Lost Girl (6 page)

The gown or cloak was tattered, frayed away from sticklike limbs, so loose and spare, that spiked the folds and billows. Like trailing rags of cloth around a disintegrating kite frame, a vessel
flung aloft and battered in strong wind, a fluidity was also evident in the entirety of the picture: an effortless prance, or a leap in a ballet for the graceful dead preoccupied this figure, and
the length of the stride was unpalatably feline.

Ashy fragments fell away from the garment’s hem and great round sleeves, becoming a slipstream of finer dusts, or a black aerosol of dross. Pebbles or seeds drifted from the bone hands
too, sifting through a metacarpal sieve to the littered ground.

The father moved around the car for a better view, but soon recoiled at the sight of the impression of fleshless feet, vaguely sandalled.

But there was something close to beauty as well as terror in this graffiti. A sense of a diminishing of the begrimed and overcrowded town around the blackened wall, as if the crooked world was
mocked by this figure, or utterly absolved of . . .
significance
.

There was no street lighting at night in the area, so it was doubtful the figure had been drawn then. By day it seemed unlikely that an artist would have remained unbothered for long enough to
paint such a work. No council would have sanctioned it either. The father wanted to know why it was there and what it meant, because it really meant something to someone. His desire to understand
became strangely urgent.

No one had tried to embellish the figure with a cock, tits or a toothy smile either. It simply cut a swathe unopposed. And who would deface the figure once they’d glimpsed the partial head
inside the cowl? The whites of the eyes revealed misery, even ecstasy, or maybe a combination of each. Within sharp sockets, the eyes seemed to stare upwards or inwards, an expression morbidly
religious, or tragic. The father had not thought in these terms for a long while, nor been affected by anything artistic since the afternoon his little girl was taken. He was reminded of other
times and experienced the slight disorientation that came with the sudden sense of better days.

Now that he looked more closely at what there was of a face, it seemed tightly papered in flesh, or perhaps it was a mask, the long features drawn and weary as if from the sight of epic
suffering. One face for all. No strength remained to keep the jaw shut, and the mouth gaped beyond beseeching for mercy, a morsel of food, or a drop of water. The figure seemed beyond all of that
and was still rushing further into . . . the father didn’t know.

Around its unsightly feet a skilled hand had written:
Usque ad mortem
. Latin. Something from a dead language, and he didn’t understand what it meant, though the mural did remind
him of the very little he knew of medieval art that celebrated death in old churches. And he briefly imagined that this was a sign, or metaphor, that
it
all had to end:
this
,
us
, the world. He imagined this was the figure’s true message. Let us all sit down exhausted and die in our unlit homes.

The father climbed inside his car, shaken, though not sure by what precisely, and now wished that he had not looked upon the wall.

That was the first time, his first sighting of the figure, but it would not be his last.

Heavy head, soft bones. He didn’t have a shirt on and was still slick all over. He dripped. Thoughts of the coming move against Murray Bowles punctured the father. His
strength seeped out of a hole in his body that he couldn’t find. He had to repeatedly visit his ensuite bathroom to drink water.

Moving to and fro made him feel weaker. It had been thirty-seven degrees that day and was not much cooler at night. Kent had had the highest temperature: forty-one, even hotter than predicted.
The next day it was going to hit forty in Devon. For three months the lowest recorded temperature had been thirty-four degrees. You moved, you stayed hot.

The room was too cheap to have air conditioning. Powering A/C was too costly for the near-defunct hotel chain, so he conserved his strength like the area conserved water and electricity. Until
the three new nuclear power stations were finished, the whole of the south-west would sweat and spend more time in the dark. They got everything late except for refugees, that’s what the
locals said. People should have been used to delays and power cuts, but they still watched keenly for progress, as if reactor readiness could be achieved by force of desire alone. People had
learned that the power could not stay off for long. It wasn’t only darkness they feared; it was what the darkness did to
other
people and to them too.

Through the evening the father obsessively checked the water meter in the bathroom, filling jugs from the cold tap. At midnight he ran another
cold
shower with the timer fixed at one
minute. When he stepped out he didn’t dry himself. He lay on the bed with most of his body upon a towel. The room’s only window was open and the street below was quiet. No breeze.
He’d kept the lights off to trick his mind into thinking the room was cooler. He could smell the sea.

To distract himself from his nerves and the heat, the father looked for local news. He got national. All available channels had switched from the Gabon River Fever aboard the refugee ships
drifting off the coast of Italy, and moved away from the new bug in Hong Kong, to continue the summer’s top story: the forest fires. Flashing into the darkness of his room came the onscreen
pictures of the blaze in Spain, Portugal, and France, filmed from as close as safety would allow, and from space, where the smoke was visible as a black cloud over the Mediterranean. Subtitles ran
across the bottom of the screen to tell viewers that more firemen were missing, fifty this time in Spain.

He tried another channel, then another, but similar pictures continued to flicker across the dark walls and ceiling. There were long lines of black rubber sacks in a vast warehouse with grey
walls. People wearing masks walking between the rows of dark lumps, like scientists waiting for pupae to hatch. The caption said Paris.

That summer an expert called the heatstroke a ‘climate holocaust’. Like all bad things the phrase caught on quickly. As the father drove back to Devon two weeks before, he’d
passed refrigerated supermarket trucks, taking their cargo out of Torbay Hospital and up the M5 at night, on their way to the makeshift mortuaries near Taunton. Airport buildings were now being
used. So many had come to the coast to retire, but were retiring from life sooner than they’d anticipated. The care homes were emptier after three months of such heat, or at least the
cash-strapped bedlams were. The refugee camps were not air-conditioned either, and the heat had cut a swathe through their elderly too.

Every second summer now.

There was not much worse than being old, the father had decided long ago. But he still wanted to be old, and when his time came he wanted his daughter to be there and to hold him in her arms
like he was her baby.

The father took the mute off.

Reports cited a death toll of three hundred thousand across Europe, and climbing with the mercury. Old people, refugees, the homeless: the usual suspects. The summer records of ’29 and
’33 had been broken; ’47’s body count was now in sight. The European summer had been set a new challenge of how long it could smother, and of how many it could take away.

Crop losses too of thirty-two billion euros across three months of heat and drought. Atmospheric carbon emissions had leapt again. Another positive feedback: plant stress. Plants and trees were
throwing out what they were supposed to be sucking down. Another loop getting tighter, closer than the air, every second summer. At times, when the father struggled to breathe, he thought he could
sense all of the dry, exhausted trees releasing their last gases like dying breaths.

Pictures of river beds came next. They made him feel worse than the sight of flames shrieking through the tops of trees. Brown trickles in cracked mud: the Rhine, the Po, the Loire. Rainfall
down ten per cent with poisonous algae blooming in depleted lakes. He tried to imagine what the algae looked like but didn’t have the strength. People were being told not to drink the water
or bathe in it to escape the heat.

White smoke above a forest in Germany.
Them too now
. Red coals smouldered beneath the plumes. The trees reminded the father of tall, thin people, all panicking and unable to move their
feet. These pictures made breathing seem more difficult and he thought he could smell smoke again.

An area as big as Denmark was already ash and black bones in southern Europe. People thanked God there wasn’t much wind. A small mercy. A land mass as big as Luxemburg had gone up in
northern Spain a few years back and choked Barcelona. The father only briefly considered what the scorch mark would be like in ten years’ time, by 2063: a black smudge the size of France? No
one could bear to think that way. Guesses and estimates were unwelcome in most company.

Pictures of a rockslide, filmed from the air, followed. Mountains in Switzerland were falling apart. Glacial melt rates had also reached new records.

When the news moved to North Africa he switched channels. No one could look at Africa and not believe that they were next in line. He flicked down two channels and waited for the local service
to come on after the international links.

The British nationalists’ shaky unity, The Movement, had endured a big rally earlier that day, followed by a sluggish, heat-battered march through Torquay. He’d heard them in the
distance that afternoon: drums, muffled chants, the odd tinny blurt through a microphone.

The Movement planned to walk through Paignton the following day. Progress would be slow because even The Movement’s determination would stumble in such heat, but there’d be more
people than usual in the area, and the available police would gather further along the coast around the refugee camps, filling their boots with sweat they could ill afford to lose.

Heat kept people indoors. A good thing because the recipient of the father’s coming move would probably be home, just like Robert East had been. He’d go in real early, when it was a
bit cooler.

The father turned the screen off and looked at the open window: a black square of hot night. He dropped the blinds as a precaution. An intruder would disturb them and the noise would wake
him.

His thoughts swam. The bottle of rum was empty. He hadn’t intended to finish it in one sitting. It used to take him three nights to go through a bottle. Half-asleep, drunk, feverish, then
strangely chilly, always more dreaming than thinking, the father waited and waited for Scarlett to call.

At eight in the morning, she finally made contact. The father believed he’d dropped off only for a few minutes in the night, but could now see the intense bars of light at the side of the
blinds.

‘I have the address,’ she said. ‘You ready?’

The father peered through the windscreen at the sky. Glimmers of dawn’s thin light seemed more evident. Soon there would be a merciless clarity for early-morning eyes to
squint into.

If the heat was to last forever, he knew that everyone would go mad. Or maybe everyone had already gone mad without being aware of the disintegration, and not only the mutterers or
head-slappers, the screamers or the too silent, who were plentiful. But perhaps those still shuffling through domestic routines, or frantic with some purpose, in what was called the war against the
climate, were incapable of fully remembering what life was like before. Back when? When was it not like
this
. When was that exactly? He often wondered if the lucky ones were those who had
known nothing more than this.

When it had gone five, he was still sat in the car, slowly sweating and sipping at his water bottle. Public information about heatstroke stayed on repeat in the local media he had playing. He
knew the health advice by heart like an old song: symptoms to watch for were quick, shallow breaths and a rapid pulse followed by dry skin, nausea, dizziness, irritability. Stay indoors, do not
move during the hottest part of day, use cold compresses, stay in the shade, sip water.
Stay, sit, sip
.

There had been no room in intensive care since June so good luck with an ambulance. With heatstroke, a coma might be only a stumble away. And a move could be a boisterous business, as was the
retreat or extraction. If there were delays or tussles, he would need to periodically check his skin and make sure the sweat never stopped leaking.

He returned his attention the house across the road.

The last time the father saw his target, Murray Bowles, the man had been returning to this address, carrying two fabric bags packed square with cartons of food. And the man had managed to remain
overweight, so he wasn’t eating only soya products, fruit and vegetables. He was probably supplementing his fare with sugary black-market victuals, and they weren’t cheap.

Bowles didn’t work, but lived alone in a three-bedroomed terraced house that looked close to being condemned. In the frenzy of resettlements from flooded Liverpool and East London to a
county already swollen by the surge from southern Europe and Africa, the father wondered how a rehoused sex offender had become the sole occupier of a three-bedroomed property, even one so poorly
maintained. Benefits would never stretch so far. Bowles had
friends
.

The bay windows of the street-facing rooms on each floor were permanently curtained, the window sills revealing a permanent litter of objects just inside the glass: plastic bottles, crockery,
bunched-up clothing, the back of a circular mirror. The attic had been converted into another floor; its bays were also concealed by blinds.

No one else had entered or left the house with Bowles during the three days the father had watched the property, parked outside, on the other side of the road. And each time the father had seen
Bowles that week, the man hadn’t changed his shirt. He looked like an ogre from a fairy tale; he looked like the cliché of a child molester. The father had discovered that
they
often did. Longish, unwashed hair mopped his wide skull, the black locks forming greasy fronds across the broad forehead, and dangling over a rubbery-looking collar, unless they had
been scraped tight behind his ears. The man’s round-shouldered posture was a result of a perpetual lowering of the head, chin dipped to sternum, as if he were a big, harmless, shy man: meek
and self-conscious in collared shirts stretched out by a ponderous belly and slabs over his hips. Where they stumped from his shorts, his pale legs were thickly haired trunks.