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  I phoned him from Calais when I got there. I couldn’t be on for long, because I wanted to save my money – the exchange rate hadn’t been favourable to me. He sounded puzzled at first, but he was OK about it when I assured him I’d be back in a couple of days.

  And I was. I never let him down. I went to Lille on the train, which used up most of my money. I got round paying for accommodation by picking up a bloke in a bar – but only after three hours leaning against the radiator and swigging Kronenbourg from the bottle, watching them all, deciding who was the safest to go for. Anyone who came up to me and tried it on was a non-starter to begin with, and, of course, there were plenty of those.

  Eventually I went to a club with a bunch of students. It was a mixed crowd, so I never felt uncomfortable. Memories are hazy, but I do recall telling Luc at one point – loudly, in his ear, in dodgy French and over the beats of some Euro-pop or other – that my mother had just died. It was easy from there.

  I left Luc at dawn – he was still asleep and I didn’t wake him. He was nice, and a great lay, but he snored.

  *

  Before I left Lille, I chose a backstreet shop where I was to prepare myself for the rest of my life.

  I was vulnerable now. I felt alone, unprotected in the world. I had seen just how easy it was to leave this little place, and in the two days since my mother’s death I had suddenly found myself suffering from a heightened awareness of the harsh, spiky, poisoned nature of the world. Every step could be the one to lead you into chaos or destruction. And a growing conviction had burned itself on my mind. The knowledge that there was something I could do about it. Something which had been at the back of my mind for literally years.

  Throughout the eighties, the years in which I had lived the first years of my life, the governments of the world had been poised, ready to obliterate each other. Through simple fear – and, I’m sure, mutual ignorance about what the other side could actually do – they had not. They had survived. We had survived.

  Dying’s easy. Anyone can do it. Well, it wasn’t going to be easy for me. It was time to acquire myself a deterrent.

  Inside the shop, which smelt of polished metal, leather and wood, I found an indifferent old man looking at me over half-moon spectacles and a copy of Le Figaro. And a counter full of flick-knives.

  I pointed to one at random.

  ‘C’est combien?’ I asked.

  Chapter Sixteen – Cat’s-paw

  The town is full of sky today. This is a thin town, a fragment floating on the surface of the world. Above it, so much sky. Even before you get to the clouds, there’s a big open space, with a pale hole where the sun should be.

  An irritated wind scuttles across the pier, pushing a polystyrene tray, chip paper, a drink carton. Pungent vinegar and grease smear the air, daub their smell on your nose and mouth.

  I watch the empty sea churning, grey and white. My hair tangles up like sea kelp. When I get it home, it’ll be stuck together with salt, sculpted into a mess as if it’s made of clumps of dead mermaids’ hair.

  I suck on a cigarette, and its hot, savoury harshness blocks out the rank smell of the End of the World. Sometimes it smells like death up here on the end of the pier, especially now in the grey zone between summer and autumn. It’s like there are bodies under the sand, decaying into a spinachy mulch of seaweed.

  A long way out, beyond the headland, spray’s being kicked up by a hovercraft. Going to Dover or Folkestone. Those towns might be dilapidated in places, but they still have a haunted nobility, and they still do business.

  But nothing comes near here; this town’s no businessman. More like a decrepit whore, built for pleasure, but unable to give it any more. The juice has been squeezed from the flesh, the skin’s gone putrid, and her lush sweetness – once a honey-trap for sailors, students, drunkards and artists – has turned fishy-stale.

  I’m leaning on the rail, smoking, trying not to singe my hair. I wonder how much longer I can stay here in this chaos of salt and chill. I glance down at the end of the pier, past the stilled arcades and the faded booths. There’s a small blonde figure in a black coat, scurrying against the wind.

  I know that she can see me, so I don’t try to hide, but I pretend to be looking through a ten-pence telescope when she approaches me.

  ‘Hi,’ says her croaky voice.

  I look up. ‘Hello.’ I can’t help wrinkling my nose as I notice that she is wearing cheap plastic earrings, moulded into flowers of disgusting pink and purple. They’re the kind that you’d win on a shoddy hoop-la stall and wear as an ironic joke.

  ‘Kate said you were here.’

  ‘Yeah, well, good for Mystic Kate.’ I spit a stream of smoke into the wind, and it comes back at me, a spiky cloud.

  Marcie leans on the rail beside me. I look at her again, and for a moment I’m shocked to see how rough she looks. Her face is ghost-white, with fever-red splodges on her cheeks and nose, and her eyes are scribbled round with fatigue and mascara, etched with outlines so deep that they look hammered into the skin. Her blonde bob’s scraggy, fraying above those horrible earrings, hacked and slashed at the back in a vain attempt at home hairdressing. A pig’s ear of a duck’s arse. There’s a haze of cheap soap around her.

  She twitches her lips in a sideways smile at me, and a scabby cold sore lifts its head out of the white make-up to say hello.

  ‘How have you been?’ I ask her. I realize I have not seen her for several weeks.

  She shrugs. ‘Could be worse.’ She looks at me, and I can’t meet her gaze – I feel it almost blinding me with its bone-whiteness. ‘I’m gonna lose the flat. Can’t pay the rent.’

  I feel the chilling burden of other people’s problems, and a strange guilt. ‘What happened?’

  ‘You know that green dress what I wore out?’

  Mentally, I translate Marcie’s vernacular. I assume she doesn’t mean she used it to the end of its natural life.

  ‘That night?’ I ask.

  There’s a pause in the conversation, as if we are acknowledging something unspoken.

  ‘Yeah. Cost me a hundred and fifty.’ She looks up, a brief, shy, tangential glance. ‘I wanted to wear it ’cos it was good. Made me feel good.’

  My cigarette burns down further. Sparks cascade into the sea. I nod quietly to myself. ‘And the coke?’

  ‘Your money,’ she says in a small voice.

  ‘Ah. Right.’

  ‘I think . . . I mean, I . . .’ She flips her fingers, slumps into her arms on the rail. ‘Dunno, I can’t . . . I’ll have to leave this town.’

  ‘And go where?’ I look at her properly for the first time. ‘Why do you want to go away? Tell me something you’ve considered, Marcie, tell me something you’ve thought through for once. Talk to me, not off at a tangent. Take some fucking control, for God’s sake!’

  She seems totally numb to my outburst, and I turn away from her, tutting, feeling my face roar with colour. I wonder why I care.

  ‘Damien’s not been out since. He’s sold them CDs. Planning another raid, he is. Thinks it’s easy money.’

  ‘Ah. Right.’

  ‘What did you do?’ she asks suddenly.

  ‘When?’

  ‘That night. I don’t . . .’ She sounds embarrassed. ‘I don’t remember it. I mean . . . I remember all them Fallies, and I was in the car park at one point, yeah?’

  ‘You were in the car park. In body. We got you home.’

  ‘Wet. I got wet. I woke up in the spare room at Damien’s.’ She shudders. ‘His mum was so good to me. It was terrible. I’d, like, gone further than when you ask what someone’s done, you know? It was like she’d took me in off the streets to give me breakfast.’

  So Marcie wants to know what we did.

  And I am confronted with a question about my own actions, when I have hauled myself through these last few weeks just by not questioning what we did, by telling myself that we had to do it. There was no other alternative.

  *

  J
J scratches at a night’s stubble and then wraps his hands around a cup of coffee.

  Opposite him, on the sofa, I sip some orange juice. The clock clunks to itself, the land dries out under a morning sun.

  ‘It was an accident,’ he says. He almost offers it as a suggestion, as a starter in a game of Chinese Whispers.

  ‘It was an accident,’ I agree. ‘She didn’t get out of the way, and there was no way you could stop.’

  It’s as if we have to find this common ground. It has to be said. We don’t say what really needs to be said. We talk about the car.

  ‘We . . . couldn’t have left it,’ he murmurs. He’s looking at the floor, his fringe falling down and hiding his eyes. ‘If we’d left it someone would have seen it.’

  ‘But no one thinks anything of another burnt-out wreck.’

  ‘Nothing at all. Joyriders.’

  ‘Fallies,’ I offer. Our eyes meet. ‘Fallies,’ I say again.

  *

  And since then, we have drowned in silence.

  I thought there might have been something. An item on the news about the girl. But no, it seems I must have been right about her being a Trav. Could it be that no one’s going to miss her? My God.

  I’ve relived it again and again and so has JJ, I’m sure. I don’t know if he still has the same conclusions, but I have convinced myself that the actions had to be taken, swiftly, decisively.

  Evidence was purged in flames. Not all the evidence, though.

  *

  I have to tell Marcie something.

  So, the truth. But not the whole truth.

  ‘We drove the car out to the quarry,’ I say to Marcie. ‘It was quiet, still. We set fire to it and let it burn.’

  I can feel the fire-bright face searing me again. Is she going to burn through the spaces between the truths?

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Nothing. It started to rain, so we ran. Got soaked. Went back to mine.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  It’s essentially the truth. A component may be missing, but it’s not a vital component as far as Marcie is concerned. And it actually seems that she’s prepared to accept that. Marcie missed the whole bloody lot, and all she knows is that we had to get rid of the car.

  ‘Bel,’ she says in a small voice, ‘I need some more money.’

  So that’s it. She didn’t come out here to the furthest point of the Town at the End of the World for the pleasure of my scintillating company. Even on the pier, I can’t be an amusement.

  I give her a brief, empty laugh and a shrug. ‘I don’t think you’ve come to the right place. Why not try the bank?’

  ‘Bel, I ain’t joking.’

  OK, so Marcie is obviously not in the mood for banter. Nevertheless, what does that change? She has already taken quite enough from me, in return for some blame that never materialized, some security I didn’t need.

  ‘I was thinkin’ about an idea,’ she said. Her fatigue-bruised eyes carry desperation in their hollows. ‘I was thinkin’ that maybe I was drivin’ that night.’

  I push my hair out of my eyes, angrily. ‘But Marcie,’ I hear myself saying, at the risk of stating the obvious, ‘you weren’t driving. I know you weren’t. And the problem is, no one knows who was. We were in town, as far as everyone’s concerned, and I want it to stay that way.’ I stare at her, wanting to pierce that pale, limp body. To harpoon it with truth, bright and ineluctable.

  ‘But they might come and ask us about that night. About the Fallies.’

  ‘Yes, they might. In which case, we know nothing.’ JJ and I have thought this over, and decided that this is our policy.

  ‘But if they do,’ Marcie ventures, ‘wouldn’t you like the security of knowin’ someone would take the rap for the wrecked car?’ We are both looking out at the choppy sea now but I can sense her as strongly as if her eyes were on me. ‘I’ve got a record already, it wouldn’t bother me. I’d take the blame for it, if they came askin’. If we’d made an arrangement.’

  I’m not stupid, and I can see where this is leading.

  I can see the flames riding high in the night sky, vortices of orange stars. A husk of a car, crumbly to the touch like an old fire.

  And I can see white globules of fat, fused to the earth at the bottom of a wooded slope.

  ‘All right,’ I hear myself saying to her, and my voice is roughened by smoke and salt. ‘I’ll find you the money. What is it, another fifty?’

  ‘Fifty’ll do,’ says Marcie with quiet satisfaction.

  Why? I don’t know. I feel, maybe, that I am paying something beyond mere Marcie.

  A ghost that hovers one fragment of space and time beyond her. Its face bright red on one side and virginal white on the other. A scythe swung up to its shoulder perhaps.

  I am trying to pay my dues.

  And Marcie doesn’t know exactly what she’s taken on.

  *

  I go round to JJ’s flat but he’s not answering the door. The only sounds are the echo of the bell, and the swishing of cars on the spray-dashed promenade. I even try standing above his voyeur-skylight and peering in. The place looks much as normal – mouldering dishes on the draining-board, caseless videos scattered around the blue carpet and over The Rapy Couch.

  I have to see him. This whole business is just eating me up. I can get a tram out to the suburbs, see if he’s at Imelda’s house. I hurry along the promenade, past the dead and dying shops, my boots smacking the puddles.

  I see myself pictured in each window, sometimes clearly, sometimes just like a ghost. There are other objects in these half-abandoned shops, and they all seem to be watching me. One, which looks like a dark crustacean ready to pounce, is just a wide-screen television on a stand.

  The most sinister shop-window is just opposite the tram-stop. There’s something in it like a metal skeleton, a two-foot-high match-stick-man made from rusty steel. I realize, as I hurry past and reach the tram-stop, what it must have been. That shop used to be an optician’s, and it had a little bespectacled dwarf in the window who used to bob back and forth, pointing at a board of letters. Now he’s gone, and, as with the town, only the bare bones are left. I shiver as I wonder whether the little skeleton still dances there on a dark night. I picture him nodding sagely at the strolling couples, the shivering drunks and the snivelling druggies. I see him bowing to the gaggles of cackling, Lycra-sheathed creatures as they surge from night-club caverns.

  It’s grey now, the off-tuned autumn grey which this place attracts. There is only one other person at the stop – a girl with scraggy black hair and a beaky crow-face, slumped in contemplation, a sloppy Asda carrier bag hanging from one hand.

  A tram approaches from the other direction, from East Bay. It moves with the sleekness of a barge. For some reason, my eyes become fixed on it, even though it’s not the one that I want. There are quite a few passengers on it.

  The tram approaches, whining and clanking. I am watching the windows. There are three people sitting on the back seats. Momentarily, a fragment of sunlight breaks out and brushes across the windows, and I see a white face outlined in blackcurrant-coloured curls, and glowing with a garish red birthmark.

  I actually take a step backwards, almost crashing into the Scrag, who mutters a lacklustre obscenity.

  The tram is slowing down. The face has receded into the shadows, but I can still see the candyfloss outline of that hair.

  I can feel my eyes pulled open wide with horror, and my heart hammer-hammer-hammering away.

  I hop across the tracks and on to the other platform, but the tram has already started.

  I’m running alongside it, back the way I came. I’m trying to keep pace with the tram, reality bouncing up and down like I’m running with a hand-held camera. The tram’s getting faster and faster, its whine building up.

  The figure’s turning now, turning – the whiteness of her skin, the aurora of the hair –

  And an unblemished face, staring back at me in puzzlement.

  T
he tram trundles off along the sea front, and I stand and shiver and watch it until it’s just a toy in the distance. It rounds the coast by the abandoned fairground. It slips into suburbia. It disappears into perspective-oblivion.

  *

  I go to the cashpoint, and take out fifty pounds.

  Chapter Seventeen – Slack

  Up here, we can see houses, sky and some patches of green. That is, they would be green if they weren’t clogged by experience, adorned with the envious meals consumed and vomited upon them. Up here, no greenery is silent – it is alive with colour and texture. It twitters with skittery chip cartons and scrunches with yellow plastic Quaver packets and pssshutts with red-and-white Coke cans and squelches with pitchy dog sludge. Living history. Beyond the green, there’s a row of blinded windows, and one still-active video shop, plastered with larger-than-life posters.

  ‘I wonder,’ JJ murmurs, ‘if this is the kind of place people mean when they say they’ve come to the University of Life.’

  *

  I’m at Imelda’s house within half an hour. She finally comes to the door with her hair arrayed in tar-black needles, and a lime-green towel pulled taut around her shoulders. She frowns first of all, and I smile nervously, taking in what she’s wearing – an apple-coloured dress, little more than a long T-shirt, rumpled and stretched in places as if she’s pulled it on while coming down the stairs.

  ‘Oh. Hi,’ she says at last. She looks vaguely surprised to see me, and folds her arms across her breasts, as if she’s trying to hide something.

  ‘Sorry to wake you,’ I find myself saying glibly. ‘It is only four in the afternoon, so I could come back later.’

  Imelda grins. ‘You’ve caught me conscious. Kettle’s just boiled.’

  I settle myself in the kitchen, and she flicks the kettle on with one hand while towelling her cropped hair with the other.

  ‘Is he here?’ I ask her casually. I hold my breath, because I haven’t contacted him for nearly a week, and for all I know he might not even want to see me again.