There’s something beguiling about it. Fear, for me, has always been a diffuse thing, leaching into everything. Here, fear has the surgical precision of a scalpel: focused on a single flickering patch of rapidly moving concrete. It’s terrible, but comforting as well, because this kind of fear is small enough to hold in your hand, small enough to crush if you squeeze hard enough.
Jonah’s “safe place” turns out to be the South Mimms Welcome Break: a service station just off the M25. It feels like a warehouse or an airport. There’s a central food court, with cheap-looking Formica chairs and tables and big plastic self-service bins. Around the outside of it there’s a series of roofed-off areas, each one with a frontage displaying its logo: Starbucks, McDonald’s, Burger King, Wetherspoons.
“You’re right,” Farah says, deadpan. “This is definitely better than the hotel.”
Jonah laughs sharply. “Don’t mock what you don’t understand, girl. Give it a minute, you’ll feel it.” He strides across the food court, his arms raised like a preacher giving a sermon. “This place only half exists in the real world. People shelter here, nothing more. It belongs to no one, which means it belongs to us.”
He’s right, I think. The crawling, uneasy feeling in my chest is easier here. Like the library was easier than the canteen, the hotel was easier than my house.
“Levi!” Jonah shouts. “You know what to do!”
Levi walks off. They’ve rearranged the leather sofas from the Wetherspoons, added roll mats, beanbags and an eclectic assortment of table lamps, and made a ramshackle sort of living room for themselves. A giant flat-screen television forms the centrepiece, black and insectoid in the half-light of the food court.
“Ose, if you would do the honours,” Jonah says.
Ose moves slowly from lamp to lamp, switching each one of them on in turn. A gasp escapes my mouth. Light? I look at Farah and Chiu and Farah looks amazed. The finishing touch is the television and for an incredible moment I’m caught by the wild and almost incomprehensibly wonderful idea that we might get to sit and watch for a while. But when the screen powers up it has nothing but a kind of digital static. Broken, frozen, disjointed filmic images.
“Ose is as moody and uncommunicative as they come,” Jonah remarks, mocking as before. “But there are advantages to having an electrician on the crew.”
“You’re an electrician?” I say.
Ose’s face twitches with a look that might be one of irritation. “I know enough of the basics to get the lights working.”
“How do you do it?” Chiu asks.
“How do you wake up?” Ose replies.
Levi appears again, holding a large bellowed instrument that I recognize as an accordion. He starts to play, a wheezing whine like a dozen harmonicas played slightly out of tune with a higher, sharper melody playing over it. Each sound would be grating and unpleasant on its own, but together they create a weaving, wonderful, discordant chaos.
Jonah disappears behind the bar and returns with a crate of bottled beer that he slams on to the table. “Plenty of old stock in a service station as well,” he remarks. He cracks open a bottle, takes a long swig and then spits it upwards, over and behind him like a geyser, before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “No decent Scotch though.”
Tongue cracks open bottles for himself, Levi and Ose. Then he cracks open another and hands it to me. He offers one to Farah but she shakes her head slightly. A moment later, Ose appears with a crate of Coke and gives one each to Farah and Chiu.
“Come! Come dance!” Jonah calls.
He takes up a spot in the main food court, just outside the bar, and begins a slow, side-stepping kind of dance: heel–toe, heel–toe, his arms floating above his head. Ose lets himself sink into an armchair and closes his eyes. Tongue does the same. Levi plays and plays, utterly absorbed by his music.
Farah and I sit on the spare sofa opposite Ose, and Chiu takes the armchair nearby. I take a sip of the warm, flat beer. I’ve never been a big fan of beer, but I’m beginning to understand Jonah’s point about drinking to remember. I’m not sure if it’s the body or the brain, but some part of me remembers the idea of drinking a beer, some part of me hankers after that feeling. I sip and watch Jonah dance. Heel–toe, heel–toe. Incongruous but oddly fitting. Chiu has been distracted by the television, the steely-grey light reflecting off his rapt expression.
“Our lives are brief flickers,” Jonah says. “We matter to no one. But we have a choice. We can huddle in the darkness like timid little mice … or we can throw our arms out into the night and yell: ‘Come on, you sadistic wanker! Show yourself!’”
A debilitating, drug-like tiredness falls over me. There’s something about the music, the lights and the television. I know at some level that I’m with a man who nearly murdered me. I know that just underneath the surface we are prisoners. But those troubles seem distant.
“This is not a death dream.” Jonah’s drawl intrudes into my thoughts. “‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I am known.’ Do you know what that means?”
The familiar words pull me back into wakefulness.
For now we see through a glass, darkly.
Father Michael. I remember him saying those words. Anxiety twists inside me. Fragments of memory push themselves into my mind. Mum’s note. Exciting news! Searching through the papers in the kitchen.
Why was I outside on my own? What was it I was trying to do that was so important?
All I know is that it was urgent. The longer I stay here, the more likely it is that it’s going to be too late in the ordinary world to do whatever it was I was trying to do.
Levi’s accordion music goes on and on. The melody stretches over the notes like a sheet: smooths them out, turns them into liquid glass inside my head.
“We are on the other side of the glass, Farah, do you see?” Jonah continues emphatically. “That which you call reality is the universe of reduced awareness, it is a measly trickle. This is living.”
Farah looks uncomfortable. Jonah notices and his face tightens with annoyance. “Relax, Farah. Your boyfriend doesn’t mind us talking, does he?”
“He’s not my boyfriend—” Farah begins.
“I’m not her boyfriend—” I say at the same time.
Jonah laughs loudly. “Oh, jeez! Kids! You two are broadcasting hormones halfway to the moon.” His voice becomes hard. “You still don’t get it, do you? It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. We can do anything we like here.”
He reaches for Farah, grabs her wrist. She lets out a yelp and twists away from him. Ose’s eyes are suddenly open, his face alert. He flashes me a warning look.
“Leave her alone,” I say, standing.
Levi stops playing and the air becomes abruptly empty. A grin splits Jonah’s face as he squares up to me, like a panther stalking his prey.
“Well, well, the mouse squeaks,” he growls. “There, you see, Farah? You see what I mean? Anybody can do anything? Even this little one. That’s the wonder of this place.” He turns back to me, his eyes narrowing. “But I expect some respect around here, boy. You stay, you make nice, OK?”
“We’re not staying,” Farah says. “Actually, we’re leaving. Right now.”
Jonah points a finger in her direction without taking his eyes off me. “You’ll leave when I bloody well say you can leave.”
