The Actuality Read online

  Daniels pulls her across the pavement to a set of steep steps that lead down to a narrow alley.

  In the quiet shadows, he draws to a stop. She can feel the beat of his heart through his fingers. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, looking over his shoulder back up the stairs, and she glances behind too, half expecting to see the machine descending on its tracks. ‘I didn’t realise it had got this bad. We should never have come this way.’

  ‘Did it know who we were?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s the Tower. With the king moving in, the security has gone crazy. Hopefully that’s all it was.’

  He is still out of breath and she checks her own energy level to find that it has dropped sharply again. At this rate she may be obliged to make him keep his rash promise to carry her.

  As they turn the corner of the building, the space between the warehouses opens up into a harbour with elegant yachts moored to pontoons. New snow lies on the decks of the boats, their furled sales and the network of wooden walkways.

  ‘Ideally I wouldn’t have brought you this way either,’ Daniels says, ‘more cameras, but this time at least they’re here merely to protect rich people’s property. Just don’t touch anything, or you’ll set alarms off.’

  They skirt the basin, criss-crossing the water via little bridges, giving as wide a berth as possible to the ghostly sail ships and bobbing motor launches.

  In theory, Evie has only seen such things in the picture books kept on the bottom shelf of her husband’s library, acquired for her to learn about the world. But she has also a second and stronger association – a nagging feeling that she once sailed on such a yacht. In the memory, she is entrusted with the boat’s wheel and clings to it with a small hand while not letting go of her bonnet with the other. The responsibility terrifies her as she must steer without assistance, while tall figures, silhouetted against the bright sun, do complicated things with the rigging. With the sails fixed, a woman climbs down to sit beside her in the stern, the light gleaming on her beautiful face as she presses Evie to her and strokes her hair. Evie cradles the moment in her mind now, keeping its glow alive like a candle behind her palm, drawing from it the warmth she can. It is the only remembrance they gave her of a mother.

  She knows of course that it can’t be an actual memory because in it she is in a child’s body – it is an implant based possibly on something Evelyn herself once experienced. That knowledge doesn’t make her recall of the boat’s nauseous chopping motion, nor the blinding blue of the sky, seem any less real.

  Beyond the harbour, she and Daniels move through narrow streets lined with dishevelled shuttered shops. It is a couple of hours since they set out and dawn is breaking, bringing people out of stairwells and doorways – a wagoner trundling the morning milk, a brickie with his empty hod sloped against his shoulder, a yawning nurse in a tall white cap wheeling an electrocycle . . . but these bleary-eyed early risers have enough to worry about keeping the freezing air from creeping under their clothes, without paying attention to strangers.

  On the corner of a wide highway, where the wheeled traffic slips and slides, a vendor sells sugared tea from an urn at the rear of a horse-drawn cart.

  Daniels buys himself a mug, holding it in his stiff hands, allowing the steam to condense on his cheeks. Evie stands behind him, trying to make herself inconspicuous but nevertheless attracting the attention of the horse which startles her by putting its whiskered chin on her shoulder and breathing over her face.

  ‘Maisy’s curious about you, Miss,’ the man says. ‘Sure you won’t be fancying a wee tot yourself?’

  Evie shakes her head, nervously stroking the horse’s rough mane and patting his firm, warm neck. She has never touched an animal before and the vigour of life throbbing under its skin leaves her feeling like a sham.

  ‘You’ve made a friend there, you have!’ the man says, as the horse licks her cheek. ‘She likes sweet things.’

  The last stage of their journey is along a canal.

  Her energy levels are at critical. A small light which had been flashing amber in the corner of her vision turns solid red and she holds Daniels’s arm as she walks, resting against his side.

  It is a heavier cold in the shadows and he uses his free hand to draw his scarf up around his ears. ‘This is Limehouse Cut,’ he says, ‘we’re on the last leg. We’ll soon be in Bow. Think you can manage?’

  She nods weakly, while the nursery rhyme – ‘I do not know, says the great bell of Bow’ – rings in her head.

  The towpath, no more than six or seven feet wide, gives straight onto the water. She peers over nervously. The bright algae coating the surface casts a phosphorescent glow over the snow heaped on the bank.

  In places, narrowboats are moored to posts, twisted barbed wire protecting the occupants from incursion.

  Buildings line the towpath. Many were once apartments but are now derelict, boarded up and covered in graffiti.

  ‘Why does no one live in them any more?’ she asks. The place would be less scary, less ghostly, if there were signs of human occupation, a curtain at a window, the occasional light.

  ‘Oh there’ll be people living there all right, you just can’t see them, but they’d not be the sort we’d be wanting to meet!’

  Occasional road bridges cross over the water, the low headroom forcing Daniels to bend. Evie limps beside him, dragging her feet through the snow.

  A loud siren on the road above sounds and they look up sharply but it as quickly dies. Daniels sucks in a deep breath and glances over at her. ‘Not far now,’ he murmurs.

  She doesn’t have much more to give. Simon has not spoken for an hour and even then he was almost too faint for her to understand. All of her secondary systems are in standby.

  The morning light illuminates the upper walls of the buildings but at ground level, the air remains below freezing and the snow bears a brittle crust which cracks under her shoes.

  ‘What will you tell your daughter as to why we are here?’ Evie asks.

  ‘I’m not sure. It’s unfair to involve her more than we must. Less she knows the better.’ His breath clouds around his face, the wasteful warmth of it another of those little signs of being alive.

  ‘How long will we stay?’

  ‘Just time for you to rest. Is till evening long enough?’

  She nods. Rest, she thinks, what a pleasant notion. ‘A few hours will be sufficient,’ she says. Then after a pause, ‘You think they will come looking for us out here? You think they really want me so much?’

  ‘Having gone to the lengths they’ve gone to, I can’t see them giving up now. I think they will try to find Iz’s as somewhere I might take you. She’s fetched herself off-grid but no one can disappear completely. I guess it depends who they really are and what access they have to government databases.’

  ‘But he was police,’ she says.

  ‘He may have been, if the card wasn’t forged. But if he’d been properly on police business, he wouldn’t have come on his tod.’

  ‘Maybe he was working alone and now that he’s dead, the threat is over.’

  ‘It’s possible. But then how would he have known about you, if others weren’t in on it?’

  Evie is still struggling to comprehend how it is she has become so important to whoever these people are, but the evidence is abundant and she trusts Daniels’s judgement. Simon’s fear that she would end up under the auctioneer’s hammer was way off the mark; rather she realises that she is a black-market commodity like illegal ivory from an extinct elephant or rhino. Better for her if she’d been slain in the apartment. Got it over with. Better for her if she could have climbed onto her husband’s funeral pyre like an Indian princess and been burned to ashes beside his body. ‘Where is Matthew’s cottage?’ she asks, making an effort to lift her spirits. Talking consumes only a little energy and distracts her from the demons inside.

  ‘Out near a village called Little Wotton.’

  ‘Little Wotton,’ she says. ‘I
t sounds quaint.’

  ‘It’s quaint all right. It’s small and basic and the roof leaks but it has solar power and a well and it will give us time to decide our next move.’

  ‘It doesn’t strike me as his sort of thing.’ She can only imagine Matthew in the climate-controlled apartment and its well-ordered garden. And now laid out as a corpse on his own mattress.

  ‘It wasn’t. He bought it as a gift for Evelyn because she was so taken by the country around those parts. He was going to present it as a wedding gift, but then that didn’t happen and the only person who has gone there since is myself to make sure it doesn’t fall down.’

  While they talk they completely miss the small boys, a pair of twelve-year olds, following. Evie hears the faint snap of a twig under the snow. Looking behind, she squeezes Daniels’s elbow and they turn to face them.

  The boys are dressed in oversized jumpers belted at the waist, and torn jeans tucked into army boots. Their pale, malnourished little faces are fringed with soft curly hair. For a moment she wonders if they are girls dressed up.

  ‘Got any money, mister?’ one says, the voice scratchy and high-pitched. She would have felt pity for them, having a soft spot for Dickensian orphans, but she has spied that they are hiding behind their backs lengths of wood.

  Daniels shakes his head. ‘Get lost, lads,’ he says, drawing himself up to his full height, ‘we’ve nothing for you.’ Gripping Evie by the wrist, he takes a step back.

  The boys glance at one another. Surprise has been lost and they need to adapt their plan. They bring their weapons around – pieces of two by two, one with nails in the end and the other wrapped with some kind of electrical tape to form a primitive cattle prod. One of the boys puts his fingers to his lips and whistles. The shrill sound pierces the damp air, rebounding off the blank windows of the abandoned apartments.

  Daniels pulls her against him and, half-turning so that he can keep an eye on the boys, leads her away along the canal path. She leans on his arm like a cripple, her feet dragging in the snow, slurring a channel. If it comes to it, she could achieve a final burst of energy. She has her fast sprint – one respect at least in which she is superior to Evelyn. But she’d not make it much beyond fifty yards before she was spent.

  Three more boys slip from a doorway of the dilapidated block ahead. Two are a similar size to the ones behind and armed likewise with handmade weapons. The third is older – tall and gangly with a pillar-box mouth – and carries a pole topped with a serrated spike like a harpoon. He tilts his head and the group fans out, blocking the path in front and behind. He folds his arms and grins, leering at Evie, licking the gaps in his teeth. There is something wrongly developed in his lumpish jaw and swollen lips.

  The smaller boys close in, holding their weapons out in bony fists.

  ‘Stay behind me,’ Daniels murmurs.

  They stand with their backs to the wall. It is not much of a defensive position and if it comes to a fight, he will have to let her go to fend them off. The seconds tick by, the boys glancing from one to another. They are like hounds: if they rush together, their chances are improved but at least one of them will be taken down.

  ‘Clear off!’ A small man, not much larger than a boy himself, his head oddly narrow as if it was clamped or squashed as a baby, emerges from the shadows. He holds a shotgun at his waist, the stubby barrels levelled on the group. He slides it over their faces and brings it to bear on the chest of the tall one who is evidently the leader. ‘Go‘n,’ he says, ‘mek yer move.’ It’s as if the shape of his head causes the words to come out squeezed.

  This older lad stares back, unwilling to concede, before muttering a command, and the smaller boys shrink away. Walking backwards, he slinks into the building, holding his fingers up in a three-fingered gesture of contempt, his strange mouth wide and disdainful.

  Evie and Daniels are left alone on the towpath with their rescuer.

  ‘Thank you,’ Daniels says.

  ‘Ah, think nothing of it – they’re jest a set a bleedin’ cowards, pickin’ on the weak.’ He tucks the gun inside his jacket. ‘Shem they didn’t make a fight of it, it’d have been an excuse to clean out a rats’ nest and I’d have enjoyed dropping thet skinny twat in the canal. Yur Iz’s old man, ain’t yur? I saw yer over last night. You should know we lek after our own ‘ere.’

  He begins to walk away, then stops and turns. ‘Oh, by the way if yur in the mood, come to the yard behind the Pissin’ Pig at noon.’ He points beyond a barrier constructed from dented car panels and driftwood blocking the path ahead, with a narrow way through hinged like a pair of gates.

  ‘Tell ‘em yer with Billy,’ the man shouts after them. ‘A geezer frum Wulthamstow with a bulldog the size of an ox is fancyin’ it aginst all comers.’

  ‘What was the matter with his face?’ Evie asks, as soon as she and Daniels are on their own.

  ‘Yeah, it wasn’t too pretty.’

  ‘Did someone do it to him?’

  ‘More likely born that way. A birth defect caused by toxins in the water from all the plastic and other rubbish. No wonder no one lives as long as they used to.’

  They pass under a sign dangling from a lead pipe: YOU ARE ENTERING LEA RIVER ESTATE – WHITES ONLY. Evie looks at Daniels for an explanation but he huddles down into his coat as if he is trying to make himself as small as possible.

  ‘What does—?’

  ‘Evie, don’t say anything,’ he murmurs. ‘Just keep walking.’

  11

  In the distance a pair of enormous metal frames loom over the trees, the sharp morning light, now that the mist has cleared, jabbing between the iron pillars and struts.

  ‘They’re old gas holders,’ Daniels says. ‘It’s how they used to store energy. Iz’s place is on the right.’

  His daughter lives in what appears to be a semi-abandoned block where the canal joins the river. They cross to the entrance through a patchwork of bare allotments, the icy clodded soil caked with snow. He helps Evie up the internal stairs, letting her pause on the landings.

  ‘Does she know who I am?’ Evie asks, on the last but one, as she lets her energy level stabilise before the final set.

  ‘She knew of you, but it was a long time ago, and she’s probably forgotten.’

  She shuffles along the last stretch of corridor and holds onto the wall as Daniels knocks on his daughter’s door. From the other side they hear the scuttle of rapid footsteps.

  It swings open in a rush. ‘At last,’ the woman says, ‘I thought something . . .’ Her voice fades, as she takes in that her father has returned.

  ‘I’m sorry Iz, but it’s an emergency. I’ll explain inside.’

  His daughter remains in the doorway but does not prevent them from squeezing past.

  ‘You came with Troy?’ Iz asks. Her face is expressive of her efforts to make sense of things. ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘We’re on our own,’ Daniels says.

  Evie glances from one to the other. There are two conversations going on and neither father nor daughter seem aware.

  Iz pays attention to Evie for the first time. ‘So, you brought “it”,’ she says, then, glaring at Daniels, ‘what do you mean you’re on your own – where is he?’

  ‘Where is who?’

  ‘Troy,’ she shouts. ‘Where is Troy?’ Tears leak from her eyes and she wipes at them angrily. ‘I’ve been waiting here for hours, not knowing what was going on. You have no idea what I’ve been through. These people are not to be messed with. Is he with the hova?’

  ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about,’ Daniels replies, ‘but I’m sure everything is fine. Evie needs to rest. Can she use your back room?’

  Iz drops onto a stained two-person sofa, knocking aside a low table. ‘I don’t understand,’ she mutters, ‘first he doesn’t answer calls and now you’re here . . .’ She tries to think things through, fiddling agitatedly with the cuffs of her all-in-one.

  ‘Iz,’ Daniels says, ‘we’ll sort it
out. There’ll be a simple explanation.’ He turns to Evie. ‘I’ll show you where you can go.’

  He leads her down a narrow passage crowded with coats into a box room just wide enough for a narrow bed. A large holdall fills the remaining floor. Evie squeezes around it and peers out through a grimy window onto a fire escape. Beyond are a pair of canal locks, the river slopping over swollen gates held together by rusting iron plates.

  She undoes her wet coat and passes it to Daniels who hangs it on a hook. She then sits on the bed and pulls off her hat and unwinds her scarf, releasing her hair, which unfolds flatly over her shoulders.

  Daniels takes out her transformer and cable from his backpack and plugs it into the socket beneath the wardrobe. He passes her the cable. Past considerations of propriety, she lifts her jumper in front of him and peels back a strip of skin below the jut of her ribs to expose a gold-plated socket and twists it clock-wise to lock. She hasn’t charged herself in this way for years and the sudden rush of electricity, stronger than through the wireless arrangement in the apartment, kicks her in the spine, sharply lifting her chin.

  For ten or more seconds she remains seated stiffly, eyes closed, letting the power flood through. Then her body slumps.

  Daniels lifts her legs onto the mattress and props a pillow under her head. He raises her heels, removing her wet shoes. Finding a nanoflec blanket on top of the wardrobe, he draws the lightweight gauzy material over her feet to her waist. These gestures are unnecessary for her comfort but the kindness underpinning them warms her from within.

  ‘You’re safe,’ he says quietly. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be with Iz. Nothing will happen to you here.’ He gazes down at her face and she opens her eyes and smiles back, the electricity coursing through her inducing a trance-like grin.

  Something is not right, Simon says, as soon as they are alone.

  I know, she mutters, wishing to put herself under, but reluctantly staying with it, listening to Daniels return to the other room.