On Chasing Brad Through Purgatory (21 page)

I suppose I'd also have had to clean up that blocked and excremental lavatory. God! Imagine having to spend a substantial part of all recurring time in trying to sanitize
that
without (most probably) any of the proper cleaning materials, not even a pair of rubber gloves. And think how mucky you were going to feel after you'd done it—assuming of course that you could do it; how deep-down mucky and contaminated.
Were
there any showers? Were there any showers that wouldn't need something of the same treatment and from which you could actually expect a decent flow of water rather than merely a rusty trickle—along with a decent adjustable temperature instead of one either permanently scalding or unthinkably icy? This after all was hell. In hell, I sorrowfully began to suspect, an all-singing, all-dancing, all-
zestful
lavatory attendant was going to be a bit difficult to come by … even with myself so merrily in line for such a topnotch inspirational job.

Oh hell. (
Not
a pun.) Why can't you just get a move-on you wayward bloody bus? For Pack Hill or for London (Golders Green, Marble Arch, Victoria) or for absolutely any bloody place on earth. Manila, Santa Barbara, Alice Springs—who cares?—I'll make my own way back. Just hurry up and
arrive
: first bus for any destination so long as it will only get me out of here.

I supposed he could answer, Tibbotson could answer, that he had been despairing. You don't dance and sing and whistle when you're in despair; you don't seek out the shampoo and conditioner or think about your cuticles. I supposed he could answer he didn't even know about this cycle thing; that he had thought he had more than enough time in which to get going with his mop and feather duster and in which to ponder colour schemes.

More than enough time. Eternity.

I supposed he could ask me what relatively few pages of the same book or books repaid
that
much re-reading: three thousand times over up till now. Well roughly that is. Give or take.

I supposed he could argue that the only insights you'd ever receive from the re-reading of those relatively few pages even after three thousand times (give or take) were the very same insights you'd have received on your initial reading. The only addition to your every thought on that first day would have been the knowledge that you were going to think it again.

And again.

And again.

I supposed he could ask me where I thought I was going to come across that book or those books in the first place; or where the guys upstairs were going to find their records or tapes or CDs.

And perhaps there was even another point he could have contested. I had ascribed a lot of it to being his own bloody fault but he might have replied that he'd never actually
asked
to feel ground down beneath the weight of his despair. “Oddly enough Casement that was never absolutely my aim. Even when I didn't realize everything that it would lead to.” I really hated—how much I'd always hated—that combination of stingingly sarcastic tone and flat and reedy voice!

Oh shut up I said. Shut up! You were a whingeing old fart then and you're a whingeing old fart now. Why can't you just have the decency to shut the fuck up?
Please
.

20

I saw him almost dance, I actually saw him almost dance as he went hurtling off, nearly dancing off, in the direction from which I had so recently arrived. You wouldn't have thought there'd be sufficient strength in those thin bones and shuffling feet to hurtle or to dance. Almost dance.

He didn't once look back.

“Ungrateful sod isn't he?” announced the clerk. We stood together on the rooming-house doorstep—no stretch of the imagination could call it a hotel—and he had the warty little fingers of his right hand gripping the bicep of my left arm as though those warty little fingers would really in any way have been up to the business of restraining me if I'd suddenly decided to make a run for it.

He'd presumably brought me out onto the doorstep just because somehow he'd known that Tibbotson would not look back. Or could he only have guessed it? This was the very first time in a whole long line of freshly endless days—a precedent, a landmark—a day so far unique in the whole history book of hell.

“Well smartass. Whose keeper am I now?” I must say he looked well pleased with the exchange; but then of course he would have shown himself as undiscriminating as God if he hadn't. His warty little fingers were still gripping me in a way I knew had nothing to do with security. He was simply feeling my muscle.

I decided to make a run for it.

21

It was harder to shake him off than I'd thought—he was a wiry little bastard—but my initial advantage of surprise plus a fist aimed with all my strength at his solar plexus did finally dislodge him and I left him sprawling in some pain on the sidewalk because my knee had also met up with his groin. Welcome to hell I wanted to say. (In my posh voice with its la-di-da accent.)

Yet I didn't waste time on the civilities. Concentrated solely on running. My night on a series of hard benches had left me feeling stiff but at least I'd had enough time and gentle exercise to loosen up again. Luckily too I'd avoided breakfast at the snack bar so I wasn't weighed down with insufficiently cooked meat and gristle which one hoped was purely animal but in any case was surely designed to bring on indigestion. I managed to run fast.

I ran in the opposite direction to the coach station—not because the coach station was the one place a fugitive would normally make for but because I didn't want my pursuers catching up with Mr Tibbotson and returning him into custody in lieu of myself. I made sure my would-be jailer noted what escape course I had set.

I saw him stagger up. I heard him blow a whistle. The whistle triggered some alarm system which wailed immediately throughout the town. The hitherto deserted main street soon grew populous. A posse had been summoned: prisoners whose stupid dehumanized faces betrayed an eagerness to use whatever makeshift weapons they could find—against a fellow inmate, against anyone. I walked amongst them, these men and women pent up far too long, and hoped my sweat and heavy breathing would be put down only to the excitement, practically sexual excitement, that now seemed prevalent. Today was in the nature of a holiday—a hugely unexpected public holiday. They should have fêted me, borne me aloft, carried me off to the border; not wished to prove themselves so worthy of a privilege that had briefly commuted them from convicts into bounty hunters.

Into bounty hunters given dogs. Before Tibbotson had been released a piece of my T-shirt had been cut away and placed on file; purely a formality—it hadn't been envisaged how quickly this formality would serve. But that piece of T-shirt held all the scent those dogs were going to need.

Whilst they were being rounded up, though, I had thankfully made progress. A stealthy form of progress. But I'd got to the termination of the main street; found it became a road that ran perfectly straight over endless miles of scrub and wasteland. I had veered to my right across the scrub.

Some of the bushes and the stunted trees might—just—have offered me protection from merely human eyes; yet by then I'd heard the baying of the hounds. By then too I was really straining but presumably this also applied to my pursuers—less used to liberty than me. Perhaps I could ease up slightly?

Yet I soon realized that I couldn't: I'd assumed the dogs were leashed and being held back; but why? Why on earth? More likely they'd been given their head and until their handlers caught up would either surround me and snarlingly hold me at bay or else launch themselves at my throat knowing instinctively they'd got
carte blanche
: no matter how they tore I shouldn't be allowed to die; they could inflict the ravages of death without at all providing its corollary—a merciful extinction.

Mercies did exist however; even here. There was a stream that I could wade along—which naturally slowed me down a lot though I could still half-run.

In places the stream was fairly deep, a foot or more, and fairly twisty, and when I eventually stepped out of it I felt confident my scent could scarcely have survived. Indeed I knew it hadn't: I could hear the yapping of those fallible frustrated hounds and imagined how they must be rushing round in circles some half a mile behind.

I'd left the stream on the same side as I'd entered it and hoped everyone would suppose that, because the cover grew more plentifully on the other side, I would of course have headed off in that direction. Quite obviously the hounds wouldn't pick up my tracks again over there but if in the meantime I were just to double back blending my new scent with my old I could then at some point simply take a running leap across the road: the kind of long jump I'd been so justly celebrated for ten years ago—remember, sir?—oh I'd had lots of hero worship on the sports track! And at least since then I'd kept in shape. Both in the gym and the back garden.

Anyhow that subterfuge still lay a little way ahead; or I mean with any luck it did. Right now my pursuers came pounding along the bank of the stream making straight towards me. The dogs jumped up amongst them eager for direction. Not wanting to run the risk of movement I was hidden behind the one proper tree the area had to offer. The tree was slender and weedy but it was still the obvious hiding place. (Without I hoped being
too
obvious, to people thinking I was on the other side.) They came within some fifteen, twenty yards. Then after pausing in a rowdy halt to stare about them and engage in brief excited consultation they headed off
across
the stream. Praise God.

I let a good five minutes elapse, waited until they were virtually out of sight. Then I ran back to the road and stayed on it for possibly a mile before I made my jump. It wasn't a bad jump: fuelled by urgency and naked fear. Now facing away again from where I'd started out that morning (can anyone imagine the relief?) I struck off this time to my left. The land was flat and largely barren but I thought I'd probably be all right until tomorrow; because early though it was the light appeared already to be waning: hell's one fringe benefit for fugitives. But tomorrow of course—surely having guessed by then what I had done and surely with the smell of me renewed in the nostrils of their hounds—my hunters would be back.

With that one unforgettable proviso.

If tomorrow ever came.

Or to put it another way: would I begin again in the bus station or was it only the first
full
day of an inmate—a name now entered in the files—that got to be repeated?

And could the dispensation for such a vast and exultant body of searchers be extended over a fresh tomorrow as well as a fresh today?

(I wondered if fifty or more futures would now need to be re-channelled; and almost by definition this meant improved. That would be good. Hey now. That
would
be good.)

But who knew—who knew?—and in my current state of uncertainty I thought I'd better reckon on having tomorrow and (if providence were kind) the next day too to see what distance I could put between us, me and that vast body of searchers, for otherwise what difference would it make, three miles away or ten? And even if I couldn't escape this whole damning and benighted jurisdiction there might still be certain compensations. At any rate eternal repetition of an open-air existence—one spent mainly on the move and hopefully unmonitored—had to be by far the better option.

Naturally I didn't know if I was travelling in the right direction or if indeed there even was a right direction. I vaguely hoped that just as there were many roads which led to heaven there might be many roads that led from hell; and in fact I saw it as an encouraging sign that, towards nightfall, the scrub began to change into greener and more fertile land. The fields were untilled but I came across abandoned farm buildings—in one of which I decided I'd take shelter—and even found an ancient fruit tree: ate three small apples that were tangy and sweet; would have picked a fourth but didn't want to risk diarrhoea. The night was dark but I had seen—during that enormously prolonged period of dusk—that the countryside beyond the fields showed signs of growing hillier. Which was great. All afternoon I'd felt so vulnerable on level ground: an easy prey to strong binoculars. Now suddenly the outlook seemed more promising.

And maybe partly due to this and partly due to all my exercise I quickly fell asleep. That wasn't all. I slept well.

Moreover. In the morning I awoke to—

Well hallelujah!

Yes. Hallelujah!

But in fact I'd slept almost too well; made a much later start than I'd intended. Didn't even stop to pick more apples.

Yet it soon occurred to me I couldn't distinguish any baying no matter how I listened. Then had the posse been called off? Was that possible? No second day of bounty hunting filled with its own villainous excitements? But this could only be if there was something that improved on it. I caught another sound and after staring into the sky for ten or fifteen seconds was able to identify the cause.

A first helicopter was followed shortly by a second. And yet more shortly by a third.

So? Attempting to hide inside those farm buildings would be useless—they'd be the first things searched—and throwing myself onto the earth around them would be equally inadvisable since a white T-shirt (no matter how grubby), blue jeans and blond hair would all show up against the dried-out soil and stony grass of what I'd taken to be fields. There were some scrawny bushes I could try to reach but of course they too would make a thoroughly expected hidy-hole, as well as a largely ineffectual one. My only hope was an outcrop of boulders I thought I could discern in the distance. Undoubtedly I should be seen long before I gained it but if I weaved sufficiently I might avoid making myself too easy a target for either bullets that would stun (else seemingly shoot dead, why not?) or for any sort of animal-entrapping net which could be lowered by a trio of machines working together. Perhaps I had developed an overactive imagination—okay, admitted—but when it's the forces of damnation which are chasing you it's maybe forgivable to grow a little paranoid. I'm not convinced that I was growing paranoid.