The Quarry (37 page)

Ali rang from A&E to say she and Pris wouldn’t be back; Pris had gone to Rick’s hotel in Ormiston and Ali had booked herself into the George, in Bewford city centre. She was still waiting to be seen by a doctor. Hol is limping almost as bad as Dad. Paul has a sore head and has taken some ibuprofen and some co-codamol. I settle down a surprisingly cheery Guy, make sure he takes all his meds, and then collapse into bed, too tired to play any HeroSpace or even have a wank.

I wake up to hear Guy coming hobbling along the corridor, approaching my door. I look at my phone. Half an hour since I went to sleep. The door opens, sending a widening bar of light across the floor and the far wall. Dad comes in but it’s not him after all; the figure is slighter and straighter. I realise it’s Hol as she closes the door, shutting off the outside light. A few standby lights and charging LEDs on things like the computer and socket transformers and so on provide just enough illumination.

‘Couldn’t sleep,’ she tells me. She comes up to the bed, limping a little. She’s wearing a thin, dark dressing gown. She stands so close I can smell her; coconut – from her hair, I remember – plus some other perfume, just faint, but deep and musky.

It too is something I’ve smelled on her before, but there is a last, elusive, hinted tang coming off her as well, something sharp and fresh and somehow animal at the same time, something I sort of know but don’t know, something bewilderingly, undeniably, unavoidably exciting, as though the higher regions of my brain and self have nothing to do with the experience or the effect it’s having on me.

If I reach out now
, I think,
I could touch her
.

‘Um,’ I hear myself say. My mouth has suddenly gone very dry. ‘Why, ah … Why are you … here?’ I ask her.

I think I see her shake her head. ‘I don’t know myself,’ she tells me. I hear her blow out a breath. ‘I feel like I … Like I can’t do the right thing, like there’s no right thing to be done, just a choice of which wrong one to do, trying to work out which is the least … damaging, least … humiliating or mean or selfish or … I don’t know—’

‘Sh,’ I tell her.

‘Yeah,’ she says, putting a hand into her dishevelled hair and rubbing the back of her head, ‘I’m sort of wittering, I suppose. I should—’

‘No, I mean,
sh
,’ I tell her, pushing myself up to a sitting position and turning my head towards the window. ‘I can hear something.’

She turns too. ‘What?’

‘Something …’ I say.

‘Yes, but—’

There’s a noise. I recognise it. ‘That’s the car,’ I tell her.

‘Whose car?’ she says. ‘Ali coming back after all? Rob going for a long midnight drive of the soul?’

Actually it’s nearly four in the morning, but I don’t say this. ‘No,’ I tell her, pushing the duvet back. ‘That’s our car. That’s the Volvo.’

I swing out of bed and pull on my underpants – facing away from Hol so she can’t see my erection.

‘
Guy?
’ she says into the darkness. ‘He can still
drive
?’

‘If he takes enough painkillers,’ I tell her. (So many you wouldn’t be allowed to operate heavy machinery, or drive, though I don’t say this.)

I can hear the engine sound getting louder as the Volvo leaves the garage. ‘Let me listen a moment,’ I whisper. We both hold our breaths. The car moves off down the drive without pausing. ‘He’s not gone back to close the garage doors.’ I shrug down my T-shirt, pull up my camo trousers, reach for my gilet. ‘I’d better check his room,’ I tell her.

Hol swivels, gasping with pain as she puts weight on her injured knee. ‘Give me one minute,’ she says, hobbling for the door. ‘I dress fast.’ She leaves the door open; I follow her ten seconds later, still buckling my belt.

Guy isn’t in his room. The bed is still warm. Snores come from Rob’s room. Hol comes back out of her room, a fleece held between her teeth, hopping on her good, bare foot as she pulls a boot on over the other, nearly falling, and grimacing with pain and muttering muffled curses.

‘Check—’ I start to say, as she stops at Paul’s door and opens it. There’s a grunt from inside.

‘Present,’ Hol says. She looks at me, then has to sit on the top step of the stairs to put on the other boot. ‘Take it we’re hot pursuiting?’

‘Think we should,’ I say.

‘My car,’ she says. ‘You’ll have to drive.’ She nods. ‘This is my clutch leg; doubt it’ll work right.’

I can see tail lights in the distance as we head down the drive, then lose sight of them as we come down to the public road.

Hol’s seen them too. ‘Think that’s him?’ she says. She’s staring over to where the lights were, south, heading south-west, though we’re too far down in the half-sunken, tree- and hedge-lined lane for her to have any chance of seeing them from here. It’s so dark you can’t tell that, though.

‘Only lights I could see,’ I tell her.

‘Me too,’ she says, arming her way into her fleece.

‘Where’s the wipers?’ I ask Hol. It isn’t raining now but drops from earlier are still dotting the screen.

She reaches, flicks a stalk. ‘Here.’

The little Polo feels dainty, tinny and delicate after the tank-like Volvo. I crunch the gearbox a couple of times but Hol doesn’t complain.

‘If he’d turned the other way, into town,’ I say, ‘we’d probably not have seen him.’

‘So it might not be him we’re following.’

‘Maybe not.’ The Polo’s engine makes lots of noise but doesn’t make it move very fast. It hangs on okay in the corners, though.

‘I take it Guy isn’t in the habit of doing this? Going off in the middle of the night?’ Hol asks.

‘Never,’ I tell her. I had to resist the strong urge to take a moment to close the garage doors when we ran out of the house a couple of minutes ago. At least Guy had closed the front door of the house.

‘Think he might be going off to end it all?’

‘Worried he might be,’ I confess, glancing over at her.

Hol has her mobile out, puts it to her ear. ‘Trying calling him. You never know.’

‘I think he might be going back to Yarlsthwaite,’ I say, suddenly realising. ‘To the tower. Or the cliffs.’

‘Maybe he just wants to get there under his own power,’ Hol says. ‘Climb it himself, to prove … that he can, without people trying to help.’

I shake my head. ‘I don’t think so.’

The car park at Yarlsthwaite is empty. There’s no sign of the Volvo at Ullisedge community park either: another clifftop location notoriously popular with suicides. And doggers, I’ve heard, though there are no obvious signs. The night is mild and the gentle breeze smells damp and fresh.

‘Where now?’ Hol asks.

‘Leplam lake,’ I tell her.

We head under the motorway at the Ormiston interchange, make for the lake. No sign there either. There used to be places where you could just drive straight from the bit beside the proper car park into deep water, but the council have closed that section off with a berm and boulders and there are chained bollards protecting the rest.

‘I always thought, if I wanted to end it all,’ Hol says, ‘I might just drive really fast down the motorway and then into … I don’t know. Some bit of concrete. A bridge support, maybe. Though they seem to have protected all that stuff with crash barriers. Or take an ordinary road, and hit a tree, or swerve into the path of a truck. Only that seems a bit selfish; hard on the trucker. Not that I’ve a lot of time for – what?’

‘We can go back that way anyway,’ I tell her.

‘What way?’ she asks as I spin the car round and head for the car park exit and the road.

‘Just this place I know,’ I say.

Cresting the moor road, approaching the bridge that arches high above the motorway – the bridge that I usually reach from the other side, by walking for nearly an hour over the fields and the moor, where I’ve stood and stared at the traffic and watched for random jams – we can see that there’s a car – an estate – sitting in the middle.

Its headlights are pointing towards us. Getting closer, as we start to descend, we can see that it is the Volvo, and the driver’s door is hanging open. Closer still, from the place where the bit of relatively modern approach road gives out onto the bridge proper, we can see there doesn’t seem to be anybody around, and nobody in the car either, unless they’re lying down or hiding.

‘Oh, fuck,’ Hol says softly.

I can feel my mouth going dry. The traffic beneath us is flowing normally, though, in both directions. It’s not even five yet, but there’s a respectable amount of trucks and cars labouring or thundering or just humming along beneath us, and all of it without the benefit of lots of flashing blue lights.

We drive onto the bridge, stop in front of the Volvo, get out.

The car’s engine is silent. The headlights look a normal kind of brightness so it can’t have been here that long; the battery needs replacing and doesn’t hold much of a charge.

Guy’s head pops out from behind the rear of the car, looking down its grimy flank at us. ‘Fuck me, can a man get no peace to contemplate his imminent demise? What’s up? Has Rob attacked somebody else, or Ali come back with the rozzers?’

‘
Christ
, you had us worried,’ Hol says, walking up to where Guy is sitting on the little kerb, a metre or so behind the rear of the car. His stick lies at his side.

‘Did I now?’ he asks. ‘How thoughtless of me.’

‘Hi, Dad.’ We both sit on the kerb with him. Then I get up again, turn the Volvo’s lights to sidelights only and close the door. I sit back down.

‘Just … heard you going, taking the car, not closing the garage door,’ I tell him.

‘Yeah, well, didn’t want to risk leaving time for somebody to come out and try to stop me,’ Guy says. He pulls out what looks like one of Haze’s joints, lights it and inhales deeply. There are the remains of two joints in the gutter between his feet. ‘You know, with some spurious … concern that I might be off to do what people commonly refer to as “something stupid”, i.e. top meself.’

‘That what you were going to do?’ Hol asks.

‘Might still.’ Guy shrugs, glances behind us towards the railings and traffic moving beneath. ‘You two could help push me over. Fuck Dignitas.’ The traffic makes a coming-and-going noise like surf on fast-forward.

‘Was that really what—’ I begin.

‘Oh, yes,’ Guy says, pulling hard on the joint. He puts his head back and it’s like that bit in
The Wrong Trousers
when a light goes off in Gromit’s kennel and you suddenly see he’s been crying. Guy’s upper cheeks and the sides of his nose are wet with tears. ‘Took some extra opiate, just so I could move better, not trying to overdose … But yeah, that was indubitably the fullness of my attention, oh yes. Intention, I mean. And there; that’s why.’

‘What?’ Hol asks.

‘Think it’s going into my brain, Hol,’ he says, his voice hollow. ‘Can’t think of the right words, increasingly.’

‘Everybody gets that,’ Hol says.

Guy shakes his head. ‘I never.’

Hol puts her arm round him. Guy hesitates, then puts his head on her shoulder. I do the same from the other side. To my surprise, after a moment or two, he rests his head on my shoulder.

‘Well,’ Hol says, ‘it’s your life, Guy, but I don’t think either of us is sorry we disturbed you.’

He says nothing for a while, then sighs deeply, wheezing a little. ‘Oh,’ he says at last, ‘I just want to be shot of all of you, and let you be shot of me. I just wanted to say,
Fuck you all
. Not so much to you, not to the … everybody here this weekend, but to everybody else; to the world as revealed in wank-rag tabloids and any quick channel-hop. That was the mistake I made earlier: put the telly on, caught some repeated drivel; game shows, show-pony sport, special-agent spy wank.
That’s
what I want to say
Fuck You
to; to the world and his wife and his fuckwit children, to all the idiots bought off with puerile telly and corrupted sports and brainless movie product and fame for the fucking sake of it, and the slow but steady rehabilitation of torture at all levels, whether it’s watching some witless D-list celeb scranning witchetty grubs and showering in dung beetles or hearing that our brave fucking boys have ripped the balls off another teenage rag-head in some-or-other dusty Benightistan. All that shit. All that fucking shit.’

Hol is silent for a while. Eventually she says, ‘Yeah, well, we haven’t exactly covered ourselves in glory, our generation. But there’s always another one coming along. They might do better. Even when it’d be less painful to just make our peace with despair and get on with it, there is always hope. Whether we like it or not.’

‘Not for me there isn’t, Hol,’ Guy says, and just sounds weary.

Hol sighs. ‘Which is always going to colour your judgement of everything else, isn’t it? Even if it feels like all that’s happened is you’ve escaped your last illusions and you’re finally seeing things clearly.’

Guy laughs silently against me. Or maybe he’s weeping. But I think it’s a laugh, in the end. ‘Yeah, Hol,’ he says, reaching down and flicking one of the dead joints along the side of the kerb. ‘We are all of us in the gutter.’ He pulls on the lit joint. Because his head is still on my shoulder, some of the smoke goes into my eyes, making them water. ‘But some of us,’ he wheezes, ‘are staring down the drain.’

I feel Hol hug him gently.

‘Anyway,’ he says, coughing. ‘I still couldn’t jump, in the end.’ He pulls on the joint again. ‘More of a coward than I thought.’ He laughs. I feel him shiver. ‘Thought I could at least control something, take fucking charge of something, impose my own fucking schedule on what was happening to me, rather than just being … prey to it.’ He raises his head from my shoulder, looks at the Volvo. ‘Specially as, like I say … all these little … attacks of aphasia, lately.’ He looks at both of us in turn, grimacing as he turns his neck this way and that. ‘My bum’s cold,’ he announces.

He starts trying to get up and we both help him; he opens the estate’s tailgate and sits in there, looking hunched and shivery. I pull the blanket from the car and wrap it round him, then I sit back on the kerb again. Hol stands, instead, arms crossed, on the road, looking down at Guy.