See How They Run (9 page)

He put the note back inside the boot and returned upstairs slowly, mumbling savagely to himself. Again he wanted to take them on, fight them, use the gun if necessary.

But Big M packed away his clothes and his fancy boots, cancelled all deliveries, and invited everyone in the town to a drink-till-we’re-dry comedy session at the Mutton.

When they drove away at noon on Sunday – the timing was meant to be ironic – they left a pile of sleeping bodies and a hundred hangovers lying around in the Shield and Dagger. They left a message on the bar:
Lock up when you go and throw away the key.
The fun times were over.
Yet again they said farewell to their temporary beds and hit the road.

Never mind
, said Big M,
it was fun while it lasted
.

But Pryderi was getting pissed off with Big M’s attitude, fed up with their gypsy lifestyle and fed up with being constantly hassled. Just because they were good at what they did. Or was it something else? Their accents? Maybe Big M’s bed-seeking missiles, his wandering shoes?

Forget it
, said Big M nonchalantly, driving the Bentley with his fingertips. He’d kept the comedy hat; it went well with his black Torino boots from Samuel Windsor, both soles studded with a single drawing pin to give a satisfying clink whenever Big M strode forwards. Vain, yes of course he was vain. But aren’t we all, in different ways?

Jesus Christ, we can’t go on like this
, Pryderi had said in a roadside diner somewhere between the nowhere of their past and the nowhere of their future.
We can’t go on like this.
He was looking at the clouds far off on the eastern horizon, and trying to eat a leathery breakfast which was vile enough to kill a dog. Those
clouds – perhaps they should head towards them
like storm hunters: perhaps they should ride into a tornado and end it all. Pryderi was feeling lower than he’d ever felt before, and the sky seemed higher. The world outside seemed vast and dark and threatening. Where next?

Lou stopped reading, went over to his window, and looked out onto the world again. The clouds were still there, a long line of them, but they were losing their shape and morphing into pale discolourations.

He thought of the computer clouds, viewed by four wandering friends sitting inside a grubby roadside diner. It was amazing how his mind could flick between the real world in front of him and the tiny world inside his computer. And there was yet another bank of clouds: those inside his head, on which rested the gods of the ancient world. Apollo, Lord of Mice, still alive in the small soft memories of mankind. God of the sun, truth and prophecy. A contradictory god, created in man’s image; a beautiful smooth-skinned god, androgynous and bisexual, who could bring plague and then its antidote, healing. Lou tried to compare the four travellers in the roadside diner to the mythical mice which lived below Apollo’s altar. He saw Pryderi as a mouse whose fate awaited him like a sprung trap; Big M was a small sleek mouse with a nose for cats. Yes, Big M was the master-mouse who found the next big grain store, then led his tribe to safety when the pied piper arrived.

His mind drifted to some of the mice events in his life; camping in the Lake District with his brother one Easter, with frost on the ground and a posse of
Hell’s Angels in the field below them, Lou had leant a bottle of milk against a fencing post before
turning in, and when he tried to pour some milk into their tea mugs in the morning he’d wondered why the flow was so sluggish, until he saw a small mousy face, eyes closed for evermore, floating to the top of the cream: it had climbed in and drowned in the night. The mouse had looked like a tiny hairy child coming to the surface after a dive.

Lou turned back to his desk and read the last part of the chapter hurriedly, so that he could go home to Catrin. She wanted the nursery finished, ready for their baby.

Chapter M2 had been finished while Dr Feeney recovered at a Sligo clinic, his illness unspecified.
Perhaps other things had started to go wrong in
advance of his heart attack. Lou sympathised with him briefly, a big sick man alone in a strange bed, his heavy bushtracker’s hat in his locker, sweat-stained
and smelling like a newly flensed animal hide. One of Lou’s colleagues, who’d met Feeney at a convention,
had described him as a quiet, brooding, sit-at-the-back man with acne scars and permanently
mis-shaven features. But Feeney was cunning; he’d been able to follow the fab four on their fugitive
journey thanks to a letter sent by Rhiannon to
Pryderi a few years later when she was in a psychi
atric unit. Her letter had been an attempt at catharsis
– apparently her son had been taken into care for a while when he was a small child. But though never
really meant to be seen by Pryderi, or by anyone else for that matter, the letter had been kept in the
family archive.

Following their mournful meal at the roadside
diner they’d headed off at a tangent, deep into
Middle England, and when the people and houses passing by had changed almost beyond recognition they stopped the car at a country town and sat in it for a while, windows open, listening. By now they were far away from the sea, and far away too from the chiff-chaff cadence of their native country. The voices around them had slowed and stiffened, more clay now than sand. They could go no further; they had reached the end of the road.

This time it was Ziggy who took control.

No more bloody pubs
, she said with feeling. The boys had messed up every time so far, so the girls would have a go. Something different. She left them sitting in the car and took a shufty down the high street. When she returned she had two bags of condensed cholesterol from the pie & cake shop, delicious sausage rolls still warm from the oven and fresh cream cakes. Mmm. Crumbs everywhere. Worth travelling for. So a pie & cake shop was out of the question, she said wryly. How about a shoe shop? She hadn’t spotted one, they could sell some leather goods like bags and belts as well as footwear. Anything except cider. The smell of it made her sick now. And she’d heard stories of dead rats and all sorts of shit floating in the vats. Ziggy was all woman. She wanted a shoe shop.

You making fun of me?
asked Big M, looking down at a pair of brand new boots on his size twelves.

No
, said Ziggy,
I’ve just seen some of the most down-at-heel plebs in the whole wide world. Bloody peasants. We’ll educate them, give them a better class of footwear.

Quite a snob, Ziggy.
Who was
she
to look down on people? said Big M.

After all, she was an itinerant without a home or a job. That shut her up. But shoe shop it was.

As the other patients recovered and went home, Dermot Feeney had documented it all from his clinic. Superstitious, he’d started to fear the three empty beds swimming in shark circles around him, their cold white sheets hunting for fresh meat.

Ziggy rented a shop in the high street and dipped into Pryderi’s back pocket to fund her new venture. Cider and comedy had served them well, he had wads of cash again. While the shop was being fitted out they sent Big M on a mission to buy the classi
est boots in Britain. Brown, black, red, blue or gold, they would have to be the best available. Big
M relished his task and set off in the Bentley, happy to be alone again. When he returned, a fortnight later, he was sporting an amazing pair of Lazarus Python winklepickers from Paolo Vandini, which Rhiannon ordered him to remove at once. Unusually for her she was short of patience with his sang froid, his come-day go-day attitude. Big M was always sunny side up, forever paddling in the warm river of his
own life. A shrug of the shoulders and then the
boyish smile, disarming everyone. But it was time to be a bit more serious; they were attracting the wrong sort of attention again.

So Big M went into a bit of a sulk and spent his days hanging around bars, while Pryderi went all macho on them and refused to
mince around in a poofter parlour
as he put it. Still, the shop was a big success and Big M was kept busy supplying it with
top-class footwear. Ziggy insisted on calling it
Gracious
in Defeat
.

The shop sign, white lettering on purple, was
revolting but the plebs loved it. As autumn blew its
first crinkle-cut leaves down the high street the populace lined up to part with their Jobseeker’s
Allowance. Big M spent many days and nights away buying eye-boggling boots and staying at expensive
hotels. He’d hand his card to the bar girls and
introduce himself humorously as
chief buyer
to a shoe empire called
Gracious in Defeat
. Wit and shoes: with just one more ingredient, chocolate, he introduced a whole new meaning to infidelity.

But success came at a price, as per usual. In the same way as Hay-on-Wye became a book town, Ziggy’s success turned the town around
Gracious in
Defeat
into a shoe-shop sensation. The new shops
arrived overnight, menacing the walkways with rack after rack of cut price footwear.
Moccasin Mecca
. Then came
Cobblers!
Afterward they arrived in droves:
The Athlete’s Foot, Shutopia, R. Soles, Sock ‘n Sole, Footloose and Fancyfree, The Shoe Must Go On, Sole Proprietor, Walk on the Wild Side...

Soon the town seemed to offer nothing except shoe shops and charity shops selling second-hand shoes to a shoe-obsessed population.

Just wait
, said Big M,
we’ll be getting a brick through the window any day now.

He acquired a couple of low-maintenance dogs to warn of intruders in the night, two jet-black terriers which he named Left and Right in a sardonic reference to the little bootees they sold to teach tots their left from their right. And when he returned from one of his buying missions, sure enough he was met by a boarded-up window, splinters of glass on the pavement and three very glum faces sitting upstairs in the living quarters. The rest is history, as they say. After the inevitable sale came the inevitable escape. Once again Pryderi wanted to put up a fight. But once again Big M said nothing, packed his stuff and slept in the Bentley until they were all ready to join him. A week later they were on the road again, this time heading back towards Wales. They’d had enough of the English blowing hot and cold on their ventures. God knows how long it took them to sight Hotel Corvo and the cliffs of West Wales again, but when they did it was a blessed relief, however derelict the hotel looked.

Lou closed the chapter and moved it to the recycle bin, ready for deletion. After a short examination of his desktop picture he decided it was time for a change, the photo of Hotel Corvo was beginning to depress him. He’d have to take another pic. In the meantime he flicked through the folder of alternative backdrops which came with the computer. One of them showed an autumnal scene by a lake. It looked like somewhere in Canada, though he’d never been
to North America: he was merely responding to
previous pictures he’d seen of lakes in Canada. That was globalisation for you. Instead he selected a photo of a field: a generic, undulating tract of greenness with a blue sky above it. A bit bland, really, good on the eye but meaningless. That was the way of the world.

Lou closed down his computer and went to stand by the window, in what had become a nightly adieu to the scene outside, a vista which he increasingly liked and admired. Roof ridges reddened below him when the sun set, purple and mauve slates glinted whenever it rained; he loved the narrow estuary with
its flotilla of colourful fishing boats, the broad sea
beyond, the distant islands and headlands, and tower­ing above it all, the mountains. Perhaps he would take a picture of the scene tomorrow, or on the first fine day, and put it on his desktop. But wouldn’t that be odd, since the view was always there for him? How could he capture the essence of the place, its numen – the picture behind the mirror? He imagined a ghostly assembly of matter constantly forming and reforming behind the glass facades of mirrors everywhere around the world; a secret alternative world of almost-images. Did some people leave more of themselves behind mirrors than others? Surely Big M did. If Lou was supposed to breathe in molecules from Julius Caesar or whoever on a daily basis, how many molecules from Big M were there floating
around in the world? A lot, thought Lou. He was
beginning to like the bloke. Why was he trying to obliterate him, anyway? What was the issue?

Lou examined the horizon, now without a vestige of clouds, and went back to his desk. After restarting his computer he put all three chapters in the recycle bin and pulled the plug on them.
Was he sure?
asked the machine.
Yes he bloody well was
, answered Lou with his mouse. Finitio. His revenge motive had lost its attraction so he would cut and run before it was too late, before he’d spent too much time on the project. And by killing off Dermot Feeney’s magnum opus he’d queer the pitch for anyone else.

Lou checked the green memory stick and it was empty. Micro-dust would be gathering on the empty desks and chairs inside its miniature world; someone’s lunchbox would be lying there with a titchy banana beginning to mould over (at this point his eyes flitted to his own fruit bowl); maybe there would be a pile of virtual junk mail clogging up the main vestibule. In the corner by the reception desk he imagined a family of microscopic woodlice in a huddle, becalmed, their robotic segments glinting dully in the pale afterlight of a nuclear winter.