Breaking Light (32 page)

The assembled freaks and navvies all shook their heads – no, no one had seen him since that morning. No one, apart from Gabriel, who stayed at the back of the crowd now, slowly easing his way in a circle towards the twins, Mary and Anne. For he was sure he had seen Rey that night. Not face to face. No, nothing as manifest as that. He had glimpsed him out of the corner of his eye. Always at the edge of the light, Rey had appeared, hands deep in his pockets, one leg thrust forward, water dripping from a battered fedora, silently observing with a still smile on his face – like an admiral aboard his ship, preparing to engage.

Suddenly, another shout rose through the night. ‘Hey, Buster, someone's broken into the safe!'

At that moment, Gabriel realised that he had to get out of there – fast. This was his cue. Sidling up to the twins, he whispered to Mary, ‘Let's go.' She looked up at him and he could see that she was frightened. Anne was looking absently into the mud that covered her satin slippers; her wet hair was pasted to her skull. Gabriel thought she looked incredibly vulnerable. ‘Come on, we've got to get out of here
now
.' He hesitated for a moment before wheezing into Mary's ear, ‘Rey created all this turmoil so that we could escape; he wanted you and Anne free of this, just as much as I do.' And, at once, he realised that what
he had just said was true – that Rey was somehow the instigator of the chaos. Could he even have raised the storm?

Quickly, he put a finger to his lips and indicated to the girls to follow him. Mary hesitated at first, but then something seemed to clear in her eyes and she put an arm around Anne and started pulling her sister into the vanishing shadows of the long night.

Behind them, Dr Buster clenched his fists and raised them towards the streaming rain. ‘Argh!' he thundered. ‘I'll find that bastard and kill him! We will have police crawling all over the place, now. It will be the end of the show. Where is that fiend? The trickster has escaped again to his Maleperduis.' He flung his head back and laughed his chilly wolf laugh before suddenly composing himself and looking around the crowd with a wild gaze. ‘Perhaps we should run away too, eh? What do you say? We bury the bodies and get out before dawn.' His voice was feverish, intense. ‘Eh? Eh? Zilda, old pal, give me a hand, will you?' He turned to the magnificent whore, who remained silent. Turning around again, as if following his own tail, Dr Buster faced his troupe of freaks. ‘Dido, old man, you have been part of my pack for a long time; give us a hand, will you?'

But Dido only spat on the ground and turned into the night.

Sliding through the mud and rain, Gabriel and the twins somehow reached Maryanne's caravan. ‘Quick – into the car!' Gabriel shouted over the storm.

‘But what about our things?' Mary cried back.

‘There isn't much time – just grab the essentials and any valuables,' Gabriel replied with his new and unusual authority, which appeared to convince.

Someone had put a stretch of tarpaulin under the wheels of the twins' Ford. Bending closer, Gabriel saw that it was laid out
so that the car would have a fairly dry passage until it reached the gravel path, which connected with the main road. This too, he suspected, was Rey's work. A rectangle of light fell on to him as the door of the girls' caravan was flung open.

‘Could you help out here, please?' Mary shouted from within.

This is taking too much time, he thought to himself as he rushed up the steps and into the caravan. The girls were laden with bundles of clothes, bags of cosmetics and jewellery and even the crystal chandelier, which drooped out of their arms like a newly hauled fishing net. Annoyed, he relieved them of some of the stuff. ‘That's enough,' he said, with irritation in his voice. ‘Let's go.'

The girls seemed enthralled by his new command and followed quickly, leaving the door ajar as they bundled their belongings into the boot of the Ford. Gabriel had already got into the driver's seat and started the engine. A dark shape, it might have been a stray dog or a fox, released itself from the shadows under the car and passed into the night with a glint of bared teeth. Mary, herding Anne ahead of her, dived into the back seat. ‘That's it,' she said. ‘Drive.'

Gabriel backed carefully on to the tarpaulin, remembering what Rey had taught him. Biting his lip in concentration, he somehow managed to get the car on to the track, where he accelerated so fast the tyres tore up the gravel.

‘There's something in here,' Anne protested from the back.

Gabriel swung round to see, but it was too dark. ‘What is it?' he asked, keeping his eyes on the road, which was barely visible, like a ghostly ribbon, snaking into the blackness.

Anne was rummaging through something. ‘It's a backpack with some men's clothes and a couple of books,' she said, with something like disgust in her thin voice.

Gabriel realised it was his belongings.

‘And here's an envelope with our name on it,' Anne continued. ‘It looks like … a wad of money.'

Gabriel suddenly laughed out loud as he realised how Rey had planned their escape, leaving nothing to chance.

‘Whoa!' Mary shouted. ‘You better keep us on the road. Why don't you turn the bloody lights on?' She leant across from the back seat, Anne in tow, and turned a switch so that the gravel lit up. Stunted trees, currently tortured by the storm, stretched their thin branches through the falling rain like hands clawing through metal bars, and, behind them, a darker row of hedges shook and fretted. Gabriel felt a chill run down his spine. Just then, they saw the junction with the main road a few yards ahead. It looked like they might have made it.

It was suddenly very quiet. The inside of the car could have been a submarine, one hundred feet under water. The moment seemed to float; it was as if the three bodies in the car had somehow broken free of reality, of life, and drifted away into some other state – a dream where they were weightless and the passing of time, the idea of a past, present and a future, was inconceivable.

Looking into the rear-view mirror at the twin pairs of eyes, hooded now in violet shadows as they stared back at him, he was not so much surprised at the fear in Mary's eyes as by the lack of distress or alarm in Anne's. Normally so timid, her gaze at that moment was calm and determined and there was a slight smile on her pale lips. Aware of his eyes on her, she pulled out a pocket mirror and a lipstick from a handbag in her lap and carefully, with minute precision, dabbed colour on to her parted lips. The next time he looked in the rear-view mirror, her eyes seemed
to be smiling at him seductively, her lips a slit of scarlet in the flickering light. They had got away.

If anyone back at the site had noticed the car slip away, only the departing tail-lights would be visible now – a couple of sore eyes, finally closing on that wretched night.

The fallen leaves from a silver birch stuck to the wet cobbles like golden confetti from some spectacular event that was now irretrievably over. Mr Askew stopped in his tracks and watched as a gust of wind rippled across a puddle. That's how a ghost would move, he thought to himself – parting the surface of life with its breath.

The coming of autumn was always unsettling. He did not mind the actual season, in fact he cherished that period the Americans called fall. It was an appropriate name, he thought, for the time of year when you no longer had to keep up the pretences, when you could loosen your grip and let yourself settle down into something less intense. No, he did not mind autumn itself, it was the transition – that uneasy coming-of-age as summer matured – that he could not stand. ‘Let it be over with,' he muttered to himself and walked on. Fall. As in
falling in love
.

It had started to drizzle. The fog was coming in from the moor. It made the village look dirty. If it had a smell, he imagined it would be stinking – of filth and the aftermath of war. A car passed with dipped fog lamps gleaming off the wet pavement. Mr Askew trembled slightly. The car reminded him of a wolf sneaking past with all-seeing yellow eyes. His mind was not right today; he was feeling unsettled, exposed, as if he was at a turning point – just like that time when he had first gone
to London, following that eventful summer after leaving school. He thought of himself as he was then: independent and strong for the first time in his life but still an innocent with so much more to learn. His body half inhabited, half suspended.

After escaping from Dr Buster's in the storm, he had driven through the night to Portsmouth. He had driven without a licence, with a couple of conjoined twins curled up in the back seat of a car that wasn't his. A pair of Siamese showgirls who he had helped run away from a nineteenth-century-style freak show that was living out its last days on the commons of England. It
did
sound like a joke. But the girls had got away all right. Once they reached Portsmouth, he had bought them two tickets with the money they'd found in the car and he had put them on to a ship bound for America – and he had never heard from them again. For a while afterwards, he kept scanning the papers for news of those spectacular twins, but it was as if they, like Rey and Dr Buster, had vanished from the face of the earth that day when they stepped on to the gangplank, turning once to wave at him. Before boarding, they had sold the Ford to a man in the harbour for fifty pounds, which they had left with Gabriel. Not knowing what to do next, he had found a phone box and rung his mother, who had given him his next cue – he had been accepted to university in London and was due to start in a couple of weeks.

On reaching Paddington, he had made his way to a room in Camden Road, which the university had allocated him. Completely alone in the world after being abandoned by Rey and the twins so abruptly, he was left with the fine sand of sleeplessness behind his eyelids and the darkness that opened the following morning, as he stirred to the smell of frying fat – a darkness
that lingered long after the sun had reached his new window, fruitlessly trying to brighten the yellowing standard-issue bedclothes. But what did it matter if he slept and woke in light or darkness? The dreams and nightmares were all the same.

During those first rainy autumn nights in London, he had kept moving through the city, entering its metabolism like a thief on the run, seeing his loss reflected in green and silver on the surface of black puddles and streaming gutters. There were moments when he had begun to suspect that Rey, the sideshow, Maryanne, had all been a dream, a folly, a brief madness. Or perhaps it had all been a rather complicated plot, elaborated by some ancient and long-forgotten gods or obscure spirits of fate in order to … in order to do what? What was the purpose? He had managed to keep this unsettling feeling of uncertainty from his mind most of the time, but every now and again, when he had found himself alone and had time to think about it, it had overcome him, this doubt, like one of those fevers that will keep you awake all night, twisting in damp sheets.

In love.

Did he, had he ever, loved Anne? Well, he had risked his life for her, for them. He had entered another world for them and saved them from it. And, at times, in the days leading up to that last night, he had been overwhelmed by a longing to kiss Anne's lips, knowing what it would feel like and certain that just one single kiss like that would stay inside him for an entire day or more. But, just as he started to lean towards Anne's half-smiling, pouting lips, Mary would say, ‘Ah, this could not have been more agreeable; aren't we lucky to be together, the three of us?' but with such steely tones in her voice that Gabriel would sit back again and draw a finger through his moustache. But love?
He was not so sure. Thinking about it now, in hindsight, he was not at all sure why he had got involved. Love? That was not it, he realised – no, that was not it. He had done it because the opportunity to do something good – to do
something
 – had presented itself and, for once, he had acted forcefully. He had just done it and, for the first time, he had loved
himself
 – a little. Yes, he had done it. He – Gabriel Askew.
Gabe
.

And the twins, in the end, as they walked up that gangplank, had they not loved him, too – his new, assertive self? They had loved in a rather finicky way, he was sure, the way they loved themselves and their dream of a new life.

*

In the past, Mrs Ludgate's black eyes had often been inconveniences, a hindrance, like a stomach upset or – in her youth – the monthlies during a day at the beach. She had tried to conceal the bruising with the foundation that she had started buying years and years ago, precisely for this purpose, in the pharmacy in Stagstead. To be perfectly honest, she was quite baffled by her own foresight as a young woman – it was remarkably crafty of her to keep it to hand, just in case, for those occasions when it was needed. Lately, she had not had any reason to use it, but she did all the same. It had become a habit and she felt naked and exposed without the protective membrane. Now she was running out and had to buy some more. It had been preferable, she reminded herself, as she hurried down the lane towards Stanton's Cross, when he had not hit her in the face; the bruises on her body were more easily covered up. Even that time when her arm broke, there had been no reason for people not to believe that she had fallen down the stairs. These things happened, after all, especially on farms. But, of course, it had
not been for her to decide where he hit her, in spite of the inconvenience.

The foundation was by Rimmel, which was supposed to be a slightly better make than No 17 at Boots. And yet it was not satisfactory. The colour was off – just a little too dark – and it made her skin look sodden and slightly yellow – and blue and yellow makes green, as we all know. The mirror in the bathroom up at the farm was too dark these days; she could not really see what she looked like. The window was small, just a slit in the stone wall, and the lights were no longer working – not since her husband stopped paying the bills.