‘Hey,’ she said. ‘I know. Hang on a minute.’ She grabbed one of the carved wooden panels on the wall and pulled it open, revealing boots, a tennis racket, an assortment of coats. ‘Okay, no luck here.’
She opened a second panel and found a wall of shelves filled with gardening tools, bottles of antifreeze and a big industrial flashlight. ‘Yes! I knew it!’ She grabbed the flashlight and tucked it under her jacket, a move that did not conceal it even slightly.
‘Susie! What are you doing?’
‘What do you think I’m doing? Stealing a flashlight.’ She giggled suddenly and put a hand over her mouth.
‘They’re going to notice it’s gone, for Christ’s sake.’
‘I don’t give a fuck. This is like, this is like me losing a penny. Screw them.’
‘Are you twelve years old or what?’
‘Come on. Let’s get out of here.’ She pushed open the door and they stepped out onto the walkway, a furtive little knot of pot-smoking professors huddled by the side of the house, the branches of the trees creaking in a harsh wind.
‘Susie.’ He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Susie-Sue. Please. Not tonight. Please just let me take you home. We can go first thing tomorrow.’
‘I told you, Alex,’ she said, pulling away from him. ‘I have to do this now. It has to be now.’
‘People are sleeping,’ he said, desperate for some rationale. ‘If we even find him, he’ll probably be asleep.’
‘No problem,’ said Susie. ‘When he’s off his meds, he’s nocturnal.’ She lost her footing on the step at the end of the walkway and caught herself on the wall. ‘Jesus, I didn’t mean to get this drunk. No, that’s not true, I totally did.’
‘Okay, Susie,’ said Alex, throwing up his hands. ‘You win. You always win. We will go down into the ravine and look for your brother under the guidance of the man who’s making great progress on cleaning systems.’
‘Good. Thank you.’
‘Just give me the stolen flashlight, okay?’
She walked ahead of him along the street, but then stopped at the corner, and he caught up and found her looking confused. ‘This way,’ he said, touching her elbow. ‘Up Glen Road.’
‘It’s all twisty here. The streets. I never know where I am.’
‘Yeah, well, you’re just lucky I spend my time wandering around taking pictures of metal structures.’ But she didn’t react; she didn’t remember.
‘I forgot to ask you, that call you got. What was it in the end?’
‘You probably don’t want to know,’ said Alex.
‘No, tell me.’
‘It was an assault. It was horrible. I don’t much want to talk about it.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She squeezed his hand.
‘Somebody got burned up because they thought he was the subway poisoner.’
‘God. God, this is so fucked. I don’t know what’s happening to this city.’
‘Me neither. Adrian thinks we’ve been cursed.’
Susie giggled again. ‘Fuck. What a concept. Who does he blame?’ ‘The government, I suppose. That’s who he always used to blame.’ He detached his hand from hers and stuck it in his coat pocket. Below the road the earth fell away, another valley opening beneath them, sheer and dizzy, into a well of darkness.
‘I hate this fucking neighbourhood,’ said Susie, still giggling, as they left the bridge and continued north, past wide yards filled with trees outlined in fairy lights. ‘I just want to scrape the paint on their Mercedes with my house keys.’
‘Oh yeah. Resort to vandalism. That’s always good.’
At the end of Glen Road they turned and took another short street into a park, walked across the grass until they had passed through a fence of bushes and found themselves at the top of a steep hill. Alex turned on the flashlight and scanned the bushes until he found a narrow track leading downwards into the shadows. He started to scramble down, his boots sinking in the slippery mud, but Susie tripped and fell almost immediately. ‘Goddamn,’ she moaned. ‘This is my only good dress. Look at this.’ Her stockings were covered with mud, and there was a large smear across the front of the dress; clearly not thinking, she wiped her caked hands on the sleeves of her jacket.
‘Okay, c’mere.’ He stretched out his hand, and she took it and and stumbled towards him, the shock of her body against his, and he thought, Oh shit. Oh no. He caught his breath, his arm moving around her waist to pull her closer, Oh no. Then, bracing his feet, he steadied them down the long slope to a forking path at the bottom.
‘I think we’re on level ground from now on,’ he said, though she continued to lean against him, her hand pressing into his back. He didn’t take his arm away. They turned to the right, the mud sucking and clinging to their boots. The wind was muffled by the wooded hills on either side of them, but his ears and fingers were stinging with the cold. He aimed the flashlight ahead, and then swung it to either side, looking for any signs of habitation.
‘Wait for me a sec.’ He let go of her and walked off the edge of the path, into the snow beneath the trees, circling the flashlight around him, trying to see into the woods as far as he could, but he wasn’t good with darkness, he couldn’t see much. She probably didn’t remember that either. He stood at the edge of a deep gully, hearing water running below; came back to Susie, and she leaned into his chest again, wrapping both her arms around him.
They walked on, and then he saw a signpost on his left, between two hills. ‘Okay. That’ll be the brickworks.’ He led her off the main track to a smaller path that ran sharply downwards, and he could make out the shape of the old brickworks now, and a smaller building at the side lit up with orange security lamps. They crossed a concrete plaza, ponds and wetlands spreading out around them, and then they were beside the great hulk of the abandoned factory, which had been haphazardly tidied and repaired, a strangely inaccessible cultural monument. The wind was worse here, howling around them in the broad exposed flat.
Susie shook her head. ‘This doesn’t look right,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he’d live near a, an attraction. And it’s not far from the road, listen.’
‘Well, it’s maybe not a very successful attraction. But I don’t know. Anyway, it sounded like he was a ways behind it.’
He turned the flashlight into the factory hall, picking out the blurry shapes of men in sleeping bags among the twisted piles of old machinery, and pointed to them wordlessly. Susie left his arm and moved skittishly towards the men, veering at an angle, but then she saw empty bottles lying by the sleeping bags and shook her head and returned.
‘They were drinking,’ she said. ‘Derek doesn’t drink.’
‘He could’ve started.’
‘No. He wouldn’t. Anyway, they’re just crashing. Your guy said he had a tent, right? He’s settled in.’
There was another mud path, narrow and sloping upwards, leading on beside a fence. It ran by the parts of the brickworks that had never been restored, that were smashed and boarded up and covered with graffiti. There were no lights here; Alex turned the flashlight on again. Susie tripped on a tree root and fell again, and cut her knee, and he bent and took her back into his arms. Thistles bit and lodged in their clothes.
The path led them around a corner, to the back of the vast dark walls. In the beam of the flashlight Alex saw a sign with a hazard symbol and the words Asbestos and silica contaminated area. Do not enter. They passed the warning, around the corner of a barbed-wire fence into a clearing. Not far beyond them was the railway overpass, towering on massive concrete pilasters, reaching up far above their heads, far beyond where he could see.