The End Of Mr. Y (42 page)

I have no choice. I have no choice.

Every millisecond of this horrible journey is an epiphany in which I realise that this is it. This is my last moment of life, and any idea of free will disappeared long ago. And each epiphany is, at the moment I have it, absolutely irreversible. It’s not the moment when you think ‘Shit! That was close.’ It’s the moment after that, in a world where you are the unluckiest person on Earth, and there’s no one to help you and no one to care, especially when everyone you know is already dead …

I can’t stand this.

Console?
I say, weakly, although I can barely believe that such a thing still exists. It comes up.

Where do I get off?
I ask it.
You get off at your station
.
Where is my station
?

You have to be able to see it
.
What?

You now have no choices.

Well, I knew that.

I want to stand up and go and ask the driver to stop the train, but I know that there is no driver and this isn’t really a train. I’m surfing on a wave of fear that’s moving faster than … What did Apollo Smintheus say? Incomprehensible speeds. Think, think. Don’t look out of the window. Don’t … I look.

And then I realise that I’m not alone out here. There’s actually something worse than being alone with your own worst fears, and I’m just beginning to see what that might be. Faintly – not above, below, in front of or behind my images of fear, but in some other relation to them – I now sense the howling spectre of something else: layers upon layers of other people’s fear. There are misty representations of money burning, of someone being fisted by his own father, of toys that tell you to ‘fuck off ’ and then rip out your throat, of the idea that there is no such thing as reality, of someone being abducted by an alien and strapped to a table in a white lab, of nuclear war, of a child drowning, of hundreds of children drowning, of it being all YOUR FAULT, of choking on fish bones, of lung cancer, of bowel cancer, of brain tumours, of spiders – thousands and thousands of spiders, of

a prolapsed uterus, of sleep apnoea, of eating, of any kind of sex, of rats, of cockroaches, of plastic bags, of heights, of planes, of the Bermuda Triangle, of the live rail, of ghosts, of terrorism, of cocktail parties, of crowds, of the dentist, of choking on your own tongue, of your own feet, of dreams, of grown-ups, of ice cubes, of false teeth, of Father Christmas, of getting old, of your parents dying, of what you might do to yourself, of coffins, of alcohol, of suicide, of blood, of not being able to take heroin again, of the thing behind the curtains, of soot, of spaceships, of DVT, of horses, of fast cars, of people, of paper, of knives, of dogs, of redundancy, of being late, of being seen naked, of scabs, of leap years, of UFOs, of dragons, of poison, of accordion music, of torture, of any kind of authority, of being kicked while you just lie on the ground trying to protect your head until you become unconscious and can’t protect yourself any more.

You – why don’t you look out of the window for a while?

My eyes are now shut. Incomprehensible speeds. What does that mean? I can’t breathe. The man with the gun …

There’s no man with a gun, Ariel.

There is. The whole world is only made of men with guns. There’s no one else in the whole world, just me and billions of men with guns. I feel sick.

Incomprehensible speeds. I can comprehend the speed of light. I can comprehend ten times the speed of light. The only thing I can’t comprehend is infinite speed … That’s what Apollo Smintheus said, didn’t he? Or did he just say that the train track was infinite? Anyway, what if we were moving at infinite speed? Although I can’t really comprehend it (which is, I think, the point of ‘incomprehensible’), something travelling at infinite speed would actually seem to be at rest at every point that it travelled past. Something with infinite speed, travelling in a loop, should be able to be everywhere at once, surely? Maybe more than once: who knows? So maybe I don’t have to wait for my station. Maybe my station is simply there, outside, and I have to find it.

I don’t want to look out of the window, but I do. Now my own fears are in sharp focus again. Everything I’ve ever written is on fire. Someone’s rubbing my name out of every document in which it’s ever appeared. I don’t know where these images are coming from. They appear to be random, but maybe … I try to think of Adam again and, as if I’d ordered the memory in the consciousness equivalent of the most efficient fast-food restaurant in the world, there he is, outside the window, fucking my mother. He’s fucking my mother and saying to her: ‘Who’s Ariel? I’ve never heard of anyone called Ariel.’ He seems to turn and see me watching them. Then he laughs. He pokes her in the ribs and points at me and they both laugh. ‘I don’t have time for this now, Ariel,’ my mother says. ‘You’re not the centre of the universe, you know.’

Cars, I think. Driving. Driving towards London from Faversham. Come on. I’m escaping from the priory; from the Project Starlight men. And then I see/feel it. I’m in my car and I’m zoning out into the fear. In the image through the train window I can see the men racing behind me in their black car, driving down the almost-empty motorway with the grey sky above and the snow lying in fields, on rooftops, and alongside the long, curving hard shoulders. I can see them behind me and I know this is the end. In a film, I’d shake them off. But they’re going to run me off the road, and no amount of gutsy driving or intelligence is going to save me. My life is going to end in a crunch of jagged metal, with my blood spurting onto the windscreen. I don’t want to go there, to this place, but I have to. I have to get into that place from this one. My mind is open at that point, I instinctively know that. And the men aren’t really there: that’s just the fear.

At least – I hope it’s just the fear.

How do I get off? Not knowing what else to do, I walk towards the doors.

The image is still the same one outside the windows. I focus on it, and then I press the button to open the doors. The train’s still moving but the doors open and …

It’s 6 a.m. – just gone – on the A2 and the sign is telling me that if I keep going, I’ll end up in London. That’s not what I want. Or maybe it is? No. I need the M25 and then a road to Torquay, wherever that is. I glance in the rearview mirror: still no black car. There’s another sign ahead of me pointing to the various exits you could take if you wanted to go to any one of the various Medway towns. I haven’t lived around here long enough for any of the names to mean anything to me.

Except … One of them does mean something to me. It’s the town where Patrick lives. But – oh, shit. I’m having déjà vu. I remember being here before and taking that exit and getting Patrick to come and fuck me in the toilets for a hundred quid.

Except it wasn’t déjà vu. It happened. It happened, and then I went to Molly’s school and then I got lost in the Troposphere and then I time-travelled back here, in a train full of fear and … So much for paradoxes. I pull over to the hard shoulder and take out a cigarette. At the same time I check my purse to see if I still have the rest of Patrick’s money. No. I’ve got the
£
9.50 I set out with and very little petrol. I light my cigarette and pull back onto the road. I’m going to Torquay. And I can’t help smiling. I’ve no idea where I’ve actually been, but – oddly – for the first time since I first went into the Troposphere, I don’t feel at all mad. I feel absolutely fine about what just happened. I’m not a whore after all, I think as I drive off again. I got what I wanted without actually doing anything. Or did I actually do it and then overwrite it with something else? Oh, whatever. I put all thoughts of Abbie Lathrop – and the KIDS – out of my mind and, as I drive towards the M25, I try to make myself vow never to try Pedesis again.

It’s just gone midday when I park in a big, anonymous car park next to Torquay Library, about 250 miles from the Shrine of St Jude in Faversham. There’s no snow in the south-west, but the sky is as grey and flat as the one back home, as if January has been reformatted in two dimensions and broadcast on a cheap black-and-white portable TV. The Troposphere always seems flat to me, but this is worse; I’m not sure that the real world, with its dirt and its people, is exactly where I want to be. But then I’m not sure the Troposphere is a good place for me, either. I still have half a tank of the petrol that I ‘forgot’ to pay for, but now I need food, and coffee. There’s a café just across from the library, next to a big slab-like church of a denomination I don’t recognise. I decide to go into the café before using the public Internet terminals that I hope are in the library. I’m going to search for local castles and see what I find. I remember Burlem’s memory of the one in his town: the one he thought of as being like a giant’s ring, ripped off and left on a hilltop. If that doesn’t locate it, I’ll try something else, but I’m not sure what.

Even though I have my plan, I still sit in the car for about five minutes before I do anything. What a journey. I drove about two hundred miles before I stopped looking in my rearview mirror for the police (who I assumed would want to ask me questions about the petrol) and the Project Starlight men. Some time after that, I lost track of where I was. I pulled into a town I thought was Torquay, but there was nothing at all to distinguish it from every other town I’ve ever seen in Britain, and I couldn’t be sure that I’d actually reached my destination. There was a large roundabout with various signs to industrial estates, and a Sainsbury’s supermarket off to the right. I pulled into the Sainsbury’s car park and got out of the car for the first time since the petrol station on the M25. My legs felt shaky. I walked in and went straight up to the kiosk and bought a cheap packet of tobacco. ‘Where am I, exactly?’ I asked the woman, after she’d given me my change.

The way I said it made it sound like a completely normal question. But the woman looked at me as if I were completely odd.

‘You’re in Sainsbury’s, dear,’ she told me.

But after some further conversation, I realised that I was not in Torquay and got some pretty good directions that led me straight to the library.

So now I’m in a car park that is indistinguishable from any other car park in any other town, and I

watch as people unload buggies and small children, or pack away large, shiny carrier bags with the word ‘sale’ on them. Two women go past, both in those new mobility scooters that look a bit like dodgem cars, and they seem to be arguing about something. The grey concrete is smeared with old fag ends, familiar take-away wrappers and polystyrene coffee cups. I look beyond all of this, towards the thin line of bare-branched trees up a small hill separating this car park from the road above. The trees are the only things that stand out in the greyish-whitish smudge of official buildings and the sky. And then I see something in the trees: six or seven squirrels all moving at once; one in each tree, or so it seems, moving and jumping and rearranging themselves constantly, like pixels on a screen. Their bodies are silhouetted by the pale light of the sky behind them. It’s winter, and I can’t imagine what they find to eat in a place like this. Aren’t squirrels supposed to hibernate? Do they have a god looking after them or does nobody pray for squirrels? I shiver. What if Burlem isn’t in this place any more; or what if I can’t actually find out where it is? I imagine what it’s like to live as a squirrel – or any animal – in a concrete, urban space, where everything costs money. What will I do if I can’t find Burlem? I can’t go home; I think it’s fair to say that I have no home any more.

I wonder if the book is still safe.

I wonder if the men have got to Adam yet.

And I feel a pulse like a fist, hitting me first between my legs and then somewhere in my stomach. Is it possible that I’ll ever see him again?

I stop thinking and get out of the car. There’s a hoarding layered with rained-on, peeling posters, most of which are advertising a pantomime starring someone from an Australian soap that I’ve never heard of. Above that there’s a sign:
no overnight sleeping
. Shit. I never realised that you could be stopped for just parking your car somewhere and sleeping in it. I walk over to the ticket machine, the cold wind jabbing at my face as if I’ve stolen something from it. As I’d feared, it’s extortionate to park here: about a pound an hour. I pay for half an hour and then use my fingernail to smudge the time on the ticket as I walk back over to my car. Then I prop the ticket in a hard-to-see place on the edge of the windscreen, so only the date is showing, before locking the car door and walking across the road and through a tinkling door into the café.

It smells of soup, plus something sour that I can’t identify. It’s almost full up, but I manage to get a seat in the corner by a display of greeting cards, jewellery and Fairtrade muesli. There are various pictures on the walls, depicting slim white women in Africa leading choirs of small, brightly clothed children; or helping equally brightly clothed women pull water up from a well. I realise this is a Christian café just as a late-middle-aged woman in a yellow twinset comes to take my order. As I ask for the carrot and parsnip soup and a black coffee, I notice the leaflets that are scattered around, and the poster on the wall advertising the times of the service in the church – presumably the one next door. And I wonder: what kind of god is created and sustained by the hundreds of people who must pray here? Apollo Smintheus is the result of six people’s prayers, and he seems real enough. What does more prayer do? What sort of god does it make? And is this god – the one made by the people here – the same god created by the people in the church near Burlem’s house? Is it the same god created by the people in the Faversham priory? What would a god like that look like? I suppose if I met him in the Troposphere, he’d look exactly as I’d want him to look – probably an old man with a white beard: the atheist’s view of a Christian’s view of God. And what does he do for these people? What must it be like to have millions of people telling you what to do? And I also wonder: what does he ask in return?