Just in Case (8 page)

Not warm at all, he thought. Frigid, in fact.

The ring ring ring of the telephone disturbed his dreams. Eventually he answered it.

‘What’s happened to you?’ Agnes was irate. ‘You’ve dropped off the face of the earth. What did you think of the pictures?’

‘What pictures?’

What pictures? Agnes shook her head. He was some cool character, that Justin Case. ‘Never mind. When can we meet?’

‘I’m not well.’

She snorted. ‘You don’t sound ill. You sound depressed. When was the last time you went out?’

He could hear her frown. ‘I went running a few days ago.’

‘Aside
from running. School, the shops, a film, a friend. Anything.’

He didn’t answer.

‘
Think
.’

‘A week or so?’

She hadn’t seen him in two. ‘You’re agoraphobic now, are you?’

‘No,’ he said, annoyed. ‘I just don’t feel like going out.’

‘Justin, no one except little old ladies with hundreds of cats stays home for a whole week. It’s not normal. What are you doing now?’

‘Nothing.’

Agnes sighed. ‘I’ll come and get you,’ she said, and hung up.

When he answered the door his appearance shocked her. He’d lost weight and his skin looked faintly greyish. He wore rumpled sweats and his hair was long and greasy.

‘Yuk,’ she said, ‘you look disgusting.’

‘Thank you.’

His mother emerged from the kitchen with Charlie in tow. She introduced herself to Agnes, holding out her hand with a diffident smile. ‘How nice to meet you.’

Agnes studied her face for a clue to Justin’s pathology. He didn’t exactly look like his mother, but then it was hard to find the resemblance when one person was so striking and the other so middle-aged. Like most people’s parents, she looked worn and a little shapeless, her lips the same colour as her skin, her hair beige and feathered into layers. From the creases around her eyes, Agnes guessed she was in her mid-forties. And there was definitely something of Justin in her expression after all. Something hesitant, off-balance.

Agnes followed Justin upstairs to his bedroom where a boom box screamed out noise with a massively overbalanced bass line. She wondered how anyone could
live in such a pit of a room. It stank of male hormones and misery. She threw open a window, stood for a moment to inhale the cold clean air, then sat on the bed and looked him over.

‘Don’t you think you’re taking this doomed youth thing a little too seriously?’

‘Try living it.’

‘There’s a fine line, you know. Between looking romantically shabby and just looking horrible.’

Justin’s eyes narrowed with anger. ‘I’m
not
interested in your fine line, and it’s
not
romantic. And you may as well leave because I’m
not
going anywhere.’

‘Don’t be snippy, it doesn’t suit you.’ She took his arm and flashed her most beatific smile. ‘Come on, some air will do you good.’

She waited for his resistance to dissolve, then tugged gently on his elbow. He dragged his feet like a child as she steered him down the stairs to the front hall, where his grey coat lay on a chair by the door. Agnes picked it up and handed it to him.

When she opened the door he hesitated, turning to look behind him.

She sighed. ‘Leave the dog. Let’s go.’

But the walk was not a success. Despite the crisp autumn day and a bright blue sky, Agnes’s voice gave Justin a headache, and his legs felt tired and heavy. When at last they reached home, he said goodbye without raising the subject of another meeting, went straight to his room and
lay down. When his mother knocked, offering dinner, he pretended to be asleep.

He dozed, waking long after midnight to the sound of a regular thudding noise coming from his brother’s room. After a few minutes, he slipped down the hall to investigate.

Peering around the door, he saw that Charlie was wide awake and studying a picture book. Across the room was a large, untidy heap of books that he’d flung from the cot.

At the sight of his brother, Charlie squeaked with delight. Face alight, he stood up and held out his arms. Justin switched on a lamp in the shape of a toy boat and swung the child up and out of his padded prison, plunking him down on the floor, where he sat wearing his stretchy sleepsuit and an expression of intense concentration.

‘Blocks,’ he said, pointing a chubby hand in the direction of the toy box.

Justin rummaged through the soft toys, musical instruments, games, sweets and lost socks, tossing out as many of the painted wooden alphabet blocks as he could find.

‘Do you want to make words?’ Justin asked, pleased with his own altruism. Poor linguistically challenged little sod. Maybe he could teach him to swear.

His brother busied himself with the blocks. J, S, T. He fixed Justin with an intent look.

Justin shook his head. ‘That doesn’t spell anything,’ he said, reaching to find a vowel. ‘Look, C-A-T, cat.’

The child sighed and snatched the blocks back, adding more letters to the ones on the floor.

J, S, T, N, C, A, S. There was a shortage of vowels.

Justin’s attention wandered. He was already bored with this game. The child added an ‘E’ to the end, and clapped his hands. ‘Look.’

‘Yes, fine, OK.’ Justin drifted back into humouring mode. ‘Hooray, well done, excellent. What have you spelled?’

He glanced at the letters, looked again, and froze. The blood drained from his face, and he stared at his brother. ‘Jesus Christ, how on earth did you do that?’

The child, busy with his task, didn’t look up.

H, A, T.

Justin stared. ‘Justin Case hat? What? What are you trying to write?’

With a look of infinite patience, Charlie began to adjust the letters. ‘Look,’ he said again, with satisfaction.

Justin looked. The letters had been divided more carefully now, leaving large spaces between words so there could be no doubt as to the meaning.

JST IN CASE WHAT.

He looked at Charlie, then down again at the words.

Just in case what?

Just in case
something irreversible occurs.
Just in case
he was maimed, injured, died.
Just in case
something so horrible happened to him, or to someone he knew, that he would never, ever recover.

Was it possible that the child understood the meaning
of his own question? Could he have arranged the letters as a premeditated act? Or was it like monkeys at typewriters and eventually, if left here with an infinite supply of blocks, Charlie would fill the room with
Hamlet?

The sheer cosmic strangeness of his brother’s feat and the unlikely question in the cryptogram made Justin tremble. I must ask him, he thought, I must find a way to communicate with him. He fumbled for more blocks but it was too late. The child was fast asleep, fat pink fingers wrapped around the leg of his sock monkey.

Justin replaced him carefully in his cot, tucked a blanket under him and slowly returned to his own bed. There he lay, spooked, a spinning pin in a celestial bowling alley.

Perhaps I could offer fate a truce, he thought. A deal. You live your life, I’ll live mine. No surprises, no one gets hurt.

He fell asleep at dawn.

20

I don’t make deals, Justin. I deal.

And here’s how your cards are falling: a couple of negligible hearts. A joker. A sad little club.

Will you draw?

Oh look! The ace of spades.

I
am
sorry.

21

Justin awoke at noon with a start. He knew instantly and with utter certainty that he had to leave home. Fate was closing in, sending ominous messages in strange guises.

Just in case what?
Oh ha ha. Why don’t you talk to
me
instead of channelling evil questions through Charlie as if he were some sort of human Ouija board.

Just in case what?

Even in the bright light of day, the only response he could think of involved a thousand hellish possibilities. But it didn’t matter. He knew what he had to do. Packing a bag with a change of clothes and a toothbrush, he cracked open the door to his room and stepped out, ready to begin his journey.

Hello, said Charlie from the floor at his feet. One fat hand gripped his toy monkey, the other guided a large wooden spoon through the air like an aeroplane. Justin lowered himself to the floor and looked his brother in the eye. ‘What was that business in the night?’ he asked gently. ‘Since when have you learned to spell?’

Charlie held his brother’s gaze for a moment before answering.

It was an important question I asked you in the night, he said, and you need to answer it or you’ll never get over that time I tried to fly.

‘Blocks!’ he said emphatically, hitting the floor with his spoon.

Having expected no further explanation, Justin kissed the child, tucked his passport into his pocket, called his dog, told his mother his school trip had been moved forward a week, and set out for Luton Airport.

As he stepped on to the local bus, Justin felt the gravitational tug of his past loosening. It was a good feeling. The open road beckoned. The closer he came to the airport, the freer he felt, like a comet streaming off into a weightless infinity of possible encounters.

Main terminal, his stop. The
whoosh
of automatic doors and the sweep of steel and glass excited him. There were no curtains, no occasional tables, no kitchen utensils. No heaps of dirty laundry or drawers filled with tartan pyjamas. There was no letter box. No milk on the doorstep. Nothing domestic, cosy or familiar; nothing with his scent or his name or his NHS number on it.

Why hadn’t he realized it before? The problem was all around him. The stuffy little room. The conventional parents, the dismal house. The street. The school. Here, all the little threads that connected him to earth could be broken. He was in transit, on the lam. He was
Gulliver, Neil Armstrong, Bonnie and Clyde, all rolled into one.

Making his way to the information desk, Justin obtained an application allowing an unaccompanied minor to travel abroad, filled it out and forged his parents’ signatures, bought a sandwich and a coffee, and settled in to wait for a flight. One by one he considered destinations: Verona, Antalya. Rhodes, Zakynthos, Barcelona. Salzburg, Salonika. Istanbul. Nîmes, Brest. Halifax.

For three hours he sat very still at the centre of the airport, motionless like the human eye of a storm, until all the swirling activity blurred and made him sleepy. Moving to a quiet corner by the observation window, he folded his coat into a pillow, went to sleep and dreamt he was a mouse in a maze. Round and round he ran until he found the pathway leading to freedom – only to find it blocked by the face of an enormous mechanical cat.

YEOWWWWW!

He leapt in his sleep, startled and disorientated, banging his head on the metal window frame. Boy was awake, watching him anxiously. But despite the terrifying image he felt calm. The cat in his dream was a murderer, but the mouse was still alive.

He stretched, found the toilet. More hours passed, during which he drifted from kiosk to café, reading magazines dedicated to subjects that had never before interested him, flipping through foreign guidebooks, shaking plastic blizzards, observing the wax and wane of
the shifting crowds. Time slipped by easily here. He felt inconspicuous, relaxed.

The next time hunger beckoned he sought out the Traveller’s Café, pushed his tray around the chrome track with the rest of the In Transits, chose sausage and mash and peas, chocolate cake and orange juice, and paid for it with the pocket money for his school trip. He ate slowly, happy to be an observer. He was the only one with no mission, no plane to catch, no breakfast to serve, no children to entertain. All around milled anxious groups of travellers, all nationalities and all colours, all sizes and shapes and sexual persuasions. Sometimes they smiled at him, struck by his face, his coat, or even his dog, establishing the most fleeting of human connections, a millisecond of brotherhood.

We’re all in this together, they said to him, silently, in a hundred different languages.

And then, in a sudden blinding flash, he realized he no longer needed to comb the world in search of a destination.

He had arrived.

22

Eight hours spent stretched out along an undulating row of plastic seats is not everyone’s idea of a good night’s sleep. But with legs slotted under metal armrests, ten thousand watts of fluorescent light glaring directly overhead, hundreds of disgruntled travellers for company, an abandoned acrylic airline blanket for a cover and his loyal dog at his feet, Justin slept like a baby.

He felt almost serene.

The rattle of the cleaner’s trolley lulled him into the gentlest unconsciousness he had experienced in years. The intense artificial light gave him a powerful sense of well-being; it occurred to him that he’d spent most of his life afraid of the dark.

He slept through the early morning arrivals and departures, waking refreshed and cheerful at 8 a.m.

The first day of his new life began with a full English breakfast at the café across from the first-class lounge. Except for the mushrooms, which tasted strongly of plastic, the meal was adequate: microwave hot and plentiful. When
he asked for more toast, the middle-aged woman behind the counter waved his money away.

‘You save that money for your journey,’ she said, handing him a plate heaped with slices of cold, singed white toast, a handful of individually wrapped butter pats, and five tiny tubs of strawberry jam.

He smiled at her.

Working his way through the pile of toast, Justin felt there was no pressure to do anything. His pace slowed accordingly, and it was nearly ten by the time he’d finished his food and read all the newspapers abandoned on surrounding tables.

He wiped his mouth and stacked his rubbish for the cleaners, left Boy to look after his belongings, followed the picture signs to the Comfort Zone, pushed a pound into the slot of a tall turnstile, stripped off his clothes and stepped gratefully into the steamy blast of the airport shower. The thick stream of hot water felt like a miracle; he stood under it motionless, letting it pour through his hair, down his neck and back, over the narrow smooth planes of his hips, down his legs, and off his ankles, swirling around the soles of his feet before disappearing down the plughole. For ten minutes he stood, allowing the warmth to penetrate his muscles and soak through to his bones. It brought with it a realization of how lucky he was, how privileged to be alive and well and living at Luton Airport.