The Four Last Things (29 page)

Sally followed one of the paths round the east end of the church. On this side of the churchyard there were benches, more trees, more railings, beyond which was the main road, heavily used by traffic even on Sunday. She slowly walked the length of the church, deciding to make a circuit of it before returning to Oliver’s.

The gates of the south porch had been boarded up and secured with two padlocks. In the angle between porch and nave she noticed a pile of what looked like human excrement. Adolescents had been active with their aerosol sprays, displaying their limited grasp of literacy with the usual obscenities and tribal slogans.

Were such people human like herself? And if they were, what about child molesters and child murderers? Or the nurse who killed the children in her charge, or the father who stubbed out cigarettes on his baby’s arm? Or, worst of all, the person who had stolen Lucy to practise unknown obscenities on her mind and body. ‘Christ knows,’ Sally muttered aloud, knowing that old certainties had grown misty and insubstantial.

The path narrowed as it turned into the dark, urine-smelling ravine between the tower and the blank gable wall of the terrace of shops on the western boundary of the churchyard.
The shadow of death
. Sally accelerated. Just as she was about to emerge into the wider spaces of the churchyard beyond, a man stepped round the corner of the tower and blocked her path. She stopped, her heart thudding.

He was almost six feet tall, with dark hair, a broken nose set in the middle of a pale, lined face, and a long, thin body. Despite the cold, he was wearing a T-shirt, a pair of thin trousers, and muddy trainers. The T-shirt had once been white, but was now stained and torn at the neck. He dug his hand in his pocket.

Sally took a step backwards, nearer the dangerously enclosed space between the tower and the wall. With a speed that caught her unawares, the man moved to her right and then drew closer to her, forcing her back against the wall of the tower. She put her hand in her jacket pocket and felt for the money which Oliver had given her in case she needed to phone: two or three pounds in change.

He was very close to her now. His mouth hung open, revealing the rotting teeth within. For an instant she smelled his breath and thought of open graves. He stretched out his arm towards her. Suddenly she realized that the lips were pulled back into a smile.

‘Do you believe in Jesus? Do you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve got to really believe.’ He looked in his forties, but was probably younger than she was. He had a Midlands accent and spoke in a near whisper, breathless as if he had been running. ‘Listen, just saying you believe isn’t enough.’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure? Remember, Jesus can see into your innermost soul.’

‘Yes. Do
you
believe?’

‘He chose me. Look, he put his sign on me.’

The man pointed to the inner edge of his left forearm. Among the scars and goose pimples was a red cross in faded felt-tip, surrounded by a wavering wreath of letters which made up the words JESUS SAVES.

‘He pulled me up from the gutter. He sent an angel to wash away my sins in the water of life.’ The man stretched his arms wide. ‘Look – I’m clean. Like driven snow.’

‘I can see that.’

‘You must be clean, too. Otherwise you’ll never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’

Sally took a step to her left, trying to outflank him.

‘You must pray with me. Now.’

‘I must go. My husband –’

He came even closer. ‘You haven’t much time. The Kingdom of God is at hand. We must kneel.’

He touched her shoulder, trying to force her to her knees. Revulsion welled inside her and she reacted instinctively: she slapped his face with all the strength she could muster. His skin was rough with stubble, like flabby sandpaper.

The man gasped, his face a parody of dismay, and stepped backwards. Sally flung herself through the gap between his arm and the wall of the tower. His hand gripped her wrist. She screamed, a long howl of fear and anger, and dragged her arm free.

‘Piss off, you shithead!’ Sally heard herself shrieking.

She broke into a run, crouching low, and escaped. The churchyard stretched before her. She glimpsed the railings through the branches of the trees. The panic affected her vision: nothing was fixed any more; the path, the trees, the grass – everything pulsed with a dull, menacing life, as if visible reality were nothing more than the skin of an enormous, dozing monster.

At the gateway she glanced back. The man was not pursuing her. The churchyard was empty. She clung to a railing and tried to get her breathing back to normal. The monster slipped away. Her body felt limp, as if each muscle had been individually drained of energy. Now the crisis was past, she could hardly walk, let alone run.

‘Sally – ?’

She turned. Oliver was jogging down Inkerman Street towards her. She stared blankly at him. Her legs could barely support her weight. A moment later he was beside her, his face dark and angry.

‘What happened?’

‘There was a man …’

‘Easy, now. It’s all right.’ He put his hand under her arm. ‘A mugger?’

She shook her head and began to laugh with the irony of it. Once she started laughing, it was hard to stop.

‘OK, Sally. Calm down. It’s OK.’

Oliver had his arm round her now. He half-carried, half-dragged her towards a bench a few yards away. They sat down. Trembling, she hugged him.

‘What happened?’

‘This man – he tried to
convert
me.’

‘Are you hurt?’

‘No. Oliver, I swore at him. I hit him.’ She started to cry.

His arm tightened around her. ‘Listen. Your reactions are out of kilter at present. It’s hardly surprising.’

For a moment she thought Oliver’s lips were nuzzling her hair. She said angrily, ‘He shouldn’t have been on the streets. If we had a halfway decent society someone would be looking after him properly.’

‘A mental patient? Pushed back into the community?’

‘It’s possible. There were knife scars on his arms. I should go and find him. He can’t have got far. I –’

‘No. You’re in no fit state to go after anyone. In any case, we don’t want to go too far from the house.’

‘I failed him.’ As she spoke the words, she realized that she did not believe what she was saying: what did that shambling apology for a human being matter beside the fact that Lucy was missing? But old habits took a long time to die. She heard herself mouthing words which were no longer true. ‘People like him are part of my job.’

‘If you like I’ll phone the local nick, see what they can do.’

She allowed this to satisfy her. A moment passed. She looked up at Oliver. His face was very close to hers.

‘What were you doing? Did you come after me?’

‘I was worried. I don’t know why.’

She tried to smile. ‘My guardian angel?’

He kissed her decorously on the forehead. ‘We should go home. You’re cold.’

For an instant Sally did not want to move. For an instant she wanted to stay on that bench for ever with Oliver’s arms, warm and strong, wrapped around her. For an instant she felt, faint but unmistakable, a stirring of desire.

‘… we are what we all abhor,
Anthropophagi
and Cannibals, devourers not onely of men, but of our selves … for all this mass of flesh which we behold, came in at our mouths; … in brief, we have devour’d our selves.’

Religio Medici
, I, 37

Eddie pulled the front door closed behind him and walked swiftly down Rosington Road, his fingers scrabbling through his pockets for the keys. He stopped by the van, which was parked a few doors down, and hammered the windscreen with his clenched fist. The keys were still in his bedroom, in the pocket of the jeans he had worn yesterday. All the keys – the keys of the house as well as the van’s. He had also left his wallet behind, though he had a pound or two in loose change.

He thought he heard a door opening. Without looking back, he broke into a run. His coat flapped behind him. The cold air attacked his face, his neck and his hands, its sharpness making him gasp; in his mind he saw a curved, flexible knife with an icy blade.

The word
blade
reminded him of the scissors. Had the screaming stopped? He was not sure. He thought he could hear screams, but they might have no basis in reality now; they might simply be echoes trapped within his mind. But he was certain of one thing: he could not go back to the house.

While he was running, he risked a glance behind him. No one was there. Angel wasn’t following him. He wasn’t worth following.

Panting, he slowed to a walk and buttoned his coat with clumsy fingers. Even if she did come after him, it wouldn’t matter. He would just walk on and on and on. It was a free country. She couldn’t stop him. He crossed the access road leading to the council flats.

‘You all right, then?’

Eddie stopped and stared. Mr Reynolds waved at him. The little builder was about to open his garage door, on which someone had recently sprayed an ornate obscenity.

Mr Reynolds hugged himself with exaggerated force, as if miming winter in a game of charades. ‘It’s bitter, isn’t it?’

Eddie opened his mouth but could think of nothing to say. Panic rose in his throat.

‘The odds are shortening for a white Christmas,’ Mr Reynolds remarked. ‘Heard it on the radio.’

The silence lengthened. Mr Reynolds’s face grew puzzled. Eddie’s limbs might be temporarily paralysed but his mind was working. First, Mr Reynolds would do anything for Angel. Second, why was he spending the coldest Sunday afternoon since last winter standing outside his garage? Conclusion: he was keeping his eyes open at Angel’s request. He was spying on Eddie.

The paralysis dissolved. Eddie broke into a run again.

‘Hey!’ he heard Mr Reynolds calling behind him. ‘Eddie, you OK?’

Eddie ran to the end of the road and turned right. He had no clear plan where he was going. The important thing was to get away. He did not want to be a part of what was happening behind that door. He did not want even to think about it. He wanted to walk and walk until tiredness overcame him.

He crossed a road. Two cars hooted at him, and one of the drivers rolled down his window and swore at him. He walked steadily on. Why was there so much traffic? It was Sunday, the day of rest. There hadn’t been all those cars when he was a child. Even ten or fifteen years ago the roads would have been far quieter. Everything changed, nothing stood still. Soon the machines would outnumber the people.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he told himself. ‘It really doesn’t matter.’

The world was becoming less substantial, less well-defined. A bus rumbled down the road, overtaking him. The red colour spilled out of its outline. The bus’s shape was no longer fixed but swayed to and fro like water in a slowly swinging bucket. You could rely on nothing in this world, and what other world was there?

Eddie remembered that he had a temperature. He might be very ill. He might die. A great sadness washed over him. He had so much to give the world, if the world would only let him. If Angel would let him. His mind shied away from the thought of her.

He was surprised that he was managing to walk so far and so well. It was not that he felt weak, exactly. His legs were as strong as usual but they did not seem quite so firmly attached to the rest of his body as they normally were.

‘It’s just the flu,’ he said aloud, and the words – in blue, lower-case letters, sans serif – seemed to hang in mid-air beside him; he watched the wind muddling up the letters and whipping them away. ‘I’ll feel better in the morning.’

What if he felt worse? What if there was never any getting better?

Eddie forced himself to walk faster, as though the faster he walked the further he left these unanswerable questions behind.

The important thing was to get away. It was some time before he noticed where he was going. He crossed Haverstock Hill and zigzagged his way up to Eton Avenue. On either side were large, prosperous houses occupied by large, prosperous people. At Swiss Cottage, he hesitated, wondering whether to take the tube into town. It was too much of a decision: instead he kept walking, impelled by the fear that Angel might, after all, pursue him and by the need to keep warm. He drifted up the Finchley Road to the overground station for the North London Line. He went into the station because his legs were becoming weary and because it was starting to rain – thin, cold drops, not far removed from sleet. A westbound train clattered into the station. Eddie ran down the steps to the platform. The train was almost empty. He got on, grateful for the warmth and the seat.

At first, all went well. He closed his eyes and tried to rest. But the memory of what he had left behind in Rosington Road shouldered its way into his mind. Eddie tried to distract himself with the usual techniques – making his mind go blank; remembering Alison on the swing and in the shed at Carver’s; imagining himself as Father Christmas in a big store, with a stream of little girls queuing for the honour of sitting on his knee, a long line of pretty faces, sugar and spice and all things nice.