Ibrahim & Reenie (8 page)

‘Not
all
the way,' he said. ‘Not if you were slowing me down.'

‘I see,' said Reenie. ‘Well, that's fair enough. Wouldn't want to slow you down, now, would I?' She stood on tiptoes, peering into the van. ‘Alright, love,' she said to the driver. ‘It's a deal. You two'll have to get the trolley in there, mind. Might be able to push it, but I can't lift it.'

It took all the strength of both men to hoist the trolley up into the van, and Ibrahim noticed her watching him as they did. She looked so disappointed, and he cursed himself for not telling her everything there and then. Why he couldn't come with her, why he wished he could. Why he was sorry. Why he regretted almost everything he'd ever done. But it had been this way for so long. As if what lay inside his head couldn't be translated into words, the right words. How could he begin to tell her? She would never believe him.

With the trolley loaded, doors shut, driver behind the wheel, and birdcage balanced safely on her lap, Reenie looked down at him from the open passenger-side window. ‘Sure you can't come?' she asked. ‘There's plenty of room in here.'

‘I can't,' said Ibrahim. ‘I'm sorry.'

Reenie nodded but said nothing, and the van began to move. She leaned out of the window to look at Ibrahim one last time, but didn't speak, and as they picked up speed, Gary, the driver, beat out a ‘goodbye' on its horn.

Later that day Ibrahim would remember how they hadn't said goodbye to one another. Perhaps, he would think, it was because they weren't friends, in any real sense. They were barely acquaintances. They had shared food and a portion of their journey, and a little of their time. They breathed the same air, and walked under the same sky, but what else?

He knew what else.

But maybe that was it. Twenty-four hours, or less, in her company. The kind of coincidence you read about in cheap magazines. Something he would remember, but not a story he would ever share, and yet it didn't feel final, and a part of him was almost certain they would meet again.

7

Sputnik scratched and snuffled at the gap between Casper's bedroom door and the threadbare carpet. A helpless, desperate whimper. Hungry? Thirsty? It couldn't be that he needed a piss. When that dog wanted to piss he pissed, never mind where he was.

Casper sat up. Though he lived at the top of the house, three floors up, his bedroom was cold enough for him to see his own breath, and it wasn't even winter. He heard music coming from Andy's room, drum and bass, and voices laughing. They were still going from the night before. And the house stank.

But then, the house always stank. The kitchen had a stench of takeaway food impregnated into its walls, a smell you'd never get rid of. Elsewhere, the carpets had a mildewy staleness; three years' worth of spilt ashtrays, bongs and beer bottles. From the first floor up the house had the pissy, ammonial tang of strong, home-grown cannabis. The individual bedrooms smelled of damp, forgotten towels and old socks.

When Casper opened his door, Sputnik came bounding in, prancing around his ankles before charging back out onto the landing.

‘Okay, okay,' said Casper. ‘Chill. We'll get you some food. Hang on.'

He followed the dog downstairs, past the noise coming from Andy's room – music and a bellowing chorus of laughter followed by the bubble and hiss of another bong hit – and went straight to the kitchen. Nothing in the cupboards, nothing in the fridge.

‘Shit,' said Casper.

Sputnik whimpered.

Casper ran back to his room, avoiding the step where the carpet came loose, turning their staircase into something from a funhouse, and on reaching the top floor noticed that once again there were small orange mushrooms growing near the bathroom door.

He found his least smelly pair of jeans and the t-shirt he'd worn yesterday, sprayed himself with deodorant, and slipped on the pair of trainers with the greatest degree of structural integrity. On his way out he knocked on Andy's door, and it was answered by a man he'd never seen before with tattooed teardrops on his left cheek.

‘Just popping to the shop. Anyone want anything?'

‘Ketamine,' grunted the man with the teardrop tattoos. The others in the room laughed.

‘No, mate,' said Andy. ‘We're fine, thanks.'

Sputnik shadowed Casper as far as the front door, now certain he'd be taken for a walk, and Casper apologised as he edged his way out of the house, closing the door quickly enough to prevent the dog from following.

Casper often thought that if it weren't for the houses on either side of them, theirs would almost certainly collapse. Everything about it felt so ramshackle, the floors so uneven, the walls chipped and peeling. Everything creaked and groaned. All too easy to imagine it caving in on itself one day, leaving a gap between their neighbours like a missing tooth.

He'd never forget his father's expression the only time he ever saw the place. Not exactly sadness, or even disgust, but something placed mysteriously between the two. Gone was any attempt at humouring his son's choices; that was strictly for his university days. An eyebrow raised sardonically, a witty aside to Casper's stepmother, a good-humoured shaking of the head.

‘Well, it's certainly very
bohemian
, I'll give you that.'

There were no such comments this time, and Casper hadn't even wanted him to come. Casper's embarrassment – his father's car so new and big and silver and expensive, parked right outside their house; his father wearing an actual suit and an actual tie – was the unstoppable force to the immovable object of his father's shame. Their conversation happened on the pavement; his father never daring to go any further than the front door.

That was two years ago, and though his father had written and Casper had sent birthday cards, they hadn't spoken, hadn't heard one another's voices, in all that time. There was nothing for them to talk about. They had nothing in common, the only thing binding them was a genetic coincidence which was meaningless in the great scheme of things. His friends were his family.

In the shop, the man who lived at number 16 and who always smelled like sherry was buying a two-litre flagon of strong cider, two packs of Lambert & Butler, and a scratch card. The Sikh lad who worked there made a show of waving his hand in front of his nose after the man from number 16 had left.

‘He stinks, man. Always in here, always buying that cheap cider shit. What can I get you?'

Casper paid for the dog food and left. As he neared the house he could hear Andy's music again. Had it been that loud when he went out, or had they turned it up? Thank God most of their neighbours were in work, or unlikely to complain about the noise. If he hadn't had to feed Sputnik, he would have kept walking. The park was quiet and clean and smelled of honest things, like dead leaves and wet grass, and he liked to watch the crows peck at worms. He went there, sometimes, when the house was too much, when there was no money, when he had nowhere else to go.

8

On the map Ibrahim's route, represented by a crooked blue line from Cardiff to London, resembled the outline of a mountain; the journey from Cardiff to Chepstow its rambling foothills, with Gloucester as the summit. No matter what the topography of the journey after Gloucester, he could only imagine it feeling as if he were walking downhill, as if the force of gravity pulled south instead of down. To stop at Chepstow would feel like a defeat, as if this imaginary mountain had beaten him.

Ibrahim thought of Reenie and the stranger in the van. Gary Evans. His name was Gary Evans. He had even made a point of writing that name down, along with the first half of the van's registration number – as much as he could remember – after they had driven away. They would be across the bridge by now. Reenie would be somewhere on the far side of Bristol, and maybe she was ploughing on alone with her trolley, or perhaps had set up camp again beside some near-deserted stretch of road.

How much easier his journey could have been if he'd joined them, if he'd climbed into the van with her, allowed himself to be driven over the bridge. It would still have meant walking a hundred miles or more, but when he traced his fingertip along that other route he saw a less eccentric course carve its way across England.

But he had never considered taking up the offer of a lift, not even for a second, and even when he had walked for seven hours and was only then nearing the English border, not once did he consider hitchhiking. He hadn't been in a car, a bus, or a train in four years. In those first few wheelchair-bound months after the crash, and when there were still people willing to drive him, he was driven from place to place, but each journey was an ordeal, his hands becoming clammy, his mouth dry. He felt his stomach lurch with every turn in the road. By the time they reached their destination he was exhausted by panic alone, and from the moment he could walk again he refused to travel anywhere except by foot.

Walking felt safe, his every step a choice, a decision made by him alone. Walking happens at a pace free from chaos; the chance disruptions that can tear a life apart reduced to a minimum. He took care when crossing roads, always waiting until the lights had changed, and even then checking in both directions as he crossed. Just in case. Excursions beyond his front door became few and far between. On the rare occasions when he left his flat – to buy groceries or to sign for his benefits – he knew exactly which routes involved the least number of crossings, and he knew the times of day when he would encounter the fewest pedestrians.

When planning his walk to London, he weighed the anxieties of walking on busy roads against the two or three hours of sheer, suffocating panic he would experience on a coach or train. He knew there would be no moment, if he chose the latter, when that panic would subside. It would escalate, consuming him; his thoughts a maelstrom of derailings, head-on collisions, deafening flames and black, volcanic clouds of smoke.

On the night of the crash, his heart had stopped beating twice, but he had no memory of this, and so he wondered obsessively how the instance of death in another accident might feel. Would it be a sudden going out of the lights, or would that split second be drawn out, an infinite scream of white noise and searing pain; the unending awareness that this was terminal?

He entered England halfway across the bridge spanning the River Wye, and he stopped there, at that halfway point, and looked back the way he'd come. He wasn't sure what he left behind, but it felt as if he'd passed a point of no return, as if to go back now wasn't just an act of surrender, but a physical impossibility.

On the English side of the bridge the road narrowed down from four lanes to two. A dog leashed to the gate of a farmhouse strained against its rope and barked at him as he walked past, and the sheep in an opposite field followed him with their communal, blank-eyed gaze. He passed small towns and villages he'd never heard of, places that sounded almost fictionally quaint, like Wibdon and Stroat, and he entertained himself by imagining the petty rivalries between villages – the flower competitions and lawn bowls tournaments that turned nasty; the cider festivals where local lads became provincial Bloods and Crips.

He wanted to carry on walking, but he was weak. His stomach ached with hunger, and his mouth was sandpaper dry. Lydney, the place he'd hoped to reach the night before, was only a few miles ahead, but they were a few miles too many. Now, out here between the towns and cities, he realised there were few places he would find shelter. There were no guesthouses or bed and breakfasts, and besides, he doubted any guesthouse would take him in. To the owner of a guesthouse in rural Gloucestershire, he imagined he would look as outlandish, as intimidating, as a Viking.

Instead, he left the road and searched for a place where he could hide – from the road, from the locals, from the elements – settling on a barn that stood a hundred metres or more from its farmhouse. There were no cattle inside or nearby, just bales of hay and what might be bats fluttering in the shadowed beams above him. Though he had virtually no sense of smell – hadn't enjoyed a sense of smell since the accident – the air itself tasted sickly sweet, of cow dung and fresh hay.

He found a place to sleep, hidden from the view of anyone passing the barn's open door. The hay was comfortable enough; despite the straws piercing his sleeping bag and clothes and jabbing into his flesh it was better than the previous night's hard bed beneath the motorway.

It was a cloudy night, and once the sun had set the darkness was absolute. Even when he'd been lying in the dark, trying to sleep, for an hour or more, his eyes failed to adjust. Holding his hand before his face, he still couldn't see the outline of his fingers. He heard what sounded like a screaming baby, echoing across the fields: a desperate, chilling scream. A fox. It had to be a fox.

Another scream, and he shuddered.

There were few other noises that night, but in a way he found the absence of a city's constant drone – traffic, helicopters, sirens – more distracting. Any sound, however small, was amplified by the stillness. A wooden beam creaking as it expanded in the damp night air became the mast of a tall ship sailing into a storm. A single bat flying across the barn became a whole colony of leather-winged nightmares. His feet and legs throbbed painfully, and in the seconds before he fell asleep it felt as though he was still walking, his whole body rocking forward with each imaginary footstep.