Jane’s presence, however, had made all the difference: she had calmed the situation simply by being there, and they had all slowly relaxed into an almost pleasant groove. When she had made her revelation regarding all the stuff she’d sent him over the years, things had threatened to become tense all over again, but she’d handled it beautifully.
He still couldn’t understand why she’d been sending him those updates — not fully. Yes, it was a way of anchoring him to the Grove, of forcing him to remember — or, rather, not to forget — that he’d left the other two Amigos behind to live with the mess they’d all made, but somehow he felt that there was something more to it. She did not know what had happened when the boys were ten years old; nobody did, not even the boys themselves. So why would she put her marriage at risk to keep her claws in his life?
It was all too complex, an emotional assault course that he was nowhere near fit to complete. He was out of shape; his stamina was gone. The truth was, he had not been in good enough shape for this kind of onslaught for years.
He lay back and kicked off his shoes, wriggling on the sheets until he found a comfortable position. Outside, a dog barked, children laughed, a distant siren made a tune to which the city danced. The darkness behind his eyelids writhed.
Jane. He could see her now, emerging from that darkness.
He would be lying to himself if he thought that he did not still find her attractive. Her youth had faded, there were lines and blemishes where once her skin had been smooth and flawless, but still there was something about the woman that drew him, sent his blood pumping too quickly around his body. There was a homely quality to her beauty that intrigued him. Natasha didn’t have that. She was too perfect, too model-like: zero body fat; a flat chest; porcelain skin; a way of carrying herself that suggested she was always aware of people watching her. Whereas Jane moved naturally, with an almost slovenly gait. She didn’t give a damn who was watching, or if nobody was. She was her own woman; nobody could own or rent her image. She was real. She was a beating pulse under the skin of life.
When he’d first seen her this evening, his initial reaction had been base: he wanted to fuck her. He felt ashamed of himself for having these thoughts, but that didn’t negate them. Jane was his one regret: back in the day, they’d never made it past the heavy petting stage — a feel of her tit through her lacy bra cup, a hand on her warm, moist pudenda, but only over the top of her knickers. Once she had grabbed his crotch when they were kissing in the back of somebody’s car. He remembered it now; he had been breathless, his chest hitching and his legs shaking. She had never done it again.
He wondered how often she and Brendan made love. He tried to imagine what her body looked like beneath the baggy, unflattering clothes she wore. Was it full, voluptuous, like a real woman, rather than thin and scrawny, with the bones jutting through her paper-thin flesh, like Natasha?
He realised that he was rubbing his cock. He was hard as steel.
He stopped and turned onto his side, feeling obscurely guilty, like a schoolboy fantasising about his best friend’s mother.
She had kids. They had kids — Brendan and Jane. They were a family, a solid unit; he could not come between them, even if he tried. It was all just make-believe, another way of trying to hold on to a past that he had never really owned in the first place. Of trying to identify what was missing, what had been taken from him when he was ten years old and the world had seemed so large and filled with promise.
Kids…
What on earth was going on with those two kids?
The ambulance had arrived in five minutes, and two paramedics had inspected Harry’s throat for blockages, massaged his tiny chest, and pushed an oxygen mask over his face. By that time, the worst of it was over. The hummingbird — had it really been a hummingbird? — had flown, and the boy was breathing easier, but they had not taken any chances. Jane had gone with them in the ambulance and Simon had called a taxi for Brendan, insisting that he pay the fare when it arrived.
It had all happened so quickly; the whole scene had played out faster than he could recall. He barely even had time to register how he felt, what it all might mean in terms of the reasons for him being in the area. It was all linked — he knew that, could not deny it — but he didn’t understand how, or why. The dots were there, all over the page, but he was unable to connect them.
A hummingbird…
Small, silent, and forcing its way out of the boy’s throat, being born into the world.
A hummingbird…
Just like the ones he could remember from the Needle, when he and his friends had been imprisoned there. With his eyes closed, he could remember the sound of their wings beating: a hushed whisper in the darkness. He could see the colours of their feathers, the multi-hued blurs they had become as they darted across the room, emerging from conical nests high up in the branches of the old trees.
There had been a forest in there: inside the Needle. There was a forest indoors, but he could not imagine how that might be true. It was impossible, a child’s daydream. Trees growing indoors; one world enveloped by another; wheels within wheels; stories within stories. A fairytale…
Other, darker memories remained out of reach, backing off from him, not allowing him access to the secrets they might reveal. All he had, all that he could recall, were the trees and the hummingbirds… and the girl. The girl called Hailey: the same girl from the newspaper report, the girl who had gone missing last year on the estate, along with her mother. The girl with the hummingbird wings.
But how could they be the same person? How could that girl — the one who had lived on the Grove so recently — be the same as the winged phantom he had seen inside the Needle twenty years ago? It made no sense. They must be two different people. Perhaps they were related.
Surely that was it. Mother and daughter, or aunt and niece, perhaps they were even grandmother and granddaughter. But then, it seemed, time was somehow elastic inside the Needle; it looped back on itself, creating cracks and fissures where bad things might scuttle through. Perhaps their childhood selves were still in there now, going through the same nightmare he’d already experienced twenty years before…
Sleep stole over him, moving across his body and carrying him away. When he opened his eyes he was in another place, yet he knew that he was still somewhere in the Concrete Grove, lost in a fold in the fabric of the place, paused at a point where all things converged and time lost all meaning.
Time lost all meaning…
The low, fat clouds were dark brown, the colour of old bloodstains, and the sky beyond them was black. There were graduations in the blackness, but he could see no stars: just an endlessly folding darkness, an overpowering sense of nothingness.
The Grove was a wasteland: buildings had fallen, roads were shattered, chunks of tarmac lay strewn across the dirt, and broken paving stones littered the scene like the forgotten building blocks in a child’s game. Something had happened here — something devastating. An apocalypse had taken place, and as far as Simon could see, there were no survivors. The houses had all been flattened, taken apart, and the burnt-out shells of vehicles resembled the abandoned carapaces of giant dead beetles.
Up ahead, the Needle was in ruins. It had fallen like some mighty citadel, an ancient fortress from a storybook battle. The concrete looked like old stone, and had taken on less modern forms. Like ruined castle ramparts, the concrete walls and lobbies had been destroyed and reshaped.