The Actuality Page 18

  ‘There is a gate in the corner. The code for it is in the office behind the corner door. New curators are sent to find it.’

  She follows his instructions and discovers a number amateurishly taped to the wall. Returning, she types it into the keypad and a glass panel swings inward. A second later he is beside her, so close his breath lifts the hairs on her neck. However much he is determined to conceal it, Evie senses that he is terrified.

  She lets him begin to steer her across the concrete. But almost immediately, reaching the limits of his domain – the extent of the floor that has been in his line of sight – he glances about indecisively.

  For a few moments they stand marooned.

  ‘We should use the back stairs,’ she says, forced to take the lead.

  Outside, at the foot of the service ramp, David stares around. Despite his attempt to be brazen, it is transparent that he’s going through a more extreme form of what Evie had on leaving the apartment. Why had she expected more? His world has been even more unnatural than hers – just the interior of one show space after another. She had hoped that a benefit of rescuing him, apart from appeasing her conscience over deserting the mannequins, would be gaining a powerful ally. It is beginning to look instead as though she has encumbered herself with an overgrown child – one that is not even prepared to admit it needs her help.

  ‘We’re soon going to be among lots of people,’ she says, keeping it simple. ‘We must not draw attention.’ Despite his great size, there is much about him which is naive. She knows so little about him and how he will behave out in the world. What if he panics and becomes violent? Hurts her or attacks people? She could get away from him, perhaps, if she has enough warning, but what if he behaves irrationally or unpredictably? Her failure to spot the psychopath lurking within the geeky Maplin has been a warning of her lack of experience.

  ‘Stick close to me,’ she says. She has never been in a leadership position and the responsibility has been thrust upon her without preparation. He stiffens and peers at her in the gloom, and for a moment they stare at one another.

  Until he blinks and looks down.

  Leaving the museum grounds, they reach a road. An alarm sounds behind them. He tenses, ready to run, and she grips his arm. ‘No,’ she says, ‘that is how they will spot us.’ She has learnt at least a little since all this started.

  From between the dark trees, a cyclist sweeps between them, bell tinkling, nearly knocking them down, and he is left quaking. The confident demeanour that he maintained in the museum, the armour he presented to the world, nearly completely fallen away. How long will she be able to carry him like this before he gets them both caught?

  They cross back over the river, making their way to the town centre.

  A police hova glides up behind and she slips her arm through his in an attempt to be inconspicuous.

  The hova passes and she relaxes. Brazening it out has succeeded. Maybe everything will work out given a chance.

  Then the hova descends sharply to block the pavement, and doors on both sides shoot back.

  Evie drags David off the path across the grass. Fortunately, once he is in motion, he moves powerfully.

  They leap a low timber barrier, passing between a pair of cottages, and run down a winding narrow path but after fifty yards find it closed off by a tall wall.

  Behind them, their pursuers race into view.

  Fear swamps her. After everything she has been through, in particular after Matthew and Daniels have both been lost while trying to protect her, she is still going to be caught.

  Then she feels David’s hands around her waist and before she can figure out what he is doing, he lifts her eight feet into the air and deposits her on the top of the wall, placing her between the fragments of glass wedged into the cement. He takes a couple of steps back and vaults, catching the top brick, hauling himself over and landing on the other side. Within seconds, he takes hold of her again and, raising her high enough to clear her legs, lowers her smoothly to the ground at his side.

  He then leads her splashing across the darkness of the flooded cricket ground beyond.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, breathless and amazed, peering up at him as they run through icy water pooled around the pale wickets, trying to read his face as it bobs along above hers in the dark. To understand afresh who it is she is with.

  26

  Three hours later the train deposits Evie and David at King’s Cross. It is just after midnight. Maplin told her she only had to walk a few yards to St Pancras to get the train to Dover but, standing outside it, looking up at the sooty brick facade and broken windows, she discovers that it shut a year or more ago. There’s a tower on its corner, like a mini-Big Ben, but its clock face is missing leaving a hole in the brickwork like a gouged eye. She reads on a peeling notice that services to the coast now leave from the other side of the river.

  She takes David to the entrance to the underground railway but the gates are pulled across. Services in winter no longer run after dark, after the pumps stop. Daniels had told her as much.

  Evie needs to concentrate. She needs to know what she knows.

  The truth is, she is paranoid about asking something stupid and drawing attention. Is the distance walkable? She doubts it – she knows how huge London is. And anyway she’d have no idea even in which direction to start. She wanders from the tube entrance, passing the mouths of takeaway outlets gushing fumes.

  David follows tamely, peering about, hiding his nerves behind a show of bravura – still reluctant to admit weakness but sensible enough at least to go along with her decisions, guesswork though many of them are.

  On the plus side, people back away on seeing him, providing her with more space than she’d have ever been given on her own.

  She leads them into an unlit passage, away from spying security cameras for the first time since they disembarked. A breeze rustles the litter around their feet. It is a hazardous place to be at any time of day, but David close behind her gives her courage.

  The passage opens onto a side road in which waits a rickshaw driver smoking a long-stemmed pipe. She has seen these machines in Lizzie Long graphic novels, a bound collectors’ edition of which was in Matthew’s library. Lizzie Long and the Shah of Persia’s cat, Lizzie Long and the Great Wall, Lizzie Long and the Velvet Flower. Lizzie in army shirt with epaulettes and khaki shorts, always knowing what to do . . . always someone to be reckoned with.

  Evie steps into the street and the driver removes his pipe and spits a string of phlegm into the gutter where it lies, glowing, giving the illusion of pulsating on the surface of the dirty snow.

  They eye each other speculatively. He is appraising her as a commercial proposition. She’s feeling like she’s entered the pages of a Lizzie Long picture book.

  ‘What would you charge to go to Waterloo station?’ she asks.

  He tilts his head, assessing how much there is of her under her coat – how much work she will be to tug along. ‘Thirtydollarmissy,’ he mutters, his lips barely parting beneath his moustache.

  Thirty dollars, she repeats to herself, thinking about how much money she has left and what she can afford.

  David emerges from the passage behind her, dwarfing the fragile vehicle. The driver backs along the kerb. ‘Noride, noride,’ he snarls, flapping his hands.

  ‘You need to take both of us,’ she says, hoping that his sudden reluctance is just part of the negotiation.

  ‘Noride,’ he repeats, but although he wags a yellowed fingernail up at David, she senses that there is a price he will be willing to accept.

  ‘One hundred,’ she says, ‘for the two,’ holding up two fingers.

  ‘Twohundred.’

  ‘One,’ she insists, buoyed by David’s presence, folding her arms, attempting to be resolute despite how irresolute she feels. How would Daniels have done this? He always gave the impression he knew what was fair and that people knew he knew.

  ‘Onefiftyandnotabloodycentlessmissy,’ the d
river hisses, hunching his shoulders and turning his back on them.

  It is a lot for the addition of a second passenger but she has little choice. If this continues, they’ll start to attract attention.

  They clamber into the back. David takes up two-thirds of the narrow cushion, squashing her against the struts.

  The driver climbs onto the cycle attached to the front and they leave the kerb, slowly at first, wheels slipping, but gaining pace.

  As they tilt around the corner, she glances behind through the little window in the rear of the hood. It has become a habit, checking her tail. She sees nothing, but it is still difficult to relax.

  Their progress is accompanied by a string of complaints. ‘Một cô gái ma và một cậu bé béo . . .’ the driver wheezes. ‘Nói về việc mang lại xui xẻo.’ The tirade is louder on the slippery downhill when he has the breath and can freewheel with his feet clear of the pedals. They hit the uphill again, ‘Lừa!’, he repeats bitterly, ‘lừa!’, and as they meet a broad junction, he sneezes loudly into his loose sleeve, muttering what could have been ‘sly bitch’.

  He seems so angry that maybe the deal she struck is better than she’d supposed – although she is also suspicious of the original price. Without David’s presence, he could have been intending to drive her somewhere isolated to rob her.

  He would have had a surprise, though, when she’d fought back.

  With the two of them in the rear, the machine rides at a list like a poorly loaded dhow. David’s shoulder presses against Evie. She can feel his warmth.

  What would Lizzie Long have made of events, ever scornful of male assistance as she was? Her only companion in her stories was a kimono-clad twelve-year-old rescued from an orphanage in Kyoto, expert at both the tea ceremony and with the deadly needle-pointed tanto, one of which she kept concealed in her sash at all times.

  While the streets are relatively clear, the kerbs are crowded with wrecks, flat on their axles as if ploughed into the tarmac – the legacy of bio-fuels growing scarce and reliable electricity becoming unaffordable for most.

  The rickshaw builds momentum, steaming over junctions irrespective of traffic signals. A small solar-powered car, similar to Maplin’s, halts suddenly ahead of them and their driver is forced to swerve. He passes it with an inch to spare, leaning down to knuckle the window. ‘Bạn nghĩ bạn đang lái xe gì?’ he shouts, kicking the door with the toe of his sandal. ‘Một chiếc xe bò trong một lĩnh vực?’

  David chuckles, his shoulder rocking hers. It is the first time she has seen him smile. His face is swooningly beautiful, that has been her impression from the start, but only now does she begin to find it likeable.

  ‘What is it?’ she asks, smiling back, suddenly less alone.

  ‘He called him “driver of bullock cart”,’ he murmurs.

  ‘You understood that?’

  ‘I try to figure out what I can – it was useful to know what the people who came to look at me were saying. I got to know Vietnamese quite well.’

  Evie is astonished. To have taught himself languages without books, purely through observing visitors to his exhibitions, puts her own ineffectual attempts at self-education, when she had a whole library to hand, deeply in the shade.

  ‘What else did he say?’

  ‘Something about ghosts, I think because of your “moon” skin.’ David chuckles again. ‘Something about marriage also, but for that you’ll need to play your cards right, apparently he has two very ungrateful wives already and the last thing he needs is a third.’

  Evie stares back. The light from a roadside fire flickers over his cheek. In the last few minutes, he has said more than in the whole of the preceding three hours and something of the confidence and charisma she glimpsed from the other side of his enclosure in the museum is re-emerging.

  27

  At Waterloo, Evie and David wait for the morning train, hiding in the end cubicle in the men’s latrines. The locked, cramped space is comforting – they are safe for a while, at least.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asks, surprising her with his interest. It is the first personal question he has asked.

  ‘From here in London,’ she replies, although all that seems like a very long time ago.

  ‘What is London like?’

  ‘I loved my home. I was happy there. The rest of it – all of this,’ she glances about them, ‘I’d rather forget.’

  ‘I heard the curators say you killed your owner.’

  Evie tenses. ‘That is untrue. What is true is that I killed the man who did kill my . . . my husband, and I wouldn’t have even done that if I hadn’t been forced to.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ he says, meekly, ‘I did not mean to make you angry.’

  ‘You didn’t,’ she says, although her voice is still raised. ‘It is just that people are telling lies. And the truth is the opposite of what they are saying.’

  ‘So after what happened, you had to leave?’ he asks, his gentle tone soothing her.

  ‘I had to leave,’ she confirms.

  ‘I was driven through the centre of London once. I was being taken to the airport. We stayed the night in a vehicle park because the plane we were going to fly in needed repairing, but they did not let me out. I was kept in the vehicle. They never took risks like that.’ He has a disarming way of talking, the rhythm of his speech without inflexion, almost childlike, not unintelligent but completely without artifice.

  ‘Where else have you been?’ she asks.

  ‘Lots of places – all over the globe – although they all seemed the same. Now everywhere I go is different.’

  This makes Evie grin, a feeling of youthfulness overcoming her. ‘For me, too. For forty years I knew just the one place and in the last week I have witnessed enough of the rest of the world to last a lifetime.’

  ‘It can’t be all like this,’ he says. ‘Some of it must be good.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she says, thinking about the cottage and her little room painted in watery green. She slides down until she is sitting on the floor with her back to the wall.

  ‘Where are you going to go?’ he asks. The question makes her realise that she has not confided in him even the smallest detail of her plan, while he, for his part, has been obliged to place his full trust in her. She, who knows only a little more about how the world works than he does.

  ‘I was created in imitation of someone,’ she begins. ‘A copy of a woman my husband had been in love with but who’d tragically died. Now that I’m on my own, I’m trying to find this woman’s father. I don’t know whether he is alive or dead and if he is alive whether he will want to see me, or even recognise whom I am intended to be.’

  In the harsh light falling from the ceiling bulb on the other side of the door, she perceives that he is examining her, trying to process the bizarre motivation behind her existence.

  ‘Where is this man?’ David asks, prompting her after she has been silent for a while.

  ‘He lives in Austria, in a village in the mountains, or at least he did when his daughter was alive. I have his address from a letter.’ She pauses and smiles faintly to herself. ‘I guess it sounds like a lot of long shots.’

  ‘I think he will want to see you,’ he says. ‘And will appreciate you for what you are.’

  ‘That’s what I hope.’ She breathes out a short sigh, wanting to believe it but wondering whether she is completely deluded.

  ‘Do you wish me to come?’ he asks hesitantly.

  She nods. ‘Yes, I wish you to come.’ She cannot read his expression because his face is in shadow.

  Is this really what he wants too? Does he realistically have any other options? Is she mad not to uncouple herself from him at the earliest opportunity?

  They hear the door to the corridor squeal and bang against the wall. Evie hurriedly gets up from the floor so as to avoid being glimpsed under the three-quarter-length door, and retreats to the back.

  The man on the other side zips and leaves. The do
or bangs again. The tension departs from her spine and she slumps against the wall by his head.

  ‘I will come with you,’ he whispers, resuming their conversation, his breath caressing her ear.

  Emerging from the latrines half an hour later, they cross the concourse, passing a massive tele-display mounted above the departures board.

  Evie pauses to watch, attracted by the sports coverage of women charging around in the mud with a ball. All of this is still so new to her. Then the item suddenly terminates and she is staring up at a twenty-foot-sized video close-up of her own face in which she timidly scans her surroundings, looking first right and then left, and then straight ahead as if searching the high station walls for someone she has lost. Believing that they have her on camera, she freezes, before realising that the clip was taken from her first visit to the Hawking Museum. Reassuringly, her appearance has since been transformed by the wig and change in clothes.

  ‘People are beginning to look at you,’ David says and he takes her by the arm and draws her away. But as he does so, all she can think of is what she wouldn’t give to be able to visit her fool-self of just a few days ago, and coach her out of all the stupid things she was about to do.

  On reaching Dover, they need to change to the train that will take them through the tunnel.

  Evie and David cross the station and enter under a stone arch into a cavernous embarkation hall. Grand once, several of the high windows are broken and a piercing wind enters through those not boarded over. Melting snow drips from the roof to form pools on the cracked cement.

  Little attention is paid to policing the border on the English side, just as Maplin had told her, and they walk through past a guard huddled at the rear of his box.

  But French controls, sited here in England, are more thorough.

  They join the queue snaking back from the French gate, leaning against the stained plaster. They keep their eyes down but with David standing an inch or two taller than the next-largest man, it is not easy to blend in. If only I could shrink him, she thinks, or (feeling guilty for contemplating it) somehow slip away.