Think Yourself Lucky Page 5

  "I've done nothing to anyone. What am I supposed to have done?"

  "She's in a sulk, that's all. Putting out the brochures and looking like she thinks someone else should." Emily moved to stand beside him. "David," she added as she read the screen, faking shock that nonetheless pinkened her cheeks. "I didn't know you went in for that kind of thing."

  "I don't." He'd reached what he assumed was the end of the episode of the blog, in which the narrator followed a cinemagoer into the Gents. "It's what that fellow from the writers' group meant," David said. "The title was already out there."

  "Are you going to find out what happens?"

  "Don't blame me if it isn't nice," he said and scrolled down the page. "I've seen what he gets up to elsewhere."

  "I'm glad this isn't you, then. Nobody could say you aren't nice."

  Emily's face grew pinker, though he couldn't tell how much of this was caused by the story that crawled into view. All at once the phone skittered across the table as his hand jerked. "Oh, David," Emily cried. "I see what you mean."

  Perhaps she did, but she couldn't see his thoughts. He recaptured the phone and peered at the screen in the hope of having been mistaken, but what he thought he'd seen was there. His head felt hollow and unstable, and all he could do was convince Emily that he'd been shocked for the reason she had. "We don't want any more of that, do we?" he declared and broke the connection. "Let's give Andrea a hand," he said, gripping the edge of the table until the dizziness went away. "As you say, it's a good job this has nothing to do with me."

  TEN

  He opened his eyes to find Stephanie's face close to his. It felt like being wakened by the sun until she said "What's wrong, David?"

  At first he didn't quite know where he was or when. It was Sunday, and neither of them needed to get up, but this fell short of reassuring him. "Why is anything?" he mumbled.

  "You don't usually talk in your sleep."

  At once he was a good deal more awake. "What did I say?"

  "I couldn't make most of it out."

  "I expect it wasn't worth hearing. Just me using up my breath." He would rather not have added "You said most."

  "You kept telling yourself not to say something." Stephanie reached out to caress his face as she murmured "You can say anything to me."

  "I know. I have." Since this was inadequate he tried saying "You can understand I'm worried for you and your job."

  "Don't be too much. There are a couple of places that wouldn't mind taking me on if I'm available. They mightn't pay so much, though." Before David could respond she said "Do I need to be worried about you?"

  "I can't see why," David said but wondered if he should.

  "I haven't caused you any more problems with Miss."

  "Andrea, you mean." When Stephanie only gazed at him across her pillow David said "It wouldn't be your fault if I had."

  "You're saying you have."

  "None I can't laugh at."

  "You can with me if you like."

  "I will if I need to, then," David said and slipped an arm around her waist. "You know I don't like speaking ill of people. Speak ill and you'll be ill, my grandmother used to say her mother said."

  "I just wish sometimes you'd share more of your thoughts."

  "Suppose they aren't worth sharing?"

  "If they're yours they are to me." Stephanie held his gaze while she said "You shouldn't ever be embarrassed. We ought to know all about each other."

  "Maybe there's nothing you don't know about me." When he felt her waist grow slack against his arm he said "You know a lot more than Andrea."

  "I should hope so, David."

  Perhaps he needed her discontent to make him say "All right, I'll tell you why I think I was talking in my sleep. Did you ever have an imaginary playmate?"

  "I had enough who were real."

  "I had plenty of those, but I made one up when I was little." He had a sense of setting free the truth with no idea of the consequences. "I called him Lucky," he said.

  "Oh," Stephanie murmured and stroked his back. "Does that mean you didn't think you were yourself?"

  "No, I thought I was. I remember my parents kept saying we were, and I couldn't see any reason to argue. We were a lot luckier than the people they had to deal with every day."

  "So why did you call him that, your friend?"

  "Because he could do things I didn't dare and get away with them."

  He saw a glimmer of naughty amusement in Stephanie's eyes. "You did them and blamed him, you mean."

  "I wouldn't have, not the kind of things he did. I'm sure you wouldn't have wanted me to. He behaved like the children my parents talked about when they thought I couldn't hear."

  "Well, you were a child yourself." Before David could decide whether she was offering this as an excuse or even wishing he'd misbehaved a little more, Stephanie said "Anyway, I thought we were supposed to be talking about—"

  "We are." Just the same, it took some effort to say "He came back."

  "hi your sleep, you're saying."

  "Not last night and not while I was asleep. Long before that." With a laugh that hardly sounded like his David said "You might say he was me as I didn't grow up."

  "I might if I knew what it meant."

  "When I turned adolescent I was afraid I'd start being like the teenagers my parents had to cope with, so—"

  "Poor David. You ought to have been able to let go at that age." With a smile not entirely free of wistfulness Stephanie said "You could a bit more now and then."

  "That sounds like a complaint."

  "Don't let it spoil our day. Just forward it to the appropriate department. Anyway," she said to return him to his subject, "you were being a teenager."

  "Yes, and so I wouldn't be the wrong kind I brought him back."

  "Your friend Lucky."

  "I wouldn't call him that. More like bad company. You'll laugh, but I must have been trying to make myself think he wasn't a childish idea, so I gave him a last name."

  "What did you call him?"

  "Mr Newless, and don't ask me why. It didn't seem to have anything to do with me." For no reason he could think of David wondered if this was the first time he'd ever spoken the name. "I ended up using him when I was tempted to do anything I thought my parents mightn't like," he said. "He caused all sorts of mayhem, but only in my head. In a while I convinced myself I was what they wanted, and that got rid of him."

  "So why were you thinking about him last night, do you think?"

  "What I've just told you about, that wasn't the last time I called him up.

  "You're making him sound like some kind of demon, David."

  "Well, he wasn't." David stiffened so as not to yield to an unexpected shiver. As he pulled the quilt around them both he felt like a child trying to take refuge in bed. "He was just something I made up," he insisted. "And I did again while I was at university."

  "I'd have thought you would have broken out of yourself there at least."

  "I had fun, don't worry. It's a good thing I did, considering how hard I worked as well and where I've ended up."

  "We have to take the best jobs we can get, don't we, even if there's more to us."

  "There isn't that much more to me." He hoped Stephanie realised he wasn't saying the same about her. "The problem was," he said, "maybe I had a bit too much fun."

  She made a joke of looking apprehensive. "What am I going to find out about you, David?"

  "It was the only time I got into drugs."

  "Well, they're out of your system now, and you needn't think I didn't. I shared a few bongs back then and ate the odd mushroom."

  "I did all that too. I even had a year on cigarettes. You wouldn't have known that, would you?" For a moment David managed to feel he was sharing a secret, but he was too aware of keeping another. "Only once I went too far," he said.

  "You're back now, though. What did you do?" Stephanie murmured and inched closer.

  "I don't think any of us even knew
what it was called. Give us a pill and we'd swallow it if it was something new that was going round the campus."

  "Maybe that's how we had to be to grow into who we are now. So what happened, David?"

  "I still don't know exactly what it did. Maybe someone at the university designed it, but we never found out who. It wasn't around very long. Maybe whoever made it panicked because they were afraid of being found out."

  "What happened to you, I was asking."

  "I know." David was aware of fending off the memory. "A few of us took it one night in somebody's room," he said. "Everyone else was happy just to lie around and have visions, but it didn't work that way for me. I had to get out."

  "You aren't claustrophobic now, though. I suppose some drugs can make you feel you are."

  "It wasn't just that. I was trying to get away from what I'd done."

  "You couldn't just let go and enjoy it."

  "It made me feel I couldn't, so I wandered off the campus on my own."

  The memory was growing as vivid as any of the visions he'd wished he hadn't had. The old buildings of the university had glowed like bones in a fire, but he'd seen that the new blocks lit by white globes on stalks were fossils of the future. As he crossed a road, the cars that glared at him with their great eyes had seemed poised to multiply their speed the instant he stepped off the kerb. He'd had to walk through far too many streets composed of display cases furnished with a selection of people, unless the images within the frames were arcade games, since the figures didn't move until he stared at them. Despite the January chill, he'd felt his sweaty feet squelch at every step. At last he'd come into the open on the far side of a stile, which was as cold as metal and transformed his hands on it into wood. The electric amber sunset of the town had faded from the sky he'd left behind him, and eventually he'd lain down in the middle of a field that frost had turned into enormous spiky half-buried ribs. He'd felt the skeleton splinter beneath him, and then he'd been aware of nothing except the sky, where the moon had sharpened the edges of clouds as it crept from behind them. "Where did you end up?" Stephanie said.

  "Somewhere out in the country, I can't tell you anything else."

  "Is that where you met your Mr Newless?"

  "I didn't meet him. I never have and I wouldn't want to."

  "Gosh, I've never heard you sound so fierce. I was only thinking you might have thought you did when you were out of your head."

  "Not even then," David said, which felt like trying not to put the memory into words. He'd lain on the icy shards of the world and gazed up at the moon, the half that shone like snow and the rest that he couldn't be sure he was seeing, a rounded segment of the night like a denial rendered solid. The frigid light had gathered all around him until he'd started to believe that nothing was alive except him—that nothing else was even real. The notion had closed around his mind, eating away at his sense of his own reality, a threat that had terrified him so badly that he'd clutched at the only solution he could think of. "It's exactly what I didn't do," he told Stephanie. "I managed to imagine everything was happening to him instead of me."

  "Did it help?"

  "It must have." All the same, for a moment if not longer—it had felt like the rest of his life—he hadn't known where or even who he was. Until he'd succeeded in recalling his own name he'd felt as if he had left his body, which had frozen beyond his ability to revive it, unless the dead light had entirely erased it. At last he'd rediscovered the use of his muscles and had jerked the shaky puppet to its feet, and it had jittered slithering across the blanched field towards the false dawn of the town—the amber glow that, however artificial, had seemed less dead than the moonlight. As he'd run back to the room he'd set out from, the breaths in his ears had sounded like the world returning to life. When he'd fallen back into his chair nobody had bothered wondering where he'd been, and he'd found his insignificance unexpectedly reassuring. He must have been over the peak of the drug by then, since he'd been able to close his eyes and dream in great detail of countries he wanted to visit even though he never would. "It got rid," he said.

  "Or you thought it had."

  David shifted uneasily, and the quilt slipped off their shoulders as if somebody were tugging it away from them. "Why only thought?"

  "Weren't you dreaming about him last night?"

  "He's never in my dreams that I'm aware of." David was conscious of having far too much still to tell. "Do you want a coffee?" he found he would rather ask. "We ought to be moving if we're going for a drive before you've got to head for work."

  "I'll come down with you. I'm guessing there's more to hear." As he made for the stairs David was beset by a sense of how little his personality was apparent in the house. The spare room was playing host to all the superhero comics he had collected as a boy and was keeping as an investment, but otherwise the place didn't seem to have acquired much character in a lifetime hardly more than twice as long as his. The dark green fittings of the bathroom belonged to the previous owner, but the plastic switches and sockets on the walls looked like the opposite of history, while the plain pine banisters of the narrow staircase and the carpets with their blurred perfunctory pattern could be as old as the house. In the kitchen some of the dull metal surfaces marked by anonymous scouring came vaguely alive with his reflection and Stephanie's as she followed him. "Is there, then?" she said.

  "I told you what happened at the writers' group," David said and turned away from her to load the percolator. "I shouldn't have let myself go at all. I felt as if they wanted to turn me into someone else."

  "Nobody but you is all I want. Are you saying they made you write about your character?"

  "I never have and I wouldn't want to. They got a title out of me, that's all. The first thing that came into my head."

  "That doesn't seem very much to bother you in your sleep."

  "It was like being at an alcoholics' meeting and having to stand up and speak." With an effort David said "Only that wasn't the end of it. Someone's used my title for a blog or some kind of fiction site."

  "It must have been a better title than you thought, then. And if you were wrong about that—"

  "I'm not saying anybody stole it. It's just a phrase people use. No, the thing is, what's odd..." He almost wished he were a writer after all if that would help him speak. "Whoever it is," he said and felt his breath falter, "he's calling himself Lucky."

  "That's a coincidence, isn't it? I don't suppose it's very much of one, though, if you say the title's such a common phrase." Stephanie gazed into his eyes as if she was seeing someone far away and said "Why does it bother you, David?"

  "I suppose I don't like the idea that anyone could have things like that inside them. He seems to want to kill half the people he meets."

  "Don't we all have days like that sometimes?"

  "I don't believe I ever have." He hoped she didn't take that as criticism. "It's how he writes about them as well," he said, "as if he's eager to find the next victim. And he has too much fun imagining what he'd do to them."

  "So who does he want to get rid of?"

  "There was a shop assistant who carried on talking instead of serving a queue, and somebody whose car alarm disturbed him every night even though it was miles away, and a man who kept walking in front of him in a cinema while a film was on. That's all I looked at."

  "They all sound like people we might like to strangle."

  "Yes, but we wouldn't write about it, would we?" Talking about the material he'd seen had left David more uneasy than he understood. "We wouldn't write about doing worse to them," he said. "We wouldn't put ideas like that in people's heads."

  A hiss at his back gave him an excuse to turn away. "Here's the coffee," he quite unnecessarily said, "and now I'll forget about all that if you don't mind."

  They took their mugs upstairs and shared the bathroom before making a token breakfast of cereal. As they left the house Mrs Robbins emerged from its twin across the road with a bag of garbage in her hand. "Off
to work, Mr Botham?" she called. "And the lady, of course."

  "Not just yet. Going out for a drive."

  "Well, you take care." Having shut her bin with a decisive slam, Mrs Robbins said "And the lady as well."

  She retreated into her house as David unlocked the car. "I don't think I've ever felt less like a lady," Stephanie said with a rueful laugh.

  "You're enough of one for me," David said and managed not to wince as he glanced at the scrape on the side of the car. Weeks ago he'd ground it against the gatepost, having instinctively waved back to a passing neighbour. "Thanks for the souvenir, Mr Dent," he muttered, but he oughtn't to blame Dent for his own carelessness. Still, he was glad not to see Dent hurrying to guide him out of the driveway, as the fellow insisted on doing whenever he had the chance. Now David thought about it, he hadn't seen the man for weeks.

  ELEVEN

  As David stepped onto the crossing at the fifth bleep of the green man he was almost deafened by the blare of a horn. He just had time to stumble backwards onto the pavement as a car hurtled at him. A woman cried out behind him, and the driver brandished the mobile phone he was using. "You nearly trod on my toe," the woman complained. "It's sore as it is."

  "My fault," David mumbled, though he hardly thought it was.

  When he ventured onto the crossing again a man at the front of the crowd that met him was ready with advice. "You want to watch out what you're doing, lad."