Remember Why You Fear Me (38 page)

So, not Venice then. (Maybe some other year. She nodded at that, said, “Maybe.”) Where else should they spend their anniversary then? Esther suggested Scotland. Harry didn’t much like the sound of that, it didn’t sound particularly romantic, especially not compared to Venice. But she managed to persuade him. How about a holiday where they properly
explored
somewhere? Just took the car, and
drove
—a different hotel each night, free and easy, and whenever they wanted they could stop off at a little pub, or go for a ramble on the moors, or pop into a stately home? It’d be an adventure. The Watkins family had put their footprints in Italy, she said, and now they could leave them all over the Highlands! That did sound rather fun. He didn’t want it to be
too
free and easy, mind you, they might end up with nowhere to stay for the night—but he did a lot of homework, booked them into seven different places in seven different parts of Scotland. The most they’d ever have to drive between them was eighty miles, he was sure they could manage that, and he showed her an itinerary he’d marked out on his atlas. She kissed him and told him how clever he was.

And especially for the holiday he decided to buy a satnav. He’d always rather fancied one, but couldn’t justify it before—he knew his drive into work so well he could have done it with his eyes closed. He tried out the gadget, he put in the postcode of his office, and let it direct him there. It wasn’t the route he’d have chosen, he was quite certain it was better to avoid the ring road altogether, but he loved that satnav voice, so gentle and yet so authoritative. “You have reached your destination,” it’d say, and they’d chosen a funny way of getting there, but yes, they certainly had—and all told to him in a voice good enough to be off the telly. The first day of the holiday he set in the postcode to their first Scottish hotel; he packed the car with the suitcases; Esther sat in beside him on the passenger seat, smiled, and said, “Let’s go.” “The Watkinses are going to leave their footprints all over the Highlands!” he announced, and laughed. “Happy anniversary,”
said Esther. “I love you.”

On the fourth day they stayed at their fourth stately home of the holiday a little too long, maybe; it was in the middle of nowhere, and their next hotel was also in the middle of nowhere, but it was in a completely different middle of nowhere. It was already getting dark, and there weren’t many streetlights on those empty roads. Esther got a little drowsy, and said she was going to take a nap. And the satnav man hadn’t said anything for a good fifteen minutes, so Harry knew he
must
be going in the right direction, and maybe Esther sleeping was making him a little drowsy too—but suddenly he realized that the smoothness of the road beneath him had gone, this was grass and field and
bushes
, for God’s sake, and they were going down, and it was quite steep, and he kept thinking that they had to stop soon surely, he hadn’t realized they were so high up in the first place!—and there were now branches whipping past the windows, and actual trees, and the car wasn’t slowing down at all, and it only dawned on him then that they might really be in trouble. He had time to say “Esther,” because stupidly he thought she might want to be awake to see all this, and then the mass of branches got denser still, and then there was sound, and he hadn’t thought there’d been sound before, but suddenly there was an awful lot of it. He was flung forward towards the steering wheel, and then the seatbelt flung him right back where he had come from—and that was when he heard a snap, but he wasn’t sure if it came from him, or from Esther, or just from the branches outside. And it was dark, but not yet dark enough that he couldn’t see Esther still hadn’t woken up, and that there was all that blood.

The front of the car had buckled. The satnav said, “Turn around when possible.” Still clinging on to the crushed dashboard. Just the once, then it gave up the ghost.

He couldn’t feel his legs. They were trapped under the dashboard. He hoped that was the reason. He tried to open the door, pushed against it hard, and the pain of the attempt nearly made him pass out. The door had been staved in. It was wrecked. He thought about the seatbelt. The pain that reaching it would cause. Later. He’d do that later. Getting out the mobile phone from his inside jacket pocket—not even the coat pocket, he’d have to bend his arm and get into the coat first and
then
into the jacket. . . . Later, later. Once the pain had stopped. Please, God, then.

Harry wished they’d gone to Venice. He was sure Venice had its own dangers. He supposed tourists were always drowning themselves in gondola-related accidents. But there were no roads to drive off in Venice.

He was woken by the sound of tapping at the window.

It wasn’t so much the tapping that startled him. He’d assumed they’d be rescued sooner or later—it was true, they hadn’t come off a main road, but someone would drive along it sooner or later, wouldn’t they? It was on the
satnav route
, for God’s sake.

What startled him was the realization he’d been asleep in the first place. The last thing he remembered was his misgivings about letting Esther nod off. And some valiant decision he’d made that whatever happened
he
wouldn’t nod off, he’d watch over her, stand guard over her—
sit
guard over her, he’d protect her as best he could. As best he could when he himself couldn’t move, when he hadn’t yet dared worry about what might damage might have been done to him. What if he’d broken his legs? (What if he’d broken his spine?) And as soon as these thoughts swam into his head, he batted them out again—or at least buried them beneath the guilt (some valiant effort to protect Esther that had been, falling asleep like that!) and the relief that someone was there and he wouldn’t need to feel guilt much longer. Someone was out there, tapping away at the window.

“Hey!” he called out. “Yes, we’re in here! Yes, we’re all right!” Though he didn’t really know about that last bit.

It was now pitch black. He couldn’t see Esther at all. He couldn’t see whether she was even breathing. “It’s all right, darling,” he told her. “They’ve found us. We’re safe now.” Not thinking about that strange twisted neck she’d had, not about spines.

Another tattoo against the glass—tap, tap, tap. And he strained his head in the direction of the window, and it hurt, and he thought he heard something pop. But there was no one to be seen. Just a mass of branches, and the overwhelming night. Clearly the tapping was at the passenger window behind him.

It then occurred to him, in a flash of warm fear, that it was
so
dark that maybe their rescuer couldn’t see in. That for all his tapping he might think the car was empty. That he might just give up tapping altogether, and disappear into the blackness. “We’re in here!” he called out, louder. “We can’t move! Don’t go! Don’t go!”

He knew immediately that he shouldn’t have said don’t go, have tempted fate like that. Because that’s when the tapping stopped. “No!” he shouted. “Come back!” But there was no more; he heard something that might have been a giggle, and that was it.

Maybe there hadn’t been tapping at all. Maybe it was just the branches in the wind.

Maybe he was sleeping through the whole thing.

No, he decided forcefully, and he even said it out loud, “No.” There had been a rhythm to the tapping; it had been someone trying to get his attention. And he wasn’t asleep, he was in too much pain for that. His neck still screamed at him because of the strain of turning to the window. He chose to disregard the giggling.

The window tapper had gone to get help. He’d found the car, and couldn’t do anything by himself. And quite right too, this tapper wasn’t a doctor, was he? He could now picture who this tapper was, some sort of farmer probably, a Scottish farmer out walking his dog—and good for him, he wasn’t trying to be heroic, he was going to call the
experts
in, if he’d tried to pull them out of the car without knowing what he was about he might have done more harm than good. Especially if there
was
something wrong with the spine (forget about the spine). Good for you, farmer, thought Harry, you very sensible Scotsman, you. Before too long there’d be an ambulance, and stretchers, and safety. If Harry closed his eyes now, and blocked out the pain—he could do it, it was just a matter of not
thinking
about it—if he went back to sleep, he wouldn’t have to wait so long for them to arrive.

So he closed his eyes, and drifted away. And dreamed about farmers. And why farmers would giggle so shrilly like that.

The next time he opened his eyes there was sunlight. And Esther was awake, and staring straight at him.

He flinched at that. And then winced at his flinching, it sent a tremor of pain right through him. He was glad to see she was alive, of course. And conscious was a bonus. He hadn’t just hadn’t expected the full ugly reality of it.

He could now see her neck properly. And that in its contorted position all the wrinkles had all bunched up tight against each other, thick and wormy; it looked a little as if she were wearing an Elizabethan ruff. And there was blood, so much of it. It had dried now. He supposed that was a good sign, that the flow had been staunched somehow, that it wasn’t still pumping out all over the Mini Metro. The dried blood cracked around the mouth and chin as she spoke.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Good morning,” he replied, and then automatically, ridiculously, “did you sleep well?”

She smirked at this, treated it as a deliberate joke. “Well, I’m sure the hotel would have been nicer.”

“Yes,” he said. And then, still being ridiculous, “I think we
nearly
got there, though. The satnav said we were about three miles off.”

She didn’t smirk this time. “I’m hungry,” she said.

“We’ll get out of this soon,” he said.

“All right.”

“Are you in pain?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Just the itching. The itching is horrible. You know.”

“Yes,” he said, although he didn’t. “I’m in a fair amount of pain,” he added, almost as an afterthought. “I don’t think I can move.”

“Not much point bothering with that hotel now,” said Esther. “I say we move right on to the next, put it down as a bad lot.”

He smiled. “Yes, all right.”

“And I don’t think we’ll be doing a stately home today. Not like this. Besides, I think I’ve had my fill of stately homes. They’re just houses, aren’t they, with better furniture in? I don’t care about any of that. I don’t need better furniture, so long as I have you. Our own house, as simple as it might be, does me fine, darling. With you in it, darling.”

“Yes,” he said. “Darling, you do know we’ve been in a car crash. Don’t you?” (And that you’re covered in blood.)

“Of course I do,” she said, and she sounded a bit testy. “I’m itchy, aren’t I? I’m itching all over. The feathers.” And then she smiled at him, a confrontation neatly avoided. Everything smoothed over. “You couldn’t scratch my back, could you, darling? Really, the itching is
terrible
.”

“No,” he reminded her. “I can’t move, can I?”

“Oh yes,” she said.

“And I’m in pain.”

“You said,” she snapped, and she stuck out her bottom lip in something of a sulk. He wished she hadn’t, it distorted her face all the more.

“I’m really sorry about all this,” he said. “Driving us off the road. Getting us into all this. Ruining the holiday.”

“Oh, darling,” she said, and the lip was back in, and the sulk was gone. “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.”

“I don’t know what happened.”

“I’m sure the holiday isn’t ruined.”

Harry laughed. “Well, it’s not going too well! The car’s a write-off!” He didn’t like laughing. He stopped. “I’ll get you out of this. I promise.” He decided he wouldn’t tell Esther about the rescue attempt, just in case it wasn’t real, he couldn’t entirely be sure what had actually happened back there in the pitch black. But he couldn’t keep anything from Esther, it’d have been wrong, it’d have felt wrong. “Help is on its way. I saw a farmer last night. He went to get an ambulance.”

If the Scottish farmer
were
real, then he wouldn’t ever need to bend his arm to reach his mobile phone. The thought of his mobile phone suddenly made him sick with fear. His arm would snap. His arm would snap right off.

“A farmer?” she asked.

“A Scottish farmer,” he said. “With a dog,” he added.

“Oh.”

They didn’t say anything for a while. He smiled at her, she smiled at him. He felt a little embarrassed doing this after a minute or two—which was absurd, she was his wife, he shouldn’t feel awkward around his wife. After a little while her eyes wandered away, began looking through him, behind him, for something which might be more interesting—and he was stung by that, just a little, as if he’d been dismissed somehow. And he was just about to turn his head away from her anyway, no matter how much it hurt, when he saw her suddenly shudder.

“The itch,” she said. “Oh God!” And she tried to rub herself against the back of the seat, but she couldn’t really do it, she could barely move. The most she could do was spasm a bit. Like a broken puppet trying to jerk itself into life—she looked pathetic, he actually wanted to laugh at the sight of her writhing there, he nearly did, and yet he felt such a pang of sympathy for her, his heart went out to her at that moment like no other. On her face was such childlike despair,
help me
, it said. And then: “Can’t you scratch my fucking back?” she screamed. “What fucking use are you?”

He didn’t think he’d ever heard her swear before. Not serious swears. Not ‘fucking.’ No. No, he hadn’t. ‘Frigging’ a few times. That was it. Oh dear. Oh dear.

She breathed heavily, glaring at him. “Sorry,” she said at last. But she didn’t seem sorry. And then she closed her eyes.

And at last he could turn from her, without guilt, he
hadn’t
looked away, he hadn’t given up on her, in spite of everything he was still watching over her. And then he saw what Esther had been looking at behind his shoulder all that time.

Oddly enough, it wasn’t the wings that caught his attention at first. Because you’d have thought the wings were the strangest thing. But no, it was the face, just the face. So round, so
perfectly
round, no, like a sphere, the head a complete sphere. You could have cut off that head and played football with it. And there was no blemish to the face, it was like this had come straight from the factory, newly minted, and every other face you had ever seen was like a crude copy of it, some cheap hack knock-off. The eyes were bright and large and very very deep, the nose a cute little pug. The cheeks were full and fat and fleshy, all puffed out.