They fix a neck brace onto him, then ease him onto a stretcher.
‘Can I go with him in the ambulance? Please?’
Again, I’m ignored.
‘Get back on the bike,’ Saul says curtly. It’s the first time he’s spoken to me since the accident. ‘We’ll get there before they do.’
The bike. I can’t face it. My legs ache and my chest hurts where the wing mirror of the other bike hit it.
‘Please,’ I say.
He barely looks at me. ‘You can get on the bike or I can leave you here. Doesn’t make any difference to me. I only brought you along so Adam would come. You might still be useful to us, but I doubt it.’
In that moment, I understand I mean nothing to this man. Literally, nothing. He’d leave me at the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, without a second thought. With my boyfriend in an ambulance, my daughter kidnapped, and a baby on the way.
I feel numb, helpless, like all I can do is watch while the world spins out of control around me.
I get on the bike.
We set off before the ambulance does, crossing a bridge over a motorway. Three years ago there would have been nose-to-tail traffic. Today, there is a string of tents along the hard shoulder on one side and two people on horseback the other side. The road runs between gently rolling fields. We pass signs for Chippenham, Corsham and Bath, and I wonder if we’re heading for one of them when Saul starts braking.
I’m confused. There’s nothing there, just a track leading to a dull-looking hill. I’m expecting the track to go up, or round. But it doesn’t. It carries straight on. And then I see it: a large metal door set into the hillside. A pair of uniformed men, armed with the same rifles as Saul and his men, stand either side.
A bunker.
We come to a stop by the metal door. The armed men salute, and one of them slides back a bolt before pulling the door open.
I don’t want to be buried in there, shut in with no light, no fresh air. I can’t do it.
‘Is Mia here?’ I say to Saul’s back.
He doesn’t bother answering me, just kills the engine and dismounts.
‘Get off the bike,’ he says.
I don’t move. I don’t want to go inside the hill.
‘I’m losing patience, Sarah,’ Saul murmurs, then, before I can say anything, he grabs me round my waist with one arm and hauls me off the bike. I stagger as my feet hit the ground. My joints are agony.
‘Can you give me a minute?’ I ask. ‘I just need to stretch my legs—’
‘Stretch them inside,’ he snaps.
I look at the entrance in front of us – a square of light in the hillside, a bright, empty corridor about twenty metres long – and then I really start to panic. My breath is tight in my throat, I’ve got goosebumps everywhere, and my scalp’s tingling.
If I go in, I’ll never come out.
‘Is Mia inside?’ I ask again.
Saul pauses for a moment, as if debating whether the information might be useful – to him.
‘She’s here,’ he says eventually.
Is he telling me the truth? I have no way of knowing.
But there’s only one way to find out.
The corridor is empty apart from a few wooden chairs lining the walls. The artificial glare of strip-lights on the ceiling hurts my eyes. At the end of the corridor is a metal grid, and behind that is something that looks like a lift door.
I follow Saul to the grid. He presses a button on the wall, but there’s already a whirring and whining sound. The lift thunks to a halt. Then the door concertinas open to reveal a squad of people in white coats, and another uniformed guard. He slides open the metal grid.
The white-coats barge past us at the double, heading to the bunker entrance.
‘Adam Dawson’s ETA five minutes,’ Saul says to one as he passes.
The man merely nods. He’s wearing a tweed jacket under his white coat. None of the other white-coats looks at me. It’s as if I’ve become invisible.
I step into the lift. It’s huge, easily big enough for twenty people. It’s an antique, though – the control panel isn’t a set of buttons but a retro dial with a metal handle. I hear the grid slide shut behind me, and I spin round.
Saul’s standing on the other side of the grid. ‘This is Sarah,’ he says to the guard. ‘I’m going to wait for Adam. He’s the important one.’ His piercing black eyes turn on me. There’s a mocking glint in them. ‘Don’t worry, Sarah. It’s thirty metres deep, you know. Safest place in England. Just one way in, and one way out.’
‘I want to see Mia,’ I say. ‘And Adam.’
‘You will,’ he replies, turning his back on me.
I’m dismissed. Unimportant.
The guard heaves the lift door shut, then winds the handle to ‘DOWN’.
The whole thing judders, and my stomach flips as the lift starts to drop into the earth.
What the hell is this place?
Chapter 12: Adam
I can hear voices.
‘We’ve got eye movement … He’s coming round …’
Who are they talking about?
‘Adam. Adam, can you hear me?’
Now they’re shouting at someone called Adam. I feel sorry for the poor sod, whoever he is, with people yelling at him like that.
I open my eyes a little but the light’s so bright I shut them again quickly.
‘Did you see that? He’s back. Adam! Adam!’
I open my eyes again, and a circle of faces begins to drift into focus. Am I meant to know these people? I look from one to the other. They’re faces with eyes and noses and mouths and numbers, but I’ve no idea who they are or who I am or where I am. All I know is I’m alive and breathing. What happened?
One of them’s talking to me now. Face like it’s been squashed in a lift door. 8112034. Fifty-something, tweed jacket under a white coat. His hair’s too brown, not a hint of grey, parted on one side and hanging in two curtains either side of his puffy cheeks.
‘Adam, if you can understand me, blink now.’
I understand him, I’m just not sure I’m called Adam, but I blink anyway. A ripple of excitement runs round the circle of faces.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘Now can you squeeze my hand?’
I peer down my body, past the big collar thing round my neck. The guy’s holding my left hand now. Bloody hell, I don’t even know him, do I? Or is he my dad or something? His chubby fingers squeeze mine.
‘Can you feel that? Can you squeeze back?’
I squeeze back.
‘Excellent.’
He works his way round my body. Arms, hands, legs and feet – all in working order.
‘Remarkable,’ he says. I don’t know him, but I’m pleased he’s pleased. I start to relax. ‘What’s my number, Adam?’
He asks it all casual, just lobs it in like any of his other questions, but it’s not the same. I don’t feel relaxed now. Alarm bells are going off in my head. Then I hear another voice. But it’s not someone in this room. The voice is in my head.
You mustn’t tell, Adam. Not anyone. Not ever.
‘I dunno,’ I say.
Tweed Jacket looms over me. ‘You don’t know? Are you sure? What’s my number, Adam?’
‘That’s enough. Leave it, Newsome. Let’s get him downstairs. He should sleep.’ It’s another voice speaking, deep and sharp. I move my eyes. There’s a man standing on the other side of me. He’s got cropped grey hair and a scar above his left eye. His number’s shimmering as I try to get a fix on it. I’ve seen him before. My mind’s racing to remember, trying to place him, but I can’t get there.
Tweed Jacket straightens up.
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘We’ll try again tomorrow.’
The crowd thins out.
I close my eyes again, but I’m not sleepy. I’m going over and over what I’ve just seen, what I know. The faces, the numbers … and that voice.
You mustn’t tell.
She called me Adam, too, the woman in my hea
d, so it must be true.
I’m Adam.
Adam who?
Chapter 13: Sarah
The lift thunks down. We’re at the bottom. The guard winds the handle to ‘OPEN’ and then drags the door back to reveal another corridor. This one’s dimly lit and concrete and so long I can’t see where it ends. The walls are lined with gurgling pipes and punctuated by metal doors with shuttered grilles at eye level, keyholes and numbers. Everything’s painted battleship grey. It’s like a prison.
The guard takes my arm. I try to shrug him off, but his hold is firm. Am I a prisoner? I look at him properly for the first time.
He’s young, not much older than me. He’s got the beginnings of a moustache, and his military beret doesn’t seem to sit at the regulation angle. He glances at me, nervously.
‘I’m to take you to see your daughter,’ he says to me. ‘We’re trying to … settle her in.’
Mia. She’s here. Relief floods through me. And now I don’t care about Saul and the soldiers and how weird this place is. I just want to see Mia.
The squaddie leads the way, deeper and deeper into the tunnel. He mutters something about food and a bed, but I don’t really take it in. Our footsteps echo dully on the concrete floor. I can hear a low mechanical throbbing in the background.
Every step feels like a step away from life and light and everything else I’ve ever known, but it’s also a step closer to Mia and that’s what matters. I try to note where we’re going, but we turn so many corners, pass so many doors and everything looks the same battleship grey, I soon give up.
Then I hear a sound that makes me freeze. A child crying. The noise is faint but unmistakeable. Mia.
We stop next to a door with the number 1214. The guard taps on it, and it swings open. Mia’s voice blasts out into the corridor. I get a glimpse of a square, plain room, a single bed in the corner. A woman is sitting on the bed and next to her is Mia, her face screwed up and beetroot red, her arms and legs flailing.
‘Mia!’ I shout. ‘Mia!’ I push past the guard and rush into the room. He doesn’t stop me.
Mia stops mid-scream and opens her eyes, then she throws herself at me, clinging to me like a little monkey, sobbing. I kiss her hair, hug her.
The woman stands up. ‘She was starting to settle,’ she says, unconvincingly.
At the sound of her voice, Mia increases the volume of her yells.
That’s my girl, Mia, I think. Give her hell.
The woman looks offended as she sweeps from the room, slamming the door behind her. I hear a key turn in the lock. There are towels on the bed and clothes in two sizes. But the walls are bare and there’s no window. It’s a cell.
‘We’re locked in, Mia,’ I say, trying to control my sudden panic.
She lifts her head up from my shoulder. Her eyes are puffy from crying, her breath is hot in my face. We might be prisoners, but Mia’s here. She’s alive.
‘Locked in,’ she repeats.
I hug her closer and look around the room. There’s a bathroom connected to it – for a moment, I think of running water, having a hot shower for the first time in two years.
‘Let’s have a wash,’ I say.
The bathroom’s functional but clean. I turn on the shower. The pipes creak and groan, then hot water squirts out of the shower head.
Mia shakes her head, clings to me harder.
‘Mia, it’s like rain – nice, warm rain. You’ll like it.’
I’m not taking no for an answer. I undress myself, then Mia, ignoring her protests. Holding her hand, I step into the shower, pulling her in gently after me. I tip shampoo into the palm of my hand and rub it into our scalps. The shampoo, the soap, the steam and the water all smell clinical, like we’re in a hospital. But they’re doing their job. The water draining away around our feet is grey. Bits of twig and leaf stick in the plughole.
We step out of the shower and I wrap a towel round me while I get Mia dry and dressed. Soon she’s all pink and clean and warm. The smaller clothes on the bed are too big but she snuggles into them anyway.
When I hold up the others, it’s obvious they weren’t expecting me to be pregnant. There are underclothes and a T-shirt, sweatshirt and jogging bottoms. The bottoms are stretchy but they’re still pretty tight over my stomach.
I take in the chemical smell of the shower lingering in the room, stare at the lock in the metal door and at the blank, windowless walls.
Where is the air coming from? How can we breathe in here, thirty metres down?
Safest place in England. One way in, and one way out.
I don’t care what that man said. We can’t stay here. I’ve got to get us out.
Chapter 14: Adam
I go in and out of sleep for hours. I don’t know how long, but there’s always some stranger there when I wake up, and there are always questions.
‘How are you?’
‘Can you feel this?’
‘How many fingers am I holding up?’
And there are tests – temperature, blood pressure, pupil reaction to light.
And sometimes there are injections. They soften the edges of the room, the people around me – the nurses, the guy with the tweed jacket, the guy with the scar and the shimmering number – and the mattress I’m lying on. They blur the thoughts in my head and before I know it, I’m asleep again.
This time when I wake up I don’t want to go back to sleep. Somewhere between dreaming and waking I’ve remembered who that voice was.
My mum.
I can see her now. I can see it all.
She was only little, but boy, was she tough. No Dad, just Mum. We lived by the seaside. We’d walk on the sand, walk for miles and miles. I’d chase the seagulls. There were icecreams, donkey rides.
Jem Marsh. That’s who she was.
And I’m her son. Adam.
I’m Adam.
And that’s where the numbers came from. She saw them too, when she was growing up. She understood and she tried to help me, even after she died. I feel a stab of grief just under my ribs as I realise she’s dead. It’s like losing her for the first time. I’ve only just remembered her and now she’s died again. My mum’s dead.
Those words I heard, about not telling, she never said them to me. She wrote them in a letter I only got after she died. I remember every word on that paper, and I remember who gave it to me.
Nan.
I can see her, too. Perched at the kitchen table in her grotty house in West London. Her hair a brilliant, ridiculous purple. ‘My crowning glory,’ she’d say. She scared the shit out of me at first – I thought she was my worst nightmare. But I loved her. The inside of my nose tingles as I inhale the smoke from her cigarette. ‘I’ll be the last smoker in England,’ she said once, bloody-minded and proud of it.
The smoke takes me somewhere else …
I’m sitting by a bonfire, in the middle of the woods. I’m in a circle, a circle of friends, and I’ve got my arms round a girl. She must be my girl if I’m holding her like that. She’s got her back to me and I’ve got my arms round her waist, my chin’s resting on the top of her head. I kiss her hair and she twists her face up towards mine, and I see her blue, blue eyes. My God, I could get lost in those eyes. Her number’s a beautiful thing, not full of sadness and horror like most of them. I get a a comforting feeling from it, like it’s washed through with love.
This girl. My girl. What’s her name? Is she still mine? Where is she?
‘Time for another shot.’
They’re back again. Two people in white coats.
No! Not now. Not yet.
I try to fight them off, but I’m outnumbered. There’s two of them for a reason; one to hold you down, the other to stick in the needle.
‘Have you got him?’
‘Yes. Quick, though.’
I don’t want it. I want to stay awake, to hold on to my memories … Mum, Nan, my girl …
Where am I? What is happening to me?
Chapter 15: Sarah
<
br /> I can’t see her. I’ve lost her. She’s gone.
I’ve lost Mia in this cold and lonely place. I scream her name, over and over, until my throat is hoarse. My voice is swallowed by the fog, absorbed by the trees and the stones.
‘Mia! Mia!’
How could I let her out of my sight? I only looked away for a second and she was gone. The gravel crunches under my feet, and I leave the path and walk through and round and over the graves until the pain stops me again and I have to stand, gripping onto a stone, closing my eyes, trying to breathe.
When I open my eyes again, she’ll be here. She’ll smile at me and hold her arms up for a cuddle.
I open my eyes. She’s not there.
‘Mummy! Mum-meee!’
Mia’s shaking my shoulder.
‘What? What is it?’
‘Mummy shouting.’
‘Was I? Did I wake you up?’
This place is pitch black. I don’t know where we are or whether it’s night or day. I can’t smell the musty closeness of our tent, and there’s no breeze. The air is perfectly still. But Mia is here. And right now that seems terribly, terribly important. I can’t remember the dream any more, but hearing her voice, feeling her little hands digging into my shoulder feels like the answer to a prayer.
I put my arms round her and she snuggles in close. My eyes start to make some sense of the darkness. There’s a strip of light at the top and bottom of a door, and a bright rectangle where a shutter’s open a crack. And now I remember.
We’re in a room, a cell.
Mia and me.
But Adam … Where’s Adam? There was a crash. He was flying through the air. Saul said they were bringing him here, but did he arrive? Is he okay? Is he still alive?
I’ve got Mia snuggled close, but suddenly this cell seems like a lonely place. It doesn’t feel right without Adam.
‘Let’s go back to sleep, Mia,’ I say, although I know I won’t be sleeping any time soon. ‘Shall we sing “Twinkle”?’
I start singing. But Mia doesn’t join in. Halfway through, she reaches up and puts her hand on my mouth. It stops me in my tracks. ‘No stars,’ she says.
‘You don’t want “Twinkle”?’