only reaction Jill thinks Connie is unable to control. Obviously when she complained of problems she meant Jill, but Gavin was hardly in the car before Connie turned on him. It seems not to matter whom she attacks as long as it's someone. A yawn that feels like a dismissal of the notion overcomes Jill, carrying with it the wish that she had failed to brake in time when he stumbled in front of the car. Suppose she asks him to walk ahead as people used to precede vehicles in fog? Still better, why doesn't she suggest that Connie keep him company? She wouldn't mean to run them over, but she's so exhausted that n.o.body could blame her if she lost control, if she forgot which pedal she had to push down hard-- It isn't just the childishness of the plan that s.n.a.t.c.hes all her breath. It's the exultation that her thoughts seem to bring to the surface, a joy too vast and savage, surely, to be hers. ”Can we all stop arguing till we get out of this?” she pleads. ”I mean really try and stop.”

”We might if you did,” Connie says.

At least Jill made an effort to suppress her irrationality, but Connie sounds like a child in a schoolyard. Jill senses delight welling up again, drawn by her own contempt. They've all reverted to thinking and behaving like fractious children, her included--and then she sees more in the situation. She has observed it all too often, children fighting when another child relishes slyly turning them against each other. She opens her mouth to pa.s.s on the insight, but she already knows how Connie reacts to being 367 included among the childish. She's about to let her thoughts subside into her dull mind when she senses they're being engulfed by more than her fatigue. The impression so resembles lurching awake from a dream that she gasps ”I know why we mustn't fall out any more.”

Gavin doesn't quite yawn, but barely p.r.o.nounces ”Why?”

”Think about it.” Jill is doing so aloud, which seems to help. ”We've all been arguing all night, haven't we? And before that too for I don't know how long at the shop. Something wants us at each other's throats. Why, you even saw people fighting on your tapes.”

At once she's afraid that her last remark is one comment too many. At least Gavin isn't yawning. She glances away from the reflection of his silhouette she hopes is thoughtful. She's watching the road, though the dim ill-defined enclosure of fog has begun to make her feel helpless as an insect trapped under a gla.s.s, when Connie says ”Well, I'll vote that's the silliest thing I've ever heard.”

Words won't suffice as a response to that; not words alone, at any rate. Perhaps she'll believe they are little better than puppets if Jill gives her a demonstration. ”This is even sillier,” Jill says and shuts her eyes before pressing the accelerator.

At first n.o.body notices. She's beginning to think she can judge the road without looking when Connie says ”Careful, you'll have us in the hedge.”

”Better do something about it, then.”

”I just did. Careful,” Connie repeats with an edge.

”I need more than that. Which way do I steer?”

”Left, of course. You can see--was As Jill eases the wheel leftwards, Connie says ”I'm not falling for that. You haven't got both eyes shut.”

Jill shows Connie her face and releases a smile that feels dry as a crack in dead earth. ”All right, you've made your point, whatever it was,” Connie says, and when Jill doesn't relent, ”You're the driver. You drive.” 368 Jill's seat quivers as Gavin leans between it and Connie's. ”Right now. Right,” he urges, no longer sounding inclined to yawn.

”I was about to tell her, Gavin. There was time,” Connie says and adds ”Right.”

”It's going to need both of you with a driver like me.”

”We weren't saying anything about your driving,” Gavin protests.

”You will,” she a.s.sures them and faces forward as she presses the pedal harder. In a moment she feels Connie clutching at the wheel. ”All right, you steer,” Jill says, letting go. ”But I want Gavin to tell you which way. If he doesn't I'll drive faster.”

She has to do so before they're convinced she's serious. ”Left,” Gavin directs in a choked voice, and she feels the car slew that way. She's glad he and Connie are too preoccupied with the situation to ask her what she's doing, because she can't explain it even to herself; it just feels right, perhaps by accident. She has the notion that she's beating some vast idiocy at its own game. She thinks she senses it pacing the car behind the hedges or under the road or both. That makes her desperate to speed out of its reach, and she doesn't know if she's yielding to the impulse when Connie cries ”Jill, slow down. Think of your little girl.”

”You said I was too slow before. Can't you make your mind up, or haven't you got one?” Connie is the last person she needs to remind her of Bryony; indeed, Jill resents it so much that she can't decide if she ought to chance driving faster. Suppose she will otherwise never see her daughter again? She imagines Bryony in the Christmas play with only Geoff to support her, unless he takes Connie, but of course Jill has Connie at her mercy in the car. Whichever of these thoughts is compelling her to accelerate, she's amused to hear Gavin cry ”Right” and Connie respond in the same agitated tone ”I know.” She's close to feeling that she's dreaming the journey, that the pictures within her eyelids are more real: the crowds of greyish 369 shapes struggling to destroy one another or tear themselves separate from one another, if not from the mora.s.s into which they're sinking, unless they're emerging from it. Her fascination with all this is one reason why she's in no hurry to respond to Connie's entreaty. ”We're there.”

”Where's that?” Jill hears herself ask sleepily.

”The phone. You're pa.s.sing it. You've pa.s.sed it. The phone box.”

Jill slits her sticky eyelids and is confronted by a mult.i.tude of eyes glinting at her out of the dark. They could belong to hundreds of swollen spiders or a single immense one, but then she recognises them as beads of moisture on the tips of the hedges. She can't see a phone box, not until the brake lights paint its lower section crimson in the mirror and splash the interior dull red. She leaves the engine running to power the lights while she says ”I'll phone about the shop. What do you want to do about your car that doesn't involve me driving back?”

Connie seems almost too enervated to say ”Just get us home.”

The call may take too long for Jill to risk leaving the lights on with the engine off. She's certainly not about to trust Connie or even Gavin with the key in the ignition. She s.n.a.t.c.hes the key and gropes her way out of the car to pace alongside, one hand on the slimy roof. Two diagonal paces away from the rear bring her close enough to the phone box that she senses it looming over her. She fumbles at the door, which feels moist enough for rot, and locates the drooling metal handle. As she lets herself in, the box lights up with a glow that she could think has floated upwards rather than appeared beneath the cramped ceiling. It stays lit as the door shuts with a creak that seems to find an echo in the hedge behind the box.

There's no directory on the rusty metal shelf, but she doesn't need one. Someone has sprayed incomprehensible symbols over the mirror and the framed notices, rendering all the words unreadable and trapping her exhausted face 370 in a thick web. The tarry paint has caught the phone as well. As she lifts the chill receiver, the light dims as though it's shrinking from a waft of fog. She taps one of the most basic three-digit numbers in the world as soon as she's greeted by the dialling tone, m.u.f.fled though it is. When it's silenced by a click, she calls ”h.e.l.lo? Operator? h.e.l.lo?”

”Operator.”

It's hardly surprising if so late at night the female voice sounds somewhat mechanical. ”I'm not sure which service I need,” Jill admits.

”Which?”