The One Safe Place (33 page)

"Five minutes later than last time you asked. Don't make a row less you want us stopped." The boy shoved the glass door between the windows, and Marshall saw that the whole of the wall was composed of black glass. Even though the heavy roar of buses seemed like darkness transformed into sound, the daylight was so welcome that he floundered into it, grabbing a branch wrapped in track suit to steady himself. "Watch who you're handling, lad," the boy warned him, wrenching it away to point across the divided road. "Give us your money, quick. There's the bus."

Marshall dug in his pocket and stepped into the road. A screech of brakes pierced his skull, and an object several times his height overwhelmed him. There was a duet of "Fuck" from the driver and the boy as Marshall staggered sideways, not sure whether the bus had struck him. Apparently not, because he was able to remain standing, though the smell of diesel was slopping back and forth behind his eyes. The driver shouted, "If you want to kill yourself, son, don't make any other bugger do it" as the bus veered around Marshall, squirting fumes at him. Then the boy dragged him back, knocking Marshall's ankles against the curb, the curb. "What you playing at? Get across or we'll miss your bus."

"It's number, number..."

"I know which it is. Get your arse across."

Marshall made himself look in the wrong direction, where the traffic on this side of the road was coming from, before dashing to the central barrier. As he clambered over, it dug into his crotch like a huge dull blade poised to saw him in half. The underside of the mall shifted above the road, dislodging a rain of sand which hissed through the mating chorus of the buses, and he was so afraid the bridge was about to fall and crush him that he would have retreated if the boy hadn't bumped him onward with his shoulder. "Get it out, will you. The queue's nearly on."

Marshall understood enough of that to dig out his money as he levered himself onto the sidewalk. Shouldn't he go to the bookshop now that he was almost within sight of it? But the boy pried the money out of his fist and swung himself into the doorway of the bus. Another rush of panic sent Marshall after him, because the number and the destinations on the front of the vehicle were streaming upwards like an image on a dying television, too fast and too distorted for him to read. "Two," the boy said to the driver, and to Marshall, "Up."

Marshall used cold handfuls of the rail to haul himself up the steps, which vibrated with the growling of the bus. He dropped himself on the front seat, which seemed to nod forward and pant in his ear, as the bus unstuck itself from the patch of road and his friend came to find him. The boy threw himself on the seat across the aisle and clanged his heels on the metal windowsill, the bolts on each side of his neck sizzling with power, and Marshall blurted, "Where's the rest of my money?"

"I'm looking after it for you. You don't want to be bothered with it while you're feeling like you're feeling."

"Aren't you? You said everyone."

"I've felt like it, lad, and that's a fact."

The boy stared hard at him as if he was seeing Marshall's face turn into the doll's face. "Evom eht no elpoep," Marshall thought and, in an attempt to rid himself of the tendrils of it which were rooting themselves in his brain, said. What if he'd forgotten how to speak English? Suppose he couldn't understand himself? The bus emerged from beneath the mall, and he heard it grinding its way through the sand that was dimming the light and making his eyes itch, and then he saw the words sailing in the sky. They were the slogan of the bus company, a transfer glued to the outside of the window, but that wasn't at all reassuring; he felt as if everything else had been reversed, including himself. Maybe he'd gone through the looking glass, because he was back in some part of a zoo or a circus, a herd of dusty buses grumbling and roaring around him, crowds of dwarfs dodging boldly in front of them, their little heads held high. The bus emerged from the herd and put on speed toward the stone daggers of the town hall roof. They tore open the sky above the square, and the sun exploded into Marshall's eyes. He felt it blaze all the way through his skull to the back—he could almost see it doing this to the brittle parched bare shell which was the inside of himself. He clapped his hands over his face, crushing his nose until he could hardly breathe, and wedged his soles against the yielding metal. "Can you tell me when we get there?" he pleaded.

"Trust me, Ma."

Marshall persuaded his hands to loosen their grip—his face was throbbing like a wound—and glimpsed darkness toppling toward him. It was the shadow of the town hall, and it was snatched away at once to let the sun at him. When he tried to mask his eyes with his hands held close to them, the stops and starts of the bus kept making him thump himself in the face. Whenever he peered between his fingers the sun knifed his eyes, or he saw sights he couldn't cope with—a railroad train sprouting from the air in front of him, or rooms with people hanging head downward in them being dragged through a canal, or traffic falling into an abyss beside the road. If he kept his eyes covered he saw multicoloured cartoon shapes capering toward him, and felt himself turning into a cartoon, so that he didn't dare look at himself. He made his fingers part, only to see clouds come to a complete halt in the sky and shake themselves like sheep and move off. Then the boy pinched his shoulder, and for a moment which seemed to contain all the hope and peace in the world Marshall thought the pinch had wakened him from the nightmare. "Don't go off yet," the boy said "We're the next stop."

The world spun at two speeds, fast inside the bus and faster outside, as Marshall turned to him and then lunged after him so as not to be left alone with the only other passenger upstairs, a woman's body sitting three seats behind him, holding a carrier bag full of vegetables with ahead piled on top. The stairs clanked underfoot like a machine that was running down as he fled, his hooves striking the floor of the horse-box just as the roar of the world cracked open the glass side of it. When the boy stepped through the opening and became a head shorter, Marshall could only leap after him.

The world thumped his heels, and he staggered a few paces while he discovered whether his bruised feet could still walk. The bus shut its driver into his cell and set off in pursuit of the rest of the migration. The shrill hiss of tires pierced the unending thunder with which the road was loaded, and the shrillness transformed the sunlight into lightning which flickered without ever going out. Maybe it was shivering on his behalf, because he had no idea where he was.

It wasn't just another symptom. This wasn't any road he'd seen before. He was standing alongside a block of shops like boxes thrown together in an attic with a few old safes, incomprehensible slogans scrawled across their metal fronts. Even the shops that might be open were crisscrossed with grey mesh. Sections of old signs were visible between some of the signs over the shops, as if the row was about to revert to its previous self. Some of the windows above the signs were broken, and he saw their frames begin to warp and sag as he held out his artificial hands to the boy. "Why did we get off here? You said you knew where we were going."

"Bet your arse I do, Ma. There was a diversion, only you didn't see it for hiding your face. We just have to walk a bit. You can do that, can't you, lad?"

Marshall had to, feeling sweat being squeezed out of his feet and the backs of his knees with each step. He could smell himself, his panic. Red and green cartoons kicked their legs in the air as he followed his keeper across the halves of the road which had gone through the mirror, evom eht no elpoep. Now the boy was leading him along the sidewalk past a strip of turf sown with fragments of newspaper headlines, perhaps about 
Marshall or about the murder at the shop he should be going back to, and planted with trees as thin as his arm, their frayed ends wired into the electric sky. The sky was up to its tricks again, grinding to a halt and having to shake itself in order to move off, tweaking the roofs of huddles of low flat-faced houses the color of sodden sand. Marshall had wandered past quite a length of these while he shielded his eyes from the sight of drowned rooms floating by in glass tanks before he realised he was no longer following. The boy had stopped to lift a fence in front of a house to its feet. "Don't go running off, Ma. Don't get lost when you don't know nobody but me."

Marshall stumbled back to him. "Where's this? This isn't where I live."

"No, it's where I do."

There was an aggressiveness, even a threat, in the boy's voice which made Marshall nervous of saying anything wrong, but that was the least of his fears under the jerky old film of the sky. "You said you'd take me home."

"Come in first. I want a drink. You can have one too if you want, a Coke. You like them, don't you?"

How did he know? Maybe he'd seen Marshall drinking Coke at school, or maybe he thought all Americans drank it. He opened the gate, which screeched over the stump of concrete path. "You can lie down if you want, Ma, then you might feel better."

Marshall took a step, feeling his leg haul his foot up and deposit it a few inches forward and somehow take the weight of his leaden body, and then another. "I don't want to stay long. I need to be with my mom."

"You don't want her seeing you looking like that, do you? Get in and I'll give you something you can take."

If he had the antidote to Marshall's condition, Marshall thought he would be mad to hesitate. He mustn't let himself wonder if he was already going mad. He conveyed the burden of himself onto the path between two untended plots of grass without even a headstone to mark them. "Thanks," he pronounced, trying to sound absolutely sincere, and thought of something else it would have been friendly of him to have said much earlier. "What's your name?"

His friend closed the gate, and the fence leaned its points toward Marshall. Now the boy was jabbing a hand at him to urge him toward the house, and slipping a metal glint out of his pocket as his neck whispered to itself. "Darren," he said.

Susanne had driven out of the car park and was accelerating through a gap in both directions of the traffic when she saw one of her students hurrying toward her along the sidewalk—Pik, his black pony-tail wagging. As she swung the Volvo parallel to the sidewalk he waved urgently. She stamped on the brake and switched on her hazard lights and stopped the car close to the curb, even though at this time of day the lane she was in was supposed to be reserved for buses. Her eyes met Pik's, and he smiled, far too fleetingly to be bringing her good news. She pressed the button to lower the passenger window with a finger which had grown clumsy and unsteady. The glass was inching down when Pik hesitated before running past the car. She saw him sprint across the crossing as the invitation to pedestrians began to falter, and seize a girl by the hand and whirl her to face him and set about kissing her on the mouth. He had been waving to her, not to Susanne at all. Of course he had no news of Marshall.

She mustn't worry, certainly not while she was driving. Marshall would be home by now, or on his way home, since he knew she was. She switched off the insect clicking of the hazard lights and steered the car out of the bus lane. "Just be there," she said aloud, and tried to stop remembering the day she'd driven home to find Don's message, but she couldn't forget while she was driving his car. She'd sold hers rather than get rid of his, and by now she'd found everything of his which remained in it—a street map of Manchester annotated in his handwriting, a thin pack of his business cards held by a rubber band which had snapped when she'd extracted one, a dolphin key ring which five-year-old Marshall had bought him for his birthday and which, though broken, he'd stashed in the glove box rather than throw it away. Worst of all had been two clips of bullets which he might have used to save his life and which she wished he had. By now she was able to use the vehicle without having her vision dissolve into a weepy blur, not much of the time anyway. Driving the car felt like being with him, made him seem present in at least a generalised sense, and now the impression appealed to her as a reassurance that she was close to seeing Marshall, since she sensed no ominousness. "We'll look after him," she murmured. She could already see the Indian restaurants ahead, and a minute later she was surrounded by them, and then they shrank into her mirror as she made the first turn. Right, and right again, as the lengths of street grew shorter and narrower. Mrs. Satterthwaite's mongrel lifted its head above the garden gate on the corner and gave a token bark which sounded like a signal as the Travis house came into view. Whatever the bark might have signified, it wasn't that Marshall was waiting outside. No doubt he was in the house.

The scent of lavender rose to meet her as she opened her gate. She parted her lips but didn't speak, and shook the Yale key forward from her bunch of keys and slid it into the lock. It turned easily, but nothing further happened when she pushed at the cold metal plate. The mortise was still locked, and Marshall wasn't home.

She found the mortise key and turned it in the mechanism and palmed the door open. The inner door imitated its movement, and the alarm announced itself. She heeled the front door shut with a vigour that sent her along the hall in time to dig the key into the alarm panel just as its siren raised its shriek. The sound invaded her nerves like a drill finding a tooth, and the silence which followed only left them aching. The answering machine showed one call recorded: her own. At least there was no message about Marshall, but also none from him.

He would have called if he didn't intend to be home any minute. She mustn't let herself start speculating whether he'd thought he would be and had then been prevented somehow, because if that was the case there was no reason to suppose that anything bad had happened to him. She snatched the fistful of keys away from the alarm panel and threw them in her purse, and marched herself to her kitchen, where she raided the freezer for a tinfoil carton of her homemade bolognese sauce, Marshall's favourite of her dinners. She set it down next to the microwave. There was no point in doing any more with it until she knew that Marshall would be home by dinner time, which obviously he would be, and much earlier if he knew what was good for him. "We'll be having a few words about how not to worry people, young man," she said, and heard the empty house displaying her talking to herself. She tramped back along the hall to grab her case full of essays awaiting grades, but left it on the stairs and made for Marshall's room.