Being (16 page)

‘Yeah, right. You’re so worried about me that you killed Kamal –’

‘We didn’t kill anyone –’

‘What about Casing?’

‘What about him?’

‘Has he been killed too? Stabbed to death in a frenzied attack…?’

Morris shook his head, like he was listening to a raving madman, and I knew I was wasting my time. He was never going to tell me anything. And I didn’t have time to waste.

But still…

He was here.

Morris.

He was right here in front of me. And he
knew.
He had to know something about me. And I wanted to know.
I had to know. I had to know what was happening to me. I had to know what I was, what I wasn’t, what I was…

I had to know.

‘Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you,’ I said.

Morris frowned at me. ‘What?’

‘You heard.’

His mouth moved, looking for an answer, but nothing came out.

‘I don’t have anything to lose,’ I explained to him. ‘I’m either human or I’m not. If I am, then I’m already wanted for Casing’s murder, so another one isn’t going to make any difference. And if I’m not… well, if I’m not human, it doesn’t really matter, does it? A machine can’t be guilty of murder.’

Morris just stared at me.

‘Do you see what I’m saying?’ I said.

He nodded slowly.

‘So,’ I continued, ‘what’s it going to be? Are you going to tell me what I want to know, or do I have to kill you?’

We stared at each other in silence for a while. Morris’s eyes were blank. Empty and emotionless… almost unhuman… and I wondered for a moment what I looked like to him. Did he know what I was? Did he see me as something else? And then it suddenly occurred to me that maybe he
didn’t
see me as something else, because maybe I
wasn’t
something else to him. I was the
same
as him. He was the same as me. We were
both
something else – unhuman, unreal. And if Morris was the same as me, then the others had to be the same too – Ryan, Hayes, Cooper… all of them. Maybe Bridget and Pete were the
same. Maybe there were hundreds of us, thousands… maybe
everyone
was the same as me.

I looked at Morris in the mirror, trying to see myself in his eyes.

‘All right, Robert,’ he said quietly. ‘What do you want to know?’

He sounded genuine, pained and resigned, and for a moment I was convinced he was telling the truth. He really
was
going to tell me what I wanted to know. But then his eyes flicked suddenly to the right, as if he’d just seen something outside, and even as I turned to see what he was looking at, I realized I’d been tricked.

But it was already too late.

The instant I took my eyes off him, Morris released the seat handle and thrust out his legs, shoving himself backwards with all his weight. His seat slammed into my chest, emptying my lungs and throwing me across the car, and as I thudded against the back of the rear seats, the pistol flew out of my hand. I was too shocked to move for a moment. I couldn’t breathe. I just sat there, slumped in the seat, dazed and breathless, vaguely aware that Morris was already clambering over the seat, his killing eyes fixed on me. I saw him draw back his arm, and I tried to get out of the way, but I was too slow. He smashed his fist into my head, then almost immediately rammed his arm against my neck, shoving me up against the back seat. He had me pinned down now. My head was whirling, filled with blackness, and his arm was crushing the life out of me. I struggled, trying to kick him, but he just leaned in harder and hit me again, cracking his left hand into my jaw. It didn’t hurt – none of it seemed to hurt.
I was insensible, painless. Switched off. Numb. I was just a thing. But I couldn’t function any more. There was too much blackness inside my head, the air was too thick. I couldn’t do anything.

With his body jammed between the two front seats and his right arm rammed up against my neck, Morris started scrabbling around with his other hand, looking for the pistol. I knew where it was. It was on the floor, under my right foot. I could feel it through the sole of my shoe – the hard steel, the trigger guard, the barrel. I forced myself to move my foot, trying to slide the pistol out of Morris’s reach, but he’d seen it now. I could feel him grabbing hold of the barrel, wrenching the gun from under my foot. I tried to stop him, kicking his hand away with my left foot, but it didn’t have much effect. He was too big, too strong. He just shouldered my leg to one side and grabbed hold of the pistol again. I was too weak to do anything about it. I could feel the gun slipping out from under my foot…

Then the car door opened.

It’s hard to remember exactly what happened next. My head was still reeling, and Morris still had me jammed up against the seat, so I could barely see anything at all. I
heard
the door beside us opening, and I
felt
the sudden rush of cold rainy air, and I knew that
someone
was there, but I couldn’t see who it was. All I could see was a shape in the rain, standing beside the open door.

Everything froze for a fraction of a second – the figure just stood there, Morris stopped moving – and then suddenly they both made a lunge for the pistol. I still couldn’t see what was happening, but I felt the figure stooping down
and diving into the car, and I felt another hand making a grab for the pistol, and then Morris was chopping at the hand, smashing it into the floor, and I heard the figure crying out in pain. Then almost immediately I felt another lunge, and Morris suddenly jerked and gasped – ‘Shit, you
bitch!
’ – and I felt his hand whipping back… and I knew then that the figure was Eddi. She’d just bitten Morris’s hand. And now she had the pistol. But as she started to get up off the floor, Morris suddenly let go of my neck and clubbed his fist into the back of her head. She grunted, and I felt her crash back down to the floor. Morris raised his arm again, aiming to finish her off, but he’d forgotten about me. I wasn’t pinned down any more. I could move. I sprang forward and hammered my head into Morris’s skull. The impact rocked through my head, spinning me round in a sickening swirl of blackness, but it didn’t matter. Through the blackness I could see Morris slumped against the back of the front seat, his head hanging down, his eyes closed. I’d hit him hard enough to momentarily knock him out, and that was enough to let Eddi get hold of the pistol again and struggle up off the floor.

The next few seconds are the hardest to recall. I was still dazed, my head was still spinning, and whenever I think about it, everything seems to start whirling again. But this is how I remember it.

Eddi had just about got to her feet again and was leaning into the car, kind of half-in and half-out of it, steadying herself against the back of the seat. Her face was very pale, her eyes unfocused. The gun was in her left hand. She was aiming it at Morris, but I don’t think she was going to shoot him. She was just covering him, waiting
for him to wake up. But when he
did
wake up, opening his eyes quite suddenly, Eddi had briefly turned away from him to look at me, and before I could warn her, he’d reached out and grabbed her left hand, fighting to get hold of the pistol. She reacted quickly, tightening her grip on the pistol and clutching at his wrist with her other hand, and then he got both hands on the gun, and they were both pulling and twisting, fighting over the pistol, and then… I don’t know. I just don’t know how it happened. One moment they were struggling, both of them grunting and gasping, and then –
BANG!
- the gun went off, loud as hell, and a shower of wet stuff sprayed into my face.

I didn’t realize what had happened for a moment. Everything was silent and still. The wet stuff on my face was warm, then suddenly cold. Nothing was happening. I closed my eyes, wiped my face, then opened my eyes again. Morris had fallen between the two front seats. One of his legs was twisted up under him, the other one was sticking out between the gap in the seats. From the neck down, he still looked like Morris – dark suit, white shirt, shiny black shoes – but he wasn’t Morris any more. He was just a thing: a thing with half its head blown off.

I sat there for a while, just watching stuff ooze from Morris’s head. I didn’t want to keep looking at it, but I couldn’t seem to stop. His blood was thick and slow-moving, like tar. Black, crimson, pink. There were bits of bone in it. Flecks of white. There were globs of grey stuff on the seat, like lumps of thick grey snot.

They were human things.

No metal, no silver, no plastic.

Morris had definitely been human.

But now he was nothing.

I looked at Eddi. She was just sitting there staring at Morris too. Her face was shocked white, her eyes glazed with horror. She still had the gun in her hand.

‘Jesus…’ she whispered. ‘Shit.’

Her voice was shaking.

I leaned forward and touched her arm, but she didn’t seem to notice.

‘Eddi,’ I said quietly.

She carried on staring at Morris.

‘It’s all right, Eddi,’ I said, gently squeezing her arm. ‘It wasn’t your fault. It was an accident. It’s all right…’

She suddenly went even paler. Her eyes closed, her throat gulped, then she leaned out of the car and threw up.

It took us a while to get Morris’s body into the barn. Neither of us was thinking straight, so instead of just driving the Corsa over to the barn, we wasted ten minutes getting the body out of the car, then another fifteen minutes dragging it across the mud-soaked yard. By the time we’d finished, we were both exhausted and covered in all kinds of crap – blood, mud, cow shit, rain…

But at least Eddi wasn’t in a trance any more. She was pale and breathless, and her hands were shaking, but she wasn’t in a trance.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked her as we walked back to the car.

‘All right?’ she said, lighting a cigarette. ‘I just
killed
someone, for Christ’s sake.’

‘It was an accident –’

‘Yeah, right. I
accidentally
shot his head off, and now we’ve just
accidentally
dumped his body in the barn.’

‘You know what I mean.’

She sighed. ‘Yeah, I know…’

‘If you hadn’t shot him…’

She looked at me. ‘What? What would have happened if I hadn’t shot him, Robert? What was he going to do?’

‘I don’t know…’

‘And what were you going to do with
him?
Why did you make me go in the barn?’ She stopped beside the car. ‘Who was he anyway? What was he doing at the hospital?’

I stopped beside her. ‘There isn’t time to explain now, we have to get going –’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what this is all about.’ She stared at me. ‘I just
killed
a man for you. The least you can do is tell me who he was.’

I looked back at her. Her face was streaked with blood and rain. Her hair was soaking wet. She was angry. Afraid. Confused. She was inappropriately beautiful.

‘We have to go,’ I said calmly. ‘If we stay here any longer, someone’s going to see us. We need to get in the car and leave here right now.’ I put my hand on her shoulder. ‘As soon as we’re safe, I’ll explain everything. I promise.’

She carried on staring at me in silence for a while, the rain dripping pink on her face, then eventually she took a deep breath, slowly let it out, and nodded. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But you’d
better
tell me –’

‘I will.’

‘Everything?’

‘Everything.’

She took a final drag on her cigarette, dropped it in the mud, then opened the car door and got in the driver’s seat. I didn’t move for a second. I just stood there, gazing down at the still-smoking cigarette, wondering why I wasn’t picking it up. It was evidence. DNA. Evidence that Eddi had been here.

‘Are you coming or what?’ Eddi called out to me.

I looked at her, smiled, then walked round and got in the passenger seat.

We just drove for a while, neither of us knowing or caring where we were going, just as long as it was away from the barn. The barn was north, so we headed south.

‘It’s probably best if we get off these country lanes,’ I suggested.

‘I know. That’s what I’m doing.’

I shut up then and let Eddi get on with it. As she drove, I searched through the glove compartment. Most of the contents were useless – a bag of boiled sweets, a tube of lipstick, some kind of nasal spray – but I managed to find a road map and a box of tissues. There was a bottle of water in the side compartment of the door. I uncapped the bottle and passed it to Eddi. She took a long drink, then gave it back. I wet some of the tissues and passed them over.

‘What am I supposed to do with these?’ she said.

‘We need to clean ourselves up.’

She pulled down the sun visor and studied her bloodstained face in the mirror. ‘Oh, God… why didn’t you
tell
me?’

‘I just did.’

We spent the next five minutes wiping our faces and
scrubbing at our clothes, trying to clean off the worst of the mess. It wasn’t easy, and for Eddi it was doubly difficult because she had to concentrate on driving at the same time. I thought about offering to help her, but I didn’t think she’d want me to. It wasn’t a very pleasant task, and neither of us wanted to talk about it, so we worked in silence – scrubbing, rubbing, scouring Morris’s blood from our skin.

It felt like madness.

Obsession, compulsion.

Denial.

It was as if we both thought that by cleansing ourselves of Morris’s blood we were cleansing ourselves of his death. No blood, no death, no memories, no guilt. But it didn’t work. You can’t wipe away death with a box of damp tissues.

After a while I realized we were back on the A12 again, heading towards London. I didn’t know if Eddi knew where she was going, or if she was still just driving, putting as much distance between us and Stoneham as possible. I glanced across at her, trying to decide if I should ask her or not.

‘Where’s the nearest railway station?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘The nearest railway station… look on the map.’

‘Why?’

‘We need to get rid of this car. The police will be looking for it. We need to ditch it and get another one.’