DEATHLOOP (15 page)

So the following afternoon Zack pulled out of the underground parking lot in his Mercedes and set off. An oppressive heat met him at street level despite bloated black clouds that slung low in the sky blocking out the light. Zack drove automatically, he knew this route well.

He liked Islington, the restaurants, the bars. Years ago he used to hang out in a pub called The Island Queen in Noel Road, full of the wildest cross section of humanity: plasterers, lawyers, antique dealers, copy writers, students, builders, actors, drug dealers, pop stars and bouncers. He had picked up dozens of girls in there, in fact a dozen or so too many, the daggers thrown in his direction across the bar by a motley selection of peeved women became just too tiresome in the end, causing him to cast his net elsewhere.

Zack turned into Upper Street to find himself in a snarl of heavy traffic. A couple of cars in front of him edged forward optimistically, and then gave up. The street was gridlocked.

On the pavement opposite Zack’s eye was drawn to a small girl, her head crowned with a mass of dark ringlets, her rose bud lips set in a perfect smile. She ran along, carefree, a balloon held aloft in her right hand until, that is, an innocuous puff of wind snatched the balloon from her and sent it floating off over the road, way beyond her grasp. She stepped from the curb to try and retrieve it just as the queue of traffic bulged forward, the impact of the lorry that hit the child throwing her up into the air like a discarded puppet. She landed on the central white line where the back of her head hit the ground with a crack, blood seeping out beneath it as though impatient to be elsewhere.

Zack shoved open his door and stepped out onto the road as a blanket of airlessness settled over him, but he was there in one pace next to her, as all movement ceased.

“
Zachariah
,” she said very quietly looking up at him, “
you’re here. Help me
.”

The child’s eyes locked onto Zack’s in tragic longing, then, her soul in retreat, milky veils slid over the dulling orbs preparing them for defeat, until, in a final act of charity, calling a halt to the yearning once and for all, her eye lids fell shut for the very last time. As though touched by a malevolent wand a sweep of blackness crawled boldly through this imminent corpse, decimating her beauty, ripping it apart in its hands. Within seconds the grip of death was complete.

As people swarmed towards the child, the mother on her haunches beside her now and screaming, Zack waited for his release which this time seemed cruelly delayed. Then, as though a key had been turned in a very old rusty lock, Zack found he was able to move again, and although still hobbled, like a faltering clockwork toy he jolted off towards the sanctuary of his car, chucking himself headlong inside it. Grasping air into his lungs, trying to contain the wild panic that swept through him, Zack kicked at the pedals and in response the Mercedes gunned forward.

He caught a final glimpse of the public spirited as they surrounded the little girl, stooping down to see what they could do, but there was nothing they could do he wanted to tell them. It was an empty shell they tended now, its insides sucked out. As the car sped off, cutting through side streets, Zack listened out for the distant wail of sirens but heard nothing. Islington had fallen silent suddenly, as though everyone had stopped their noise and their clamour in deference to the dead.

Zack parked up in Thornhill Square, jumped out of the car and cast his eye along smart front doors. He leapt the steps of number 7 and hit a bell which said “French”. The door opened soon afterwards and Zack went inside.

Veronica’s flat was exactly as he had imagined it, dark wood floors, minimalist decor, but with paintings all over the walls, as though each frame was vying for position with its neighbour. It was actually a maisonette not a flat, and Veronica led Zack down into the basement where a huge kitchen opened out to a courtyard and a long garden, and where a pine table sat groaning in the corner under piles of books, papers, magazines, fruit and general clutter - girl’s clutter.

Zack needed to sit down. The journey from his car had exhausted him. It was like he had just run 5 miles. Veronica was chatting but he failed to decipher the words, he just guessed the appropriate demeanour from her tone. Then Miriam came in and they were introduced. He stood to greet her, managing a smile. She looked like Veronica he decided, but a plainer version, without Veronica’s wonderful selection of features that made you just want to grab her.

While Veronica was making coffee, Zack found the bathroom, locked the door and sat down on the side of the bath to regroup. He wanted to call Sam and was annoyed he hadn’t thought of it before. He tapped out the familiar number and waited for a response.

“Sam…” said Zack immediately. “Listen to me, I’m going away with Veronica.”

“Who the hell’s Veronica?”

“The girl from the club, the girl from The Mango Tree of course…”

“Oh but
of course
…”

“We’re going to Derbyshire.”

“What,
willingly
?” snorted Sam, who thought there was nothing more dull than these cruddy old Northern counties and had always presumed Zack thought the same.

“I thought you’d be pleased,” said Zack, intending irony but unable to prevent himself sounding a little deflated.

“I am pleased, it will do you good. You’ll be bored shitless within minutes, but it will do you good.”

“But guess what…” said Zack, almost in tears, “it’s just happened again.”

“What has?”

“A terrible accident this time, the most beautiful little girl… hit by a lorry, in Upper Street, and she knew me Sam, she called out my name. You have to speak to Clarissa and ask her what the hell we do about this.”

“Mate, you are seriously stressed out…”

“It happened, Sam, don’t tell me it didn’t happen.”

“Just go to Derbyshire and forget everything. Enjoy yourself, enjoy Veronica as I am sure you will, and come back next week a new man.”

This was a load of old tosh and they both knew it, but Zack decided to keep up the pretence because right at that moment he was incapable of anything else. “Okay, yes, good thinking,” said Zack, giving in, “speak soon.”

Back in the kitchen, over coffee, Zack launched a delayed charm offensive on Miriam who he noticed was shooting admiring glances in his direction whenever she thought it safe, but Zack didn’t miss much and he certainly didn’t miss this.

“So why Derbyshire?” she asked.

“Well, it’s beautiful there,” said Zack, aware as soon as he said it of the crass generalization. Actually, he’d heard that somewhere, so he hoped he wouldn’t be proved wrong by a landscape punctuated with slag heaps and peopled by wizened old men in cloth caps walking their whippets back and forth to the pub.

“You’ve been there before?”

“Well, a while ago, just passing through,” said Zack, sounding not terribly convincing.

“We’d better get going hadn’t we?” said Veronica.

“Indeed,” said Zack, keen to release himself from the sudden critical gaze of Miriam who he sensed did not buy his bland recommendation of Derbyshire for one minute, and who had picked up on the fact that he had never been near the damn place in his life.

As they took their leave of Miriam, Zack noticed Veronica now really for the first time. She was wearing a white tunic and black leggings, gold high heels, and today her toe nails were painted bright red. She had those silver bangles on again that made a terrible racket, and a large cross hung round her neck on a chunky chain. Her hair shone with various shades of red skimming through the lustrous dark mass and her eyes looked massive, but at their centre, those two little flints of coal. She was a fantastic woman, but there was something missing, and for a while Zack couldn’t work out what it was. Then he did and it genuinely shocked him. Veronica was not crazy, or weird, or odd, or zany, just plain gorgeous, and for a few moments this unnerved him, but as he was loading her case into the boot of the Mercedes he thought to himself that maybe at long last, despite Sam’s frequent outbursts to the contrary, Zack Fortune was actually growing up.

The journey to Derbyshire took no time. Zack didn’t have a clue where they were going but he pretended he did.

“So where are we going exactly?” asked Veronica.

“A secret,” said Zack, hoping they would stumble across somewhere picture perfect and he could pretend that had been his intention all along. In the end they did. A small town called Telper that squatted at the foot of the Derbyshire hills. A massive hotel dominated the town square and Zack parked up outside it.

“Wait here, I’ll see what it’s like,” he said, ducking out of the car, and sprinting up the steps. The place looked decent enough, with bellboys in uniform, and huge displays of flowers dotted around the honey oak panelled foyer. Zack asked for a special room, one that had a decent view, but then he changed his mind and asked for a suite of rooms, maybe a bedroom and living room arrangement if one was available. It was, and at the price Zack was asked to pay he wasn’t surprised. He booked it for one night only, thinking they could move on the following day and find somewhere else.

Veronica was impressed by the accommodation and curious too that Zack had seen fit to hire a suite of rooms, but she wasn’t complaining. They washed and changed and wandered down to the dining room which was sumptuous and vast, littered with myriad tables laid with white linen cloths and proper silver cutlery, (Clarissa would have been in her element). Young waitresses stood around looking gauche in their cheap clunking shoes, sporting traditional black and white, little caps perched uncertainly on their heads. Veronica had changed into a slinky green dress that hugged her, long sleeved but wide at the neck, revealing one shoulder, the most wonderful shoulder Zack thought he had ever seen.

In the car Veronica had talked of her family: mother, father, sister and a couple of aunts - they were close she said, although her parents had retired to Canada a while ago but hadn’t settled, and were thinking of coming back. Zack said nothing at the time but he did now.

“So, you’ve got no one to blame then.”

“What?”

“Your family, being so supportive and your childhood so perfect, there’s no one to blame.”

“But you have, obviously… to make a comment like that.”

“Maybe that’s why you seem so…” Veronica looked at him waiting for the verdict, “well adjusted…”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“Of course not, it’s just rare that’s all, don’t you think?”

“So was your childhood angst ridden then, is that it?”

Zack said: “It wasn’t a bundle of laughs, let’s just leave it that shall we?”

They didn’t have to wait too long for their first course, an over elaborate seafood concoction impaled on a throne of limp lettuce. It was average cooking for all the pomp of the place and Zack felt nervous suddenly, too nervous to swallow the stuff so he pushed his away. Veronica surprised him by tipping it onto her plate.

“You don’t mind do you?”

“Be my guest.”

“I love food. I eat macrobiotic stuff usually, at least I try to,” she said, with a little laugh, “but when I’m away like this it’s just too complicated, so I fall off the wagon for a bit and go mad.”

Well that makes a change thought Zack, women and their diets were just too dreary for words but none of that nonsense here he noted as he struggled to keep up.

Over dinner Veronica told Zack that she had trained at St Martins and had made a fair living painting portraits at one time. She still did the occasional commission, but recently she’d gone off in a different direction. She’d started painting huge canvasses - figurative abstracts, (whatever that was), and sold mainly to corporate clients or interior designers, the size of the pieces precluding them from average households. Veronica told Zack that she had set up the gallery as a venue to show her work and other people’s work, and had done quite well although the running costs were high. She was looking for a cheaper place and had considered a couple of units right out of town, but they were just so soulless she’d put the plan on ice for the time being.

An hour later they left the hotel to explore and found a tiny pub, like someone’s front room really, with very low ceilings, and an Inglenook fireplace, the kind of place that makes private conversations difficult. Veronica insisted that they played darts, something else that surprised him.

“I’m not that good,” she lied, beating Zack hands down in no time.

“Okay, so where did you learn to play like that?”

“My parents ran pubs, all six of them, so… hey… what else does an eight year old do?”

On the way back to the hotel, Zack realised he had drunk too much. He’d barely eaten so it was hardly surprising his head was swimming. Veronica had drunk a few gins but she seemed energized and raring to go.

In their hotel room Veronica fell on the bed and switched on the TV. Zack pulled off his shoes and went into the bathroom. He looked strange in this unforgiving light, gaunt, distracted. He washed, cleaned his teeth and went into the day area, curled up on the couch, and within seconds was spark out. When Veronica found him there a short time later, (unsure whether she felt insulted or amused by this), she decided to leave him to it and went back to bed.

In the early hours her own screams woke her, she was panicky and breathless but she calmed, relieved and reassured when she realised where she was.

“What was it?” said Zack, climbing in bed beside her, “a bad dream?”

They lay face to face staring at each other, illuminated by shafts of street light that sneaked in from the square.

“It’s been the same for a couple of nights now.”

“Ever since you met me…” he said, smiling, but his smile was short-lived because a strange chill seemed to settle over them and as though to deny it, Veronica seized him with an urgency, (a panic almost), that surprised them both. It was as though he was there for her to plunder Zack decided, finding bits of him that had never before been discovered, allowing him pleasure that he knew nothing of. Sex with Veronica was so unique and so overwhelming Zack found himself wondering if it was something else entirely, an extreme sport maybe with only a select few allowed to participate for fear of civil unrest.