Incarnate (32 page)

He remembered how it felt: like this, like someone trying to poke around inside his head. When they’d attached the pads with their wires and left him alone, he’d felt as if an insect with wiry feelers had hold of his brain. “Nothing,” he said.

“Are you absolutely sure?”

“Yes.” The heat and smoke made it sound more like a cough. “Yes.” he shouted.

“Forgive me, Danny, but I don’t think you’re telling me the whole truth. I know this must be difficult for you, but now the subject has come up I hope you’ll be frank with me. We need to understand what happened. It may be important for both of us.”

Her gentleness made him even more suspicious. He gulped more beer though his stomach felt heavy and uncomfortable. “Did you foresee too much, is that what went wrong?” Dr. Kent was almost pleading. “Whatever you saw, surely it must have happened by now. It isn’t as though talking about it can make it happen.”

She must be lying. Perhaps even thinking about it could. He was raising his glass, but not to drink. He could feel how it would smash against the table, how her mouth would twitch and jerk as he stuffed the broken glass down her throat to shut, her up for good. If they had been alone there was no doubt that was what he would have done. He wasn’t sure he wouldn’t do it anyway as she took hold of his arm. “Danny, look at me,” she said.

He managed to turn his head at last and meet her gaze, and felt that everyone was watching him. “I asked you at the time but I’m asking you again,” she said. “Did all of you dream the same thing?”

He couldn’t remember what he’d dreamed. He’d spent eleven years not remembering, not saying a word to anyone about that day. He felt himself grin as he said, “I don’t know.”

“You didn’t discuss it afterward. That in itself shows how disturbing it must have been. You really don’t remember, do you?” She looked frustrated and guilty, or would have to anyone less gullible than he was. “There’s one thing you must remember,” she said.

He was already remembering too much, remembering how it had felt as if something were both trying to creep into his brain and emerge from it. That was how he felt now. He reached blindly for his glass, but hadn’t found it when she said, “What did you mean by what you said the last time you came out of your room?”

He gripped the glass and didn’t care how many people saw. They were all on her side anyway. But he rammed it into his own face instead of hers, though it still felt as if it might break. “You said she made it happen,” Dr. Kent was insisting. “You know who I mean. What was her name, now? Yes, Molly Wolfe.”

He bared his teeth at her. There was no point in pretending now. “Don’t you know what I meant?”

“No, I don’t.” She looked so puzzled that he almost thought she was. “I really don’t. If I did I wouldn’t be asking.”

He drank more beer as if that might frustrate her. It seemed not to be working for him: the sense of something in his brain was growing, he felt that everyone in the crowd that was flooding upward was waiting for him to speak. Suddenly he thumped his glass on the table and was shouting. “She started everything changing, that’s what she wanted to happen. It would have too if it hadn’t been for me. I’ve been stopping it ever since. That’s why you want to get rid of me.”

“Who does, Danny? Nobody does. I give you my word.”

He was groping to unbutton his overcoat—he was so hot and sticky—until he remembered he had already taken it off. The crowd was pressing close around him, hundreds of people, and he no longer had control of himself when she said, “If that’s what you think about yourself and Molly Wolfe, what about the others who were there?”

She was trying to confuse him, trying to make him feel the way he’d felt eleven years ago, so that he wouldn’t be able to stop things from changing. The others wouldn’t know what Molly Wolfe was up to, he was the only one who was standing up to her and holding off the change. The insight came too late to prevent him from smashing the glass against the edge of the table.

Only the base was left in his hand. It never happened that way in films. Dr. Kent was staring at him as if she were frightened and wouldn’t let it show, people were shouting at him and picking splinters out of their clothes while he gazed stupidly at the jagged disk in his hand, and then the crowd that had pretended to be jammed shoulder to shoulder was parting to let the barman at him. “That’ll be all,” the barman said. “Fun’s one thing, that’s another. On your way and think yourself lucky I’m not prosecuting.”

He was in it too, of course. Danny grabbed his overcoat and bundled up its flailing arms, then he staggered along the aisle that Dr. Kent’s crowd were happy to make for him now they’d confused him and got rid of him. When he reached the doors, he found she hadn’t followed. The barman blocked his way and waited until Danny stumbled out of the pub.

She would have to come out when the pub closed. He almost tore his overcoat before he could get it on, then he folded his arms about his throbbing, queasy stomach and waited while crowds began to converge on Trafalgar Square. Each time the pub doors opened, his fingers sank into his upper arms. They and his bladder were aching when the emerging crowd forced the doors wider, when the last stragglers swayed out, when the pub went dark.

Either the barman had let her out another way or she had been able to sneak past him. Nevertheless he thought she was somewhere in the crowd that was piling into Trafalgar Square; why, she’d said there was nowhere else to be. He relieved himself in a dark alley, he pressed his forehead against the wall then shoved himself away, because the wall gave like a mattress. The dark must be on her side. He staggered back into the light and the crowd as soon as he could.

Perhaps the dark had weakened his hold, for nothing would keep still. The crowds hustled him toward Trafalgar Square. Now and then he had to struggle free, panting and swallowing, but at least they were giving him the concealment he needed. He was sure he would find her, never mind how impossible it seemed in the enormous festive crowd.

He could see Nelson on his column now, like a student who had dared to climb a chimney. Revelers were dancing in the fountain; there wasn’t room to move in the square or even to struggle round the perimeter. Suddenly, unfairly, the clocks began to strike midnight, the crowd was singing “Auld Lang Syne“ until the buildings seemed to shake, thousands of people were embracing and kissing, fireworks exploded in the sky. Someone was firing guns behind him in the Haymarket. No, it was the popping of champagne corks, and all around him beer cans were spitting. Another firework bloomed in the sky, and couples parted in the Haymarket to look up. For a few seconds the upturned faces were brighter than day. Before they went out Danny felt as if his head were on fire. Not a hundred yards away a tall slim man with rumpled hair had lifted his face from a woman’s upturned face, and she was Molly Wolfe.

She was turning away from Trafalgar Square before Danny was able to move. He had been right to feel that the tables were turned, to follow his instincts; he’d only been wrong to think it was Dr. Kent he was hunting. The crowd between him and Molly Wolfe was still facing the square. He couldn’t shout “Excuse me” too loudly in case she heard, but more than one knot of revelers turned ugly when he tried to struggle through. He lost sight of her before he reached the Haymarket. but when at last he fought his way round the corner there she was, five hundred yards away and unmistakable. This time he wouldn’t lose her.

He almost did at Piccadilly Circus, among the famished chalky addicts with their bruised arms. Her tall thin friend kept waving at taxis, all of which were taken. They wouldn’t get a cab tonight; her friend’s waving only helped Danny to see where they were. Crowds danced in Regent Street and Oxford Street among fallen Christmas decorations and trampled hot dogs, buildings full of faces seemed to be collapsing like waves toward Danny; people dressed like Dr. Kent or with faces that resembled hers kept getting in his way. Some of them didn’t even look like women. None of this could distract him, not when he’d been dealing with it for eleven years. Nothing could make him look away from Molly Wolfe.

He followed them along Bayswater Road, past an estate agent’s, up a hill. When she disappeared beyond a gate, he turned up his collar and scrambled up the icy hill before she could close her door. As he reached the railings she was stooping to a niche under the steps and slipping out a key. Danny saw her and her friend vanish into the basement flat. His penis was aching, he needed an alley or somewhere else dark, but his grin didn’t falter even when he turned to go downhill and almost fell. He not only knew at last where she lived, he even knew how to get in.

30

M
ARTIN
was asleep first. Molly lay awake for a while in his arms. She breathed his warmth and stroked his chest and listened to the sounds of the New Year. She no longer felt as edgy as she had in Trafalgar Square and all the way home. She was resigned to feeling that way until she resolved what she had to resolve. She had to trust the dream.

A police car blared along Bayswater Road, greeted by a variety of shouts, and she wondered if Rankin were driving. She knew his name and his face, she knew he’d helped kill Lenny Bennett, she almost knew how he would betray himself. She’d dreamed of him before she’d met him in what most people would call reality, and that proved the dream—proved that Maitland had been telling the truth in the dream when he had implicated Rankin. Perhaps people always told the truth in dreams, in Molly’s, at any rate. Rankin didn’t like her audience to be told lies about him any more than he did, Maitland had said, but it had taken her a while to realize that meant Rankin had been involved in Bennett’s death.

She was sure of it, but what could she do? It wasn’t as if she had any proof. The dream had made her feel even more frustrated than Joyce’s visit had: she hadn’t turned her back on dreaming as Joyce had, but she might as well have done so for all the use her dreams were. She hadn’t been able to think of much else until Martin had come home and then, that very night, she’d had the next dream.

Perhaps he had made her feel safe enough to do so. She’d found herself in a playground outside the sketch of a school, a long red anonymous Victorian building under a shaky sky. Boys had surrounded the skinhead policeman, red-kneed in a school uniform that was absurdly small for him. He’d shaken his fists at them as they chanted “Randy Rankin the wanker”; she hadn’t invented his nickname after all.

If the police didn’t know what he had been called at school, what use would it be to tell them? Did she really expect them to admit anything because of a dream? She needed proof, and the next night she’d realized she could get it. All she had to do was dream.

She was nearly there now. The sounds of New Year’s Day were retreating. She was walking through a field and knew precisely how many blades it contained, and then she was looking out of that number of windows, somehow looking out of all of them at once. It was too momentary to bother her, for now she was in Rankin’s flat, high in a tower block.

She had been here three times. Each time there had been more to see. She hardly glanced at the chest expanders hanging beside the fitted wardrobe, the reports on immigration beneath the glass-topped table with its stolen beermats, the wrestling magazines stacked on the long low cupboard that hid the rifle she had glimpsed in last night’s dream, the shelf full of much-thumbed horror stories and war books. She headed for the mantelpiece, for the plate-lipped ivory figure of a native woman with large bare pointed breasts. This time Molly meant to see what was hanging round its neck.

“So that’s what you were after,” Rankin said. She turned, for she had seen what she wanted to see: Lenny Bennett’s identity bracelet rusty with blood. It was hanging round the figure’s neck like the trophy it was. She had her proof, she could wake now, before triumphantly sneering Rankin reached her with his hands, claws ready to dig into her arms or her breasts. But she couldn’t wake in that case, by God, she would take control. It was her dream. He must have realized, for all at once his face began working uncontrollably, he was sinking to his knees as if she had dumped an unbearable weight on him. Tears of pain or rage were pouring from his eyes. If she could do that, she could do more. “You killed Lenny Bennett, didn’t you?” she said, stepping forward to stand over him. “You beat him to death.”

His mouth clamped shut, writhed open to let his teeth tear at his lower lip. Whatever she was doing to him, she intensified it almost without thinking. Blood sprayed from his lip as his teeth lost their hold, and she had to force herself not to look away. “Yes, yes,” he said, almost screaming.

“You and who else?”

“Maitland. Maitland!” He was on all fours now but couldn’t crawl. “Stop, stop.”

“I will just as soon as you’ve told him what you’ve told me,” she said, and pointed behind him. But the door of the flat was shut, and nobody was there.

Someone would be. She was resolved on that now. All she needed was a photograph that showed the trophy. The lies of the police had lost Martin his series; it was only appropriate that she should have him reinstated and herself too by exposing the police. She might be able to get Joyce on the air; she would be able to keep an eye on Nell. Filming Rankin’s flat would be the solution to so much that she had to wake fully before she realized how difficult and dangerous it would be.

At breakfast Martin said. “You look preoccupied.”

She almost told him why, except that she’d caused him enough trouble already. Whoever went with her to film, it oughtn’t to be him. “So much has been happening,” she said.

“Yeah, well, that was last year.”

“Something else happened that I didn’t tell you. You know about Stuart Hay’s letter and how I thought I saw Danny whatever his name is in Soho. Well, while you were away someone else I met that time in Oxford came to see me. Joyce Churchill. She’s looking after old folk now.”

“She came to see you after all that time? That’s strange.”

“Well, not so strange really. She read about me in the paper.”