Survival of Thomas Ford, The (17 page)

Thomas Ford had not come to anything so lofty and evolved as true consciousness while he lay by the silver birch near the caravan, swathed in the materials of his own tent. It had been more the passing from one level of dream to another.

Swimming gestures of his arms and legs as he lay on the dead leaves had released him halfway from the tent. Jack, over at the generator, had accepted the sounds as just another ghost on the hillside, or the wind. Maybe even the soured spirit of Poppy the kitten, returned for justice.

But it had been Thomas Ford, crawling along the forest floor, through the darkness. That is, partly Thomas Ford, and partly the reawakened animus within Thomas Ford, the same raw and primitive slice of Ford’s brain that had left Lea to die alone in the car in the loch that day.

And Thomas Ford remembered it now, the moment of decision as he left his wife, abandoned the idea of saving her, and turned instead to the business of living. He did not know that he was crawling along a forest floor. He was passing through the glassless windscreen again, kicking, grasping at black water, pulling. His body replicated those swimming movements among the dead leaves and Thomas Ford travelled smoothly past tree trunks, magically missing them with his already half-shattered head. Instinct turned his torso to face upwards and Thomas Ford climbed the hillside as though the trees were the ripples in the body of the loch, the reflexes of its peristaltic belly.

Now the forest vomited Thomas Ford’s body upwards, just as the water had once done.

Then he stopped crawling and became still on the forest floor.

What was he doing, leaving Lea behind like this? He did not want it.

His remaining healthy eye blinked. He could feel the binding tent material tight against his hips and stomach. He rolled and kicked, trying to free himself, not understanding what was on him. He took the tent to be soaking wet, heavy clothes, full of the loch’s water, or drenched in Lea’s blood.

Ford turned full circle on the leaves.

Lea. Something was wrong.

They had been in the house, not in the car. Lea had been making love to him, like before, before she hated him.

Lea, but this Lea in his mind’s eye was big, heavy, different. Thomas bent his neck and pressed his face against the vegetation. The smell of the leaves choked him.

A roar filled the air, as though some beast, the loch’s monster, or that great black bird from Thomas’ earlier dream, had arrived to tear the world apart between its taloned feet. Thomas raised his face and light flooded his good eye, blinding it.

He blinked and a little howl came up from his throat.

He heard men’s voices on the wind, it sounded like church singing somehow for a moment, until one voice separated itself out into a barking, commanding roughness. Thomas held his breath at the rage in that voice.

He didn’t know where he was or why but he knew now he wasn’t in the water and this was not the day of the crash. He remembered the hospital suddenly but this was no hospital despite that white, glaring light.

The thing to do was get out of that light. Thomas crawled and changed the angle of his shoulders. He could hear boots now, crushing the leaves, grinding them against the earth.

Lanski and McCallum found the discarded tent. It lay on the leaves like the slewn-off skin of some great serpent that had passed. McCallum looked at the tent and shook his head.

“Lanski, I’m going back to the girl before she fucks off too. Find him Lanski. Find him fast. If he reaches the village down below, or one of the chalets up above, we’re finished.”

Lanski stepped over the tent and walked without hesitation up the hillside, not sure what he would do when he reached the natural border of the generator’s light.

Above all of them, invisibly, the clouds were shifting like thoughts in a disturbed soul. The wind shoved and tugged mercilessly at their vapours and gasses. High in the firmament stars blazed while a full moon reflected effortlessly the hidden sun’s power. Like the theatre lights of drama or medicine they waited expectantly for the curtain below to raise.

Thomas Ford was crawling downhill now. He did not know he had already passed the caravan and Lorna’s blanket-covered body. He only wanted to escape the perimeter of the roaring, monstrous generator bulbs.

Soon his bare feet and wriggling toes left that light’s caressing edge.

Ford was confused again, not sure whether he moved through air or water, not sure if this was the day of the crash.

Then his head bumped hard against the Subaru’s front right tyre. It was a puzzle to him. Something in his head, at the top of it, seemed to have exploded. The shock travelled down Thomas Ford’s skull and entered the vertebrae of his neck. With that sudden compression of nerve and bone, a red light erupted deep within Thomas Ford’s eyeballs. He groped upwards with his right hand and grabbed the Subaru’s headlamp. It filled his palm like one of Lea’s breasts. The headlamp still shone bright and was hot as fevered flesh. For some time Thomas Ford had been free of the generator’s perimeter of light. He had entered the Subaru’s headlights without knowing the transition.

Ford raised his head and the Subaru’s light glared him down into snowblind submission. He crawled to the left instinctively. Grabbing handfuls of earth and leaves he bypassed the huge vehicle.

Lanski had gone as far uphill as he dared in the darkness. It was pointless anyway. Nothing could be found in a place like this, not without luck, and there was no luck in this situation for Lanski. His grandmother would have told him the spirits of Fortune were against him tonight. But he did not need her here to tell him that. There was a sound in the air now, new, running water. Some stream or even river that had been hidden away among these trees. Lanski started to head for the sound. Ford might have headed for it. It was not that Lanski really wanted to find Ford, but he was accustomed to obeying McCallum. The habit ran deeper than Lanski had understood.

Jack McCallum stood over the girl’s still, blanket-covered form. The light from the generator bulbs made the caravan and the covered girl look very unreal. At least the girl was still here. Jack sniffed and raised his face to the sky. For a moment he thought he felt the beginning of raindrops. It was only the wind. Some stars were breaking through the clouds above. The generator’s light masked them but Jack could pick out some familiar patterns of pinpoint white dots above him, like holes in a black fabric. Holes in everything, thought Jack. Holes in me. Holes in my marriage. Holes in my boy’s head. Holes in plans. Holes in the ground on this hillside to bury my mistakes in. Jack bared his teeth and turned his back on the caravan and the girl. He headed for the generator housing, to look for the long shovel he had left there last time.

Thomas Ford was crawling downhill in the darkness. It was like sinking down in the loch’s water, or falling from the talons of the great bird through the sky in the nightmare. He had left the light from the generator, and the light from the Subaru, far behind now. He had not looked up for some time when, again, his head crashed hard against an obstruction. Ford whimpered and pushed his face deep down against the rotted leaves. He let out a howl of frustration, not caring who might hear. He was near the edge of himself now. He thrashed again on the earth, then lifted his head viciously, expecting to see nothing. But the starlight and moonlight had broken through the carpet of clouds above. In silver light, Thomas Ford clearly saw that his head had bumped into a huge metal object. He tilted his face, presenting his good eye to the object, letting the silver light bathe the eye.

Ford looked behind himself suddenly, up the track, which was visible now in the moonlight and oddly familiar. He tried to stand and managed to bring himself onto his knees. Nausea swept through him and he swayed there for a moment. Then it seemed his whole being steadied and solidified as he stared at the old, abandoned tractor in the moonlight. His breathing stopped. His bad eye tried to open but it couldn’t. McCallum had hit it much too hard for it to ever work again. Out of the eye he had left, Ford gazed at the tractor in front of him. Its rust was a crisp, ragged coating that glinted in the silver light.

Ford turned his neck and a shooting pain jolted him so that he rocked back on his heels. But he kept the good eye open and, just behind the tractor, impossibly, he saw the other vehicles, abandoned, like animal skeletons picked clean of once-plump flesh. There was the van, like an old Post Office van but its markings rotted off. And beside it, flat and embedded in the rotted compost of leaf and tree, the metal wheel rim Thomas Ford had last seen that day while Lea had stood a little way down this hillside track, waiting for him, that day when there was no way she could know she was waiting to be taken to her death.

As though of its own will, Thomas Ford’s eye lingered on the area of silver space just beside the broken and twisted, earthbound wheel rim.

Like bubbles burped up from the earth’s belly into the silver air, Thomas saw the gas emission that had puzzled him and absorbed him that day weeks, or months, or lifetimes ago, when he had made Lea wait as he stood over it and stared down. That day the earth had been brown, not silver, and he had seen what seemed like gas coming up. It had shimmered in the cold sunlight. There had been no smell.

Now the air seemed clear again and Thomas swayed forward. His head hung low, almost all the way to the leaves. This was Ardlarich then, the hillside. This was real. He remembered the hospital, Finlay had driven him home, no, he had not made it home the first time, he had thought he had seen the bird-faced driver on the pavement. He had tried to chase him.

Thomas Ford whined and a sudden clump of vomit burst from his lips, skidding down the front of his bare chest. He looked down at himself. He was covered in filth, except for a tangle of artificial tough fabric swathed around his waist and hips and thighs. That fabric seemed familiar too. Ardlarich. The hospital. Lorna, the cleaner. Lorna. It was like electricity in Ford’s spine. He remembered Lorna coming to his house, talking to him about money, information, the bird-faced boy. The house. Lorna had been at the house with him, they had been together in the living room. Someone must have come there, done this, taken him here and Lorna here. That was what she had warned about. She had been saying it, that the bird-faced boy and the passenger had already been to the house, planning something like this.

Ford opened his eye. The gas bubbled up from the earth again and Ford told himself it was not real. He told himself it could not be gas or it would have a smell. What if it was a sign? What if it had been a sign that day, causing him to make Lea wait? If it had been some warning from God or the Universe, slowing him down, he should have paid more heed to it. If he had stayed to understand the sign then Lea would still be alive.

But equally, if the strange gas had never been in the air here, to distract and delay him, they would have driven away earlier and passed that deadly corner safe, too soon for the bird-faced boy to do them harm. Thomas Ford laughed in the moonlight, air whistling between his remaining teeth. At that second, something light as air kissed his cheek. He froze, believing it was Lea’s ghost here with him on the hill, here to help him. Then he blinked his good eye as a second kiss came. Something tiny and fast made the air flicker in front of Thomas Ford’s face. The butterfly danced back and gave the half-broken man room to see it. Its wings were silver now, not white, and yet somehow the clean whiteness could still be sensed. Ford’s body gave up beads of precious moisture it could ill-afford now, there was a wet sensation in his chest, then the good eye filled with water until tears rolled down his filthy cheek. It felt like he was being washed inside, some lump passing that had been there since waking at the hospital. Even while the throbbing pain in his head and eye and mouth intensified, that other pain deep within him was relieved and released.

As the butterfly flew higher and higher above Thomas’ head, he looked up after it, raising one shaky leg which took his weight, and then the other, until he stood.

He blinked his eye as the butterfly seemed to disappear among the clouds overhead. He raised his palm and rubbed the salt tears into his cheek like an annointment. He turned his head to look back up the hillside. At a distance, the Subaru headlit zone represented one area and further up the hillside the perimeter of the generator’s light arc could clearly be seen.

Thomas Ford twisted his neck and clenched his fist. He started to walk back up the hill towards the lights. He had already left one woman behind to die. He could not do it again.

In the living room of 72 Broomfield Road the telephone rang out suddenly and violently. It seemed so loud to Marie Ferguson. She could not believe that its ring was always that loud, that insistent.

Marie and Robert had been sitting, pretending to drink tea.

It was Jimmy’s hand that reached out and lifted the phone.

“Hello?” he said.

At first, all Jimmy could hear in response was the dull roaring of some great insect or engine.

“Have you got everything under control there, boy? You better have. Look, I was going to send Lanski there, but now Ford’s gone missing here, see? So you’ll have to deal with the woman and the lad yourself, alright boy? Can you manage it?”

Jimmy lowered the phone and placed his palm over the mouthpiece in a gesture of great politeness. Marie Ferguson watched Jimmy’s eyebrows raise almost all the way to his vertical black hair.

“There’s been a terrible road accident,” said Jimmy. “Out by the hospital. All the officers from this side of the river have been sent out to it. They think it’ll be half an hour before they can send anyone here.”

Jimmy shook his head and shrugged. Robert frowned. Jimmy lifted the phone to his ear again.

“Are you there, Jimmy!” he heard his father shout into the phone.

Marie and Robert heard the shout too. They also heard the strange buzz of the generator on the hill.

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Well, boy, can you handle things there?”

“No, Sergeant. We really need an officer here right away. It’s urgent.”

“Look, boy, do you know where I am? I’m on the hill. Ardlarich. The hill, boy. The caravan. Remember?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Ford’s fucked off, Lanski’s chasing him, and I’ve got a shovel and I’m standing here and I’m about to put your wee lassie in a hole in the ground here on this hill. Do you understand, boy? In a hole on the hill. You know all about that, don’t you boy?”

Marie Ferguson watched Jimmy blink four times as though he was suddenly paralysed except at the eyelids.

“I can’t come to help you, Jimmy. Lanski can’t come to help you. You’re on your own.”

“No Sergeant, we really need an officer here right away now.”

“You stupid little…”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” said Jimmy.

Like a skull, Marie saw Jimmy grin widely and replace the phone in its cradle.

“They won’t be long now,” said Jimmy.

He lifted his mug of cold tea to his lips.

“Who was that on the phone, Jimmy?” said Robert.

“It was the police, Robert. I told you.”

Jimmy shook his head.

“Robert,” said Marie. “Go and make some more tea. Mine is cold. Jimmy’s must be too.”

Robert looked over at her. She looked back at him with clear, bright eyes. She nodded.

“Go on, Robert.”

She held out her mug to him.

“Get some biscuits too, Robert.”

Robert took her mug. Jimmy held his mug out to be taken. Robert stared at Jimmy for a second, then took the mug. He walked out of the living room.

Jimmy smiled at Marie Ferguson.

“Aye,” he said. “They won’t be long now.”

Marie smiled back and nodded at Jimmy.

“How’s your mum these days, Jimmy?”

“My mum? Aye, she’s alright, Mrs Ferguson. She’s fine.”

“I should keep in touch with her, Jimmy. We were good friends when we were young, your mum and me. Before she started going with your dad we’d be up town every weekend, your mum and the rest of us.”

Jimmy grinned.

“That right?” he said.

“Oh aye. Your mum was happy when she was a girl, Jimmy. We all were really. Everything was a laugh then. It’s when you get older that it all changes.”

“Aye, I know what you mean.”

“No, Jimmy. You’ve no idea what I mean yet.”

“My dad battering me and that, Mrs Ferguson. I know what you mean well enough.”

“Ok, Jimmy. Maybe. But should that not mean you need to get right out from under your dad now? While there’s still time. Before it’s too late.”

“Is that no what I’m doing now, Mrs Ferguson?”

“I don’t really know, Jimmy. I’m not really sure what it is you’re doing.”

Jimmy sighed out air.

“Aye well,” he said.

Marie licked her upper lip.

“We’d help you, Jimmy. Me and Robert. We’d not turn our backs on you.”

Marie watched the boy’s eyes change. It was as though some great and intense heat from deep within the boy had suddenly erupted into the black eyes. In that moment half the hope in Marie’s heart seeped away, like a liquid that had spilled out of the soles of her feet and down into the thick carpet.

In the kitchen, Robert was opening the knife drawer. He took the wooden handle in his palm and pulled out the long, curved, serrated knife that his mother used to cut turnips and pineapples. The knife shook in Robert’s hand. He was due for his next injection. His eyes swivelled to the left slowly, then they scanned to the right as though Robert was reading some invisible document suspended before him in the kitchen’s air.