Thieving Fear Part 13

Her voice had grown so faint that Rory couldn't judge whether it was urgent or wary or both. 'I don't,' he said.

He shouldn't mention Thurstaston Mound or Arthur Pendemon in case his brother would. Just the thought of doing so seemed capable of shutting him inside himself, blanking his vision and filling his ears with an utter hush, but he heard Ellen say 'I went there.'

'Any use?'

Presumably she answered him. As he strained his throbbing ears he managed to distinguish some kind of mutter. He wouldn't have said it was Ellen except for knowing it had to be. 'I didn't get that,' he complained. 'Say it again.'

The response was so incomprehensible that he could have imagined it was mocking him. He shut his eyes in case that helped him concentrate his hearing, but it felt like cutting off another sense. He widened them until they stung and gazed at the blank sky. 'Can you hear me?' he said. 'Something's up with someone's phone, it sounds like. Tell me another time.'

Had she gone? Rory pressed the mobile hard against his ear. Surely her phone was the problem, because he was able to hear his brother, or at least the message with Hugh's voice embedded in it. 'Me again. Where are you? Lost your phone?' Rory said without raising an answer. He'd had enough of waiting. It would be Hugh's fault if Rory disturbed him at work.

'We're your Frugo superstore at Huddersfield. Competing to be cheapest. This is Doreen serving you. How can I help you today?'

Rory had already tried to interrupt, but there was no stopping the formula. 'Can I speak to Hugh Lucas?'

'Who wants him, please?'

'I'm his brother.'

'Hold for a moment, please,' she instructed Rory and gave way to Vivaldi performed on an instrument centuries younger than the composer. After a number of seasonal bars and two a.s.surances that Rory's call was important to someone, Doreen said 'Putting you through.'

As soon as the acoustic fell away, not down a hole but into the body of the supermarket, he said 'Hugh.'

'It's not, no. Wouldn't be.'

'He'll be here in a moment,' another girl called. 'Is that the can man?'

'I'll ask him. Tamara wants to know a'

'I'm Rory Lucas.'

'Says it's him. Doesn't sound that mad.'

'Ask him if he's after any models.'

'Tamara a'

'I heard,' Rory said with the impatience he'd been reserving for Hugh. 'Are you offering?'

'He's asking if we're offering.'

'Tell him there's plenty of his kind on the shelves.'

'Maybe we can give him a bulk deal. There's plenty of your kind a'

'I'll do without your bulk, thanks all the same.'

'What's up, Mishel? What did he say?'

'You don't want to know. Skitting how we look and he can't even see us. Can't see anything worth seeing if you ask me. He's as rude as his brother,' Mishel said and directed her voice at the phone. 'If you've got anything else to say you won't be saying it to us.'

He could hardly wait to begin speaking until he heard his brother take the phone. 'Christ, are they the sort of t.w.a.ts you have to work with? I thought it was just that w.a.n.ker that got himself promoted over you. Don't let anybody tell you you haven't got it hard. I wouldn't be able to keep my gob shut if I had to put up with the likes of them as well as whatever you said he was called, Dustbin, it ought to be. Sounds like waste all right. A load of c.r.a.p that thinks it's better than the rest of you.'

'Who do you think you're talking to?'

Rory shut his eyes and had to open them at once. 'I wouldn't know. Who?'

'I won't use the words you've been using.'

'Hugh doesn't either, so don't take it out on him.'

'What's he saying, Justin?' Rory heard one of the girls enquire with something like concern.

'Back to work, ladies, please. This isn't for your ears.' To Rory the supervisor said 'I take it your brother has been claiming he's been victimised.'

'He's said nowt about it. Doesn't mean he hasn't been. I'm warning you not to, that's all. Anyway, why am I talking to you? I asked for him.'

'I'm a.s.suming you aren't very close.'

'You do a b.l.o.o.d.y sight too much a.s.suming, pal,' Rory said, all the angrier for feeling that the accusation was related to the truth. 'What's your reason if you've got one?'

'If you were you'd know not to ring here for him.'

'I know we're not meant to ring him at work. I just want a quick word to see if anything's up with him.'

'Plenty, I'd say, but you can't do it here.'

'Why not? Spit it out, for Christ's sake.'

'I'll terminate this call if there is any more abusive language.' When Rory squeezed his eyes shut in an attempt to keep his lips that way, Justin said 'He was sent home yesterday until further notice. It looks very much as if he's been doing something to his brain. I don't know who's responsible or who he thinks he has to impress.'

Rory widened his eyes once he was sure he would say only 'What's he been doing?'

'Behaving completely inappropriately for a Frugo employee. I'm not interested in what other people may get up to, but it won't do for anyone who wants to hold down a real job.'

Rory succeeded in maintaining restraint for Hugh's sake. 'You've not told me what he did yet.'

'I'm afraid I can't discuss it with you. I wouldn't want my employers to be sued for alleged slander. Some people seem happy to claim payment however they can. Of course I'm not referring to anyone specific.' As Rory tried to visualise the supervisor's fat smug face Justin said 'I take it you'll be visiting your brother. I hope you'll devote your efforts to helping him in any way you can.'

'I don't need you to tell me that,' Rory declared and rang off before he could say anything else. As long as the job was Hugh's choice he shouldn't jeopardise it any further. His fury grew as he listened yet again to the message, and he could scarcely wait for it to finish droning so that he could say 'Can't you answer, for Christ's b.l.o.o.d.y sake? I know you're not at work. It's me. It's your brother. Whatever's up, you can talk to me.'

His ignorance of the situation felt like a lump of nothingness at the centre of his brain, and capable of blotting out his thoughts. Suppose Hugh was indeed unable to answer? From the little Justin had implied, Rory suspected that Hugh might have given way beneath the acc.u.mulated pressures of the job or, to judge by Rory's solitary experience with them, of his workmates. When teaching had almost broken him down he hadn't wanted to admit it or even to speak to his family for weeks. Charlotte had sent him encouragement, Ellen had kept a.s.suring him how much they all cared about him and would look after him, but Rory believed it had been his own roughness that had dragged Hugh out of the dark lonely pit he'd become. That sort of conversation, more like a monologue, was best conducted face to face, and Rory was already dressing. He shoved his feet into a pair of trainers that were muddy from the moors and hurried down the corridor to slam the door behind him.

The lift was a grey box for eight people, seven of them represented by s.p.a.ce. Without its control panel and the midget door to the emergency phone it would have been entirely featureless. Well before it descended twelve floors Rory found the sight of little more than nothingness unwelcome. His mind must be narrowed down to worrying about his brother, because when he stepped out of the tower block the car park and the queues of vehicles on the main road seemed flattened by the sunlight, insufficiently present. He rubbed his eyes and blinked stickily as he headed for the van.

How hot was the interior? As he drove to the road he lowered the window, but wasn't sure if that made any difference. A Volvo almost blinded him with its high beams to indicate that it was making way for him. The traffic was reduced to pacing the pedestrians by roadworks that had occupied a lane. Rory closed the window, even though he couldn't smell the gathering fumes, and laid his mobile on the seat beside him as the traffic halted ahead.

A lorry that blocked most of his forward view crawled a yard before stopping with a muted flare of brake lights a grimy, they must be. Its next effort covered half the distance, and the eventual one after that even less. When Rory saw a gap alongside he swerved into it, only just ahead of a Rover, which flashed a blank patch into his eyes. Presumably its horn wasn't working, but the driver compensated with a vigorous mime. Now the traffic in the inner lane was overtaking Rory, and the length of the lorry kept him out, forging forwards beside him but never far enough to let him dodge behind. His fists were clenched so fiercely on the wheel that he'd ceased to feel them. A Peugeot in front of him surged ahead several yards, but not enough to overtake the lorry so that Rory might be able to. His frustration seemed to swell behind his eyes, clogging his senses, and for too many seconds he imagined he was hearing his own voice only in his head. 'Ring ring. Ring ring,' he said, or rather the phone did.

The speed of the traffic gave him time to glance at the display. Hugh was calling at last, and Rory was about to speak to him when the Peugeot advanced another few yards. The headlights of the Rover glared at once. He switched the mobile to loudspeaker mode and drove forwards, blinking his smudged eyes so fiercely that it felt like nervousness. 'You can hear me, can you?' he demanded.

'I think so.'

'Of course you b.l.o.o.d.y can or you wouldn't be answering.' Rory tilted his head towards the phone as he braked to a halt, and felt as if he were shouting down a well to his brother. 'How long does it take to return a call?'

'I couldn't find it.'

'Which?'

'This.' As Rory lost patience with being unable to see what was meant, Hugh said 'My phone.'

'All right, no panic. We're talking now. What's up?'

'I just told you.'

If that was enough to distress Hugh so much, worse must be wrong with him. 'Well, you've found it now,' Rory said. 'Hang onto it till I get there and keep talking if you want.'

'Not just the phone.'

'Christ, you're in a bad way, aren't you?' Rory said in case a dose of bluff humour might help. 'What else, then?'

'Everything.'

'b.u.g.g.e.ration, that's a lot,' Rory said, though he suspected his attempts to buck Hugh up were falling short. 'Eh, don't you try to tell me what to do. I'll go where I want when it suits me.'

'Who's there? Who are you speaking to?'

'Just some t.w.a.t in a flash car that thinks n.o.body's good enough to get in his way.' As the Peugeot had drawn alongside the cab of the lorry, the Rover had instantly glared in response. 'I'm on the road,' Rory said. 'I'll be with you when I can, but don't panic if I'm a while. It's a nightmare here.'

The Peugeot sprinted ahead of the lorry, but not as far as the length of his van. 'What did you say?' Hugh seemed less than anxious to learn.

Was his voice growing faint with emotion? 'Driving right now, it's a nightmare,' Rory said and closed the gap.

'What kind?'

'The kind that gets on your nerves.' In case this sounded like an accusation Rory said 'It's just a figure of speech.'

'It isn't. I'm in one now.'

The Peugeot gathered speed as the lorry did, and Rory saw that the roadworks had come to an end, opening the outer lane on the approach to a large busy roundabout. 'I'm out of mine,' he said. 'I should be with you very soon.'

'Are you certain?'

The Rover veered into the third lane, and Rory bade it a mute but expressive good riddance, which failed to revive much sensation in his hand as he returned it to the wheel. 'I don't know what'd stop me,' he said.

'I didn't mean that.'

The Rover sped onto the roundabout, and the lorry and the Peugeot were at the edge when Rory saw a gap in the circling traffic large enough to admit both the car ahead and the van. 'Let's leave it till I see you,' he said.

'Just answer me one thing first.'

The lorry and the Peugeot braved the roundabout, and Rory floored the accelerator. He needed the first exit, for which he was in the correct lane, but the lorry wasn't taking that route. As it blocked the exit at length Hugh said not quite faintly enough to be inaudible 'Nightmares.'

'Right, them.' Rory was going to have to circ.u.mnavigate the entire crowded roundabout. He would have welcomed a break from Hugh's commentary, but as he set about overtaking the lorry in the midst of the headlong traffic he was provoked to add 'What about them?'

'Have you started remembering any? Because a'

For a heartbeat Rory managed to believe that only the mobile had failed, and then he realised that he couldn't hear the vehicles all around him or even the van. At least he was more or less able to see, despite a blur unpleasantly suggestive of the notion that his eyeb.a.l.l.s had grown an extra skin. He tried to blink them clear as he accelerated desperately past the next exit. At the second blink his vision was extinguished like an image on a television that had been switched off.

He heard himself cry out, a distant feeble almost formless wail that he remembered uttering in an attempt to waken from a nightmare. It didn't work. He no longer knew how he was driving the van, since he was unable to feel the controls. He only knew that he was trapped inside it, as vulnerable as a mollusc in a fragile sh.e.l.l. If he wouldn't be able to feel what happened to him, this was the opposite of rea.s.suring: it felt like his ultimate dread. He was nothing but a helpless consciousness enclosed in an insensate ma.s.s. Nothing and n.o.body, he just had time to think before he was.

SIXTEEN.

'Have you started remembering any? Because I have. Only I'm not just remembering,' Hugh pleaded before Rory switched his mobile off. Hugh couldn't blame him. However desperate he'd been to talk about his plight and explain why he hadn't returned Rory's calls, he shouldn't have rung his brother while he was driving. He pressed the mobile against his right ear to confirm there was silence, which meant that Rory would be concentrating on the road. Had he really heard a cry just now, the sort of almost powerless sound he uttered whenever he was struggling to waken from a bad dream? It could hardly have been Rory; it must have been himself. Disturbing though it was to be unsure of his own voice, he supposed this further expressed his helplessness a and then he gasped. He was so preoccupied with how remote the cry of panic had seemed that he'd overlooked something far more immediate. He knew he was holding the phone to his right ear.

Quite a time pa.s.sed before he was able to risk moving it away. He was terrified of losing the faculty he'd somehow regained. Eventually he laid the mobile on its back between his hands, which he flattened on the old stained wooden table where he and Rory had spent boyhood mealtimes with their parents, and gazed around the kitchen. For hours that felt like the beginning of eternity the room and the rest of the house had become appallingly unfamiliar, harder to find his way through than a maze many times the size of the building, in which every recognisable object seemed to mock his confusion. Now he grasped that the door to the small back garden was to the right of the unrelieved pane of gla.s.s above the metal sink ahead of him, while the door to the hall was on his left. He made himself turn his chair around with a protracted stuttering screech of its legs on the linoleum. There were the cupboards and the laminated working surface, but far more important, with his back to the sink and cooker and refrigerator and the garden that was mostly occupied by a pair of rusty swings standing knee-deep in weeds, he had no problem with understanding that the hall door was now to his right, the opposite of the door to the garden. How had he recaptured his sense of direction? He could only a.s.sume that talking about his condition, no matter how perfunctorily, had done the trick. His mental interlude must have been the result of all his confrontations with Justin and Tamara and Mishel, and perhaps it came of indulging his imagination too. That was best left to the creative members of the family, and for the moment he didn't even want to think about the situation at work; he wanted to celebrate the return of the sense that he'd taken so much for granted. Pocketing the mobile, he made for the hall.

Apart from Rory's portraits a Hugh and their cousins gazing ahead in frozen antic.i.p.ation a there wasn't a great deal to it, since it was halved on the right by stairs. To the left the lounge recalled his and Rory's boyhoods: the old squat television with its dusty almost square screen did, and the video recorder piled with tapes so often used that their labels were palimpsests of his and Rory's handwriting and their parents' too, and the bookcase not overfull of books that Hugh had learned from his father to buy in charity shops and library sales. Just the free books Charlotte used to send her cousins before the publishers warned staff that complimentary copies should be given only to the press were new. At the top of the stairs the bathroom announced itself with a flush that never quite stopped trickling, while his and Rory's old rooms were more or less ahead and the largest, once the parental bedroom, was now Hugh's. All the doors were open, as he'd flung them during his panicky quest for his sense of direction; otherwise the diminutive hall a big enough for him, he always thought a would have been much dimmer. He turned right along it into his room.

He'd left most of the relics of his boyhood a ramshackle scale models displaying too much glue, Scottish comic annuals, a poster for an AIDS benefit concert by Hindi rappers Jihadn't in Manchester (one of his very few demonstrations of adolescent rebellion, which had his parents wondering for at least a year and very possibly still if he was gay) a in his original bedroom. The one he occupied now retained much of his parents' bedroom furniture, wardrobes and a dressing-table too rickety to move. His single bed was newer, and so were the posters for Rory's exhibitions, and the bookcase piled with material Hugh had read and written while training as a teacher. They could rouse his guilt over the career he'd abandoned because of his inability to cope, not to mention his failure to share the house, no doubt because he was impossible to live with a but just now he felt guiltier for crossing to the window and pushing the musty faded curtains wider to gaze along the deserted street. He was starting to regret having troubled his brother.

Perhaps trying to contact him had even aggravated Hugh's state, or Rory's absence from the phone had, so that Hugh had ended his first call without a word. He'd fled to the toilet, only to be unable to find his way back for longer than the most protracted nightmare, despite hearing the Sesame Street theme so often that it might have been taunting him. He mustn't risk putting the phone down again, although the need to keep it on him threatened to revive his terror of losing his way. All at once it seemed crucial to know what he absolutely mustn't do, but he was nowhere near identifying it when the mobile came to life.

As he wondered whether to apologise to Rory he saw Ellen's number. It only intensified his sense of some action it was vital to avoid. Surely that couldn't be answering the phone, though he almost dropped it from nervousness. 'Are you busy?' Ellen said. 'Can you talk?'

He mustn't burden her with his problems at the supermarket; she sounded tense enough. 'I'm not at work just now,' he said.

'Not even for me?'

She might be trying to sound innocent if not coquettish, but it made Hugh uneasy. 'How do you mean?'

'Rory says you've been finding things out for me. He called before.'

In the midst of his mounting anxiety Hugh felt betrayed. 'Why?' he complained.

'I wasn't completely clear about that. Something was wrong with his phone, I think. He kept not being able to hear me, but he was asking if you'd been in touch.'

Hugh saw this might have been his fault for neglecting to leave a message. 'What did he say I've been doing?' he was impatient to learn.

After a pause that struck Hugh as surely unintentionally cruel, Ellen said 'Looking into Thurstaston.'