Her rental car was virtually concealed behind the bulk of the huge van in which the young Americans had arrived. One of the women was sitting in the front passenger seat with the door open, looking at a road map of southeast England spread on her lap. If she looked up as Teresa went past the gesture went unnoticed, as Teresa was intent only on getting out of the hotel as soon as possible.
She started her car, and after squeezing narrowly out from behind the van she drove it from the parking lot with a minimum of delay. She turned on to the Eastbourne Road, heading west, and almost at once found herself held up in the slowmoving crawl of traffic that seemed permanently to clog the roads during the early part of the mornings. After half a mile she took a right at a traffic signal, and headed up towards the industrial estate overlooking the town. She parked in a space at the front of what she now knew as the GunHo building.
Half an hour later, with her neck dressing replaced by a simple BandAid, she was sitting in the driver's seat of the car and looking through the road map of Sussex. She had been told she should not use the ExEx simulations for another two days, until she had finished the antibiotics and the infection on the valve incision had cleared up. Once again she had time on her hands.
The road map she had found in the rental car intrigued her. English roads spread out illogically, following no discernible pattern. The map showed features you would never see on its equivalent in America: churches, abbeys, vineyards, even individual houses. Clergy House, Old Mint House, Ashburnam House did people still live in these places? Was the fact they were marked on the map an invitation to go visit?
There was for her something solid and real about the English landscape, unlike the sensuous glimpse she had had of the California of 1950 when she briefly took over Elsa Durdle's identity. Then she had been haunted by the sense of an infinite unfolding of virtuality: nothing existed beyond her immediate awareness, but she had only to turn her head, or drive towards it, for it to spring suddenly into existence.
This English map was another intriguing code, like a programming language, a series of symbols depicting a landscape that for her was mostly imaginary, mostly unseen. The codes would turn to reality as she went towards them, the ancient England of her dreams would be there to be discovered, an endlessly unfolding panorama.
She left Bulverton on the coast road, crossed the Pevensey Levels, and after driving through several tiny villages reached the main highway between Eastbourne and London. Here she turned north towards London and let the car build up speed. She closed her window and put on a CD by Oasis, one of several records she had found in the car. She had heard of the band, but had never listened to their music. She turned the volume up loud.
Driving had always helped her think, and all the decisions she remembered having taken were made in a car. Not all were the right decisions, of course, but they were none the less memorable for that.
She and Andy had decided to get married, one day in a car going through the flat countryside of southern New Jersey while they were looking for a motel for the night. She had not only decided to apply to join the Bureau one day while driving, but had also decided to take leave of absence, again in a car, although that particular car had been parked in the drive outside her empty house in Woodbdidge, where
the windows were dark and the memories were uselessly and frustratingly of Andy alive and living there with her.
Her eyes misted as she drove, while she remembered that day and the violent events which had led up to it. They had become the basis of everything, the rationale of all her actions, or so she had supposed. That dread feeling of blankness, spreading out and around her, swamping everything but replacing nothing.
Life became a series of cliches, some of them mouthed by the people around her who loved her, many more of them forming unbidden in her own mind. Bereavement turned out to be beset with comforting formulae for the bereaved, 'no doubt springing from the shared unconscious mind, used by every generation that had preceded her and who had lost someone close to them. As much as anything else, it was trying to escape from these easy platitudes that had helped her conceive the idea of the trip. Bulverton, East Sussex, England, a town so appallingly twinned with Kingwood City that it became an irresistible lure.
At that time the coincidence had beckoned her: she could not find what she needed at home, so maybe it would be there in the English seaside town few people in the US had ever heard of The vagueness of this attraction made one part of her suspicious, but the pull it exerted on the other half was undeniable. lt was not even the unfamiliar, alien quality of Bulverton, as she had imagined it before she got here, because Kingwood City had been just as much an unknown quantity for her before the massacre; if foreignness was the only characteristic pulling at her she might as well have been drawn to that soulless place on Interstate 20 near Abilene. lt would have been easier for her to get to, and cheaper too, but Bulverton was where she knew she had to be.
Now Bulverton's vagueness had become a specific: it was
just a dull, tired, unhappy seaside town, full of the wrong memories and with no conception of its future. The real Bulverton was undermining her resolve, making her think about Andy more than she wanted or needed. Being able to glimpse the losses some of the people had suffered did not help at all. She was not comforted by them, and the stark uselessness of everything that had happened, the pointless waste of lives, the tragic, unintelligent nihilism of the gunman, only underlined her personal tragedy.
Worse, being here was driving her back to the gun. The ExEx scenarios pandered to that fascination.
She could not stop thinking about Elsa Durdle. What she thought out loud, so to speak, was her reaction to the hyperreality of the shareware scenario: the wind, the heat, the lovely old car, the sense of an endless landscape. But deeper feelings, ones she had suppressed until now, were more visceral.
She kept remembering the moment when she opened Elsa Durdle's glove compartment, found the weapon and took it in her hand. The weight of it, the coldness, the feel of it there.
For a few moments she had been reminded of how it felt to be driving to an imminent spree event, with no idea of how it would resolve, but with a loaded gun at her side.
She drove past a sign that told her she was in Ashdown Forest, and on an impulse she turned into a narrow side road. lt led windingly through open, wellwooded countryside. She drove more slowly. The Oasis record was beginning to intrude on her thoughts, so she flicked it off.
She wound down the window, relishing the sweet smell of the woodland, the sound of the tyres on the road, the flow of cold air around her. She slowed the car to a crawl.
Something kept changing her mind about what she wanted to do, where she wanted to go: she told herself it was
the old familiar scents of a wetfloored English winter landscape, mild sunshine on grass and branches and pine needles, things rotting away, mould and fungus and moss.
Teresa saw a cleared space for cars at the side of the road, so she stopped and switched off the ignition. She climbed out and stood for a few minutes on the grassy verge.
Sometimes driving made her think even when she didn't want to.
She had been born into the world of guns: even before she was taken to the USA by her parents she was used to the sight and feel of weapons.