Bree and Jones hadn’t said very much since the incident. Bree, because she was nervous. Any second she expected a siren to hiccup and whoop, and blue-red lights to revolve in the rear-view. She didn’t know how far Red Queen’s reach went, but there was only so much you could do. Someone would have found the body, she thought. Made their car from a security camera at the store – as usual, she’d ensured Jones parked with the plate towards a low wall and the car well away from the store, but there’d been only one way in and out of the parking lot.
Jones had killed. And Red Queen was leaving him in the field? Leaving Bree with him?
It made Bree feel faintly sick to think about him. That large-knuckled hand settled on the steering wheel had pushed a penknife into a man’s neck a few hours previously. And if he was upset by that he wasn’t showing it. She’d thought – when she’d found him in distress – that she’d been getting somewhere with him. She’d started to feel something towards him – protectiveness, even.
Bree looked at him as they drove through the city’s backstreets in search of somewhere to lie low. His face was expressionless and his eyes seemed to be watching something out of sight. They scanned the road; his right hand passed the wheel round to his left hand as he turned corners. He blinked, occasionally. He didn’t talk. It was as if, since the incident, there was nobody there. She felt like she was sharing the car with a ghost.
They had eaten separately and Bree had insisted they check into separate motels, a few blocks apart. She said she’d collect him in the morning and they’d go on. He could cry all he liked.
She dropped him off, took the car back, found her way into another of those rooms. It had low yellow light, like all the other motel rooms in America. There was a bedspread that made you feel sad, and the sort of mirror that turned even a young face into a landscape of pits and pocks and defeated skin. Bree could feel her DNA fraying, her cells ticking down and closing in. She looked at herself in the mirror and wondered what it was like to have fun, not to be scared, not to have to work from the time you got up until the time that, gratefully, you whimpered into sleep. She felt very, very sober.
Not that she’d sleep. The incident at the store, the sight of the dead man’s face, was going to see to that. Ever since she had been tiny, Bree had been terrified of dying and death. She hadn’t been able to visit her father in the hospital. She’d never seen a dead body. Didn’t know how anybody could do so and carry on. The very thought of it was enough to bring up a small tremor in her hands.
Whenever you read about dying in books or films it always seemed to picture it as the world darkening and growing silent and getting further away: an old television dwindling away to a white dot, starting at the edges; an inky inrushing in the vision, and the volume going down. That, Bree thought, would be nice. A nice rest.
Bree’s night terrors cast it differently. What Bree was frightened of was that far from the world going away and shutting the door politely behind it, the opposite would happen. She was worried that the drab world was the only thing standing between her and something much, much gaudier – like the flimsy curtains they put round hospital beds. When that ripped, she knew deep in her bones, the murmur of daily sense data would rise to a screaming hurricane and she would be overwhelmed, drowned, vanished, obliterated but somehow still there just to take it all in like someone with their eyelids stapled open in a violent cartoon.
When she’d gone to the Freaky Fields with Jess and Anton and taken acid in school – and boy oh boy, was that ever one of her less bright ideas – she’d had a glimpse of it, what it would be like. It had started with a lemony creeping up her cheeks – something like a grin, and they’d been talking and throwing the red ball around until her teeth started to taste funny and she heard sentences a fraction of a second before she spoke them.
The burr of the light in the yellow grass, the too several voices of her friends, the panoply of facial muscles she was expected to find uses for, the way reduplicative fragments of nonsense words and phrases started muscling into the side of her mind (‘undefunnady’, ‘downshudder’, ‘slidewise’)… she felt panic rising around her like the puddles of silvery water around her hips.
It felt like she’d been flying the light aircraft of her consciousness for years without incident, on automatic pilot. And here she was suddenly and abruptly switched to manual: strapped into the cockpit of a 737 and seeing bank after bank of winking lights and switches and multiple joysticks and tiny dials: far too much information coming in. She hadn’t needed to think about how to smile, or to pronounce the word ‘funny’, or to separate out the different information coming in from her ears, her eyes, her skin and her own thoughts.
Now the filters had been removed and she was overwhelmed. She knew then, as she set in for the long haul of a catatonically bad, never-to-be-repeated trip, that this was what dying would be like – only an infinite progression of powers worse.
She hadn’t been able to explain it well to her ex-husband, when he’d found her sweating and shaking beside him in the still hours of the morning. She hadn’t been able to explain it to the therapist he’d made her see before he’d given up on her and gone.
She hadn’t been able to explain it to her mother when it had first struck her. Everyone’s frightened of dying. Everyone. But not everyone thinks about it all the time. It was the first thing she remembered from her childhood. Fear in the bones.
She had been six years old. She knew that, because her younger brother Gill had just been born. He was lying there in his cradle up the corridor, asleep already. Bree had had her bath like always and now, with a too-big, grown-up’s towel around her shoulders and her flannel pyjama bottoms on, the pale blue ones, she was brushing her teeth in front of the mirror over the sink in her bedroom.
The sink was too high. She could rest her chin on the edge of it only, so she stood on the orange plastic toy crate like her mother had shown her. Now the porcelain was cold on her belly. Her dad had come home and her mother had gone downstairs to fix him a drink.
She reached up to the toothbrush holder fixed to the tiling behind the sink. The holder had a flat plastic cartoon of Snoopy’s kennel, with Snoopy and Woodstock sitting on the roof. The body of the kennel, like Snoopy, was white. The roof was red. Woodstock was a splotch of yellow. Bree’s toothbrush was red and had a little picture of Snoopy on the handle.
She squeezed a pea-sized burr of toothpaste onto the bristles and started to brush around her front teeth in the conscientious circles she had been taught. She remembered, or perhaps imagined, looking at herself in the small mirror, her short blonde hair dark from the bath and tousled and her mouth foaming.
Milk teeth, little round pearls. Soon grown-up teeth, she knew. Then what? Round she brushed. I am Bree, she had thought, looking in the mirror. Nobody else is Bree, only me. It struck her as strange. It had occurred to her that she was a person, a separate person from everyone else, that she was alone in her head – she hadn’t expressed it to herself this way, she thought, not at the time; but she could remember the feeling and it corresponded to that – and that she was moving towards something like abandonment. She felt suddenly overwhelmed, like when she was lost in the supermarket. She knew too that she couldn’t, having once had this thought, ever unthink it.
The Snoopy toothbrush holder wasn’t friendly. It was inert: just a plastic thing, a small object in a huge universe. Bree’s mother had come upstairs to find her crying disconsolately, still moving the toothbrush in automatic circles across her teeth, and powerless, with a mouthful of peppermint foam and no vocabulary for it, to explain the feeling.
She had learned to explain it later, to herself. And she had learned to distract herself from thinking about it; but it was there knocking under the floorboards in her apartment, winking at her from the back of the refrigerator, waiting for her in the closet.
She found herself goggling, occasionally, at the people who walked past her every day, wearing their haircuts on their heads and going about their business, and seeming never to have stumbled on this dreadful thought – or if they had stumbled on it, having forgotten it.
In her twenties, she had developed a recurrent half-dream: something that would creep in between her being awake and the little mischiefs of sleep starting to derail her mind. She had learned to control it with pills and rituals and work, but the dream was essentially a dramatisation of what was going on in her conscious mind. In these dreams, she died. And instead of things getting quiet and dark and receding, Bree had the sense of something rushing in on her: something that had always been there, but had been hiding – held at bay by the walls and floor and sky, by the surfaces of things. Now her protections fell away. There was a sudden undoing of reality: something unpicking the angles of the corner of the room, the sky unzipping, the floor’s tessellations of atoms untoothing and a downflooding of light.
At the same time, the sound of something approaching from a very long way off that would also somehow be just the other side of the walls: a gathering roar, which would make it physically impossible to think, but would be recognisable as it overwhelmed your ears as the sound of a million million million million individual voices – everyone who ever lived or could have lived – whispering a single word.
Bree used to wake with the sound only of her own blood in her ears, and the sheets wet, and the walls and their vertices in place.
Now the dead man was going to bring that back. Bree wanted a beer, now, very much indeed. More than she had wanted one in the many years she had been going to meetings. She made some strong coffee, took two Dylar, waited for breakfast.