The Way Out (16 page)

In her rear-view mirror she sees the shape carrying on, crushing everything in its path. She looks at the face of the driver behind her. He is picking his nose and flicking the result out of his window. She looks further back, searching the horizon where the road meets the sky and it isn't long before another dark shape appears. This time on her carriageway.

She swerves towards the inside lane, narrowly missing another car. Ignoring the angry gesticulations of the other driver, she pulls off onto the hard shoulder, then further onto the grass. She clambers out and manages a few stumbling steps before falling to the ground, which is shuddering beneath her. The road she had been driving on only moments before, rumbles past like a giant wheel of liquorice, leaving in its wake an uneven surface of stones and gravel and a thick, tarry stench.

Nothing moves.

The ground that used to be road glitters with shards of broken glass and metal. Fragments of mirror sparkle in the sunlight and reflect tiny bits of broken sky.

Melanie turns away, pulls herself to her feet and staggers to the top of the verge. On the far side, the landscape falls away towards the city, its tower blocks and spires, its networks of houses and parks, its familiar comforts. Then she notices a cloud
of dust hovering over the eastern edge of the city and where there should have been houses, there are only shifting areas of grey and brown, rising and falling like waves. A factory chimney collapses in on itself and joins the tide pushing westwards across the city.

Matthew!

Karen's house is to the south-west. Panic swallows her in a single gulp and she reels, reaching out for support that isn't there. Oh please God, let him be okay, let them all be okay. Karen, the kids. She'd give anything.
Anything
. She has to get to them before the tide crosses the city.

Her car is still on the verge, untouched by the passing carnage. There is no road to drive on but she rolls back down the grassy bank and onto the track where the road had been. She prays her tyres will last long enough as she drives on, skidding and fishtailing, her teeth clacking together as her body is flung around inside the car like a pea in a whistle, while her fingers grip tightly onto the steering wheel.

At last a slip road, and it still has tarmac. She takes it and enters the city, which is inexplicably going about its normal business. Mothers push buggies, workmen drill holes, shoppers shift bags from hand to hand, for all the world as if this was a normal day. Something in the dust, she decides. Some kind of psycho-active chemical that's keeping everyone sedated, unaware of what's going on. She rolls both her windows up and takes shallow breaths. She has to get across the city to her family. Let the rest of the world fend for itself.

She barrels down one way streets, runs red lights, leans on her horn and swerves around other cars. It seems to go on for hours. When she eventually arrives in Karen's street, she presses her forehead briefly to the steering wheel as if giving thanks to the car for delivering her safely this far.

She gets out of the car and everything seems so completely normal that she's almost willing to believe she imagined or hallucinated the whole thing. The street is entirely intact. But then she sees the dust cloud on the horizon, to the east.

She runs up the path and hammers on the door. ‘Karen, come on!'

Her sister opens the door. ‘Mel? What on earth?'

‘Get the kids, we've got to get out of here. Fast. Where's Matthew?'

‘Having lunch. What's going on? What's happened? Melanie! Talk to me! What's wrong?'

She pushes past Karen and runs through the house into the kitchen. The kids are at the table, Matthew strapped into a high chair, merrily decorating his face with food. She grabs him and tries to pull him out of the seat, forgetting to undo the straps. He squeals and starts to cry. ‘It's okay baby, it's okay. Mummy's here. It's going to be okay,' she says, and fumbles with the buckle.

‘Mel!' Karen's hand is on her arm. ‘Stop it. You're scaring him.'

Karen's children are staring at Melanie, wide-eyed and pale, food forgotten on their plates. ‘Now,' says Karen in her best no-fuss voice, ‘let Matthew finish his lunch and you come with me and tell me what's going on.' She peels Melanie away from Matthew and says to the kids, ‘Don't worry, Auntie Mel's not feeling well, but she'll be fine in a minute. Finish up your fish fingers now.' Karen leads her gently but firmly out of the kitchen.

She can't stay still but Karen forces her to sit down and explain. In a rush she tells her everything she's seen and Karen watches her, a frown deepening on her forehead.

‘And you believe we're in some kind of danger?'

Melanie pulls her sister outside to the street to show her the
dust cloud, which must surely be almost upon them. To the east the sky is a cloudless blue bowl. She spins around. Perhaps the tide has changed direction, come around to attack from another side. But the view is clear on all sides. A white bird glides overhead, charting the clarity and goodness of the air in a steady line from North to South. Karen is watching her closely. They need a higher place to look around, she realises. She runs back into the house and takes the stairs two at a time, Karen right behind her. She runs between the bedrooms, stumbling over toys and laundry to look out of all the windows.

‘Mel?'

‘Shh! Quiet!' she snaps. ‘Listen!'

The only sounds are of children playing, someone cutting their grass, the beep-beep of a lorry reversing in an adjoining street. Can they really be safe? She strains to make out the dull roar of demolition lurking under the surface. ‘I need to get Matthew,' she says, and starts for the stairs. She can hear him crying and Chloe singing to distract him, but it isn't working.

Karen stops her in the hallway. ‘I don't think you're in any state right now,' she says firmly. ‘Let me deal with him. I'm going to clear the lunch away, then we're going to have a proper talk.'

Too exhausted and bewildered to continue arguing, Melanie sits on the floor in the conservatory with her head in her hands and listens to Karen smoothing things over with the kids, joking and scolding and clattering dishes around.

Chloe and Nathan must have got over their argument. Nearly all of the Lego pieces have been used to build an eccentric, multi-coloured structure. Part house, part garage, it has ramps and archways, al fresco kitchens and attic bedrooms with tiny balconies. Melanie lies down flat on the floor and peers inside. Little Lego people move along the corridors, smiling. She thinks if she could make herself small enough, she would go and live in
there. Take Matthew with her, and maybe they'd not come back. Maybe they would be safe there.

She feels a tug on her hair and there is Matthew, come to find her. His hands are sticky and his face is freshly wiped and shiny pink. He grins at her. His new teeth are like tiny pearls in his pink gums. She hugs him, pressing his small body into her own, breathing in the smell of his hair, his skin, his unquestioning trust. When he gets bored and begins to protest she puts him down and he crawls towards the Lego building.

‘Careful,' she warns, worried he'll spoil his cousins' work.

But Matthew picks up a loose brick, then another, puts the first down on the floor and balances the second on top. He looks for her reaction and at first she's lost. Then she remembers herself, and what comes next.

Starting again.

After destruction comes construction, putting one piece on top of another. This simple act defines us. We are the builders. That is who we are and this is what we do. She always knew this but had somehow forgotten it. Remembering now, so suddenly and with such force, feels like something bursting inside her head, releasing the pressure that had been trapped there.

She smiles and claps for Matthew.

He imitates her, smacking his fat palms together and giggling then reaching for another brick, orange as a fish finger. This is important.

Readymade

Elaine was always big on the Domestic Goddess stuff, but horticulture defeated her. When we moved into our brand new marital home, the garden was a patch of thick, claggy clay that didn't drain and refused to support life. She tried her best, shovelling up great wet cubes of clay like oversized pieces of fudge, planting all kinds of doomed green things. She may as well have just taken them out back and shot them, it would've been kinder. As it was, we were treated to the slow but inexorable deaths of dozens of blameless shrubs through the patio windows, drooping, discoloured, dead. The trouble with living things is no matter how hard you try, they seldom behave as you want them to. They have agendas.

Elaine said a lot of things before she left. Hardly any of it made any sense. ‘You're empty, Ian,' she said. ‘I thought you were all, like, Zen or something. But you're completely hollow. There's nothing there under the surface. Nothing at all.'

Better than being full of shit, I thought, and told her I loved her.

‘You don't know the meaning of the word,' she said. ‘You don't even know it's a verb, a doing word.'

By this point I had no idea what she was talking about so I told her again that I loved her.

‘If you repeat any word often enough it becomes nothing more than a sound in your mouth. You might as well say Labrador or lavatory or, or… truffle!' She shouted that last word at me then she started laughing and shaking her head. ‘Ian,' she said when she'd calmed down and was standing in the hall, a
suitcase in each hand, ‘maybe there's someone out there who's right for you. It is an infinite universe after all. But that person is not me.' She laughed again, somewhat hysterically I thought, and slammed the door behind her. Funny girl.

I convinced myself I didn't need a relationship. The price was too high. But that was before I met Julie. She really renewed my faith in things. I'll miss her.

Maybe Elaine was right. I certainly feel empty now. I don't know how long I've been sitting here in the front room, anchored deep within the armchair. Could be minutes, could be days. Perhaps I'm hungry. Someone once told me that civilisation is only ever two missed meals away from anarchy. Or was it three? No matter. The point is, there are limits. Frankly, I'm amazed there isn't more anarchy in the world considering we're all just a few sandwiches short of mayhem.

I glance over to the corner of the room. A curl of blonde hair disrupts the pattern of the carpet. Such beautiful hair. Julie's lying face down with her legs twisted underneath her, arms flung out on either side. Her skin is still pink. Such lovely skin.

By the clock on the mantelpiece, it's nearly nine. I get up and turn on the telly. Bush fires in Australia, bombs in Iraq, by-elections in Huddersfield. It's impossible to know what to care about. I let it all wash over me. This act requires focus and clarity. The conclusions I've reached, the decisions I've taken, I have not taken lightly. It's a question of following through. To thine own self be true. That means not taking any shit, from anyone.

Outside, in Glenview Crescent, the day leaks away through a hole in the sky after another day of the sun failing to shine upon either a glen or a view for miles in any direction. Darkness slips in over the windowsills and falls to the floor, laying claim to the corners, gathering in the folds of the undrawn curtains. Traffic
grinds past on the street outside. You hardly ever see a human being out walking in Glenview: everyone arrives and leaves by car. The whole estate is a machine.

The News doesn't get any better and concludes with a half-hearted report of inconsequential weather wobbling sideways across the country. I'm definitely hungry now. I lever myself out of the armchair and go to the kitchen. Nothing much in the cupboards so I look in the freezer. I have one of those chest freezers, takes up nearly half the kitchen but stores a month's worth of food so I don't have to go out to the shops if I don't want to. It's definitely curry night. Chicken tikka masala with pilau rice and naan bread, it's all there in neat plastic wrappers. A few clicks and pings from the microwave and
voila
. Why anyone would want to bugger around with vegetables and raw meat when you can buy everything readymade, I will never understand.

Julie was the opposite of Elaine around the house – no cooking or cleaning but that never bothered me. Also, she was quiet. Not like most of the women I've known, can't bloody shut up for ten seconds some of them, drive a man mental with their constant yapyapyapping. Julie understood just being with someone, not talking shite all the time for the sake of it. I respected her for that. You've got to have respect in a relationship, or you may as well pack it in.

Things started to go wrong when it seemed like Julie started to lose respect for me. I don't understand how that happened, we didn't talk about it, and it wasn't anything she said. It was that look on her face, that look getting worse and worse until I couldn't stand it anymore, until tonight when I got home. There are always limits, always a line to be crossed. That's been hard to learn. I was always looking for the path of no resistance, without complications and it still pains me to think that maybe I've been
wrong. Maybe that route doesn't exist. But if I can think it, if I can almost smell it, then surely it has to? Otherwise, how could it even be in my head? As it was, me and Julie couldn't go on that way and there was no way she was leaving. It's not as if she gave me a choice.

I mop up the last of the orange curry sauce with a bit of naan and try to concentrate on the happy memories, the good times. That's what you're supposed to do when you lose someone, isn't it? But it just makes me feel worse and, to be honest, a little frisky. Not a good combination.

Our sex life was always strong, right up to the end when I would open my eyes and catch her looking at me that way. Before that though, she was always up for it. And she never complained if I wasn't in the mood.