Night Work (30 page)

Maximum daily dose: two tablets.

He fished out the box again and took another.

It was the motorway that seemed to move while Jonas stayed where he was. His car made no sound, the white lines glided past and the scenery changed, but he might have been stationary.

The tyreless car flashed past him. He raised his arm stiffly, unable to wave, then turned and watched it grow smaller. When he turned back again he noticed that the countryside was moving past far more slowly. He put his foot back on the accelerator and everything went back to how it had been before.

Shortly before it got dark he stopped near Northampton for some food. He searched the kitchen of a pub, but all he found was a rock-hard loaf, some rancid bacon and several eggs he didn’t dare to eat. As he turned to go he caught sight of some tins on a shelf. Without bothering to check what was in them, he tipped the contents of two of them into a saucepan.

It was dark. He was driving, he realised. He seemed to be getting used to the effects of the drug. Its effects and side effects. He was alert and lucid, without a trace of fatigue. His heart was racing, his forehead permanently moist with
sweat. When he wiped the film away it reappeared within ten seconds. Before long the wiping became just a habit.

His powers of perception were gradually returning. He knew that he was going north, that night had fallen and he’d been driving for hours. He knew he’d stopped near Northampton and had something to eat. On the other hand, he’d forgotten
what
he’d eaten and whether he’d had anything to drink, whether he’d spent long there and done anything else. But that was unimportant.

He was driving.

He needed a break at some stage. He pulled up in the centre lane and folded the seat back. There was no danger of his going to sleep, he wasn’t sleepy. He needed to relax, that was all.

He folded his hands on his chest and shut his eyes.

They opened again.

He shut them.

They opened again.

He clamped his eyelids together. His eyes were smarting. He could feel and hear the veins throbbing in his temples.

His eyes opened yet again.

He lay there for a while, gazing with owl-like intensity at the roof of the car. Then he returned the seat to its normal position. He mopped his brow and his eyes and drove on.

Dawn was just visible on the horizon when he stopped at a filling station near Lancaster. He got out. It was cold. He looked on the back seat for something to put on. No luck,
and the boot contained nothing but a grubby sheet of plastic.

He waited, rubbing his arms and shuffling from one foot to the other, while the petrol flowed into the tank. It was a slow business. Something was wrong with the pump. He got back in the car and closed the door, watched the needle of the fuel gauge creep across the dial.

He had a strange sensation.

He felt he’d been here before. He hadn’t, of course, but he couldn’t shake off the impression that he’d seen this little filling station with the flat concrete roof once before – in a different place. It was as if someone had uprooted a place familiar to him and transplanted it here.

He peered out. Nothing. As far as he could see, nothing and no one nearby. No one had been here for the last six weeks.

A trap. This incredibly slow petrol pump: a trap intended for him. He mustn’t get out again. He must get away from here.

He lowered a rear window and swung round. There was no one behind him. He leant out of the window, then recoiled. No hand came reaching into the interior. He put his head out again. Swung round again. Still no one there. No alien creature, no wolf-bear, although he’d
seen
it. In the fraction of a second he’d spent looking out of the window, something had been sitting behind him.
Sitting
behind him, staring at his back
.

He reached out of the window, released the catch on the nozzle of the petrol pump and let it fall to the ground. He shut the flap without screwing the cap back on, then closed the window, climbed back onto the driver’s seat and drove off.

He looked in the rear-view mirror.

No one.

He switched on the interior light and turned round.

Dirty upholstery. A crumpled cigarette packet. A CD.

He switched off the light. Looked in the rear-view mirror again.

Mopped his brow.

Listened.

8 a.m. Smalltown.

The sun was up, but Jonas felt it was a cinematic hoax, as if the sky were a sheet of painted canvas in a film studio. He couldn’t feel the sun’s rays. He couldn’t feel any wind.

He looked at the building, the number on the gate, the railings in front of it. On a hoarding across the road, a young housewife was advertising some product he’d never heard of.

Without reckoning up how many he’d taken, he swallowed another tablet. Quite suddenly he wondered how he’d got here. It wasn’t that he couldn’t remember the journey, but everything had become so unreal. Nothing seemed real, neither the drive here, nor the car, nor his present surroundings. Those tablets. Strong.

He rested his hands on the steering wheel. You. This is you, here and now.

Smalltown. Home to Marie’s sister, who had married an English sexton, and to her mother, who had moved in with her younger daughter after her husband’s death. This was where Marie had spent brief vacations twice a year. Jonas had never accompanied her, pleading pressure of work. The truth was, he’d always disliked getting to know his girlfriends’ parents.

This was the building. The number was right and its appearance matched Marie’s description of it. A four-storeyed, brick-built block of flats on the outskirts of town.

Jonas kicked the driver’s door open but didn’t get out. He eyed the woman on the hoarding. She reminded him
of an actress he’d much admired. In the days before he acquired a video recorder he had postponed and cancelled appointments for her sake, filled with an abiding sense of gratitude for the privilege of being her contemporary.

He had often tried to imagine what it would have been like to be born in another age with other contemporaries. In the fifteenth century, or in ad 400, or in 1000 bc. In Africa or Asia. Would he have been the same person?

Chance dictated who you lived with. The waiter who served you in a restaurant, your coal merchant, your schoolteacher, your daughter-in-law. They were your contemporaries. Singers, CEOs, scientists, committee chairmen – they were the people with whom you shared the planet in your day. People living 100 years hence would be different and have other contemporaries. Even if they lived in another part of the world, contemporaries were, ultimately, something positively private. They could just as well have lived 500 years before or after you, but they were doing so now. At the same time as you. That was how Jonas had felt, simply grateful to many of his contemporaries for being alive at the same time as himself, for breathing the same air and seeing the same sunrises and sunsets. He would have liked to tell them so, too.

He had wondered, many a time, whether Marie was his predestined partner in life. Would he have met her in any event? Might they also have met ten years later, and would the outcome have been the same? Might there exist, somewhere in the world, another woman who had been predestined for him? Might he only just have missed her on some occasion? Had they been standing together in a bus? Could they even have exchanged a glance, never to see each other again? Was her name Tanya, did she live with a man named Paul, was she unhappy with him, did she have children by him, was she wondering whether there might have been someone else?

Or was there a woman living in some other age with whom he should be, or should have been, linked? Was she already dead? Had she been a contemporary of Haydn? Of Schönberg? Or was she yet to be born, and had he himself been born too soon? When debating all these possibilities, Jonas had ruled nothing out. He’d really been more interested in the question than in any possible answers.

Drawing a deep breath, he got out and went up to the entrance, where he read the list of names beside the intercom.

That was the name. Malachy. The name of the man Marie’s sister had married. The sexton.

Jonas drew another deep breath, then pushed the door open. It didn’t occur to him to look around for a weapon. Although the lobby and stairs were only dimly lit, he felt unafraid. What drove him was a mixture of longing and despair. Nothing that would have made him turn back, whatever unpleasantness he encountered.

The flat was on the second floor. He tried the handle. The door wasn’t locked.

He turned the light on. The first thing he saw was a pair of shoes – hers. Almost at the same time, he remembered how they had bought them together from a shop in Judengasse. He rubbed his eyes.

When he looked up again he saw her jacket hanging from a hook in the passage. He put out his hand and stroked the material, buried his face in it, breathed in her smell.

‘Hi,’ he said dully.

He couldn’t help thinking of the rest of her clothes. The ones in Vienna at this moment. How far away they were. Thousands of kilometres away.

It was a spacious flat. The kitchen led off the living room, the living room adjoined a bedroom, probably that of Marie’s sister and her husband. The occupant of the next bedroom was clearly an elderly woman. This was apparent from various objects, but also from its tidiness and the way it smelt.

The third bedroom lay at the end of the passage. One look was enough to convince him. Marie’s suitcase against the wall. Her make-up case on the chest of drawers. The slippers she took everywhere beside the bed, on which lay her nightdress. Her jeans, her blouse, her jewellery, her bra, her scent. Her mobile. Which he’d called so often. And on whose voicemail he’d left messages. The battery was flat. He didn’t know her PIN number.

Having dumped the suitcase on the bed, he opened the wardrobe and drawers and packed anything that came to hand. He didn’t bother to fold things any more than he worried about soiling her blouses with the soles of her shoes.

A last look around. Nothing else. He knelt on the suitcase and zipped it up.

He lay on her bed, his head on her pillow, her duvet over him for warmth. Her smell enveloped him. He found it odd that she seemed far more alive to him here than in the flat
they’d shared. Perhaps it was because this was where she’d been last.

He heard a noise. He didn’t know where it was coming from, but it didn’t scare him.

He hadn’t checked the time, so he couldn’t have said how long he’d been lying there. It was after midday. He carried the suitcase out to the car and went back to see if he’d missed anything. In the wastepaper basket he found a shopping list in Marie’s handwriting. He smoothed it out and put it in his pocket.

He drove steadily, nonchalantly. Now and then he turned his head, but not for fear that someone might be sitting behind him, just to make sure the suitcase was really there. He stopped to eat and drink and stacked some bottles of mineral water on the passenger seat. He’d been tormented since that morning by an almost unquenchable thirst, probably another side effect of the tablets. His urine, when he relieved himself, had a pinkish tinge. Shaking his head, he squeezed another tablet out of its blister pack. His shoulders were going numb.

He soon lost all conception of how long he’d been driving. Distances seemed to be relative. The motorway signs meant nothing. Having only just passed Lancaster, he came to the Coventry turn-off shortly afterwards. On the other hand, the stretch between Northampton and Luton seemed to take hours. He looked at his feet operating the pedals.

As a youngster he’d been mystified when pop and film stars committed suicide. Why kill yourself when you had
everything? Why did people snuff themselves out when they had millions in the bank, consorted with other celebrities and went to bed with the most famous and desirable individuals on the planet? Because they were lonely, was the answer. Lonely and unhappy. How stupid, he’d thought. You didn’t kill yourself because of that. That singer shouldn’t have slit her wrists, she should have called him instead. He would have been a good friend to her. He would have listened to her, comforted her, taken her away on holiday. She would have had a better friend in him than any she could ever have found among her fellow stars. He would have taken a detached view of her problems and straightened her out. In his company she would have felt secure.

Or so he had thought. It wasn’t until later that he grasped why those people had killed themselves: for the same reason as the poor and unknown. They couldn’t hold on to themselves. They couldn’t endure being alone with themselves and had realised that other people’s company was only a palliative. That it thrust the problem into the background without solving it. Being yourself twenty-four hours a day, never anyone else, was a blessing in many cases but a curse in others.

At Sevenoaks, south of London, he exchanged the car for a moped big enough for him to wedge the suitcase between his legs and the handlebars. Whether he would last fifty kilometres like that was another matter, but he needed a two-wheeler. He had no wish to go through the Tunnel on foot. The light of the setting sun helped him in his quest. He hadn’t wanted to make his way through Dover in the dark.

Jonas rode down the motorway at eighty to ninety k.p.h., trying every few minutes to find a more comfortable position
for his legs. He drew up his knees and cautiously rested his feet on the suitcase, hung his legs over it and let his feet dangle. He even doubled up one leg and sat on it, but a relaxed position eluded him. When it got dark he wedged his legs between the suitcase and the seat and left it at that.

The headwind seemed to refresh his brain. He soon felt more clear-headed and less as if he were propelling himself along under water. He was able to reflect on what lay ahead. First through the Tunnel, then across France and Germany, collecting up the cameras. And all this on tablets, with a smouldering fuse.