The Way Out Read online

  Karen’s house is full of primary colours and children and smells of toast. Her two eldest are playing with Lego in the conservatory while Karen changes the baby’s nappy.

  ‘There! Doesn’t that feel better? Yes. It. Does.’ Karen punctuates her speech with play pinches of the boy’s fat cheeks. He squeals with laughter as she picks him up and slings him over one hip. ‘Jesus, Mel,’ she says, giving her sister a searching look, ‘you look like crap. You okay?’

  Melanie rubs a hand across her forehead. ‘I’m fine. Just tired, y’know?’

  Karen puts the baby down in a bouncy chair and reaches for Matthew. ‘Have you been keeping your mummy up at night, you little monster? Well, you know what we do with monsters here?’ She blows a noisy raspberry on Matthew’s neck and he squirms and giggles. ‘When does that man of yours get back anyway? Or is he inventing more work just to dodge the night shift?’

  Melanie sighs. ‘Well…’

  A fight suddenly erupts in the conservatory over who has the most sloped bits for the roofs. There are never enough of those bits, she knows. Nathan, four, an advocate of direct action, has smashed up the house his older sister Chloe was building. In retaliation she has pushed him over and he has landed badly on his garage and is now wailing, ‘Mummeeee!’

  Unflustered, Karen makes for the war zone. It lights her up, thinks Melanie. ‘Organised chaos!’ Karen exclaims, as if that were something to be enjoyed.

  Melanie backs away. The concept makes her nauseous with dread. ‘I better get going,’ she says.

  ‘It’s not fair!’ shouts Chloe. ‘He always ruins everything!’

  ‘Shush now,’ says Karen, rubbing Nathan’s legs as he snivels. ‘Why don’t you two build something together?’

  ‘No no no!’ they yell, at once in complete agreement.

  Karen looks up at her as if surprised to see her still there, hovering in the doorway. ‘Okay then. See you later. Don’t work too hard.’

  Melanie arrives at the office on time and parks by the security gate. There’s no reason to keep coming back but every morning, when she tries to think of what else she might do, where else she might go, she finds only an empty space in her mind where the answer should be. She hadn’t liked her job but now it’s gone, as well as the pay check, she misses the familiar battles and tired jokes, the mud-coloured coffee, even her boss’s bad breath. She has hardly any savings and unless she finds another income soon, things will start falling apart.

  The roof of the office building has been removed since last week and the interior gutted. A new sign on the security gate reads Keep Out Demolition in Progress below a black exclamation mark in a yellow triangle.

  After a few minutes, she drives away and heads towards the ring road. The traffic is heavy. People with jobs hurrying from one task to another, going to meetings, chasing deadlines, delivery times, opening hours. Or perhaps they’re like her, driving for a sense of purpose, desperately trying to join the dots from A to B to give their day a shape.

  She pulls out into the fast lane but red brake lights are going on in pairs as far as she can see. To the left, a sign reading Diversion crawls by, followed by another. Up ahead she sees an indistinct shape stretching across both lanes. It looks impossibly like a small hill or an island wreathed in sea-mist. As the traffic creeps closer, the shape solidifies into a pile of rubble and the mist turns to dust. She flicks on her wipers and they drag grit from side to side across the windscreen.

  Before they reach the obstruction, traffic cones herd them off onto a slip road. She stares at the rubble as the line veers away from it. There’s too much to be the result of a lorry shedding its load. Sweat prickles on the palms of her hands. In the car in front, a woman is talking on her mobile. Behind, a van driver taps his hands on his steering wheel in time to music she can’t hear. They have their eyes on the road ahead. Just another diversion. No big deal.

  She pulls into a transport café, orders coffee, buys a newspaper and searches for the Situations Vacant page but finds only endless cars for sale. She wonders how much she’d get for hers.

  There’s a dull thunk on the table as a small cube of plaster, about two inches square lands next to her coffee cup. She looks up. The ceiling of the café is veined with thick cracks extending the length of the room. As she stares, the cracks bulge and spread as if the emptiness they contain is liquid and pulsing, alive.

  A waitress with sad eyes and pink lipstick stops beside her table and drags a dirty cloth across the Formica, scooping up the lump of plaster. Melanie opens her mouth to speak but the waitress has already moved on.

  She is still gaping at the ceiling, wondering why no one else seems to have noticed what’s going on, when the far side of the café collapses with a grinding crash. She jumps to her feet, spilling her coffee. Was there anyone sitting over there? Shouldn’t somebody do something? She coughs and wipes her eyes. Through the cloud of dust she sees the waitress shake her head and fetch a mop from behind the counter. A man in overalls belches.

  She staggers out of the groaning building, gasping for breath. There are no emergency vehicles, no one is running or screaming. She licks her lips and tastes stone. Cars glide by, the occupants oblivious. She stares at the flow of traffic and it becomes hypnotic, calming. Before long she decides she wants nothing more than to join it.

  On the outer bypass, all is serene. Four lanes of smooth running order cut through the green belt, two in one direction and two back the other way. Perfect balance. She thinks only of her wheels pressed firmly to the road, holding a steady course. She doesn’t think about how to keep Matthew in nappies and food when there’s no money. Instead, she clears her mind, tunes her thoughts to the drone of rubber on tarmac.

  She has been travelling this way for some time when the comforting hum is knocked out of tune. A deeper bass note is insinuating itself upwards, getting louder. A growling, tearing thunder eating away her equilibrium.

  A dark shape appears on the horizon, moving towards her on the opposite carriageway. A truck? No, too big, and black all over. No windows. No driver. No wheels. It grows in size, dwarfing the cars in front of it before rolling right over the top of them, grinding them to dust.

  Dear God. Doesn’t anyone else see it?

  She waves frantically to the drivers in the cars coming towards her, flashes her lights and points behind them. Some look at her curiously, most ignore her. She can feel the bone-shaking rumble through the wheels of her own car. The black shape is nearly level with her as it smashes a young couple in a red hatchback into oblivion. One second they were laughing together at some shared joke, him reaching his hand out to rest on her knee, the fall of her hair half-hiding her smile, and the next they were slapped out of existence.

  The whole carriageway is rolling itself up like a monstrous Swiss roll, black tarry stones spraying from the wheeling edges as it passes. At least forty feet high, it casts an immense shadow. Her hands are shaking as she grips the wheel and it feels like something is tearing loose in her chest. Something necessary. Something she can’t afford to lose.

  In her rear-view mirror she sees the shape carrying on, crushing everything in its path. She looks at the face of the driver behind her. He is picking his nose and flicking the result out of his window. She looks further back, searching the horizon where the road meets the sky and it isn’t long before another dark shape appears. This time on her carriageway.

  She swerves towards the inside lane, narrowly missing another car. Ignoring the angry gesticulations of the other driver, she pulls off onto the hard shoulder, then further onto the grass. She clambers out and manages a few stumbling steps before falling to the ground, which is shuddering beneath her. The road she had been driving on only moments before, rumbles past like a giant wheel of liquorice, leaving in its wake an uneven surface of stones and gravel and a thick, tarry stench.

  Nothing moves.

  The ground that used to be road glitters with shards of broken glass and metal. Fragments of mirror sparkle in
the sunlight and reflect tiny bits of broken sky.

  Melanie turns away, pulls herself to her feet and staggers to the top of the verge. On the far side, the landscape falls away towards the city, its tower blocks and spires, its networks of houses and parks, its familiar comforts. Then she notices a cloud of dust hovering over the eastern edge of the city and where there should have been houses, there are only shifting areas of grey and brown, rising and falling like waves. A factory chimney collapses in on itself and joins the tide pushing westwards across the city.

  Matthew!

  Karen’s house is to the south-west. Panic swallows her in a single gulp and she reels, reaching out for support that isn’t there. Oh please God, let him be okay, let them all be okay. Karen, the kids. She’d give anything. Anything. She has to get to them before the tide crosses the city.

  Her car is still on the verge, untouched by the passing carnage. There is no road to drive on but she rolls back down the grassy bank and onto the track where the road had been. She prays her tyres will last long enough as she drives on, skidding and fishtailing, her teeth clacking together as her body is flung around inside the car like a pea in a whistle, while her fingers grip tightly onto the steering wheel.

  At last a slip road, and it still has tarmac. She takes it and enters the city, which is inexplicably going about its normal business. Mothers push buggies, workmen drill holes, shoppers shift bags from hand to hand, for all the world as if this was a normal day. Something in the dust, she decides. Some kind of psycho-active chemical that’s keeping everyone sedated, unaware of what’s going on. She rolls both her windows up and takes shallow breaths. She has to get across the city to her family. Let the rest of the world fend for itself.

  She barrels down one way streets, runs red lights, leans on her horn and swerves around other cars. It seems to go on for hours. When she eventually arrives in Karen’s street, she presses her forehead briefly to the steering wheel as if giving thanks to the car for delivering her safely this far.

  She gets out of the car and everything seems so completely normal that she’s almost willing to believe she imagined or hallucinated the whole thing. The street is entirely intact. But then she sees the dust cloud on the horizon, to the east.

  She runs up the path and hammers on the door. ‘Karen, come on!’

  Her sister opens the door. ‘Mel? What on earth?’

  ‘Get the kids, we’ve got to get out of here. Fast. Where’s Matthew?’

  ‘Having lunch. What’s going on? What’s happened? Melanie! Talk to me! What’s wrong?’

  She pushes past Karen and runs through the house into the kitchen. The kids are at the table, Matthew strapped into a high chair, merrily decorating his face with food. She grabs him and tries to pull him out of the seat, forgetting to undo the straps. He squeals and starts to cry. ‘It’s okay baby, it’s okay. Mummy’s here. It’s going to be okay,’ she says, and fumbles with the buckle.

  ‘Mel!’ Karen’s hand is on her arm. ‘Stop it. You’re scaring him.’

  Karen’s children are staring at Melanie, wide-eyed and pale, food forgotten on their plates. ‘Now,’ says Karen in her best no-fuss voice, ‘let Matthew finish his lunch and you come with me and tell me what’s going on.’ She peels Melanie away from Matthew and says to the kids, ‘Don’t worry, Auntie Mel’s not feeling well, but she’ll be fine in a minute. Finish up your fish fingers now.’ Karen leads her gently but firmly out of the kitchen.

  She can’t stay still but Karen forces her to sit down and explain. In a rush she tells her everything she’s seen and Karen watches her, a frown deepening on her forehead.

  ‘And you believe we’re in some kind of danger?’

  Melanie pulls her sister outside to the street to show her the dust cloud, which must surely be almost upon them. To the east the sky is a cloudless blue bowl. She spins around. Perhaps the tide has changed direction, come around to attack from another side. But the view is clear on all sides. A white bird glides overhead, charting the clarity and goodness of the air in a steady line from North to South. Karen is watching her closely. They need a higher place to look around, she realises. She runs back into the house and takes the stairs two at a time, Karen right behind her. She runs between the bedrooms, stumbling over toys and laundry to look out of all the windows.

  ‘Mel?’

  ‘Shh! Quiet!’ she snaps. ‘Listen!’

  The only sounds are of children playing, someone cutting their grass, the beep-beep of a lorry reversing in an adjoining street. Can they really be safe? She strains to make out the dull roar of demolition lurking under the surface. ‘I need to get Matthew,’ she says, and starts for the stairs. She can hear him crying and Chloe singing to distract him, but it isn’t working.

  Karen stops her in the hallway. ‘I don’t think you’re in any state right now,’ she says firmly. ‘Let me deal with him. I’m going to clear the lunch away, then we’re going to have a proper talk.’

  Too exhausted and bewildered to continue arguing, Melanie sits on the floor in the conservatory with her head in her hands and listens to Karen smoothing things over with the kids, joking and scolding and clattering dishes around.

  Chloe and Nathan must have got over their argument. Nearly all of the Lego pieces have been used to build an eccentric, multi-coloured structure. Part house, part garage, it has ramps and archways, al fresco kitchens and attic bedrooms with tiny balconies. Melanie lies down flat on the floor and peers inside. Little Lego people move along the corridors, smiling. She thinks if she could make herself small enough, she would go and live in there. Take Matthew with her, and maybe they’d not come back. Maybe they would be safe there.

  She feels a tug on her hair and there is Matthew, come to find her. His hands are sticky and his face is freshly wiped and shiny pink. He grins at her. His new teeth are like tiny pearls in his pink gums. She hugs him, pressing his small body into her own, breathing in the smell of his hair, his skin, his unquestioning trust. When he gets bored and begins to protest she puts him down and he crawls towards the Lego building.

  ‘Careful,’ she warns, worried he’ll spoil his cousins’ work.

  But Matthew picks up a loose brick, then another, puts the first down on the floor and balances the second on top. He looks for her reaction and at first she’s lost. Then she remembers herself, and what comes next.

  Starting again.

  After destruction comes construction, putting one piece on top of another. This simple act defines us. We are the builders. That is who we are and this is what we do. She always knew this but had somehow forgotten it. Remembering now, so suddenly and with such force, feels like something bursting inside her head, releasing the pressure that had been trapped there.

  She smiles and claps for Matthew.

  He imitates her, smacking his fat palms together and giggling then reaching for another brick, orange as a fish finger. This is important.

  Readymade

  Elaine was always big on the Domestic Goddess stuff, but horticulture defeated her. When we moved into our brand new marital home, the garden was a patch of thick, claggy clay that didn’t drain and refused to support life. She tried her best, shovelling up great wet cubes of clay like oversized pieces of fudge, planting all kinds of doomed green things. She may as well have just taken them out back and shot them, it would’ve been kinder. As it was, we were treated to the slow but inexorable deaths of dozens of blameless shrubs through the patio windows, drooping, discoloured, dead. The trouble with living things is no matter how hard you try, they seldom behave as you want them to. They have agendas.

  Elaine said a lot of things before she left. Hardly any of it made any sense. ‘You’re empty, Ian,’ she said. ‘I thought you were all, like, Zen or something. But you’re completely hollow. There’s nothing there under the surface. Nothing at all.’

  Better than being full of shit, I thought, and told her I loved her.

  ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word,’ she said. ‘You don’t
even know it’s a verb, a doing word.’

  By this point I had no idea what she was talking about so I told her again that I loved her.

  ‘If you repeat any word often enough it becomes nothing more than a sound in your mouth. You might as well say Labrador or lavatory or, or… truffle!’ She shouted that last word at me then she started laughing and shaking her head. ‘Ian,’ she said when she’d calmed down and was standing in the hall, a suitcase in each hand, ‘maybe there’s someone out there who’s right for you. It is an infinite universe after all. But that person is not me.’ She laughed again, somewhat hysterically I thought, and slammed the door behind her. Funny girl.

  I convinced myself I didn’t need a relationship. The price was too high. But that was before I met Julie. She really renewed my faith in things. I’ll miss her.

  Maybe Elaine was right. I certainly feel empty now. I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here in the front room, anchored deep within the armchair. Could be minutes, could be days. Perhaps I’m hungry. Someone once told me that civilisation is only ever two missed meals away from anarchy. Or was it three? No matter. The point is, there are limits. Frankly, I’m amazed there isn’t more anarchy in the world considering we’re all just a few sandwiches short of mayhem.

  I glance over to the corner of the room. A curl of blonde hair disrupts the pattern of the carpet. Such beautiful hair. Julie’s lying face down with her legs twisted underneath her, arms flung out on either side. Her skin is still pink. Such lovely skin.

  By the clock on the mantelpiece, it’s nearly nine. I get up and turn on the telly. Bush fires in Australia, bombs in Iraq, by-elections in Huddersfield. It’s impossible to know what to care about. I let it all wash over me. This act requires focus and clarity. The conclusions I’ve reached, the decisions I’ve taken, I have not taken lightly. It’s a question of following through. To thine own self be true. That means not taking any shit, from anyone.