'I wish I knew,' Rory almost said despite knowing that the man didn't have Hugh or Ellen or Charlotte in mind. 'Well enough,' he hoped.
The taxi was among white buildings now – so white that he could have thought the world was being drained of colour. 'What's wrong?' the driver said.
'Nothing whatsoever. I'll be fine.'
A frown narrowed the driver's eyes as if to fit them better into the strip of mirror. 'With them.'
'Oh, I see,' Rory said and tried to judge a laugh. 'Nothing too bad.'
'Something must be or they wouldn't be kept in.'
Rory nodded, careless of how much agreement that implied if it saved him from further discussion, but it felt like a threat of subsiding into unconsciousness. It seemed to have silenced the driver until the man said 'Parent, is it?'
'Neither of them. They're away having a good time.'
'Wife.'
'I've not got any of those.'
'Give us a hint at least. Man or a woman?'
Rory wondered how determined the fellow might be to turn the situation into a game. He would have advised him politely or otherwise to desist if the man weren't providing a stimulus without which Rory felt in danger of losing awareness. The fear was enough to make him blurt 'Both.'
'That's bad, that. Same problem?'
Rory seemed to have left himself no answer except 'Yes.'
'Something that's making the rounds, is it?'
'Nothing like that. Don't worry, I can't pass it on to you,' Rory said as the taxi swerved into another onslaught of whiteness.
'What, then? Not a secret, is it?'
'I can't say.'
'You're never telling me the hospital don't know.'
'That's the truth,' Rory said, only to reflect that he didn't know much. Rather than give in to calling Hugh or their cousins again – rather than risk hearing the same voice take their place – he shut his eyes. 'I don't want to talk about it any more,' he said.
'You shouldn't let them put you off. They've got to know something, it's their job. You ought to go back and make them speak up.' Perhaps the driver saw how much this troubled Rory, but his pause seemed little more than momentary. 'Here you are,' he said.
Rory was afraid he'd been returned to the hospital, but he was almost as disconcerted to see the railway station. How long had he been unconscious of his surroundings? Presumably as long as the driver's pause had actually lasted. 'You sure this is where you think you ought to be?' the driver said.
'It's where I want.' As Rory focused on the digital display beyond the complications of the grille he was unnecessarily reminded of a bedside monitor in a hospital. He slipped a fiver through the gap beneath the grille and looked back from the pavement to find the driver watching him with such concern that it seemed to menace Rory with inertia. 'I was visiting,' he repeated and willed himself to leave it all behind, to move, to turn.
The sky was black, the interior ahead of him white. The black taxi had brought him to the station, not the hospital. However incomprehensible the giant voice that filled the tiled booking hall might sound, that must be the fault of the address system rather than of Rory's senses. Nevertheless he took care not to outdistance them by dodging too fast through the crowd to the nearest available ticket window. 'Where can we get you?' the clerk said.
He tried not to be thrown by how pensionable she looked. 'Thurstaston,' he said.
'Not here, pet.'
'I'm not expecting it to be. It's where I have to go.'
'I'm telling you you can't do that from where you are.'
'Of course you can. I can, I mean. I've done it.' Rory's panicky frustration must be affecting his eyes, since the window appeared to be growing opaque, veiling the clerk's face. The patch of blindness shrank as he managed to grasp his mistake. 'Sorry, it was the nearest station,' he said and manufactured a laugh. 'West Kirby. I know you've heard of there.'
He would have been surer if he'd been able to distinguish her expression. Her face drifted into focus as she told him the price. 'Going now?' she said, and he wished he could without lingering over the transaction. Once her skinny fingers had stretched through the aperture under the window to hand over his tickets and token change he made for the destination board.
A train would be leaving for Liverpool in less than fifteen minutes. At least he could stop worrying about his unsteadiness once he was seated. Perhaps he might doze, except that the prospect of losing consciousness revived his panic. He bought a flimsy plastic cup of coffee at a refreshment counter. A girl in a white overall reminiscent of a hospital uniform shut the steam in the cup with a lid. This must have made the hot drink safe, because he forgot about holding it as he showed his ticket at the booth.
The train straight ahead was his. Every door was open, but he walked to the farthest to save time at his destination, however much it felt like trying to leave a pursuer behind. He remembered to plant the cup on the rudimentary table before he sat down. He was about to lift the lid when it occurred to him to phone again before the train moved off. He groped for the mobile and poked at Hugh's number and lifted the faraway bell to his ear.
The ringing ceased at last, to be succeeded by silence that felt as if a listener were holding his breath. When the belated voice spoke Rory found it worse than artificial. He could have fancied it was eager to abandon all pretence, to reveal the identity beneath the bright mechanical repetition. 'Call me. Don't leave me wondering,' he said with at least as much desperation as impatience and tried Ellen, to be met by the same silence and eventually the same message, which seemed to have grown hollower, as if it were emerging from deep in a hole. He could only reiterate his plea and call Charlotte. This time the silence and its companion voice, beneath which lurked an echo like a muffled mocking imitation by another speaker, made Rory feel close to being dragged into the depths, and so did his own repeated appeal. It was beginning to resemble a ritual whose purpose he didn't understand and might prefer not to, but he was unable to bring any other words to mind. Indeed, he had reverted to pleading 'Don't leave me –' yet again before he fumbled to shut off the call.
He let the phone drop on the upholstery and stared around him. Commuters were boarding trains on either side of him, tugging their shadows after them. Shouldn't this be sufficiently vivid to anchor Rory's senses even if the artificial light reduced the trains to monochrome? Perhaps the unreality of his calls had affected him, because he could easily have taken the windows for screens on which he was projecting images. He was stretching out a hand to touch the glass when the train jerked forwards, having shuddered like a dreamer struggling to leave a nightmare behind.
Had it spilled his coffee? As he made to dodge the threat of being scalded he saw that the dribble had only formed a ring around the base of the cup. It was too pale to stain the table. It lingered like an obscure symbol as he moved the cup, but in a moment he couldn't see where it had been. Perhaps the girl at the counter had put too little coffee in the cup, because Rory wasn't sure whether he was tasting it or simply how he thought it should taste. At least it wasn't as hot as he'd anticipated; indeed, he could imagine that he felt it growing colder in his hand. He took a gulp and was almost sure he tasted coffee, however faintly. When another mouthful proved no more conclusive he planted the cup on top of its lid so as to concentrate on the view from the train.
The streets sailing past the windows were threaded with headlamps brighter than the generalised amber glow that blotted out the sky. He tried not to feel that the glow was muffling the cityscape, although in the distance it looked thick as orange paint, smudging the shapes of buildings. Or was fog doing that? He wouldn't have expected to encounter any at this time of year; it made him feel as if he'd been unconscious longer than he knew. Straining his eyes seemed to attract the indistinctness, which drained substance from a line of houses he'd thought were clearly defined. As he tried to make sense of this he realised that he couldn't hear the train.