He could not focus on anything. He kept skittering off into daydreams. His thoughts slowed down, fragmented to useless shards.
He heard Carla’s voice.
Even drunk, even like that, he’s the best I’ve seen.
Hewitt’s voice.
When Mike Bryant drives you off the road on Friday, Mr Chessman - and he will, because he’s harder and faster than you — when that happens—
He remembered Bryant’s driving. Bryant’s chess playing. Headlong, full on, joyous in its savagery.
Bryant and the car-jackers. The boom of the Nemex, the tumbling bodies.
Bryant and Griff Dixon. Implacable, precise.
Bryant and Marauder, daring the gangwit forward, grinning into the possibility of it.
Bryant on Crutched Friars, walking empty handed into the duel against five men with shotguns.
He stared at it all, behind the curtain of his closed eyes.
And heard Hewitt again.
Mitsue Jones shot through the head at close range—while she was injured and trapped in wreckage—the blood of an eighty-year-old man on your hands—You’re no fucking different to me in the end.
He wondered if she was right.
Recoiled automatically as soon as he thought it.
Found himself lying face up on the bed an hour later, exploring the idea gingerly, like a broken bone or a gaping wound he didn’t dare look at directly.
Caught himself, finally, hoping it might be true.
Because, in the absence of the consuming hatred that had driven him after Edward Quain, he didn’t know what else he could summon to keep him alive tomorrow.
He had the cab leave him at the end of the drive.
It felt strange to walk up the gravel S-curve and see the house emerge gradually through the trees. Just being there felt odd enough - he hadn’t seen the place in weeks, and even then, before his life broke in half, he couldn’t recall the last time he’d walked from the road. One weekend, one evening, out with Carla in the village maybe. Back at the start of the summer. He couldn’t remember.
He reached the turning circle at the top, and the Saab was there, quiet and sequined with rain. He wondered if Carla had looked at it recently, wondered in fact when it had last been moved. He’d need to road-test it. Check it for—
A memory arrowed in past his defences - Carla under the Saab post test-drive, calling out questions about handling, while he stood with a whisky in his hand, watching her feet and answering. Warmth of shared knowledge, shared involvement.
He stared at the Saab, throat aching. The urge to get in and drive somewhere was overwhelming. He stood for a full twenty seconds, like a starving man faced with a large animal that he might just conceivably be able to kill with his bare hands and eat raw. He only moved when the straps on his bags began to cut deep enough into his palms to be painful.
Not yet.
He dumped the bags at the front door while he fished the recog tab from his pocket and showed it to the lock. Shouldered the door aside and moved across the threshold. Inside was cold with the lack of recent occupancy and everything had the skin-thin unfamiliarity of return home after long absence. He stood in the lounge, bags dropped once more at his feet, and Carla’s departure came and hit him like a hard slap across the mouth.
She’d taken very little, but the holes it had left felt like wounds. The green onyx woman-form she’d bought in Cape Town was gone from its place by the phone deck. Two blunt little metal stubs protruded from a suddenly naked patch of wall where the flattened and engraved Volvo cylinder head from her mechanic’s graduation had once hung. On the mantelpiece, something else was gone, like a pulled tooth, he couldn’t remember what it was. The framed photos of her friends and family on the window ledge had been weeded out from others of Chris and Carla or Chris alone, and the remaining crop looked stranded on the white wood like yachts run aground. The bookshelves were devastated, the bulk of their occupants gone, the rest fallen flat or leaning forlornly together in corners.
He had no stomach for the rest of the house.
He unpacked his bag across the sofa, slung the Nemex and his recently acquired Remington into an armchair. The sight of the weapons brought him up short. He’d never brought the Nemex inside before this, he realised. Even when they went to the Brundtland that fucking night, he’d had to get it from the glove compartment of the Saab. It felt as alien now, perched on the soft leather of the armchair, as the absences where Carla had taken things away. It felt, in an odd way, like an absence of its own.
He picked up the shotgun, because it delayed the time when he’d have to go upstairs to the bedroom. He pumped the action a couple of times, deriving a thin satisfaction from the powder-dry clack-clack that it made. He lost himself in the mechanism for a while, put the thing to his shoulder and tracked around the room like a child playing at war, pausing and firing on the spaces Carla had left and, finally, on the image of himself in the hall entrance mirror. He stared for a long time at the man who stood there, lowered the Remington for a moment to get a better look, then pumped the action rapidly, threw the shotgun to his shoulder and pulled the trigger again.
He went out to the car.
Later, as evening was falling, he parked again and went back into the house for the second time. With darkness shading in outside and the lights on, the blank absence of things and Carla seemed less brutal.
He’d already eaten. He locked the door and went straight up to the bedroom. Carla had taken her scrubbed granite analogue clock from the bedside table and the only other time-piece in the room was on the dressing table, an old Casio digital alarm they’d bought together at some antique auction years back. Chris lay in the dark for a long time staring at its steady green numerals, watching the seconds of his life turn over, watching as the last minutes of the day counted down to zero and the new morning of the duel began.
He didn’t sleep. He couldn’t see the point.
Chapter Forty-Six
They were talking about him as he turned on the TV.
‘—for a driver of that rank. It’s not really what you expect, is it, Liz?’
‘I think that depends, Ron.’ She was resplendent in a figure-hugging black scoop-necked jersey, light make-up, hair pinned carelessly up. Looking at her made him ache. ‘It’s true Faulkner’s form since Quain has been variable, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad. I know from interviewing him myself that he simply doesn’t see blanket savagery as an asset.’
‘Whereas Mike Bryant does.’
‘Well, again, I think you’re simplifying. Mike’s form is more consistent, more conservative you might say, and yes, he certainly isn’t afraid to go foot to the floor when it counts. But he’s not cast in the same thug mould as, say, someone like Yeo at Mariner Sketch or some of the imported drivers we’ve got from Eastern Europe. That’s savagery as a default setting. That’s not Bryant at all.’
‘You know them both quite well.’
She made a modest gesture. ‘Mike Bryant was one of the main sources for my book, The New Asphalt Warriors. And I’ve been working with Chris Faulkner, among other drivers, on a follow-up. I hate to plug so blatantly, but—‘
‘No, no. Please.’
Mannered laughter.
‘Well, then. It’s called Reflections on Asphalt - Behind the Driver Mask, and it should, my workload permitting, be out some time in the New Year.’ She grinned professionally into the camera. ‘It’ll be a great read, I promise.’
‘I’m sure it will.’ Face to camera. Pause, and. Cue. ‘So now, let’s go over to our live-coverage crew at the Harlow helideck. Sanjeev, can you hear me?’
‘Loud and clear, Ron.’ The inset screen sprang up. Maximised. Windswept backdrop, rotors and the location anchor sweeping dishevelled hair out of his eyes as he spoke.
‘So what’s the weather like up there?’
‘Uh, looks as if the rain’s still holding off, Ron. Maybe even some chance of sun later on, the forecast people tell me.’