The Raw Shark Texts (16 page)

“If we’re going a long way,” I said. “he’s going to get heavy.”

“He already is heavy. We’ll manage.”

The dark mass of Ian shifted around in his carrier to remind us
he was actually there while we talked about him
, then got on with pretending to be asleep.

“I still don’t know where we’re going.”

“Well, lock up, you’ll soon see.” Scout took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to control the shivering. “It’s like
Dawn of the Dead
or something isn’t it?” Then to me, smiling: “Do you trust me?”

“Yeah,” I admitted, shouldering the rucksack. “I’m just not really sure why.”

Loaded-up, we walked down the alley and across a dark street which was trafficless apart from a strong through-wind and a trundling Coke can which, when it moved, seemed like the noisiest thing in the world. Scout led us to the back door of a large bookshop.

“Waterstones.”

“Correct,” she said, putting down the food and the cat and going through her pockets. She pulled out a small metal something and after inspecting it for a second, shoved it into the door’s lock.

“Wait – we’re breaking into Waterstones?”

She turned around. “You’re not helping.”

“What about the alarms, dead-bolts? What about – are you actually breaking in? Jesus.”

“Can I have some quiet? Please.”

After a few moments of looking up and down the street, clutching my arms around myself and wanting to be anywhere else on earth, Scout pulled the metal something out of the door’s lock. She pushed and the door swung open into the black.

“There,” she said. “No alarms. No dead-bolts. Remember what I said about Chinese puzzle boxes?”

“So parking the Jeep behind the bins at McDonalds means the alarm won’t go off when you pick the lock at Waterstones?”

She picked up the food and the cat carrier. “Come on.”

“Scout, that’s –”

“We’re in though aren’t we? Come
on
.”

I followed her inside and clicked the door shut behind me.

For a few seconds everything was black, then a wedge of light appeared and stretched into a tall rectangle as another door opened up ahead. Through it I saw bookshelves, the ground floor of the shop in night-time mode, still and silent with that half strength
we’re closed
yellowy-orange lighting. In front of me, Scout’s silhouette became the real Scout as she stepped through the doorway and out onto the shop floor. I followed.

Piled up with bags and a ginger cat, we stood there – two out-of-place backpackers – in the big closed bookshop.

“It feels unreal doesn’t it?” Scout whispered.

“It’s –” I couldn’t find the right words to describe the feeling, but Scout’s Chinese puzzle box system seemed much more plausible now we were inside. This space, all locked up, half-lit and silent near dawn, it wasn’t for just anyone. A person couldn’t just push a door open and carelessly walk in on something like this, something fundamental would be gone before they’d finished turning the handle. “It’s sort of religious,” I said in the end.

Scout nodded. “Places get a bit holy when they’re left on their own to think for a while. It’s something to do with the quiet maybe.”

“What do we do now we’re here?”

“Find the Hs.”

“Books beginning with H?”

“Novels. Novels by authors beginning with H. I think they’re over there.”

We made our way through the shelves and silent stacks until we came
to the bookcase where most of the novels by writers with surnames starting with the letter H were shelved.

“Just these bottom four rows,” Scout said. “We need to unload them and stack them up at the side here.”

We did it quickly, taking the books out eight or twelve at a time, squeezing our palms tight against the covers as we lifted them and piling them up wholesale in front of the G case to our left. When this was done, Scout took hold of one of the empty shelves and lifted it up and out of the bookcase, placing it neatly next to the books. She removed the two other empty shelves in the same way then got down on her knees to inspect the case’s exposed back. Taking a small screwdriver from her big army coat she was soon passing out one, two, three, four small silver Phillips screws.

“Put them with the books,” she said. As I did, Scout took her screwdriver and levered out the lower part of the thin woodchip backboard, passing that out to me as well. Where the board had been there was now a three-foot by four-foot rectangular black hole.

“That’s where we’re going,” Scout said, getting to her feet and brushing herself off.

“Un-space.”

“Yep, that’s it.”

I took the rucksack off my shoulders and got down on my hands and knees to look inside the hole. I could only see maybe two or three inches of grey bitty concrete floor before the space receded into complete black. The shop’s dry warm processed air had made me start to sweat under my heavy coat but the air coming out of the hole felt cool and hard, basic and factual, and telling stories of miles of stripped-down empty places.

I moved to take the torch out of the rucksack’s side pocket but I found myself slowing down, distracted. I turned and sat, staring into the black.

“You alright?” Scout said, crouching next to me.

“I’ve just got this feeling that if I go in there I’m not going to come out again.”

She looked serious, thinking this through carefully and then she bumped her shoulder against me, a supportive nudge.

“What?” I said.

“If you want your boomerang to come back, first you’ve got to throw it.”

“But. What if I want to keep my boomerang and not – lose it down a big dark hole?”

“The throwing and the coming back
is
the boomerang, brainstrain. Without that part, you’re just carrying a bent stick around.”

I smiled. “So who died and made you so wise?”

“Hmmm…” Thinking about it, Scout did a childish shrug. “Maybe God?”

I looked at her.

“What?”

“Wow.”

“What?”

“Just – wow.”

“Fuck off.”

Under our torch beams the space behind the bookcase became surprisingly ordinary, a small grey concrete area with a circular hole cut into the floor and a steel ladder leading down.

“That’s us,” Scout said. “You’ll have to take off the backpack and hold it up above your head to climb down.”

“What about the cat?”

“I’ll go in first and you pass him through to me.”

Scout dropped her still-turned-on torch into the carrier bag with our food, hooked the bag over her wrist and crawled through the bookcase into the space behind. Once inside, the white plastic bag glowed with a gentle diffused light. It added a fuzzy spinning skyline of food packaging and water bottle silhouettes to the concrete walls. I watched as she manoeuvred her legs over the hole, twisted and climbed a few rungs down the ladder. As she did the bag-light disappeared under the lip of the hole and a corresponding dark horizon raced up the walls towards the ceiling. “Okay. Pass him through.”

Ian had his poker-face on. He was either very scared, or surprisingly calm, considering.

“I’m sorry,” I said into the cat carrier. “I promise I’ll make all this up to you.” And I passed him and his plastic box into the hole.

Scout took the carrier by the handle on top. “We’ll see you down there,” she said, heaving cat and box up above her head and starting down the ladder one-handed. I watched them disappear in steady downward bobs, Scout’s shoulders, then Scout’s head, then most of Scout’s arm, then
finally Ian’s carrier, his blank face squinting from my torch beam as he disappeared into the hole.

I pushed the rucksack through the bookcase and crawled in after it.

I’d climbed down the ladder until my head was below the level of the floor and was struggling to manoeuvre the rucksack in after me when I heard a clunk from below. Pale light filtered up the climb shaft, casting long shadows upwards. I strained and struggled the rucksack into the hole, taking most of its weight on the top of my head and steadying it with my right arm as I climbed down.

The ladder brought me down into a very long, very straight concrete corridor. Weak orange strip lights with hanging wires and yellowing fittings illuminated the space to distant vanishing points in both directions. Batteries of thick black cables were harness-bolted down the length of one wall, with ladders like the one we’d come down appearing at distant intervals along the other.

“We’ve got light,” I said, heaving the rucksack down onto the floor. My voice made hard echoes, like the sound of a clap in an empty room. The air smelled dry, industrial.

Scout leant against the wall a little further down the corridor with Nobody’s laptop, Ian in his carrier, the food bag and, I noticed, another rucksack cluttered around her. She’d been waiting for me to make it down the ladder and when she saw I’d managed it she knelt, opening and rummaging in the new bag. “This is electrical access corridor number four,” she said. “Welcome to un-space.”

“What’s that?” I said, meaning the bag.

Scout pulled two tightly-rolled-up bundles of material out of the rucksack and shook them – they unravelled into a blue vest top and a pair of green combat pants.

“My stuff,” she said. “Right where I left it.” Scout laid the clothes out over her rucksack then started unknotting the leather belt tied around her waist. My over-sized trousers dropped down her pale legs and she stepped out of them, boots already gone. “You didn’t think I was going to –” she
struggled my big T-shirt up over her head “– spend the next couple of days walking around in your bloke clothes did you?” And she scooped up my trousers and shirt and threw them over to me.

I caught them and held them to my chest.

Scout suddenly wore only the seen-better-days bra from the night before and, I realised, a pair of my dark blue fitted boxer shorts. Standing in the corridor like that she looked – well, she looked amazing. Pale and perfect: perfect-by-not-being-quite-perfect, real. Her long neck, ice-bridge collarbones, small breasts – old world marble sculpture rising a little way naked from worn functional bra cups – too-skinny ribs, small but solid muscles working under her white white skin, moving her calves, her arms, the twist of her waist, my shorts stretching out over the curve of her hips and down onto her thighs, the waistband scooping up at her stomach, and below the shorts’ loose, empty front with buttons – yes, I looked, quickly, guiltily, once, twice – the material tightened to a bumped V and disappeared between her legs.

I turned away, trying to make the thick thudding rising in my chest and the depths of my throat sink back, subside, recede, but it wouldn’t. Electric proximity, shock, desire, my body thumped with it and with the embarrassed panic and sudden reality of all this happening. Staring down the empty concrete corridor with the sounds of Scout moving behind me I had the over-the-top-of-everything-else horror that actively
not
looking might be worse, might be much, much more obvious than just looking. By looking away, was I flagging up something corrupt and embarrassing and childish and wrong in me that clearly wasn’t on show in her? Trying hopelessly to set my face to blank and uninterested, I turned back.

Shaking out her combat pants again before stepping into them, Scout didn’t seem to care whether I looked or didn’t look as she changed. She didn’t even seem interested in whether my looking was idle or sexual. There was a powerful feminine confidence in that, something easy but unfakeable in the way she moved, the time she took or didn’t take with the various stages of changing. This was a girl – a woman – who could make
or unmake the world however she wanted it. It was the most compelling thing I’d ever seen.

“You’ve got my pants on,” I said weakly and stupidly after the end of it all.

Scout smiled up at me from lacing her boot. “You don’t meet many girls, do you, Eric?” Then she was on her feet, throwing her big army jacket over her shoulders.

“Sorry,” I said, embarrassed, catching up, realising time had been working a little bit strangely for me and that I was still pointlessly clutching the bundled clothes close to my chest.

“Hey,” she flashed her eyebrows, “it was a joke. I’m teasing.”

I nodded. She was being nice and I was feeling even more stupid than before.

Scout dropped the food bag into her rucksack, then got to work strapping Nobody’s laptop to the back. I pushed the clothes she’d been wearing into the top of my bag, heaved it over my shoulders and collected Ian’s carrier, lifting it up to check he was okay. Two half-open eyes and a smug ginger face looked out at me.

You can shut up too
, I mouthed at him.

We hiked down electrical access corridor number four for about two hours. We followed a ladder up into what looked like an abandoned warehouse, then across a gantry and down into a narrower, more organic tunnel with faulty flickering lights. We talked a lot about nothing, Scout asking lots of questions about music, about which bands were still together and which had split, and about TV, mainly who’d had sex with/cheated on/killed who in the soaps. Some of the characters she asked me about were ones I hadn’t even heard of and I wondered how much time she’d spent away from the world down in the quiet of un-space. We told jokes, getting into a rhythm of acting like: a) our own jokes were far funnier than
they really were; and b) that each other’s jokes were bad beyond belief. After one of my punchlines Scout stopped suddenly, standing still under the flickering lights.

“
Why the long paws
?” she repeated. She looked at me uncomprehending, the way the audience looks at the most extreme guests on Jerry Springer. “Eric, why would you do that to somebody?”

“You’re a Philistine,” I said, smiling, carrying on walking without her. I remember thinking, having a strong hot deep-in-my-insides realisation that
this is what life is
. But then, close up behind,
well enjoy it, you only have one more day. The Ludovician isn’t gone forever.

Underground, days are made from watch-hands. Late morning ticking into early afternoon ticking into late afternoon with us walking tunnels, upping and downing ladders, shining our torches over wide flat dark spaces with low ceilings, kicking our way through old newspapers and empty cans and thrown-away things. Places and spaces came and went. Service corridors, access chutes, flood drains, an old basement factory floor where our torchbeams found the rusted necks of over-sized sewing and winding machines and cast Jurassic shadows up across the brickwork as we passed through –
history sinks downwards
– and then on through underground car parks, abandoned archives and vaults, storage bays. Us squeezing through gaps, climbing rubble, descending
PERSONNEL ONLY
concrete stairwells into the roots of abandoned and still-living buildings.

We stopped to rest every two or three hours. Scout would check our progress in a little red notebook and we’d have water and maybe something to eat, then we’d swap custody of Ian and start out again. Stretches of colourless time passed. Afternoon became evening and we wore thin with the jokes and the games, the journey becoming a mostly silent, thoughtful and leg-aching march. Around 6 p.m. Scout finally called a halt and we dropped bags for the night.

We’d arrived in a broken-down warehouse, one of those with a strutted, peaked, corrugated roof with dual rows of glazed panels to let in the light. Most of the glass had been smashed, green vine fingers creeping down onto the struts and along the walls at the distant far end. The tramlines of sky above us were the same low-hanging smoggy purple as we’d seen in the city that morning. It was as if there hadn’t been a day.

I lay down on the gritty floor next to my bag and looked up at the clouds.

“I think my legs are turning to wood.”

The slim share of twilight we were getting wasn’t enough to read by, so Scout used her torch to check through her notebook again.

“We’re doing okay,” she said. “We should be there by tomorrow.”

Tomorrow. We should find Trey Fidorous tomorrow
.

“Good,” I said, closing my eyes and thinking about nothing but the joy of being still.

“Hey.”

“What?”

“What are we going to do about your cat?”

I opened my eyes, turned over on my side. “What about him?”

“Well, he can’t just take a toilet roll and get the other person to walk on ahead like us, can he? He’s been holding it in all day.”

I hadn’t thought about that. If Ian had to go inside his carrier and then be carried around in it afterwards –

I rolled over onto my back, screwed up my eyes. “Tell me what to do, Scout.”

“I think we should let him out.”

“What if he runs off?”

“I don’t think he’s the running type.”

“But you know what I mean.”

“Where’s he going to go? Anyway, I don’t see we’ve got much of a choice unless you want to carry him all day tomorrow in his own piss and shit.”

I opened one eye. “Charming.”

“Well, that’s what’s going to happen.”

She was right. I hauled myself onto my knees and then, aching, up to my feet. Ian’s carrier was parked close to where Scout sat on her rucksack, still looking at her book, making notes by torchlight. I knelt down in front of Ian’s box and peered through the bars. In the almost dark I thought I could just make out those two big unimpressed eyes. Ian, of course, would be able to see me perfectly.

“Right,” I said. “I’m going to let you out now so you can do your thing. Don’t go running off anywhere. We’ve got some delicious tins of tuna for you, right Scout?”

“Delicious.”

“So you’d be
much
worse off than I would if you decided to disappear. What do you think?”

Silence from the carrier.

“Okay, I’m opening the door now.”

I clicked the catch off and swung the front open. After a moment, Ian’s big ginger body stepped out, cautiously at first, and then, looking around with that
not bad
expression dads use when looking at other dads’ new cars, he sauntered off into the depths of the warehouse.

“He’s not going to come back.”

“You’re such an old woman,” Scout said, tucking the book away. Then, seeing I was concerned, she said: “Of course he will. You explained about the tuna and everything.”

“Fuck off.” I smiled in spite of myself. “But I don’t know what I’d do if I lost him. It’s always been just him and me, you know?”

“I know. He’ll be back. Don’t worry.” Scout stood up. “Let’s get a fire started before it’s too dark. There were some wooden pallets over by the hatch we came up through; do you want to drag a couple over here? I’ll sort out some paper.”

Part of me wanted to say,
but won’t someone come if we light a fire, won’t someone call the police?
But I didn’t, partly because I was too tired and
partly because I felt I was starting to understand the workings of un-space – nobody ever ever came.

Despite my worries about Ian, I had a warm feeling about sleeping in the same space as Scout again.
Being part of a team, part of a unit.
For the thousandth time that day, I thought about my trousers slipping down her pale legs and her stepping out of them, my shorts tight around her hips and thighs.
Being part of a team
, I thought,
yeah, sure, Eric, that’s what it is.
I went to get the pallets.

We built a small fire and soon the two of us were redrawn in hot orange, deep red and whispery skittish black. We shared a can of beans, dipping chunks of breadcake into Scout’s mess tin. I said we should try toasting the bread but Scout smiled and shook her head.

“Toasting bread on an open fire. It sounds like the easiest thing in the world, doesn’t it? But just ask anyone who’s tried.”

I wondered whether the first Eric Sanderson ever tried toasting bread outside the tent on Naxos. Whether
my hands
had ever attempted that. I thought about him and Clio arguing about ruined bread then I thought about them laughing about it. With both of them gone, history had forgotten if an event like that ever happened and how they’d reacted if it did. Looking into the fire, I decided to let them laugh. I realised I’d not thought about the First Eric Sanderson for quite a while.