Thieving Fear Read online

  The speed of the traffic gave him time to glance at the display. Hugh was calling at last, and Rory was about to speak to him when the Peugeot advanced another few yards. The headlights of the Rover glared at once. He switched the mobile to loudspeaker mode and drove forwards, blinking his smudged eyes so fiercely that it felt like nervousness. 'You can hear me, can you?' he demanded.

  'I think so.'

  'Of course you bloody can or you wouldn't be answering.' Rory tilted his head towards the phone as he braked to a halt, and felt as if he were shouting down a well to his brother. 'How long does it take to return a call?'

  'I couldn't find it.'

  'Which?'

  'This.' As Rory lost patience with being unable to see what was meant, Hugh said 'My phone.'

  'All right, no panic. We're talking now. What's up?'

  'I just told you.'

  If that was enough to distress Hugh so much, worse must be wrong with him. 'Well, you've found it now,' Rory said. 'Hang onto it till I get there and keep talking if you want.'

  'Not just the phone.'

  'Christ, you're in a bad way, aren't you?' Rory said in case a dose of bluff humour might help. 'What else, then?'

  'Everything.'

  'Buggeration, that's a lot,' Rory said, though he suspected his attempts to buck Hugh up were falling short. 'Eh, don't you try to tell me what to do. I'll go where I want when it suits me.'

  'Who's there? Who are you speaking to?'

  'Just some twat in a flash car that thinks nobody's good enough to get in his way.' As the Peugeot had drawn alongside the cab of the lorry, the Rover had instantly glared in response. 'I'm on the road,' Rory said. 'I'll be with you when I can, but don't panic if I'm a while. It's a nightmare here.'

  The Peugeot sprinted ahead of the lorry, but not as far as the length of his van. 'What did you say?' Hugh seemed less than anxious to learn.

  Was his voice growing faint with emotion? 'Driving right now, it's a nightmare,' Rory said and closed the gap.

  'What kind?'

  'The kind that gets on your nerves.' In case this sounded like an accusation Rory said 'It's just a figure of speech.'

  'It isn't. I'm in one now.'

  The Peugeot gathered speed as the lorry did, and Rory saw that the roadworks had come to an end, opening the outer lane on the approach to a large busy roundabout. 'I'm out of mine,' he said. 'I should be with you very soon.'

  'Are you certain?'

  The Rover veered into the third lane, and Rory bade it a mute but expressive good riddance, which failed to revive much sensation in his hand as he returned it to the wheel. 'I don't know what'd stop me,' he said.

  'I didn't mean that.'

  The Rover sped onto the roundabout, and the lorry and the Peugeot were at the edge when Rory saw a gap in the circling traffic large enough to admit both the car ahead and the van. 'Let's leave it till I see you,' he said.

  'Just answer me one thing first.'

  The lorry and the Peugeot braved the roundabout, and Rory floored the accelerator. He needed the first exit, for which he was in the correct lane, but the lorry wasn't taking that route. As it blocked the exit at length Hugh said not quite faintly enough to be inaudible 'Nightmares.'

  'Right, them.' Rory was going to have to circumnavigate the entire crowded roundabout. He would have welcomed a break from Hugh's commentary, but as he set about overtaking the lorry in the midst of the headlong traffic he was provoked to add 'What about them?'

  'Have you started remembering any? Because –'

  For a heartbeat Rory managed to believe that only the mobile had failed, and then he realised that he couldn't hear the vehicles all around him or even the van. At least he was more or less able to see, despite a blur unpleasantly suggestive of the notion that his eyeballs had grown an extra skin. He tried to blink them clear as he accelerated desperately past the next exit. At the second blink his vision was extinguished like an image on a television that had been switched off.

  He heard himself cry out, a distant feeble almost formless wail that he remembered uttering in an attempt to waken from a nightmare. It didn't work. He no longer knew how he was driving the van, since he was unable to feel the controls. He only knew that he was trapped inside it, as vulnerable as a mollusc in a fragile shell. If he wouldn't be able to feel what happened to him, this was the opposite of reassuring: it felt like his ultimate dread. He was nothing but a helpless consciousness enclosed in an insensate mass. Nothing and nobody, he just had time to think before he was.

  SIXTEEN

  'Have you started remembering any? Because I have. Only I'm not just remembering,' Hugh pleaded before Rory switched his mobile off. Hugh couldn't blame him. However desperate he'd been to talk about his plight and explain why he hadn't returned Rory's calls, he shouldn't have rung his brother while he was driving. He pressed the mobile against his right ear to confirm there was silence, which meant that Rory would be concentrating on the road. Had he really heard a cry just now, the sort of almost powerless sound he uttered whenever he was struggling to waken from a bad dream? It could hardly have been Rory; it must have been himself. Disturbing though it was to be unsure of his own voice, he supposed this further expressed his helplessness – and then he gasped. He was so preoccupied with how remote the cry of panic had seemed that he'd overlooked something far more immediate. He knew he was holding the phone to his right ear.

  Quite a time passed before he was able to risk moving it away. He was terrified of losing the faculty he'd somehow regained. Eventually he laid the mobile on its back between his hands, which he flattened on the old stained wooden table where he and Rory had spent boyhood mealtimes with their parents, and gazed around the kitchen. For hours that felt like the beginning of eternity the room and the rest of the house had become appallingly unfamiliar, harder to find his way through than a maze many times the size of the building, in which every recognisable object seemed to mock his confusion. Now he grasped that the door to the small back garden was to the right of the unrelieved pane of glass above the metal sink ahead of him, while the door to the hall was on his left. He made himself turn his chair around with a protracted stuttering screech of its legs on the linoleum. There were the cupboards and the laminated working surface, but far more important, with his back to the sink and cooker and refrigerator and the garden that was mostly occupied by a pair of rusty swings standing knee-deep in weeds, he had no problem with understanding that the hall door was now to his right, the opposite of the door to the garden. How had he recaptured his sense of direction? He could only assume that talking about his condition, no matter how perfunctorily, had done the trick. His mental interlude must have been the result of all his confrontations with Justin and Tamara and Mishel, and perhaps it came of indulging his imagination too. That was best left to the creative members of the family, and for the moment he didn't even want to think about the situation at work; he wanted to celebrate the return of the sense that he'd taken so much for granted. Pocketing the mobile, he made for the hall.

  Apart from Rory's portraits – Hugh and their cousins gazing ahead in frozen anticipation – there wasn't a great deal to it, since it was halved on the right by stairs. To the left the lounge recalled his and Rory's boyhoods: the old squat television with its dusty almost square screen did, and the video recorder piled with tapes so often used that their labels were palimpsests of his and Rory's handwriting and their parents' too, and the bookcase not overfull of books that Hugh had learned from his father to buy in charity shops and library sales. Just the free books Charlotte used to send her cousins before the publishers warned staff that complimentary copies should be given only to the press were new. At the top of the stairs the bathroom announced itself with a flush that never quite stopped trickling, while his and Rory's old rooms were more or less ahead and the largest, once the parental bedroom, was now Hugh's. All the doors were open, as he'd flung them during his panicky quest for his sense of direction; otherwise the diminutive hall – big en
ough for him, he always thought – would have been much dimmer. He turned right along it into his room.

  He'd left most of the relics of his boyhood – ramshackle scale models displaying too much glue, Scottish comic annuals, a poster for an AIDS benefit concert by Hindi rappers Jihadn't in Manchester (one of his very few demonstrations of adolescent rebellion, which had his parents wondering for at least a year and very possibly still if he was gay) – in his original bedroom. The one he occupied now retained much of his parents' bedroom furniture, wardrobes and a dressing-table too rickety to move. His single bed was newer, and so were the posters for Rory's exhibitions, and the bookcase piled with material Hugh had read and written while training as a teacher. They could rouse his guilt over the career he'd abandoned because of his inability to cope, not to mention his failure to share the house, no doubt because he was impossible to live with – but just now he felt guiltier for crossing to the window and pushing the musty faded curtains wider to gaze along the deserted street. He was starting to regret having troubled his brother.

  Perhaps trying to contact him had even aggravated Hugh's state, or Rory's absence from the phone had, so that Hugh had ended his first call without a word. He'd fled to the toilet, only to be unable to find his way back for longer than the most protracted nightmare, despite hearing the Sesame Street theme so often that it might have been taunting him. He mustn't risk putting the phone down again, although the need to keep it on him threatened to revive his terror of losing his way. All at once it seemed crucial to know what he absolutely mustn't do, but he was nowhere near identifying it when the mobile came to life.

  As he wondered whether to apologise to Rory he saw Ellen's number. It only intensified his sense of some action it was vital to avoid. Surely that couldn't be answering the phone, though he almost dropped it from nervousness. 'Are you busy?' Ellen said. 'Can you talk?'

  He mustn't burden her with his problems at the supermarket; she sounded tense enough. 'I'm not at work just now,' he said.

  'Not even for me?'

  She might be trying to sound innocent if not coquettish, but it made Hugh uneasy. 'How do you mean?'

  'Rory says you've been finding things out for me. He called before.'

  In the midst of his mounting anxiety Hugh felt betrayed. 'Why?' he complained.

  'I wasn't completely clear about that. Something was wrong with his phone, I think. He kept not being able to hear me, but he was asking if you'd been in touch.'

  Hugh saw this might have been his fault for neglecting to leave a message. 'What did he say I've been doing?' he was impatient to learn.

  After a pause that struck Hugh as surely unintentionally cruel, Ellen said 'Looking into Thurstaston.'

  If her tone seemed oddly guarded, Hugh hadn't time to analyse it. 'I told him not to tell.'

  'Why, Hugh?'

  Even this sounded nervous, unless he was mistaking his state for hers. As he stared out of the window he had to make an effort to identify which direction Rory would arrive from. 'He'd no right, that's all,' he said.

  'You mustn't blame him. Please don't fall out with him over that or anything else for that matter.'

  'I expect you'll have done all the research you want, though.'

  'I don't know.' In the same odd tone she said 'What have you found?'

  'I told you how it hasn't changed, where we spent the night.' This made the situation sound more intimate than he could expect her to like, and he tried to leave the remark behind. 'Maybe something could be holding it like that,' he blurted.

  'Holding.'

  'From inside. Something that lives there.' He did his best to laugh at his presumption or her wary echo as he added 'In your book, I mean, obviously.'

  'Obviously.'

  Was she teasing him? She didn't seem to be enjoying it. 'Maybe you ought to have a look yourself if you haven't,' he said.

  For some reason this silenced her and seemed capable of doing the same to him, or perhaps he was confused by a sudden notion that he mustn't turn around. 'I can tell you what to look for,' he tried saying.

  'What?'

  He could almost have imagined that she didn't want to hear. 'Some weird name,' he said.

  'Don't say you've forgotten it, Hugh.'

  Her laugh sounded dutiful yet not wholly unrelated to hysteria as he twisted around to glare at the room. Of course it was deserted all the way to the door, which led to the landing and the empty rooms and the unoccupied stairs that descended to the rest of the unpeopled house. 'I wouldn't when you might need it,' he assured Ellen. 'Look up Pendemon. Arthur Pendemon.'

  'Who?'

  He was starting to wish that his answers wouldn't lead to further questions; he felt as if he would never find his way out of the tangle of them. He turned back to the window, outside which the street led in two directions, the one no longer than the building and the far more extensive other, which ought to produce Rory any moment now. 'He lived there, whoever he was when he was at home,' he said.

  'Where?'

  'At the top where we all climbed up. It says that's the site of his house.'

  Hugh was distracted by a sight beyond the window, more so once he realised it wasn't beyond. A mass of cloud as black as the depths of a pit had crept above the houses opposite to blot out the sun and display his dim reflection on the glass. He was dismayed to find he was grimacing, and glad that Ellen couldn't see – and then he began to distinguish the room behind him. It was darker than his image, and at first he could only make out the vague shapes of furniture. Why did he feel unwillingly compelled to search the reflection? He'd started to wonder what was keeping Ellen quiet by the time he located an object he didn't recognise – a more or less oval shape so dark as to be featureless, but identifiable by its outline as a head. Someone was behind him.

  He spun around so fast that the mobile almost flew out of his grasp. A figure imitated him, even mocking the desperate grab his other hand made at the phone, and as he recognised the presence he was able to laugh – indeed, less able to stop. 'What's funny?' Ellen's tiny voice cried between his hands. 'What's wrong?'

  'I thought someone was here. It was just the mirror,' Hugh said gradually more steadily as his mirth trailed off. 'Rory will be soon. Here, I mean.'

  'Had I better let you go?' Just as reluctantly Ellen added 'Unless you've got something else for me.'

  'I would have but the computer at the library went silly.' He was painfully aware how feeble this must seem, and as he faced the window again he said 'What have you turned up, then?'

  'Do you mind if I don't talk about it just now?'

  Hugh didn't. Indeed, he'd regretted the question before it had finished leaving his mouth, because it seemed bound up with the disquiet that his glimpse in the window had planted in his mind. The clouds had bared the sun, erasing the image of the room, leaving him unable to confirm that he'd seen the reflection of the mirror on the wardrobe and within it his own head. Since it would have been a back view, he couldn't have glimpsed anything like a face, never mind one that appeared to be peering out of its own darkness – soil in the eye-sockets, perhaps, and deep within it the shrunken vicious glint of buried eyes. If this was how having an imagination felt, he was glad he wasn't Ellen. 'Don't till you want to,' he said. 'I know writers aren't supposed to talk about their writing till it's done.'

  'That's what you think it's about, is it, Hugh?'

  Was he presuming by attempting not to? As he searched for any comment it would be safe to utter, Ellen said 'I'm sorry. I don't meant to be nasty to you.'

  'You can if it helps.'

  'It doesn't,' she said, but added 'Thanks for going to all that trouble for me.'

  'I'd have done more if I wasn't stopped.'

  'Stopped.'

  The tone of her echo no longer tempted him to laugh. 'By their old computer,' he said.

  'Oh yes, you did say.'

  What was troubling her? Was she working too hard? Hugh made a last attempt to be of use. 'Are you taking a day o
ff now and then?'

  'For what, Hugh? Sitting inside myself? Having a good look at myself?' Ellen let out such a disgusted sound that he assumed she was more than impatient with any suggestion of indolence. 'I need to lose myself in my writing if I can,' she said.

  'I expect that's what writers have to do, but couldn't you take a day off and still be sort of working?'

  'How?'

  Was a trace of the reflection confusing his view of the street? He was unable quite to grasp either while saying 'You could go and look at Thurstaston and see if it brings anything into your head.' When she kept her thoughts about this to herself, her silence made him babble 'It's close enough for an afternoon out, isn't it? You're the closest of anyone.'

  He wasn't sure what she whispered then: surely not that she wished otherwise. 'I'm the next,' he blurted. 'I could come with you if you wanted.'

  As soon as the offer stumbled out of his mouth he knew how mistaken it was. He might have imagined that the utterance had robbed him of the ability to put it into practice. He couldn't go with Ellen or indeed with anyone just now. So long as he faced the window he would know which way his brother had to come, but if he turned around he would lose that sense and everything that depended on it. He was striving to ignore any hint of a reflection on the glass when Ellen said 'I don't think that would be a good idea either.'

  The longer they kept talking, the more desperate he might grow to admit his state. He mustn't trouble her with it, especially since he would be telling his brother about it very soon. At least Rory had a reason to come after all. 'I'd better let you go, then,' Hugh said. 'Good luck with your books.'

  'Speak soon,' Ellen said as if she could think of no other response.