She felt a pressure on the back of her hand and seconds later pain filtered through the warm mist of her body. A dark tide of fear lapped at her and suddenly she was alone at its shore. She was alone. Where had everybody gone?
‘Francine?’
Everything would be all right. It would only be temporary, just for a while. There was nothing to worry about. Her cheeks were wet. Was she crying? Why was she crying?
‘Can you count to ten for us, Francine? See if you can count.’
Something unfurled, beat against her lazy walls. A flash of terror mired. Too late.
‘Francine? Come on, one, two—’
‘One … two …’
Ralph’s face, a bitter taste on the tongue of the ravenous dark.
Eighteen
Ralph left the Tube station and turned towards home, swinging his jacket over his shoulder so that it hung from the peg of his finger down his back. The evening was as light and warm as an afternoon, holiday weather, and the joyful consciousness of summer burst in on him suddenly like a revelling crowd and swept him up in its ebullience. He had experienced several such explosions of silent happiness lately, without ever growing accustomed to the mute flash of their radiance. He would feel each glittering bloom with wonder, fearing that it would be the last; but they were delicate, responsive things, and could be triggered merely by a thought or the lightest survey of his circumstances. He would only have to look at his desk, for example, the sleek telephone crouching in service, the console dignified as a butler, the friendly scatter of pens or the brimming boat of his tray, to feel warm with good fortune; and a broader glance at the pensive, lovely faces of his colleagues — Mark, Richard, and Angela, whose desks formed a firm, efficient platform with his own — their mouths sweet and unconscious with concentration but ready to erupt into laughter at the slightest shared hilarity, would almost stupefy him with pleasure.
His briefcase was heavy in his hand, but he swung its pendulum back and forth in ungrudging appreciation of its weightiness. He had brought some work home with him from the office, although he wouldn’t have time to do very much before the party. He liked to have it with him, in any case, to feel the daily accretion of his importance, the newly dense portion of his responsibility. When he had first started his job, he had felt such disbelief in the evenings away from it that he had begun to bring his briefcase home merely as proof to stay the dreamlike recession of his days. By the time his position fitted him, so comfortably that he could hardly remember its first stiffness, he had realized that working at home immersed him more deeply in the themes of the office, meaning that his grasp of them the next day was rather better than that of Mark and the others, and he made the furtive, regular execution of it a policy. He had been singled out for praise once or twice and felt his appetite for success increase.
The sun began its downward cant over the High Street and he forced briskness upon himself as he moved through the golden haze of its benediction, not wanting to be the grateful witness of beauty but its rightful and slightly indifferent recipient. He would walk to the party later. It was at Angela’s house — not far from where he lived, he had been gratified to discover, her sophisticated proximity sanctioning his own choice of the area anew — and quite a few people from the office had said they would be there. There would be other people too, of course, people he didn’t know. He waited for the habitual tremor of anxiety at the thought of their unfamiliarity, their slick, bored faces before him, but it didn’t come. Instead, he saw himself saying that he worked in television, with Angela actually, and watched their expressions flower with admiration and envy, or perhaps relax in a more companionable recognition as aloofness was dispelled. He wondered if he would ever tire of it, this fantastical self he could produce from his pocket like a jewel to murmurs of appreciation. It still amazed him to think of how completely, how magically, he had been transformed, plucked from his ignominy by a strong celestial hand, removed from everything he now realized he had hated and given what he now realized he had longed for, as if it was a gift!
He had been lucky, of course, but what astonished him now was to remember how little he had cared about it at the time. He had seen the job advertised in a newspaper and had forlornly applied, his sense of the need to change himself dutiful and fatigued. Swept through each stage of the process, a fateful, almost comical languor had gradually come over him. He had thought of nothing, had formulated no dizzy or concrete hopes, but a strange intuition had tugged him on as if by an invisible thread until he knew that this chance was to be his, that it was being pressed upon him as if by ordination. He had not been surprised when he got the job, and its marvellous result had only dawned on him later, rising up from the darkness of his suppressions and urging him towards belief. What did surprise him was how quickly it had replaced everything that had gone before it. Within days of his succession, the banishment of his past was so complete that he hardly knew himself. He was once more in his bright infancy, the howling spectres of experience purged. Fearfully inspecting his nascent self, he saw that all his cords were cut, and for a while his severance terrified him. Nothing that had made him remained. Once familiar faces became fragments of nightmares, old feelings the faintest of memories for which he could not now find words. He was still wary of his darkness, wondering if one day he might turn a corner or open a door and topple again into its swirling chasm. Occasionally he had felt a frantic, amnesiac urge to summon up purposefully the things which he knew, rather than felt, had once mattered, but as he dug, poised for sorrow, at the withered tentacles of his roots, he could find no life in them. Even there, the fleshy, sturdy stubs of his new existence already held him. The joy of it came to him tentatively, but eventually he accepted its truth. He lived and breathed independently.
He crossed the lock, his swift steps bringing him abruptly up over the blind of its rise behind someone walking ahead of him along the pavement. He had been going too quickly, jogging more or less, and he reined himself back to avert a collision. For a moment the figure was only vaguely in his sights as he adjusted his speed to accommodate it, but then something came to him too late in a terrible flash, a recognition of a present danger, and in the next minute he saw her. Her ambulant back reared up before his eyes, the metallic sheet of hair swaying above a tall and angular form, her purposeful, predatory stride. Panic bolted from him as if at a gunshot. The girl slowed, sensing him behind her. Any second now she would turn around. A tumult of old fears roared like trains through the junction of his thoughts, and he swerved abruptly off the pavement and on to the side of the road, still walking, unable to stop, as if he were caught in the web of a magnetic field. A speeding car passed within inches of him. In the instant before the angry shriek of its horn he closed his eyes and when it came he felt his legs grow numb beneath him. At the periphery of his vision he saw her head snap round and in that moment an invisible path opened up for him across the road. He flung himself towards it with a thudding, thankful heart, his senses wild and alert. Her eyes burned at his back. He reached the other side, panting, and drove on up the pavement with his head clamped straight in a rigid vice of will. He mustn’t look back, he mustn’t. He sensed her moving parallel with him across the road like a shadow. His turning was up ahead, only a minute’s walk away. A second later something broke and he couldn’t stop himself from glancing over his shoulder. She was walking fast, her face trained on him like the barrel of a gun. He was almost there now. His feet pounded the pavement like flagging horses. He heard a shout from behind and when he looked around she was cutting across the road towards him. She glittered like a blade in the melting air. He began to run.