He looks away and says quietly, ‘I can’t tell you, Sarah. I don’t tell people their numbers. It’d be wrong.’
‘I don’t want to know,’ I say. ‘I’m not scared,’ (which is a lie), ‘I just don’t want to know. Don’t ever tell me.’
Ever. Why did I say that? Like we’re going to be friends. Like we’re going to know each other for a long time. Like we’ve got a future together.
‘I won’t tell you,’ he says. Then, ‘Are you really not scared?’
‘I’m not scared of me dying. I’m scared of …’ I stop. Scared of losing Mia. Scared of Mia losing me.
‘Scared of what?’
‘My nightmare,’ I say slowly. It’s true, after all. ‘It’s driving me mad. The same dream, the date. I can’t live with it. I can’t do anything about it.’
‘It’s the same for me,’ he says. ‘There’s hundreds, thousands of people with numbers on the first or second or third. Violent deaths. It’s getting nearer and nearer. Five days to go now. I feel like it’s crushing me sometimes. Like there’s nothing I can do, except I do want to do something. I want to fight it. Warn people. Get them out. Get them out of London.’
He’s getting agitated now, clenching his fists, moving his body where he sits, almost rocking. The energy in him, it’s kind of frightening. It’s kind of exciting too.
‘I think we can do it,’ he says. ‘I think we can beat the numbers, save people. Only I’m not sure how …’
‘Is it just London?’
‘I dunno, there’s more of them here than there was in Weston.’
‘Weston?’
‘Where I come from. Weston-super-Mare. By the sea. I lived there with my mum.’
‘What happened?’
‘She died. When I was eight. Cancer. I saw her number and I didn’t know what it was. So I told her, well, wrote it down and she saw it. She understood, because she’d seen them too. She was the girl at the London Eye in 2009, the one who knew it was going to be blown up. She saw people’s numbers in the queue. Then she had to live with it. With knowing her number. I did that to her …’
He trails off, and I can see he’s trying not to cry again. ‘It’s all right,’ I say, ‘it’s all right being upset about your mum. I’ve got some tissues somewhere.’
He sniffs loudly and wipes his nose on his sleeve.
‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m all right. I don’t need any. I’m all right.’ He sits up in his chair, rearranges his restless arms and legs. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘For everything. For being embarrassing. For being in your nightmare.’
I shrug. ‘Not your fault. You didn’t ask to be there, did you?’
He leans forward and clasps his hands, twisting his fingers together.
‘Sarah, what if your nightmare don’t have to come true? What if we can change it?’
It doesn’t have to come true. If only he was right … if only.
‘I’ve tried to warn people,’ I say. ‘It’s out there, in the painting.’
‘Is that why you did it?’
‘I don’t know. Vin suggested it. He heard me screaming every night. He said I should draw it. I’ve got piles of paper upstairs with my drawings. It’s so real, Adam. I wanted to let people know. I wanted to make it go away.’
‘Has it gone away? The nightmare?’
‘No.’
I sag back into the sofa, suddenly exhausted. All at once, the months of broken nights are weighing down on me.
‘You look knackered,’ he says. ‘I’ll go.’
He’s got up now. I start to get up too.
‘It’s all right,’ he says, ‘stay there. I’ll let myself out … only … is it all right if I come back again sometime?’
I sink back down, all the energy completely drained out of me. I was so ready to fight him, to defend myself against the demon in the nightmare. But Vinny was right. He’s just a boy, a boy who’s as messed up as I am. I’m exhausted and I do want him to go.
But I want him to come back too. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You can come back.’
He smiles then, a lopsided sort of smile, because where it’s burnt the skin is stiff. There’s something about that skin that makes me feel soft inside. He passes close to me and hesitates for a second.
‘Bye, Sarah,’ he says.
‘Bye.’
My eyes close before he’s out of the door, and I’m sucked down into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Chapter 35: Adam
She closes her eyes. She looks softer like that, younger. Her skin’s very pale, almost white. When I walk past her, we’re so close I smell her musky scent, and all I want to do is put my arms round her, hold her close, put my face in her hair and breathe her in.
I stand in the doorway for a while, watching her. I could stand here for ever.
Somewhere in the rooms above me, a noise starts up. Deep in her sleep, Sarah must hear it too, because she shifts around a bit, before settling down again. It’s weak, like a kitten, some sort of animal, but something about it bothers me. I ease myself out of my sofa and tiptoe past Sarah and out into the hall. At the bottom of the stairs I look up. There’s no sign of anyone else around, only this cry. Standing there, I think I know what it is.
I’m torn – I want to find it and I want to run away. Perhaps curiosity gets the better of me, perhaps it’s more than that. This house and Sarah, I was meant to find them. I’m meant to be here, now. I’m meant to hear this noise. If I run away now, I’ll only have to come back some other time and face it. I pick my way carefully up the bare stairs. On the first floor, the noise is still above me. By now, my heart’s banging away in my chest. I can hear my breath sighing in and out of my open mouth.
Up again to the top floor. The sound’s louder now and getting more desperate. There are four doors off the landing. I push each door in turn, standing back, like I was expecting a man with a gun to be taking aim the other side. Bathroom first – mould on the walls, a tap dripping onto a rusty stain in the sink. Then a bedroom with clothes all over the floor, a mattress on the bare boards, a guitar propped up against the wall. A second bedroom with an old sofa used as a bed and piles of books and magazines and newspapers everywhere. All empty.
One more room to go.
The door’s half-open. The noise is filling my ears now, and it’s definitely not an animal. I stop outside. I can’t do it. Come on, I say to myself, come on, you’ve got this far.
I push the door further open and stand there. Compared to the other rooms it’s surprisingly neat. There’s a mattress on the floor in one corner with a duvet smoothed flat across it, and piles of clothes and blankets and towels folded all neat on some shelves – someone’s made an effort, you can see that.
Next to the bed, on the floor, is a large drawer. From the doorway all I can see is two little pink hands thrashing backwards and forwards in the air.
I walk over and look down. The baby’s red in the face from crying. Her eyes are tight shut and her eyelashes are wet with tears. She’s waving her arms above her and her feet are going too – left, right, left, right, rubbing against the sheet.
I crouch down.
‘What’s all that noise, then?’ I say.
All of a sudden her arms and legs go still and she opens her eyes. They’re bright blue. Like her mum’s. I gasp, ‘No. Oh please God, no.’
Like a bullet to my brain, her number shoots through me.
112027.
Chapter 36: Sarah
‘What the hell are you doing? Get away from her.’
He’s there, in my room, kneeling down next to the cot. He was after her the whole time. All that little-boy-lost stuff was bullshit. He knew the baby was here – he wanted to get at her.
He looks round over his shoulder. Guilty. Caught in the act. And I see his face, her face and I know the nightmare will come true.
‘She was crying. I just came up to see if …’
‘Get away from her!’
I barge
past him, shoving him with my shoulder, and scoop up Mia. I take her away from him, to the other side of the room and pace up and down, trying to calm her down, but it’s not easy to soothe someone when you’re furious inside, boiling up.
‘You shouldn’t have come up here. You should have woken me up.’
Of course he wouldn’t have. He wanted to find her, and he had me exactly where he wanted me – out for the count.
‘I didn’t know what to do. You were so tired.’
‘Of course I’m fucking tired. You’d be tired if you hadn’t slept properly for months. Just go, will you? Get out!’
He puts his hands up, backs into the opposite wall.
‘Okay, okay. I’ll go. I’m sorry. What’s wrong with her?’
‘Nothing. Babies cry. She’s probably just hungry.’
He stands there, dumbly.
‘I’ve asked you to go. Get out, Adam,’ I say, pointedly. He hesitates. ‘Get the fuck out of here!’
That gets him moving. He stumbles for the door, muttering, ‘Okay. But I can come back, can’t I?’
‘No. No. It’s better if you don’t.’
‘Sarah, please.’ Those puppy-dog eyes won’t fool me again.
‘Don’t you get it?’ I shout at him. ‘I don’t want to see you again, bastard. I don’t want you coming here. If you show your face again, it’ll get fucking battered.’
He goes then, clattering down the stairs. I hear the kitchen door bang and the gate to the yard as well. I sit back on the bed and lift up my T-shirt.
‘Come on, Mia,’ I say. ‘Shush now. Are you hungry?’ She is, of course. She searches furiously for a few seconds and then latches on. ‘He’s gone, Mia,’ I say, ‘the nasty man’s gone. I won’t let him hurt you.’
But sitting there, I’m thinking about what he said. All that stuff, about the numbers, I believed it when he was telling me. It made sense. At school, when I saw him with his notebook, he was writing the numbers down, I’m sure he was, like a trainspotter. If he does see them, he’s living in a nightmare like me, poor sod. And his face … what he’s been through.
I shake my head. I can’t think about him. I’ve got this far. Got away from home and had Mia, and made a sort of life for myself. I can’t take on anything, anyone else. It’s got to be about Mia and me. And maybe Adam’s right. We should move away from here, right away. I’ll take Mia right out of London, away from harm, away from him. Somewhere he’ll never find us.
Chapter 37: Adam
I’m such an idiot. The picture, the painting, I never ever wondered who the baby was. I was focused on me, only me. What a wanker! It’s the baby, the baby she’s terrified about.
Her baby.
I had no idea – she must have been pregnant at school, but I never noticed. I was hypnotised by her face, her eyes, her number.
It’s still raining as I run through the streets. My feet slap against the wet pavement, and the words in my head fall into the same rhythm: Sarah’s child. Sarah’s child.
I thought it was bad enough being me, living with the weight of a thousand deaths around me. What the hell’s it like for her – with the end of the year getting closer and closer, and a vision of her own child in flames playing over and over every night? Whatever I felt before, about the numbers and trying to change them, I feel it ten times more strongly now. I can’t let Sarah’s nightmare come true. I’ve got to fight it with everything I’ve got.
‘You look like a drowned rat. Did you find it?’ Nan’s off her perch and hovering by the door when I come in.
‘I found it and I found her.’
‘Who?’
‘The girl who did the painting on the wall. It’s Sarah, the girl from school, the girl at the hospital.’
‘So what’s the deal with her?’
‘She has nightmares and I’m in them.’
Anyone else would pull a face, frown maybe, ask what I’m talking about. Not Nan. She gets it straight away.
‘The painting. It’s her nightmare, her vision. She’s a seer, Adam. She’s got second sight.’
‘She’s got a baby as well.’
‘A baby?’
‘I saw it. Her. She’s a twenty-seven, Nan. The baby’s going to die with everyone else.’
I don’t mean to tell. It’s something about Nan, about the way she listens, that makes my mouth run away with me. And then it’s out. It’s said.
Nan’s eyes spring wide.
‘The baby dies? Oh no … and you’re there with her. In the picture. Jesus, Adam. You know what this means, don’t you?’
I shake my head. My legs are like jelly, I don’t know how I’m still standing.
‘It means that you must never see them again. I need to get you out of here, out of London, like you’ve been saying. You can’t be here when it happens. You can’t be anywhere near.’
‘That’s what she said.’
‘The girl? Sarah?’
‘Yeah, she told me to get out. Not to come back.’
‘Did she do this to you an’ all?’
Nan puts her hand up to my head. When she moves it away, there’s blood on her nicotine-yellow fingertips.
‘She did, but that was earlier. When she first saw me, before we talked. She threw a stone.’
‘Nice, your friend is. Classy.’
‘Shut up, Nan. You don’t know her.’
She sniffs.
‘Not sure I want to.’
‘You won’t never meet her now anyway. You’re both right. I should stay away from her, from the baby. If I stay away, it can’t come true, can it?’
Nan makes me sit down at the kitchen table while she fetches a bottle of disinfectant and dabs some on my head with cotton wool.
‘Nan,’ I say, ‘has Nelson been back today?’
‘No. Why?’
‘’Cause I think you’re right, what you were saying before. We’ve got to warn people. We can’t just let this shit happen.’
She stops dabbing and looks at me.
‘Do you mean it?’ she asks.
‘Yeah. It’s too big, too serious. I don’t care if people think I’m a nutter. We’ve got to give them a chance to get out. And then we’ve got to get out too. You and me, Nan, out of London. Do you promise?’
‘Yeah, I promise. We’ll give it a try, and then we’ll pack our bags and go. I used to like Norfolk before it disappeared under the North Sea. But we need somewhere hilly. Out in the middle of bloody nowhere. We’ll sit on a hill, open a couple of cans and sit tight, yeah?’
Me and Nan on a hillside watching the end of the world.
‘You can have a last fag if you like, I wouldn’t deny you that.’
‘I always thought I’d be the last smoker in England. Perhaps I will be.’
She puts the TCP away in the cupboard and starts rummaging through the freezer for something to eat.
‘Adam,’ she says.
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m glad you want to fight it, ’cause I’ve already done something.’
‘Oh God, what is it?’
‘I’ve booked an appointment.’ She stands up from the freezer and sort of puffs her chest out.
‘Who with?’
‘Mister Vernon Taylor, the Emergency Planning Officer in the Civil Contingencies Unit at the Council.’
‘Who the fuck’s that?’
‘Language. He’s the person in charge of planning for disasters. I did some research. Aren’t you proud of me?’
‘Yeah, s’pose. I dunno. Shouldn’t we be seeing that other guy, the one in a suit, MI5 or something like that? He gave me his card. Some geezer in the Council’s not likely to believe us, is he? And even if he buys the stuff about the numbers, we don’t know what’s going to happen, do we? Only when.’
‘It’s his job to look after this kind of thing. Sort out this road, this estate. I don’t like stiffs in suits any more than you do, but we can’t let personal prejudice get in our way. We got to tell someone. We got to, Adam. We’ve got lives to
save. It’s our civic duty.’ She’s giving it the full upright citizen stuff now. I guess I must be pulling a face because she goes on, ‘You’re an ungrateful sod, you are. I thought you’d be pleased.’
‘I am. I think. I just … I dunno. I am. Thanks, Nan.’
She sniffs a bit and then takes the cardboard off a packet and makes some holes in the top of the plastic with a knife.
‘Dinner will be ready in ten minutes. Go and have a quick bath first, and put those filthy, wet clothes in the wash. You can wear a shirt tomorrow, look a bit smart for a change.’
‘What for?’
‘I just told you, you soft sod, we’re going to see the Council. We’ve got to look the part. Don’t want them thinking we’re on day release or something.’
I haul myself upstairs and run a bath. It’s only when I get in the hot water I realise how cold I’ve got. I let the warmth soak through to my bones and I close my eyes. It’s still pissing down outside. I see Sarah’s face and her number whispering a promise to me. For richer, for poorer. In sickness and in health. Till death do us part.
If I never see her again, if I keep away from her, how can that ever come true?
Chapter 38: Sarah
I came here with just my school bag. Now I have no idea how I’m going to pack for the two of us. I suppose all I really need is clothes, nappies and wipes. We’ll manage for everything else.
I don’t know where we’re going to go, just that we need to get away from here. I don’t have enough cash for a train ticket, maybe a coach. Perhaps Vinny would give me some. But I couldn’t ask – he’s done so much for us. Been a real friend.
Mia’s asleep as I gather up her things. I stop to look at her, with her mouth open, her arms flung up around her head. A flutter of panic starts to build in me. Will I cope on my own with her? What if I can’t find anywhere to stay? It’s stormy outside again, the glass is rattling in the window frames. I can’t just set out in that lot with nowhere to go and no-one to go to. Not with a baby.
I sink down onto the bed, not defeated yet, but suddenly realising the truth of my situation. I need to think ahead, I need to plan.