A Page 13

  – Check these out! said Tim, squatting.

  He unwound the neck of a carrier bag, and revealed a mass of mushrooms of a similar size to a football. He grinned and his skin tightened.

  – Wicked! he said. There’s got to be thousands in here. I mean, if they’re about four hundred to an ounce dried, and say we’ve got, like four thousand or something, yeah? Well, that’s like ten ounces alone! And Dave – my mate, yeah? – he can get shrooms swapped ounce for ounce with African bush. We’re talking eight, nine hundred quid just selling the weed on straight in ounces!

  – Oh yeah? said Angus, a bit remotely. Well, you can have these anyway. Share a few out when we get back or something. I don’t really think I’m up to them…

  He pulled himself into a squat and handed Tim the PJ: Clothing for Men! bag he’d been sitting on. He took a Spar one from his pocket and sat on that instead.

  – Cheers, said Tim, inspecting the contents. Yeah, that’s cool… I’ve got this idea that maybe I could take a few hundred and refine the psilocybin and try to make some tablets out of it.

  – Why not? said Angus.

  Tim reached into a pocket of his mud-spattered black jeans and pulled out a packet of blue king-size rizlas and a couple of loose, broken menthol cigarettes. He sat on the PJ: Clothing for Men! bag himself.

  – Like, he said, you’ve got A and E and K and that already. You could call it P or something.

  – Mmm, said Angus.

  – I mean, I’ve even been thinking of putting some of these on my Schedule for next year’s Glastonbury Festival… Have you seen my Schedule? I did it before you left.

  – You did it the first day after the last one.

  – Yeah, but I’ve coloured it in now, too. I’m not sure if it might be too late to start changing it all around?

  – Glastonbury’s next June, said Angus.

  – I suppose that should be long enough, really… Tim closed his eyes, inhaling delicately.

  – You’ve been eating them too? said Angus.

  – Just getting the first rushes.

  There was a pause in which Tim stuck rizlas together and Angus looked west towards the Brecon Beacons – the peaks of Gwaun Rhudd rearing like a volcano – then back towards the Bluff, wondering where Fay had got to. The common land was empty so he turned his eyes to the rocks and screes higher up.

  She was perched on a boulder, just on the Bluff side of a waterfall in the boundary stream – looking across the valley, her legs tucked up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, her hair floating on the mountains’ updraught. She looked happy, he thought for some reason. It was something in her stillness.

  – Tim? said Angus, turning back to look at him. Everything in Kingston’s a bit fucked up now, right? So I mean, like, with Katy gone and everything, how’s Fay dealing with it all? I mean, it’s not really her scene anyway, is it? Is she… alright?

  – Huh. Tim smiled faintly. With a small, respectful bow of his head he began to break skunk into his hand, lifting his knees to shield it from the breeze.

  – Er, yeah, he said, a moment or two later. Yeah, well, like, I guess she’s kind of a bit stressed, you know? Like, she’s in her room a lot… Keeps washing her hands like she did last year when she used to come and stay with Katy… He started to crumble in tobacco and mixed it with the skunk in his left palm. But, like, I mean, she’s probably alrighter than the rest of us. You know? I mean, to be honest, Belle isn’t so great either. She never goes out. Just watches TV. He laid the rizla on the mix, held it down with his right hand and turned both hands over together. It’s like, at least Fay still goes to college and that. Writes essays…

  Angus looked at Tim with surprise. It was the longest speech that he’d ever heard him make, about anything other than drugs.

  – So what about you, then? said Angus. How have you been?

  – Oh, you know. Tim lit his joint and held in the smoke for a few seconds. I, er… It passes me by. I mean, I’ve never been big on normality anyway. Do you know what I mean?

  Back on the common land, the sun had fallen some way towards the waiting horizon, casting a shadow over the east face of the Black Mountains, the line of its end running straight down the nose of the Bluff. The west face was acquiring some of the focus of the evening: each detail standing apart from its background, its colours intensifying until, in an hour or so, they would flare and die back into darkness.

  Belle was lying on the grass beside the ambulance when Angus got back there, balled like a foetus.

  – Belle? he said.

  – Where’s the keys? said Belle miserably.

  – They’re in my pocket, said Angus. Here, come on. You can lie down on the futon.

  Belle moaned again but remained where she was, so he undid the lock on the rear doors, pressed the black button and pulled them open for her to get inside.

  A beam of sunlight struck a poster on the left-hand wall: a gorgonic woman with staring eyes. The picture was bewitching. Angus wasn’t exactly sure if the woman was supposed to be Medusa, but if you looked closely into the darkness tracing the poster’s edge you could make out the frame of a mirror.

  Like the sun regarding the moon.

  – Tim? Belle pushed herself up onto her elbows. Have you got any more pills? Or… anything? Please?

  She was shivering noticeably, the side of her trousers and croptop dark with damp.

  – Jesus, Belle, said Angus.

  He reached into the back of the ambulance and found an orange blanket that had once covered the sofa in the livingroom in Kingston. He dropped it over her shoulders and dragged her up to her feet.

  Belle staggered round to the rear doors and fell flat onto the bedclothes, her legs sticking out of the back. It was a peculiar sensation, touching her now the burning had almost vanished. She was beautiful, of course, even in the middle of a shitty comedown, but all he really felt looking at her was detached.

  – Nah, said Tim, who seemed to be losing touch with time. Sorry. The only pills I’ve got are back at Angus’s.

  He wandered round to the bumper and sank onto the edge of a pillow, rooting for a lighter in his pockets and relighting the half-spliff still hanging from his mouth. When Belle smelt the smoke she began to make whimpering noises, so after a few more hits Tim passed it on to her, which seemed to calm her down.

  Those bloody comedowns. Some had stayed in Angus’s head, like cerebral scar tissue. Yawning normality. Sudden spaces in the stream of ecstasy. The desperation not to come down like that part of you that had always wanted your parents to guard you, to keep you from having to shoulder your own responsibility. Not like acid. No matter how good the trip was, on acid he’d always felt a bit of relief when the blinkers reasserted themselves.

  Fay approached from the direction of the Twmpa, appearing on a wave of common land, following a path among gorse bushes and mountain ponies. Drawing closer, she began to come into focus: the fleece around her waist, her shoulders back and uncovered. Her hair was messy, lighter somehow than Angus had always thought of it. Her face was suffused with colour.

  She gestured at the mountains when she saw him, grinning.

  – Wazooks! she said. No wonder you live here!

  – Yeah, said Angus. Well, it is a good day for it.

  – All my own work, said Fay, grinning again.

  She threw a slightly filled carrier bag onto the front seat of the ambulance, then noticed the shadow bisecting the Bluff.

  – Shit! she said. Did you see this?

  – Wicked, huh? He joined her on the driver’s side. It was a bit more precise than that earlier… Kind of more polarised.

  There were shadows reaching from the outcrops on the side facing north. They picked out minute stream beds in the mountains’ surface, shrouding the gully between the Bluff and the Twmpa entirely.

  – I like it like this, said Fay decidedly. This sort of precision.

  He knew there was something wrong the moment he lifted the clutch. The ambu
lance groaned, creeping forward a foot or two like it was hobbled.

  – Oh shit, said Fay. A bloody flat tyre.

  Angus pulled on the handbrake, rubbed the back of his neck, turned off the ignition.

  The sky to the west was thickening into orange, clouds materialising obligingly above the Beacons, the shadows of hills draping themselves across the valleys.

  Fay climbed out of the passenger door and stood inspecting the front left tyre, which was spreading at the bottom as if it had melted. On the near edge, just above the ground, a fencing staple was poking from the remoulded tread.

  – Right, said Angus, heading towards the back of the ambulance. I’d better get the stuff.

  Fay bent down and inspected the wheel.

  – It’s fine, she reported. Pretty tidy. No rust.

  Tim was sitting immediately inside on the heaped-up drape against the wall. He eyed Angus curiously a moment, then without warning started to laugh, launching himself from the rear bumper and wandering away across the grass. Belle was lying face down, wrapped in the orange blanket, breathing unevenly round her thumb.

  – Belle, said Angus. Belle, we’ve got to get at the spare tyre. You’re going to have to move.

  – Can’t, she mumbled.

  Some way across the rolling, reddening common Tim was struck by something even funnier than the last thing and fell over. Angus climbed inside and, apologising, hoisted a side of the futon off the floor so Belle rolled towards the wall.

  – Bastard, she managed, but still didn’t move.

  He flipped open the catch on the spare-tyre compartment and looked inside.

  It was empty.

  In a subsidiary compartment, the jack and all of the tools were gathered neatly, as you’d have expected from Pete; but the tyre was unquestionably not there.

  – That’s really… strange, said Fay, leaning in from behind him.

  – I want a cigarette, said Belle faintly, pressed into the folded drape at the bottom of the wall.

  – Well, can you see anything? said Angus.

  – I’m squashed against the wall, said Belle.

  – Okay, said Fay. So it’s empty.

  – Yeah, said Angus. You’re right, though. It’s really not like Pete to leave the spare behind.

  – He must have just forgotten it in the rush, said Fay. I’m quite sure it’s nowhere else in here.

  Angus let the lid of the compartment fall closed, then he flattened out the futon and rolled Belle onto her back so she could breathe properly. She twitched a few times and took her thumb out of her mouth.

  – I want a cigarette, she repeated. And some water.

  – Bollocks! said Angus generally.

  Fay produced a Marlboro from a pocket of the fleece round her waist, lighting it and poking it into Belle’s mouth. She took a water bottle from her bag and laid it on her stomach.

  – Hey! she said suddenly. I just thought of something!

  She rubbed her hands together and climbed past Belle into the back, scrambling over the bedclothes, steadying herself against the gorgon and sliding feet first through the space into the cab.

  – Yes! she said, a moment later.

  Paolo’s mobile phone was glowing as she held it up.

  – Ha! He put it in the glove compartment last night. Buried it too, except – fortunately – I was watching! Know any good garages?

  A whiteness was pushing itself upwards through the echoed red above the mountains. It was a becoming process. By the time the moon emerged, full, it had all but dispelled the last of the daylight.

  – Parties for some of us, said Angus despondently, turning the phone back off.

  – Werewolves for others, said Fay.

  She leant beside him on the front of the ambulance.

  r: ejection

  – So why couldn’t he just have put cocksucking bitch and been done with it? asked Inspector Hooey, guiding his Fiat Punto round the tight one-way curve at the end of Staines high street. I mean, female canine fellatrix? It could have meant a woman who… Well, we might have mistaken it for a code or something.

  Norman Teather rubbed a hand on his overgrowing chin. A stream of pushchairs and shopping trolleys was passing in front of the headlights. On either side, people were swarming around the car park and the Elmsleigh Shopping Centre, the zebra crossing between them like the neck of an hourglass.

  – Well, he said, I never even realised that the translator was just some polylingual bloke in Guildford. I mean, a system like Enfopol should have a programme for this sort of thing, not a Venezuelan student with a couple of dictionaries and seven hungry siblings back in Ciudad Bolivar… What do you think he makes of it, for Christ’s sake? I mean, Alright Dave, can you do us for a Wizard?! How’s he supposed to know what that means? Anyway, apparently he was getting a bit fed up with it all, so he set about amusing himself with a thesaurus; which is, basically, why the call took so long to come through. Norris said that he still hadn’t stopped laughing about fellatrix when he grilled him the next day.

  – It’s a good word, Hooey conceded, releasing the handbrake and moving forward.

  – It’s a good word, but, let’s face it, if he’d just put cocksucking bitch we might have got everything sorted out by now. Apart from anything else, we could be headed for the pub and not fucking Playtime’s again.

  – So what happened? asked Hooey.

  – Who to? Norris?

  – No. The Venezuelan.

  – Oh, they gave him another chance, I think, but he’s going to have to watch it.

  Hooey stopped at the brake lights of a minicab, craning right for gaps in the oncoming traffic while a young woman in a small piece of material steadied herself against the minicab’s right back door then leant inside to snog the driver.

  To the left the houses looked squashed, like their roofs might pop off at any moment. Across the road, swans were massed against the bank of the Thames. The full moon threw a shivering reflection up off the water.

  – Alright, said Hooey, eyeing the woman who was now reeling away down the towpath. I give up. What’s a Wizard, then?

  – A Wizard?! said Teather. Oh, come on, Hooey! Wizard: Wizard of Oz. Oz: Ounce. You should have got that one.

  – Ah, Hooey murmured, preening his moustache.

  – By the way, said Teather. Did you get anywhere with those students? Did you get any good leads?

  – Ah! said Hooey. Er… Well, the bloke who’s supposed to own the ambulance, Parsons? He’s got no tax, or insurance, or anything. But… Someone broke into Burnell Road just after we left. One of the neighbours phoned up, said they saw a girl running away from it, so we sent round a car and – sure enough – someone had been in there. The tape had been cut. There was vomit on the floor and some bits of rope tied round the back of a chair. Someone had been hacking at them.

  – Fuck! said Teather.

  – Except the place is such a shit-hole anyway it’s a bit hard to say what was there already and what wasn’t.

  – But I mean… said Teather. How the fuck did that happen?!

  – Look, said Hooey. We don’t actually know it was either of them.

  – Oh, come on, Hooey! Who else would it have been?

  – Alright, alright, said Hooey. If we assume it was… Well, the ropes were cut, badly – not untied – and there wasn’t any blood. Also, the girl’s housemates insist that they saw her at lunchtime today and she was fine, although I couldn’t get them to say where she is now. We’re still trying, obviously, but this is the point. If she’s still alive and basically okay, she must have told him something she didn’t tell us… Otherwise he’d have done something permanent to her. That’s how he is.

  The road ran left among semis and past the crowds around Staines train station. Commuters were crawling over the footbridge, heading for their gins and glasses of wine. On the platforms, people with pressing engagements were looking at the 5:37, which was fifty yards away with no obvious plans of moving any closer.


  – So what’s the story with you? asked Hooey. What’s so urgent that you need me to gather you up from Staines high street?

  He slowed for a junction. A breeze was stirring the twigs and the scant leaves around a streetlight in front of them. Teather was staring ahead of him, frowning.

  – Well, it’s all a bit embarrassing, he said a few seconds later. I got this call on the mobile, and it seems that something’s come through on the taps, except the back-up people who were supposed to have dealt with it pressed the wrong button and forwarded the whole lot straight to Knowle Green without checking what was on it or making a copy or anything. They can’t work out how to get it back again, and they’re in Wantage, which doesn’t exactly help. So there was a panic and I turned out to be the only person from the department still in the Spelthorne district this weekend.

  Hooey was driving faster now, both hands on the wheel, his eyes hooded purposefully. They passed a man limping on his way back from the train station; a troubled-looking woman with a cigarette adhered to a corner of her mouth and half a dozen children clustered around her.

  The Punto entered Sykes Lane with a squeak from the tyres, passing between Astras and Mondeos and beneath the arching cubes of the PLAYTIME’S™ sign. The barrier was up. The cubicle was empty.

  – Oh, where’s the bloody security guard? said Teather, brushing a few head-shaped pieces of hair into place.

  Hooey stopped the car to the right of the entrance and climbed out quickly, hanging his mobile phone on the back pocket of his chinos. He pushed on one of the three glass doors, catching it with a hand to allow Teather in behind him.

  Inside there was a wall of hot, dry air. The mysterious soft toys watched them from their presentation tables.

  – Alright, Norm? said the receptionist, a dark-haired woman with a prematurely lined face. I didn’t expect you in tonight.

  – Me neither, Janice, said Teather. You seen that security guard anywhere?

  – John?

  – I don’t know. Whoever was supposed to have been out there.