The Way Out (15 page)

And what a tree it is. Our family tree. Maybe every family is the same if you peel back the bark and inspect the wormholes. Maybe we all come from the same long line of broken minds,
drunks and bastards.

It's like some kind of optical illusion, seeing all the stories layered on top of each other, snapping in and out of focus. Like there's a hidden meaning in the way the pattern shifts, some secret to be revealed from the way new patterns develop.

I climb back to Section 5, shelf 8 and the bottle's near enough empty now. Might as well finish it off. The racking lurches to the side as I stash the empty bottle back in the box but I don't let it faze me. The effects of that joint I smoked in the car park are joining forces with the whisky now, setting the outer edges of my perception spinning like a wobbly carousel. I look down and watch the racking twisting round on itself, groaning under the strain into a spiralling ladder of metal. Not even going to try and get down that.

I go sideways again, find that narrow gap at the very top of Section 9 and crawl in, shoulders brushing against the boxes on either side. Just a short break and I'll get back to work. It's not bad here. Quite cosy. I could have a nap. No one would notice.

The sober part of me that's been observing, taking notes, agrees. Sleep would be a Good Thing. In my dreams, I'm always climbing.

Rubble

Matthew, who knows his name only as a sound his mother often makes, sits and looks at the thing in his hand. He doesn't have the words to describe its shape, colour or texture. To you or me, this would be a red wooden cube with sides about two inches long. And that's all it would be. Matthew, however, holds infinite possibility in the palm of his hand. He lifts it to his mouth, sucks a corner and discovers it is not a thing for eating.

Another cube nearby looks almost exactly the same, but this one is more like outside. We'd call it green. Matthew crawls over and grasps it in his free hand. This is not for eating either.

He drops one cube on the carpet and looks at the other in his hand, then back at the one on the floor and an idea begins to form. He feels it swelling in his mind, like an enormous bubble. This idea is so big, so shiny, he doesn't dare blink in case it bursts. This is important. Slowly, so slowly, he lowers one cube until it rests on top of the other and then he takes his hand away. Nothing will ever be the same again.

In the kitchen, Matthew's mother is unaware of her son's discovery. She's pacing back and forth with the phone jammed to the side of her head, her whole body tilted towards it, as if this will help make sense of what she's hearing.

‘Not coming back? What do you mean, Not coming back?' she says. She tries to think behind his short sentence, to prise the words apart and find the alternate meaning that surely must be hidden somewhere.

There's a long silence. She puts the phone down and leans her forehead against the cupboard door, presses hard and rolls it from side to side, focusing on the small, controllable pain this produces. There's no time to think. It's past eight o'clock and they should be on their way.

She splashes cold water on her face, locates her work shoes, bag and keys and goes into the front room for Matthew. At any other time, she would've paid attention, would've knelt on the floor and been properly impressed. But not today. Today, she scoops him up before he succeeds in placing brick number three and a cube of blue, bright as a summer sky, falls from his hand and rolls across the carpet. Matthew twists and wriggles. He stretches out his arms, fingers straining, and howls in protest.

With Matthew securely strapped into the back seat, Melanie joins the rush hour traffic which turns the five-minute journey to her sister's house into twenty. The windows of the corner shop have been smashed again. Boards have been hastily hammered in place and stare out over the shattered glass still strewn across the pavement. The place already looks abandoned.

She concentrates on the day ahead. Another day of job hunting. She doesn't enjoy deceiving Karen, dropping Matthew with her and heading off as if she was going to the office as usual, but if she lets go of the routine, anything could happen.

The lights at the crossroads cycle back to red but the queue doesn't move forward. She sighs and opens the windows a crack. Off her passenger side, the wall surrounding the vacant lot has a hole in it about four feet wide into which a flimsy wire fence has been crammed. A sign hangs lopsided from the wire bearing a one-word message – Dangerous.

Beyond the fence, an expanse of rubble stretches out in mini-ranges, weeds sprouting between the low mounds. There's a movement at the edge of her vision and a dry, shifting sound as
a small landslide spills pebbles down one of the slopes. Just the ground settling, a cat perhaps, or children playing where they shouldn't. That sign would be a magnet to some. The movement comes again, this time on the far side of the empty lot. Too big for a cat, or a child, a rolling wave that sends earth and stones tumbling from the peaks. She imagines the rubble as a living thing, a massive creature looking out at the traffic and shrugging its shoulders in puzzlement, or simple indifference.

Perhaps the fence and the sign aren't to stop people getting in, but to stop whatever's in there from getting out. Maybe the real danger is that the rubble may rise up and break out, inciting a revolution of collapse which would sweep through the streets in an orgy of destruction, calling other buildings to join it, pulling down garden walls, factories, empty offices, dilapidated warehouses into the boiling tide. Some structures would need very little encouragement. Others might seem stable enough but they too would succumb eventually. Ruin is innate and inevitable in all things. Everything disintegrates.

A car horn blares behind her. The lights are green.

She thinks about their last holiday. She'd been six months pregnant with Matthew and the idea was to spend some time together before the baby arrived. The island was a parched, dusty tourist trap of bars and dirty beaches, the air slimy with coconut suntan lotion and frying fat. Between the concrete blocks of hotels and the beachfront restaurants were stretches of wasteland that nobody claimed, full of rubbish and rubble and starving, thorny weeds. These patches of forgotten land disturbed her. If you stepped into one, you might not be seen again.

The heat was unbearable and she feared the baby would cook inside her. She tried to stay in the shade, switching seats in the cafés as the sun climbed overhead and the line of blinding heat advanced across the tables. Gazing out across the dull pewter
Atlantic to an indistinct shape on the horizon, she asked, ‘Is that another island?' He shrugged and made a ‘Phff' sound. She asked what he thought was beyond the island. ‘The end of the world,' he answered, without hesitation. There was no question in his voice, no hint of an upward inflection to soften the blow. They sat and looked at it and she knew from that moment the end was coming. Still, his timing could hardly have been worse.

Karen's house is full of primary colours and children and smells of toast. Her two eldest are playing with Lego in the conservatory while Karen changes the baby's nappy.

‘There! Doesn't that feel better? Yes. It. Does.' Karen punctuates her speech with play pinches of the boy's fat cheeks. He squeals with laughter as she picks him up and slings him over one hip. ‘Jesus, Mel,' she says, giving her sister a searching look, ‘you look like crap. You okay?'

Melanie rubs a hand across her forehead. ‘I'm fine. Just tired, y'know?'

Karen puts the baby down in a bouncy chair and reaches for Matthew. ‘Have you been keeping your mummy up at night, you little monster? Well, you know what we do with monsters here?' She blows a noisy raspberry on Matthew's neck and he squirms and giggles. ‘When does that man of yours get back anyway? Or is he inventing more work just to dodge the night shift?'

Melanie sighs. ‘Well…'

A fight suddenly erupts in the conservatory over who has the most sloped bits for the roofs. There are never enough of those bits, she knows. Nathan, four, an advocate of direct action, has smashed up the house his older sister Chloe was building. In retaliation she has pushed him over and he has landed badly on his garage and is now wailing, ‘Mummeeee!'

Unflustered, Karen makes for the war zone. It lights her up,
thinks Melanie. ‘Organised chaos!' Karen exclaims, as if that were something to be enjoyed.

Melanie backs away. The concept makes her nauseous with dread. ‘I better get going,' she says.

‘It's not fair!' shouts Chloe. ‘He always ruins everything!'

‘Shush now,' says Karen, rubbing Nathan's legs as he snivels. ‘Why don't you two build something together?'

‘No no no!' they yell, at once in complete agreement.

Karen looks up at her as if surprised to see her still there, hovering in the doorway. ‘Okay then. See you later. Don't work too hard.'

Melanie arrives at the office on time and parks by the security gate. There's no reason to keep coming back but every morning, when she tries to think of what else she might do, where else she might go, she finds only an empty space in her mind where the answer should be. She hadn't liked her job but now it's gone, as well as the pay check, she misses the familiar battles and tired jokes, the mud-coloured coffee, even her boss's bad breath. She has hardly any savings and unless she finds another income soon, things will start falling apart.

The roof of the office building has been removed since last week and the interior gutted. A new sign on the security gate reads Keep Out Demolition in Progress below a black exclamation mark in a yellow triangle.

After a few minutes, she drives away and heads towards the ring road. The traffic is heavy. People with jobs hurrying from one task to another, going to meetings, chasing deadlines, delivery times, opening hours. Or perhaps they're like her, driving for a sense of purpose, desperately trying to join the dots from A to B to give their day a shape.

She pulls out into the fast lane but red brake lights are going
on in pairs as far as she can see. To the left, a sign reading Diversion crawls by, followed by another. Up ahead she sees an indistinct shape stretching across both lanes. It looks impossibly like a small hill or an island wreathed in sea-mist. As the traffic creeps closer, the shape solidifies into a pile of rubble and the mist turns to dust. She flicks on her wipers and they drag grit from side to side across the windscreen.

Before they reach the obstruction, traffic cones herd them off onto a slip road. She stares at the rubble as the line veers away from it. There's too much to be the result of a lorry shedding its load. Sweat prickles on the palms of her hands. In the car in front, a woman is talking on her mobile. Behind, a van driver taps his hands on his steering wheel in time to music she can't hear. They have their eyes on the road ahead. Just another diversion. No big deal.

She pulls into a transport café, orders coffee, buys a newspaper and searches for the Situations Vacant page but finds only endless cars for sale. She wonders how much she'd get for hers.

There's a dull thunk on the table as a small cube of plaster, about two inches square lands next to her coffee cup. She looks up. The ceiling of the café is veined with thick cracks extending the length of the room. As she stares, the cracks bulge and spread as if the emptiness they contain is liquid and pulsing, alive.

A waitress with sad eyes and pink lipstick stops beside her table and drags a dirty cloth across the Formica, scooping up the lump of plaster. Melanie opens her mouth to speak but the waitress has already moved on.

She is still gaping at the ceiling, wondering why no one else seems to have noticed what's going on, when the far side of the café collapses with a grinding crash. She jumps to her feet, spilling her coffee. Was there anyone sitting over there? Shouldn't somebody do something? She coughs and wipes
her eyes. Through the cloud of dust she sees the waitress shake her head and fetch a mop from behind the counter. A man in overalls belches.

She staggers out of the groaning building, gasping for breath. There are no emergency vehicles, no one is running or screaming. She licks her lips and tastes stone. Cars glide by, the occupants oblivious. She stares at the flow of traffic and it becomes hypnotic, calming. Before long she decides she wants nothing more than to join it.

On the outer bypass, all is serene. Four lanes of smooth running order cut through the green belt, two in one direction and two back the other way. Perfect balance. She thinks only of her wheels pressed firmly to the road, holding a steady course. She doesn't think about how to keep Matthew in nappies and food when there's no money. Instead, she clears her mind, tunes her thoughts to the drone of rubber on tarmac.

She has been travelling this way for some time when the comforting hum is knocked out of tune. A deeper bass note is insinuating itself upwards, getting louder. A growling, tearing thunder eating away her equilibrium.

A dark shape appears on the horizon, moving towards her on the opposite carriageway. A truck? No, too big, and black all over. No windows. No driver. No wheels. It grows in size, dwarfing the cars in front of it before rolling right over the top of them, grinding them to dust.

Dear God. Doesn't anyone else see it?

She waves frantically to the drivers in the cars coming towards her, flashes her lights and points behind them. Some look at her curiously, most ignore her. She can feel the bone-shaking rumble through the wheels of her own car. The black shape is nearly level with her as it smashes a young couple in
a red hatchback into oblivion. One second they were laughing together at some shared joke, him reaching his hand out to rest on her knee, the fall of her hair half-hiding her smile, and the next they were slapped out of existence.

The whole carriageway is rolling itself up like a monstrous Swiss roll, black tarry stones spraying from the wheeling edges as it passes. At least forty feet high, it casts an immense shadow. Her hands are shaking as she grips the wheel and it feels like something is tearing loose in her chest. Something necessary. Something she can't afford to lose.