Chapter 6

“Aren’t you cold?”
“Frozen stiff!”
“Me too, and if you were a lady you’d offer me your jumper.”
“What? The cheek!”
Guy left school two years ago. Outside was a whole new game to learn. No longer the name and number of an institution that was paid to feed, house and educate him, he became nobody, and relished it. He moved from one boarding-house to another, from one job to another, from one town to another, inventing lives, lying, and perfecting social skills. At last he was alone. Nobody knew him.
The one remaining problem was women. They paralysed him. Especially in public. In time, he worked his way around that too.
Tonight, on the solitary lay-by, there were no witnesses, it was dark, pitch black, and they were alone, Guy and the girl selling flowers from a makeshift stall. Just him and her.
As he pulled in, the lumpy shape in his headlamps turned out to be a very attractive girl wrapped in jumpers, scarves and coats. The perfect English rose. Around her, silence and emptiness, bare black trees, pieces of litter chased by the wind, the grimy public conveniences Guy so urgently needed, and the solitary street lamp with its pitiful sphere of glowing insects in the ice-cold, six-o’clock mass of night.
The girl had another hour to go. She thrust her hands back into the depths of her pockets and made tight balls out of her fists, squeezing heat out of nowhere. Keeping her hand inside, she lifted her coat and looked at her watch. Two minutes less.

She laughed. One silly joke and that was all.
“Is that all you got on? You must be freezing.”
Guy was wearing a thin shirt.
“Bit, but not much. Mind over matter. Like them Tibetan monks.”
“What’s that?”
“Monks from Tibet; do meditation; sit on the ground in the snow and it melts.”
“Yeah, go on...”
“No, really. Read it in a book. They just think, concentrate and it melts.”
“Yeah yeah.”
“Done it myself.”
“What? Melted the snow?”
“Yeah, made a pair of Y-fronts out of me mum’s electric blanket!” As they spoke, Guy’s accent became more and more local Oxford. His voice had the chameleon-like capacity to blend in with the surroundings. The sort of jobs he did quickly taught him that a plummy accent, French surname and public-school background did not fit in.
A car pulled up. An old man doddered out to buy some tulips. Guy hovered around, then wandered off to the van. The transaction took ages. Guy turned the ignition and reversed a couple of yards. The man cranked himself back into his seat and pottered off.
The road was black. Not one headlamp. Guy leaned over the seats and rummaged around in the back of the van.
“Here,” he called, “could you give me a hand for a minute?”
“Do what?”
“There’s some crates in the back keep rattling all over the place; could you give ’em a shove so’s I can fix them wi’ me bungies.”
“Alright.”
“That’s it, bit further...”
Now! He slipped into place and accelerated. Then braked sharply. One door banged shut then bounced back open. The girl was sent sprawling over the floor of the van, trying desperately not to fall out of the speeding vehicle.
“Oi! What you bloody doing? Let me out!” she yelled.
“Shut up, slut!” he yelled at the top of his voice.
The van left the lay-by at high speed, braking and accelerating to destabilise the screaming girl. Then he slammed on the brakes and drove onto the uneven verge, sending her sliding across the floor. He leapt out and ran to the back, closed the door and had just reached his seat when she managed to open it again. He put his foot down. The van lurched forward and she could feel herself sliding out. Nothing beneath but a bandsaw of rough concrete. The sight of death spurred her muscles to mindless power. Grabbing hold of whatever she could, she dragged herself to safety then, clutching at the seat, started laying into him, punching, hitting, clawing and hammering at his face and shoulders. He swerved violently. Cars passing in the opposite direction flashed their lights in his face and banged their horns furiously. The glare dazed him and still she pounded him, screaming “Let me out, you bastard! Let me out!” He braked, the tyres screeched and the van skidded to a halt. She was crushed forward against the back of the seats and he seized her arm. With the full force of her terrified strength, she wrenched back like a madwoman and caught his elbow on the wooden partition behind the seats. He let go. She scrambled for the door. Guy leapt out and raced round to the back. As he pulled the back open to get in, a crate came flying at him. It caught the roof and spun down, hitting him on the thigh. She threw another and got him on the arm. He moved back and she clambered out, blind with panic and survival. A car sped past. A long trail of lights appeared on the other side. As Guy tried to move forward to push her back inside, she grabbed the nearest crate she could find, flung it at his head with all her strength, and fled. She ran like she’d never ran in her life. Unimaginable and incomprehensible terror paralysing her mind, she just ran.
Guy raced back to his seat and shot off, scattering crates behind him. Driving in mindless panic, he found the nearest turn-off and left the main road. But still he hurtled on, his heart thumping wildly.
Two hours later, after driving miles in an enormous loop to arrive in town from the opposite direction, he reached his own street. There was a plot of waste-land behind the end-house. He drove down and parked deep in the shadows.
He sat there, stunned by what he’d done. “It was only a joke,” he said to himself. But he knew it wasn’t.
“Jesus Christ! What an idiot! What a fucking idiot!” he wailed.
He hunched over the steering-wheel, arms in front of his eyes, hiding himself, obliterating everything... Nothing had happened.
“What an idiot! What a fucking idiot!” The words screamed inside his head, stabbing his brain again and again. Petrified to leave the safety of the van, he sat and shivered.
It was half an hour before he dared to get out. Closing the door as quietly as possible, he locked up.
Keeping to the shadows, he slunk back to his bedsit and locked himself in, sitting in the dark, smoking, cursing and sweating with fear.
“She’ll recognise the van,” he thought. “The crates!” They were all over the place, all they have to do was bloody walk down the road for five minutes and there they were! His fists pounded the bed. “Oh no!” he cried, “what a fucking idiot!”
His neighbour rapped on the wall. Guy turned to ice and lay like stone.
It woke him up. He had to do something. His whole attitude changed. He switched on the light. “What time is it?” Nearly ten. “Think, think” he told himself. The crates? They would tell nothing. Bloody orange-crates… how could anyone trace them back to him? They couldn’t. Forget it. The girl? Could she identify the van? A grey van on a dark night? What about the name, did she see it? Probably not, but that was a risk he was not going to take.
“I’m off.”
Looking around the room, his mind calculated the time it would take to pack, what he could take and what he couldn’t. His books would have to go. He started packing. There was not a lot anyway. His outdoor stuff was already in his rucksack. It took him two hours to clear up. The room was bare, just four sets of possessions on the floor: suitcase, rucksack, books and junk.
Quietly, he took the junk to the van and drove off to find a skip. Next, he changed into tomorrow’s clothes and carried the rucksack, books and suitcase down to the van, then went to bed.
At eight, he drove to the station and put his things in a left-luggage locker, checked train times, had breakfast, and went to sell his books.
By the time he got to work, a little late, he was nearly in tears. Old Gandy scowled, then softened when he saw his expression. Sniffing and sighing, Guy told him about last night’s phone call, his gran’s death, leaving his poor old grandad alone and unable to look after himself.
Gandy was a miserable sod at times, but he wasn’t bad. Luckily, he was also susceptible to the old sob story, and Guy seemed to be seriously hurt. Seeing as it was a bit out of the ordinary, he wangled it so the lad got his full week’s money. He could make it up when he got back.
Guy thanked him and slouched off.
When he still hadn’t returned a week later as promised, Gandy remembered: he didn’t have a phone.

Guy sat in the train grinning to himself. Nothing in the local papers; no “SHOCK HORROR!” No “Oxford Girl in Lay-by Abduction Drama” splashed across the headlines. Nothing.
Maybe he’d go back and kill her one day.
As the train pummelled its way east, Guy’s mood lightened up. He examined his last night’s behaviour critically, thinking about the mistakes he’d made and what he should have done. In fact, the whole thing should have been easy, a brick on the back of the head and that’s it.
The girl, did he think of her?

Guy. Guy was his own worst victim. The lonelier he became, the deeper he dug into a pose of self-sufficiency. If you want nothing, need nothing, nobody can touch you. So he affected the greatest indifference to anything that did attract him.
His poky little kitchen in Lisle Street had been his private world, shopping list and means of communicating with his mother. When things ran out, she usually bought some more. There was never any “Mum, can you get...” Her violent and unpredictable changes of temper smothered any tendency to express his wishes. Knowledge of his wants became a manipulative tool to keep him from being a nuisance, to keep him quiet and punish him for not dying at birth.
The wild outbursts of maudlin love became hated farces. There was only one person you could trust: yourself.
The only way to block out the horrible void of lovelessness was fill it with lead. And the more he clammed up on the outside, the more the molten drops of hatred splashed across his insides, numbing him until he could feel no more.
Running away seemed to help.

At Paddington, he took the Circle Line to Victoria and booked a seat on the coach to Paris. Nobody knew him there, he would blend in. And, anyway, he was French. ¶ 2:05 AM