I slam the bonnet shut and stride back past the car, suddenly desperate to be out of there. “Let’s go,” I croak.
“We’re walking.”
“What?” Chiu and Farah exclaim.
“Car’s broken; we should walk.”
About forty minutes later, we reach the flyover that leads down to the A5. After I explained what I saw under the bonnet of the car, Chiu and Farah fell into a thoughtful silence.
“In a world of ideas,” Chiu says, after a little while, “complex things – mechanical things – lose their way. It’s too hard for someone to keep the idea of them in their head.”
“Hence no mobile phones, no electric lights,” Farah says.
I nod. “It was the starter engine; that was the only part I understood, nothing else. What I saw … it was never going to run. Maybe if we had a book. Studied mechanics, or something…”
We follow the arc of the filter lane as it drops down on to the A5. It’s hard to walk because of the slope – something you don’t notice in a car. We step on to the hard shoulder and immediately my senses are flooded by an overwhelming sense of speed and movement. All at once I see the traffic again, loud and lethal, thundering past inches away from me.
“Kyle? What’s wrong?” I hear Farah’s voice as if it’s coming from a long way away.
“The traffic,” I say. “Can’t you see it?”
“Kind of,” Fara says. “Try to unsee it.”
I swallow. Unsee it? Have you ever tried to unsee an optical illusion once you’ve seen one? It’s not easy. It takes a moment. I choose not to see the traffic … and it goes. It doesn’t fade. It’s becomes … never there.
We walk along the hard shoulder, none of us fancying the road itself in case our unseeing falters. We’re making sense of this world, I think. Coming up with names for what’s happening. The Stillness. Unseeing. Blindsight.
We’re making it more real.
Chiu and Farah walk slightly ahead of me, playing a game that involves one of them punching the other on a fairly regular basis. Farah is tall: nearly as tall as me and twice as tall as Chiu. There’s a kind of unhurried smoothness to the way she moves, a confidence I know I’ll never have. She glances over her shoulder and grins at me and I feel my pulse instantly begin to throb in my ears.
Evening and then late evening come on suddenly. It felt like mid-morning all day, but then, without any of us noticing the change, the air is cooler and the sky has turned from concrete to slate grey.
“We need to find somewhere,” I say. “We can’t be out here at night.”
“I know,” Farah says.
Farah folds and refolds the map until she has it centred on our location. We crane over her shoulder to see. I haven’t the first clue where to start but Farah traces her finger along the road.
“We passed the M69 a while back,” she says. “So we’re roughly here…”
“There are some warehouses,” Chiu offers. “They might be OK. Or maybe there’s another hospital nearby?”
Farah scans the map. Then her face cracks into a smile. “I have a better idea.”
SEVENTEEN
The hotel is actually famous. Not that any of us have ever been here before, but it’s one of those hotels where celebrities and rich people fly in on private helicopters and publish their experiences on Instagram.
It’s an imposing stone-walled country mansion set in vast, perfectly manicured gardens. It takes a while to hike up the long gravel driveway with Chiu complaining all the way. At one point he stands stock-still and threatens to bed down where he stands.
“It’s too far,” he says petulantly. “There’s a perfectly good petrol station at the bottom of the hill.”
“Ignore him,” Farah says, not breaking step.
I glance back at Chiu and he throws his arms up in frustration before hurrying after us. At last, the building comes into view. Vast and timeless. Ivy-clad stone walls that look like they’ve come straight out of a period drama. East and west wings that jut forward dramatically like arms held up to shoo us away.
“Are you sure about this?” I say, nervously.
“It looks awesome,” Farah replies.
“You’re used to this kind of place, I suppose.”
“Oh, yes, Mummy is a platinum member, obviously.”
Even though I know there will be nobody in this version of the hotel, it’s hard to break the taboo of walking into somewhere so fancy. I know Farah doesn’t really frequent this kind of place, but I bet she’s stayed in a hotel before. I don’t think I have. Mum and I usually take our holidays in a caravan in Rhyl and we haven’t done that for years because being away from home makes us both too anxious.
As we approach, the building seems to get taller and even less welcoming. Our feet crunch on gravel and our steps turn hollow as we realize with a surprise that we’re on a small drawbridge that crosses a moat.
We huddle together instinctively as we go through the grand reception doors. I can’t shake the feeling that we’re going to get kicked out of here any second now.
Slate floors. Dark wood. Stone vaulting. The lights are out as we’ve come to expect, but there’s a warm, comfortable glow that leaks through from the ordinary world. It’s different from the hospital and even my house. Warmer. Softer. Perhaps people are happier here in the ordinary world; they feel safer and so the light that reaches us is better.
“This place is insane,” Farah enthuses. “Did you see the moat?”
Chiu pauses to inspect a suit of armour in the corner, shining with the light from spotlights reflected from the ordinary world. Farah examines the signs on the walls like she’s exploring priceless works of art in a gallery.
“Oh, yes!” she breathes.
Suddenly she darts off, vanishing down a spiral staircase. Chiu and I exchange a perplexed look.
“Farah, wait!” I call, giving chase.
Chiu and I hammer down the stone steps as fast as we can. Farah is ahead of us, yelling for us to hurry up. My heart thuds, confused, unsure whether we’re in danger or if something else is going on. We enter a long corridor with white walls, part of a modern extension. It has a slick, upscale feel.
Then we burst into another space and I stop, aghast to find that we’ve blundered across the most incredible swimming pool I’ve ever seen. An expanse of crystal water, stone pillars, multi-coloured tiles, recliners and crisp white towels. There’s a main pool and smaller plunge pools and Jacuzzis connected to it. It looks the way I imagine the grand imperial thermae might have looked in ancient Rome.
Farah has already shed her jeans and I catch a glimpse of her long, brown legs as she hurls herself into the pool with a “Whoop”.
The splash resonates around the stone ceiling and Chiu immediately starts working on his own jeans. I go to the edge of the pool and watch as Farah surfaces, smiling, sweeping her black hair away from her face. I see her bare legs flash beneath the water. Her face appears more angular with her hair wet and slicked back: pretty, but strong and defiant. Her neck is one long curve that I can’t take my eyes off. My breath catches in my throat.
She grins at me. Knowing, challenging.
“Stop staring and get in,” she shouts.
“I wasn’t—” I protest.
