He touched her shoulder, trying to force her to her knees. Revulsion welled inside her and she reacted instinctively: she slapped his face with all the strength she could muster. His skin was rough with stubble, like flabby sandpaper.
The man gasped, his face a parody of dismay, and stepped backwards. Sally flung herself through the gap between his arm and the wall of the tower. His hand gripped her wrist. She screamed, a long howl of fear and anger, and dragged her arm free.
‘Piss off, you shithead!’ Sally heard herself shrieking.
She broke into a run, crouching low, and escaped. The churchyard stretched before her. She glimpsed the railings through the branches of the trees. The panic affected her vision: nothing was fixed any more; the path, the trees, the grass – everything pulsed with a dull, menacing life, as if visible reality were nothing more than the skin of an enormous, dozing monster.
At the gateway she glanced back. The man was not pursuing her. The churchyard was empty. She clung to a railing and tried to get her breathing back to normal. The monster slipped away. Her body felt limp, as if each muscle had been individually drained of energy. Now the crisis was past, she could hardly walk, let alone run.
‘Sally – ?’
She turned. Oliver was jogging down Inkerman Street towards her. She stared blankly at him. Her legs could barely support her weight. A moment later he was beside her, his face dark and angry.
‘What happened?’
‘There was a man …’
‘Easy, now. It’s all right.’ He put his hand under her arm. ‘A mugger?’
She shook her head and began to laugh with the irony of it. Once she started laughing, it was hard to stop.
‘OK, Sally. Calm down. It’s OK.’
Oliver had his arm round her now. He half-carried, half-dragged her towards a bench a few yards away. They sat down. Trembling, she hugged him.
‘What happened?’
‘This man – he tried to convert me.’
‘Are you hurt?’
‘No. Oliver, I swore at him. I hit him.’ She started to cry.
His arm tightened around her. ‘Listen. Your reactions are out of kilter at present. It’s hardly surprising.’
For a moment she thought Oliver’s lips were nuzzling her hair. She said angrily, ‘He shouldn’t have been on the streets. If we had a halfway decent society someone would be looking after him properly.’
‘A mental patient? Pushed back into the community?’
‘It’s possible. There were knife scars on his arms. I should go and find him. He can’t have got far. I –’
‘No. You’re in no fit state to go after anyone. In any case, we don’t want to go too far from the house.’
‘I failed him.’ As she spoke the words, she realized that she did not believe what she was saying: what did that shambling apology for a human being matter beside the fact that Lucy was missing? But old habits took a long time to die. She heard herself mouthing words which were no longer true. ‘People like him are part of my job.’
‘If you like I’ll phone the local nick, see what they can do.’
She allowed this to satisfy her. A moment passed. She looked up at Oliver. His face was very close to hers.
‘What were you doing? Did you come after me?’
‘I was worried. I don’t know why.’
She tried to smile. ‘My guardian angel?’
He kissed her decorously on the forehead. ‘We should go home. You’re cold.’
For an instant Sally did not want to move. For an instant she wanted to stay on that bench for ever with Oliver’s arms, warm and strong, wrapped around her. For an instant she felt, faint but unmistakable, a stirring of desire.
‘… we are what we all abhor, Anthropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not onely of men, but of our selves … for all this mass of flesh which we behold, came in at our mouths; … in brief, we have devour’d our selves.’
Religio Medici, I, 37
Eddie pulled the front door closed behind him and walked swiftly down Rosington Road, his fingers scrabbling through his pockets for the keys. He stopped by the van, which was parked a few doors down, and hammered the windscreen with his clenched fist. The keys were still in his bedroom, in the pocket of the jeans he had worn yesterday. All the keys – the keys of the house as well as the van’s. He had also left his wallet behind, though he had a pound or two in loose change.
He thought he heard a door opening. Without looking back, he broke into a run. His coat flapped behind him. The cold air attacked his face, his neck and his hands, its sharpness making him gasp; in his mind he saw a curved, flexible knife with an icy blade.
The word blade reminded him of the scissors. Had the screaming stopped? He was not sure. He thought he could hear screams, but they might have no basis in reality now; they might simply be echoes trapped within his mind. But he was certain of one thing: he could not go back to the house.
While he was running, he risked a glance behind him. No one was there. Angel wasn’t following him. He wasn’t worth following.
Panting, he slowed to a walk and buttoned his coat with clumsy fingers. Even if she did come after him, it wouldn’t matter. He would just walk on and on and on. It was a free country. She couldn’t stop him. He crossed the access road leading to the council flats.
‘You all right, then?’
Eddie stopped and stared. Mr Reynolds waved at him. The little builder was about to open his garage door, on which someone had recently sprayed an ornate obscenity.
Mr Reynolds hugged himself with exaggerated force, as if miming winter in a game of charades. ‘It’s bitter, isn’t it?’
Eddie opened his mouth but could think of nothing to say. Panic rose in his throat.
‘The odds are shortening for a white Christmas,’ Mr Reynolds remarked. ‘Heard it on the radio.’
The silence lengthened. Mr Reynolds’s face grew puzzled. Eddie’s limbs might be temporarily paralysed but his mind was working. First, Mr Reynolds would do anything for Angel. Second, why was he spending the coldest Sunday afternoon since last winter standing outside his garage? Conclusion: he was keeping his eyes open at Angel’s request. He was spying on Eddie.
The paralysis dissolved. Eddie broke into a run again.
‘Hey!’ he heard Mr Reynolds calling behind him. ‘Eddie, you OK?’
Eddie ran to the end of the road and turned right. He had no clear plan where he was going. The important thing was to get away. He did not want to be a part of what was happening behind that door. He did not want even to think about it. He wanted to walk and walk until tiredness overcame him.
He crossed a road. Two cars hooted at him, and one of the drivers rolled down his window and swore at him. He walked steadily on. Why was there so much traffic? It was Sunday, the day of rest. There hadn’t been all those cars when he was a child. Even ten or fifteen years ago the roads would have been far quieter. Everything changed, nothing stood still. Soon the machines would outnumber the people.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he told himself. ‘It really doesn’t matter.’
The world was becoming less substantial, less well-defined. A bus rumbled down the road, overtaking him. The red colour