The Thing Itself (29 page)

‘I only ask,’ gruffed the driver, ‘on account of that being, technically speaking, west of here.’

In my ear Peta fair shrieked: ‘Never mind! It doesn’t matter! Away from here!’

As I clambered into the back of the car, I could hear yelling behind me, back in the lobby. An alarm was being sounded. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Let’s go to Swindon.’

The car pulled away. As we rolled past the entrance, I saw Belwether, her face a vignette of fury, emerging. She saw me, and I saw her, but then the car had turned left, and was accelerating past a curtain of green trees. In moments we were on the open road, and speeding along a dual carriageway.

‘Anywhere particular, like, in town? Bus station?’

‘It’s a hotel,’ I said.

‘I’m going to need you to be a smidgeon more precise than that,’ said the driver. I struggled to remember the name of the chain, but my brain was in a jittery and friable state. We slowed for a roundabout, and then pulled away again, along a single-carriage road.

We were on the outskirts of Swindon. The landscape was dominated by spanking-new-looking housing estates.

‘They’ve locked me out of the BlackBerry,’ said Peta, in my ear. ‘That’s bad. That’s really not good at all. Helicopter!’

And there
was
a helicopter. I could see it, buzzing above us, a little way to the left.

‘How did they get a helicopter on the case so quickly?’ I asked Peta.

‘I told you,’ he replied. ‘This is a priority mission. They have assets all around. The stakes are extremely high.’

‘What do you mean, case?’ the driver replied.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was just speaking to my …’ I was going to say friend, but the sentence got cut off by a loud double
bang-bang
! The violent dual percussion was followed by an alarming swerving deceleration. The driver swore, very loudly. What had happened was that the taxi had driven over one of those lines of spikes police trail across roads to stop cars. Stingers, I believe they are called. I don’t know why they thought they needed such drastic actions to stop the car: I’m sure the driver would have pulled over for a simple police siren and some blue flashing lights. Thinking back, I wonder if they even realised (at that time) it was a taxi. They may have assumed it was my own car.

As I was thwacked painfully against the back of the driver’s seat I had time to think:
I suppose I should have been wearing my seat belt
. My momentum transferred through the fabric to produce a heavy clonking sound – the body of the driver, going up against the glass.

I dropped Peta, and starting wailing, a dreary high-pitched sound, with the sheer shock of the impact. My leg complained fiercely.

The car slewed to a halt. I sat back. My nose throbbed, and when I put my hand to my face it was wet. ‘Bloody hell,’ I said. ‘Bloody blood.’

I was vaguely aware of sounds from outside the car: yelling, boots on tarmac.

I had dropped Peta. So I reached down to pick him up from the rear footwell; and in my weakened state, combined with my usual clumsiness, this entailed me sliding, pathetically, off the seat and collapsing wholly into the deep footwell. And there I lay, too feeble and jangled to muster the energy to get myself up.

My feebleness saved me, I think. I tried to pull myself back by gripping the edge of the seat, but the crash had unloosed some latch somewhere and instead of pulling myself up I pulled the seat horizontally along. There was, I suppose, storage under the seat, and sliding the seat in this fashion allowed access to it. Except, for me, what it did was roof-over the footwell, with myself underneath.

I lay there for a moment, trying to puzzle out what had happened. Then I started the process of gathering myself, prior to pushing the sliding seat back and getting up.

Before I did this I heard a most tremendous racket. The driver’s door was wrenched open, and several men, all bellowing at once, shouted at the driver to get out. Get out now! Hands behind your head! On the ground! The driver responded with a woozy sort of syllable that sounded like ‘warren?’ but which probably had no intentional connection with anything rabbit related.

He was pulled out of the car with some force. It was his bad luck, and my good, that he looked so much like me, I suppose.

The sound of men yelling became more distant. Then it went away altogether. I lay still, breathing shallowly, in the dark. Peta was in my hand, and, slowly, I lifted him to my ear. ‘Are you there?’ I asked, in a low voice.

‘If they take you into custody,’ he replied urgently, ‘it’s all over. You’re dead, and so am I.’

‘That’s perhaps a less than optimal outcome,’ I said. ‘For us two.’ Then I yawned. The whole escapade had worn me out, and the downslope of the adrenalin spike was a great weariness. It wasn’t particularly comfortable, folded up in the footwell there, but nonetheless I believe I dozed. Just for a short while. What woke me was an alarm from my phone, and, confusedly, I told myself that I had to get up and get dressed and over to Waste Station at Bracknell to clock on. But it wasn’t my phone, and it wasn’t an alarm. It was Peta, saying over and over again, ‘Charles! Charles! Charles!’ A distant buzzy sound, rather like a
whirr
, because I had again dropped the ‘phone’.

I picked it up and put it to my ear. ‘What is it?’

‘I can’t believe you fell asleep! We have to go!’

‘I’m thirsty,’ I said.

‘Open the door and get out of the car.’

Doing this was not easy. Pushing the seat back into place was, from my cramped position, rather harder than pulling it over had been. I got it, perhaps, halfway back. Then I contorted myself as far as I could and just about reached the door snip, but pulling it was harder than it looked. After a few goes I heard the mechanism disengage, and I pushed the door open a couple of inches. Then I moved myself, slugwise, forward. I had got my head and shoulders outside when the whole car shuddered and angled bonnet upwards by twenty degrees. This had the effect of pushing the door against me, trapping me. With a super-heroic effort, I squeezed through, pushing the door just wide enough to let me out, and I tumbled flibberty-flobberty on to the hard ground.

I didn’t have my walking stick. In fact, looking up, I could see the head of it poking out. I propped myself on my elbows and managed to grab this, as the car jerked away from me, drawing the stick from its innards like a poundstore Excalibur. I could see what was happening now. A tow truck was removing the vehicle, and had hoisted it with a little crane.

I sat up. My leg hurt. Peta was on the floor. I put him to my ear.

‘Move away! You are surrounded by police!’

Looking around I could see it was true. One was speaking to the tow-truck driver, through the window of his cab. Two more – both armed with machine guns, no less – were in conversation over by their car. In the sky above the helicopter was still making its up-sky thrumming sound, swelling as it flew closer, diminishing as it circled away.

It was not an easy business, levering myself into a standing position with my stick, but somehow I managed it. Police cars were ranged before me. Behind me, to my left, was an estate of houses, looking pristine and new-built, so much so that they did not yet look occupied. To my right was some open land. I thought to myself:
if I can make it without my legs giving up, I could get behind those houses, have a rest, think what to do
. So I turned and started my Long John Silver walk. There was a loud revving sound from the tow truck, and it started away. Down the road, quite a long way off, I could see more police starting to pick up cones and stack them.

I stepped off the road, over the low barrier and on to baked mud. A few strands of grass. Somebody was yelling.

‘Keep going,’ Peta said into my ear.

‘There’s a strong chance I’m going to die of cardiac arrest,’ I replied.

‘Hey!’ came the yell. ‘You! You with the stick!’

‘I think he means me,’ I said.

‘Keep going.’

‘Hey! Stop!’ And then, words it is never comfortable hearing, ‘Armed police! We are authorised to use lethal force! Stop right there!’

One of the new houses – a bungalow – was a few yards to my right. My heart was thudding away like a drum machine at a rave. ‘They’re going to shoot me.’

I could hear footsteps behind me, running across the tarmac. I needed to take cover. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I stomped up the wooden steps and tried the door of the bungalow. It opened, and I stepped into an unfurnished hall. It may have been in my head to pass through the house and out the other side, and so perhaps evade pursuit. But if that was my plan (and my brain was so jangled, I can’t say for certain) it was immediately foiled. I appeared to have stepped into a one-room dwelling. There was a single window. There was no back door.

The sole window right beside the door I had just come in through, and so I took a look outside. One man, not in uniform, but clearly armed, was trotting over towards me, his hand on his holster. Behind him the two machine-gun-toting uniformed guys were taking notice, and starting to walk in my direction.

Slowing up, the first man approached the window, and looked up at me. ‘Charles,’ he said. ‘You’re slyer than we realised. Come on, come out of there.’

I didn’t know what to say. But I thought I ought to say something. I cleared my throat, and the rattle of phlegm swelled and grew into a sudden din, a roaring it took me a moment to realise was exterior to my own voice box. A look of concern passed over the armed man’s face. He unclipped his holster and took out his sidearm, but as he did this he began, weirdly, sliding off to the right. He looked like a skater, upright but in motion and slipping out of my field of view.

In fact the whole world was slipping away to the right. I watched the police cars, the officers, the whole scene move away, like a theatrical backdrop being hauled offstage on rails. Then the whole world shuddered and turned, and I nearly fell over. I put out my hand to steady myself, and clacked Peta’s screen against the wall. Then a sharper sense of acceleration, and I staggered to the right.

Anxious that I had cracked his screen, I checked Peta as soon as I got my footing back; but he seemed undamaged. I put it to my ear again. ‘You OK?’

‘I was able to intercept the police radios,’ Peta told me. ‘Foolish of them to broadcast unencrypted. They thought the driver was you and he wasn’t in a state to contradict them. They’ve realised their error now.’

‘I’m a little bamboozled by all that’s happened,’ I said. ‘Was I just involved in a car crash?’

‘You’re still breathing, aren’t you? When the lorry stops at the next set of lights, dismount. You can’t stay in here.’

‘Lorry?’ And as soon as I said that, the whole room shuddered to a stop, causing me to stagger several feet to the left. I opened the door to leave the space. The steps were no longer there, but I was able to sit down and so drop to the tarmac.

I was in the middle of the road, surrounded by stationary traffic. And then the lights went green and the truck carrying the Portakabin grumbled away behind me, and a white Transit with MEAT PETITE: CATERERS written on the side in pink roared into life a few inches in front of me. I turned and made for the kerb. A large four-by-four honked its horn so loud I nearly fell over in shock. There was an answering series of honks and shrills from further down the line of traffic. I stumbled forward, and a Toyota Prius swept by me, so close the tailwind almost pulled my makeshift kilt entirely away. The stench of car fumes was strong in my mouth. Behind me, a driver took time out of his evidently busy day to lower his window and abuse me in inventive, anatomically descriptive language.

I saw a gap in traffic and limped into it. A car howled to a stop in a scream of breaks and horn-honks. It was so close my hand fell naturally upon its bonnet, and I used it as a prop to help me limp past. Now only the cycle lane separated me from the pavement – or rather, from the metal fence that separated junction from pavement. This proved the most dangerous crossing of all: slightly stunned and disoriented I lunged for the barrier and a cyclist in full neon gear slammed into me. The impact knocked Peta from my hand, and sent him skidding out across the road; and the transfer of momentum left me hopping on my good leg away from the cyclist, swearing. It was only grabbing hold of the metal pedestrian barrier that stopped me falling over. The cyclist picked his bike up, pulled off his face mask and swore at me. ‘If you
have
bent my wheel you
hair
sole I’ll have the police
harrest
you.’ He put his mask back, and said something else too muffled for me to hear and then he remounted and pushed off in a hurry, so as not to miss the green light.

I pressed my back to the metal fence and tried to get my breathing back to normal as the traffic roared past inches from my nose. I could see where Peta had fallen. A van ran him over, and then a car, and then another. The lights turned amber, the traditional signal for British drivers to accelerate noisily and move more speedily still through the junction. Finally the light went red and the traffic stopped.

I didn’t want to do it, but I couldn’t leave Peta lying in the road. So I manoeuvred my way through stationary vehicles and picked him from his position, tucked in at the front tyre of a Nissan Micra. The driver wound her window down. ‘Where’s your squeegee?’ she demanded. ‘I got bugs. Their squish is like
baked
on.’

‘I’ll go fetch it,’ I promised, and retreated to the side of the road as the lights began to change.

Climbing over the barrier was beyond me in my wobble-leg, knee brace, exhausted and jangled state. I squeezed my way along like a man on a mountain ledge to the end of the stretch of metal bars, and finally made it to the pavement. Peta looked a little scuffed. I put him to my ear. ‘Hello?’

‘They have surveillance cameras at these junctions, you know,’ he said. ‘You can’t stay here. You need to get on.’