Thieving Fear

NINETEEN

'Is Charlotte in there?' Catching sight of her at the back of the lift, Glen waved a handful of papers. 'Pass these to her,' he said and called 'They're for your cousin.' Someone in the front rank that was pressing everybody else towards the walls accepted the documents, and as the doors struggled together against the mass of bodies Glen's attention drifted left of Charlotte. His eyes widened, and he reached out as if he wished he could rescue her from the crowd. Then the doors shut, though only just, and the cage packed with bodies set about ascending, so sluggishly that she could have imagined it was being dragged down and in danger of sinking into the earth. People were relaying the papers to her over their shoulders, since there wasn't space for them to turn around. Were there three pages or four? As they arrived beside her she saw they were bordered in black. She was about to take them when the person whose bones were digging into her left side did, and she noticed that his hand was covered more with soil than flesh.

She couldn't retreat even an inch. She could only watch as he transferred the papers to his other shrivelled hand so as to grasp her face and twist it towards him. When her eyes strained to look away he released her and gestured at the doors, scattering earth like black dandruff on the shoulders of the woman in front of him. The lift shuddered to a halt and the doors staggered apart. For a breath, if she had been able to draw one, Charlotte thought only darkness was waiting beyond them. Then earth piled in, flinging everyone helplessly together on the way to filling her eyes and nose and mouth. Her companion seemed quite at home in it, because his fingers wriggled wormlike through it to fasten on her hand and pull her deeper into the suffocating dark.

She fought to cry out, but her mouth was gagged with earth. She strove to free herself from the scrawny clutch, but she was pinioned by bodies that had ceased to move and the one that should have. She tried to suck in a breath, but it consisted of earth too. Was she dreaming out of utter desperation that she'd managed to produce a sound? It was feeble and flattened, muffled by distance or worse. Nevertheless it seemed to travel past the blackness, and she put all her dwindling energy into repeating it. This time it succeeded in wakening her, and she threw out her hand to rid it of the sensation of being held. It collided with a barrier in front of her at considerably less than arm's length.

There was nothing like that so near her bed, and certainly no wall. She wasn't in her flat; she wasn't even on the roof. She'd thought spending the night on the padded sunlounger would rid her of the sense of being shut in before she had to travel to Hugh's – her four rooms had never seemed so oppressively small and dim, or even slightly until last night – but she hadn't slept much. She'd kept being wakened by a smell of earth and having to remind herself that it belonged to the plant-pots by the lounger. Each time she'd opened her eyes the night sky had looked far too close, a black lid above her face. Once it had grown lighter she'd managed to doze fitfully, and then it had been time to get ready to leave. Nothing had relieved the claustrophobia that felt as if her surroundings were smaller than her head: not showering in the glass cell of the bathroom cubicle rendered nearly opaque by steam, nor walking down the narrow street overshadowed by tenements to the main road that might have seemed wider without the traders' stalls and the crowds around them, nor the bus crammed with shoppers, nor the multitude of Saturday commuters at Kings Cross. As for the train to Yorkshire, it consisted of just two carriages for a journey of over two hours. Her seat and the one in front trapped her in a space so restricted that she had to slant her knees towards the window in order to press them together. She was further pinned by the side of the carriage and by her neighbour in the aisle seat, who must have been startled by Charlotte's nightmare cry. Charlotte opened her aching eyes and turned to make some apology, but the seat was unoccupied.

It was the only empty one in sight. When had her skinny neighbour deserted it? As soon as she was seated Charlotte had closed her eyes in an attempt to ignore the lack of space, and so she hadn't observed her seatmate, she had only felt the gaunt shape settle next to her. They must have been so eager to descend that they'd advanced into the foremost carriage as a station closed around the train. It was Leeds, where Charlotte had to change.

None of the disembarking passengers looked particularly thin, but locating her next train was surely more important. As she hurried to the nearest monitor a faint quake rose through the display, bone-white letters on a background black as earth. A train to Huddersfield was leaving platform thirteen in three minutes. Charlotte sprinted up an escalator towards the expansively arched roof and along a wide corridor with a view across the city to the moors. Despite the spaciousness, she felt as if her nightmare were still cramping her mind as she dashed down a second escalator to her train.

Was she the solitary passenger? The nearest carriage was deserted. Half the seats faced forwards, to be confronted across the midpoint of the carriage by their twins. Charlotte sat there to take advantage of the space between the halves, although it rather made her feel as if she were facing an unseen audience instead of just her overnight bag. She was regaining her breath and wondering why her brief sprint should have made it hard to breathe when the train jerked forwards.

A guard came calling for tickets, to little if any effect elsewhere on the train, and then Charlotte was alone. Trees and hedges blotted out the sky before the train was engulfed by a tunnel – no, just a bridge no more extended than the nervous breath she took. Several bridges that felt like threats of carrying her underground preceded the first station, where the train opened its doors for nobody visible and emitted a string of beeps as shrill as an alarm to indicate they were closing. As fields partly overcome by suburbs spread out on both sides, Charlotte did her best to concentrate on the sky. Was she apprehensive about seeing Rory? She couldn't understand why else the journey was making her so tense. The train halted at another station, and as it shrilled she was tempted to make for the doors. Of course they were too distant, and her nervousness was unforgivably irrational. Or perhaps she was right to take the sound as a warning, because the train had barely left the station when it plunged into the dark.

The tunnel shut her in with the rows of empty yet unfriendly seats and the vista of their equivalent beyond the doorways that kept rocking out of alignment between the carriages. The further rows appeared to be squeezed together like the segments of an accordion robbed of air. Why did she need to imagine that anybody sitting there would have to be unnaturally thin? The blackened hand that twitched between the seats as if responding to her thought must be the reflection of a crack in the wall of the tunnel, just a small crack, not an indication that the place was unsafe. The wall was rushing past almost as close to the side of the carriage as she was, with a muffled roar that made her ears feel boxed in. Perhaps a wider passage would have been unable to support the weight of the earth under which it was buried. She was far too capable of sensing all that weight, which felt poised to squeeze any possibility of breathing out of her. How long might the tunnel be? It had walled her up for over a minute, enough time for her to lose count of her nervously shallow breaths, but there was no sign of daylight, nothing ahead except seats thrashing back and forth like sleepers unable to escape a nightmare. Why had she let herself be taken on this helpless ride? If Rory was in a coma he wouldn't even know that Hugh and his cousins were there. The thought made her feel spied upon, grubby with guilt at having had it. She was too far into her journey to turn back from visiting the hospital. She could bear the rest of the tunnel, even if its walls seemed to be blackening the light that spilled from the carriage, absorbing it as a preamble to draining the light inside. The tunnel wasn't about to cave in, crushing the train like a tin can, shattering the windows, packing the carriages with earth and debris. The notion would have been easier to shake off if it hadn't felt underlain with secret glee, as if somebody were wishing it on Charlotte, anticipating it with wicked delight. She gave in to glancing over the back of her seat, but the others were owning up to no presence. As she faced forwards again a lanky shape leaped into view beyond the lurching doors. Its scrawny outstretched limbs were branches. It was a bush at the side of the track, and it was sunlit. The train had escaped from the tunnel.

She had been underground for less than three minutes, but she felt as if they or their stifling confinement hadn't released her – felt surrounded by a darkness all the more claustrophobic for its invisibility. When fields beneath a sky piled with shades of grey began to flank the carriage, the openness seemed ready to immure her in another tunnel. Whenever the train slowed, her breath did too. It was only halting at a series of small towns as yellow as sand, some of them dominated by factories. Each time it announced its departure with the shrill alarm, she dug her fingertips into the upholstery to resist fleeing to the doors. All this appropriated most of half an hour until Huddersfield raised lofty chimneys beside the track and gathered an industrial estate around it, corrugated metal buildings that resembled the outsize houses of a gentrified shanty town. In another minute Charlotte was able to liberate herself from the train.

She didn't want to be shut in a taxi. Hugh's number rang as she came in sight of a low huddle of them outside the station, and she loitered beside them as the simulated bell continued to ring. She was wondering if he'd gone out, though surely he would have taken his mobile with him, when he gasped 'Charlotte.'

'Are you at home?'

'Where else would I be?'

The question sounded embittered or worse, not at all like Hugh, but she thought it best to pretend she hadn't noticed. 'I'm at the station. How do I get to you?'

'Aren't there any cabs?'

'More than enough, but I'd sooner walk.'

'A cab's quicker. It won't cost much.'

'Is Ellen there?'

'No.' With equal bewilderment Hugh said 'Why?'

'Then there's no rush, is there? I thought we were all going to the hospital together.' At once she felt sufficiently guilty to add 'Or has there been a change? Is Rory conscious?'

'He wasn't an hour ago. He hasn't been yet.'

'But you've seen him. How is he otherwise?'

'I don't know. I've been waiting for you two like you said.'

'Since yesterday?'

'He wouldn't care either way, would he? He wouldn't have known I was there.'

She heard dismay bordering on desperation. She oughtn't to make him feel worse about his brother. 'Let's talk about it when we're together,' she said. 'Which way are you from here?'

'Empire Street.'

'I know the address, Hugh.' She didn't understand why he'd taken several seconds to prepare to say it. 'I'm asking how I get there,' she said.

'Up the hill.'

Charlotte assumed this referred to the road that climbed past a small factory, dilapidated but not defunct. 'I see it, and then?'

'Is something up with your phone?'

'Not that I'm hearing. I go up the hill, and then . . .'

'So it's me.'

'Your phone? It'll just be a crossed –' Charlotte said, having grown aware of another voice in her ear. Before she could identify its few muddy words or distinguish more than how pleased it seemed to be with itself, the line went dead.

She was almost irritated enough to call Hugh back. Instead she went to the last taxi in the queue. How could just stooping to the vehicle make her feel shut in? Even asking for directions did, though the driver was almost maternally anxious to help. So did climbing the steep road towards a blackened sky that looked pregnant with a storm and all the lower for it, and following the road across a bridge around which the air was thick with the fumes and the rumble of four lanes of traffic beneath, and tramping along a protracted stretch walled on one side by a factory while trees above a wall overhung the other. At least the route wasn't crowded; indeed, there was never anyone behind her whenever she failed to resist the temptation to glance back. She felt especially ridiculous for doing so as a narrow side street brought her to her cousin's house.

It was the near end of the terrace that formed the right side of Empire Street. Clothes of all colours drooped on lines in front gardens as small as the sandstone houses. Hugh's had no clothesline, just an abundance of weeds bordering the cramped mossy path and raising their ragged heads from its cracks. Charlotte was hauling the unhinged gate aside when a plump woman in a sari stepped out of the next house. 'How is Mr Lucas?' she said. 'Have you seen him?'

'Not yet. We're going soon.'

'Where are you going, please?'

'To the hospital.'

'Please forgive me. I did not know this. Could you say that Mrs Devi was asking about him?'

'I will,' Charlotte said and wished she didn't have to add 'If he knows we're there.'

Mrs Devi lifted stubby hands beside her face as though to shape her mouth rounder. 'What has happened to him?'

'He was in some kind of accident on his way here.'

'He was run over? I forever tell the children –'

'No, in his van.'

Mrs Devi looked as confused as Charlotte had begun to grow. 'He is a driver? Where does he keep it?'

'Sorry,' Charlotte said and would rather not have gone on. 'Who are we talking about?'

'Mr Lucas,' Mrs Devi said, vigorously waggling her fingers at Hugh's house. 'Are you not familiar with him?'

'He's my cousin. Are you trying to tell me something's wrong with him?'

'He has not been to work for nearly three days now.'

'You get time off even if you work for Frugo. I expect he'll have taken some because of our cousin, the one who's in hospital, that's to say his brother.'

'He has not been out at all.'

Charlotte peered at Hugh's house, but the faded scaly front door remained shut, and her voice hadn't brought him to any of the windows, which were slated with reflections of clouds. She tried to conceal her unease as she said 'I'll let him know you were asking.'

'If he ever needs his neighbour he knows where I am,' Mrs Devi said and withdrew into her house.

Charlotte felt watched but could see no observer. As she advanced up the path she had the impression that the house wasn't growing as it should. Of course this was an illusion, but she could almost have imagined that the house was shrinking to shut her in, like a cottage in an unpleasant fairy tale. She spent some energy in fending off the idea as she thumbed the grimy plastic bellpush.

The electronic tolling sounded blurred by dust or age. When it brought no response, Charlotte rang again and levered the knocker up and down above the equally rusty letterbox. The reluctant clanking was followed by a protracted rattle and a thud. Though it sounded like the springing of a trap, it was the sash of an upstairs window. Hugh leaned out, only to stare both ways along the street. 'I'm here,' Charlotte called.

As his eyes met hers she saw they looked hollow and sleepless, presumably from worrying about his brother. 'Are you coming to let me in?' she eventually had to ask.

She was waiting for his footsteps on the stairs when he reappeared at the window. 'Can you?' he said.

He jerked a fist over the sill, so violently that he might have been trying to punch someone invisible in the face. By the time Charlotte grasped his intention he'd dropped the key beside the path. As she retrieved it she smelled earth, but she wasn't taking that as any kind of omen. She twisted the key in the stiff lock and pushed the door wide.

The interior smelled stale, too nearly airless. At the end of a narrow hall halved by stairs and watched over by copies of Rory's family portraits, she saw and heard a tap release a dull flat drip into a metal sink. As she closed the front door the hall with its drab brownish wallpaper took on more gloom. She was expecting Hugh to appear at the top of the stairs by the time she reached them, but she couldn't even hear him moving. 'Are you all right?' she called.

'I'm still here.'

The tap emitted another drip, and she wondered how long he'd left it that way. She made for the kitchen, past a room where a dusty television squatted near a bookcase rather less than full of Cougar books and shabbier volumes. A gentle turn sufficed to quell the drips, and she was returning to the hall when she faltered. It couldn't really have narrowed. Perhaps that was an effect of the gathering darkness, which seemed capable of transforming the space beneath the stairs into a den. Of course nobody was crouching there, and so she oughtn't to have sounded nervous as she called 'Aren't you ever coming down?'

'You come up first.'

If his tone had betrayed any enjoyment, Hugh might almost have been proposing a game. Charlotte hurried past the earthy shadows under the stairs and grabbed the banister. At the top she was faced with a rudimentary landing beneath a low roof. A faint glistening trail wandered back and forth over the faded brown carpet, starting in the room from which she heard the spring-like trickle of a presumably unstoppable flush. The track, reminiscent of a snail's but surely too large, also led in and out of the front bedroom. She couldn't help hesitating before she pushed the door open and ventured into the room.

Hugh was standing with his back to her beyond the single bed and facing the window. The end of the plain pale quilt near the foot of the bed was grubby with marks, from which she deduced that he'd been lying down with his shoes on. As she stepped forwards she kicked an object on the floor – a plastic cap that belonged to the can of shaving foam in Hugh's hand. She had trouble believing she'd identified the source of the trail that led from the bathroom to him. 'What on earth have you been doing?' she said. 'Why have you made such a mess?'

'It's my house.'

'Nobody's saying it isn't,' Charlotte told him, though there was little in the shabby room to demonstrate his ownership – just some discarded clothes on a chair. 'People are worried about you, that's all. Mrs Devi was saying you haven't been to work for days. You'll have taken them off because of Rory, won't you?'

'Who?'

Charlotte's attempt to laugh only shook her voice. 'Rory. Your brother.'

'I know who my brother is. I asked who else you said.'

'Mrs Devi. The lady from next door.'

'First I've heard she's called that. I didn't know you'd be checking up on me.'

'How long are we going to talk like this? Can't you look at me?'

He only shrugged – left shoulder, then the right, and again as if trying to establish which was which. Oughtn't she to go to him? She'd taken a step, watching her feet to avoid the trail on the carpet, before she realised he was moving, so tentatively that she could almost have concluded he was having to remember how to turn. His wary gaze found hers at last, only to fall to the can in his hand. Much of his face reddened as he lurched to grab the cap beside his feet and jam it onto the container, which he dropped on the bed. Having waited for an explanation or even for him to look at her again, Charlotte said 'All right, I won't ask.'

'Don't.'

That hadn't worked the way she'd hoped it would. As his gaze sought her face he held out a hand. She could almost have thought he was pleading mutely to be led from the room until she realised he must want his key back. When she planted it in his hand his fingers twitched as if they were eager to close around more than the key. The room was threatening to feel as small and dark as the inside of her skull. 'Aren't you going to offer me a drink?' she said.

His face grew yet more mottled. 'I'd have to go out.'

'You've nothing to drink in the house?'

'Not the kind you're after. Are you feeling bad?'

'No,' she said and more truthfully 'I'm feeling thirsty. We're talking tea here, Hugh.'

'I've got that. I'm some use.'

'I'm sure nobody would say you weren't.' When his eyes remained guarded, little better than blank, Charlotte said 'I expect it's in the kitchen, is it?'

'It will be.'

Even this didn't move him until she made with some impatience for the stairs. As she reached the landing she felt his breath on her neck. At least it was Hugh, not some imaginary pursuer, but she said 'No need to get so close.'

'Sorry,' he gasped, which tousled her hair.

'I'll follow you down. I'm just going to the private room.'

She didn't glance back as she shut the door. The overcast sky blackened the window, which was already on the way to opaque with a rash of glass pimples. A greyish shower curtain sagging from immovable plastic hooks helped confine her in the token space between the bath and the opposite wall, where its reflection in the mirror failed to add even a pretence of spaciousness. The trickle of the cistern behind her might have been mocking her own activity, but she hadn't finished when she realised she had yet to hear Hugh go downstairs. Was he listening like a sly jailer outside the door? The room seemed shrunken by darkness, and the light cord was out of reach. She rose to her feet as soon as she could, because she felt watched too. What was twitching the shower curtain aside to peer around it? Her own hasty movement had stirred it, and the shrivelled clawlike hand consisted of wrinkles in the plastic. It was enough to put her in a fury at her rampant imagination, and when she stalked out of the room the sight of her cousin loitering in his bedroom doorway made her angrier still. 'What do you think you're doing now?' she demanded.

His face was reddening again, a process that her question accelerated. 'Waiting for you,' he mumbled.

'Don't you think I can find my way around your little house? I wouldn't mind if it was twice the size.'

She oughtn't to seem to be denigrating where he'd chosen to live, but he had to be the reason why she was on edge. She felt worse than guilty for wishing Ellen would arrive so that she wasn't alone with him. 'Come on, let's make that tea,' she said.

The instant she planted a foot on the top stair he came after her. 'Not so close,' she had to warn him again, and kept hold of the banister. Gaining the hall would have been a relief if it had been wider. She was heading for the at least slightly roomier kitchen before she noticed he had frozen three steps up. 'What's –' she cried as she turned to see what in the front room was appalling him. He was gazing across it and through the window, and in a moment she saw the figure outside the house.