She caught a shuttle coach from the centre of town, riding back with drunken tourists and teenage Turkish boys. Ace sat staring blankly, hugging her arms around herself. She stank of fear. When she got out of the coach at her hotel one of the boys shouted at her. Ace flinched and the boys all laughed.
10.
Ace slept until the middle of the afternoon, curled into a foetal bundle, lying on her uninjured side. She slept deeply and without dreams, oblivious to the sound of the prayers and hotel construction going on outside. When she woke she went into the bathroom and stripped off the T-shirt she"d slept in. She stared at herself in the mirror. Her shoulder had a wide bruise that extended down her left arm and up the side of her neck. It looked like the map of a new continent. Her tanned skin was pale in contrast to the deep red and purple. It hurt too much to move her arm more than slightly, but nothing seemed to be broken.
Ace ran water into the sink and didn"t think about Ma.s.soud. She dropped a cake of soap into the sink and watched the water turn a blind milky white, the surface trembling as the taps kept filling. She didn"t think about Ma.s.soud. She soaked a sponge in the warm soapy water and wiped her body clean, using only her right hand, not thinking about him.
The dolmus dolmus for the airport left late that evening. Ace killed time packing and reading a battered Englishlanguage paperback she"d taken from a stack in the lobby. Most of the books in the stack were about murder. Ace was left with a choice between the complete English poems of John Donne and a slaveryandplantationsaga. Ace took the John Donne. The book of poems fell open at "The Anniversarie": for the airport left late that evening. Ace killed time packing and reading a battered Englishlanguage paperback she"d taken from a stack in the lobby. Most of the books in the stack were about murder. Ace was left with a choice between the complete English poems of John Donne and a slaveryandplantationsaga. Ace took the John Donne. The book of poems fell open at "The Anniversarie": When man doth die. Our body"s as the womb And as a midwife death directs it home.
Ace went back for the plantation novel.
This last hotel of Ace"s journey was called The Dove. It was located among a cl.u.s.ter of similar square white tourist units in Icmeler, a resort west of Marmaris. Ace bought a chilled bottle of apricot juice in the small hotel bar three stools, a shelf and a freezer and sat with her bags in the lobby. She had almost no luggage left now, having shed things at every stage of her journey, then leaving the rest of it last night on the road and in the ditch. Ace read her book and didn"t think about Ma.s.soud. When the dolmus dolmus came it was full of suntanned secretaries from the north of England, drinking to kill their depression at having to fly home to the rain and word processing. Ace sat beside a young woman with tattoos and a teeshirt that had a hologram decal of Alistair Crowley on the front of it. They pa.s.sed two camels on the road and the woman photographed both of them. In the fields on either side of the road people were labouring, working their smallholdings by hand. came it was full of suntanned secretaries from the north of England, drinking to kill their depression at having to fly home to the rain and word processing. Ace sat beside a young woman with tattoos and a teeshirt that had a hologram decal of Alistair Crowley on the front of it. They pa.s.sed two camels on the road and the woman photographed both of them. In the fields on either side of the road people were labouring, working their smallholdings by hand.
The flight was late. Ace had checked in and received her boarding pa.s.s three hours ago. The dutyfree shop sold expensive boxes of Turkish delight, cheap computer memory and a selection of spirits. Ace was tempted to buy a bottle to obliterate the waiting. Drink half of it and simply wipe out the interval, wake up when the plane arrived. A new form of time travel. Instead she joined the other pa.s.sengers stranded in the departure lounge. Their flight had been late out of Heathrow. Unexpected atmospheric conditions.
The airport was echoing and hollow, the occasional announcements ringing off the tiled surfaces, in Turkish then in English. It was three in the morning and the returning holidaymakers looked pale and exhausted under the cruel lighting. Children were crying and in one corner a young couple were having an intense argument, conducting it in whispers. Every face she saw was tired and defeated. Ace sat on one of the plastic Eames chairs as far as she could get from the smell of the br.i.m.m.i.n.g ashtrays. Then she lay down on the cold gritty marble floor, airline bag for a pillow. Other people were lying down around her, trying to sleep. The children had stopped crying but the young man from the arguing couple was sobbing quietly in the corner, alone. A squaddie in a greyblue sweater and a beret tried to strike up a conversation with Ace. She picked up her bag and moved to a new position on the floor. The squaddie didn"t follow. He had a downy blond moustache and a rolledup copy of Hustler Hustler magazine. Ace lay staring at the airport ceiling. The floor felt good against her back. Infinitely solid. magazine. Ace lay staring at the airport ceiling. The floor felt good against her back. Infinitely solid.
Ace liked solid reality, when she could get it.
Uniformed guards wandered across the floor, carrying machine pistols, stepping carefully across the sleeping pa.s.sengers. The departure lounge was silent now. Beyond the wide gla.s.s windows there was the black of the sky and the gleaming silver and white noses of grounded jets. Ace was thinking that the blackness was her destination. She"d be flying into it soon. Or maybe it would be blue by then. Ace saw a guard step across her. High above her. He smiled. She was certain he smiled. Ace weighed his smile against his black shoulderslung weapon and decided the weapon won. Ace saw a pistol in her own hand. Her heart raced, a surge of fear that the guard would see it, that everyone in the room would see it. But the gun wasn"t real, only a memory, and her hand was curled on the floor at her side, holding nothing. Her shoulder ached. She adjusted her position without thinking about it. Just a memory. A memory of a man who jumped off a boat. She felt cool metal against the palm of her hand but now it was just a can of beer. She saw explosions on an island and heard the buzzing of a motor scooter which sounded strange when it faded, a hissing just like air escaping from something. She saw carpets with intricate patterns and she knew that if she could make the patterns out something important would be revealed to her. Ace was angry because she couldn"t see what he was getting at, the man who was showing her the carpets. Miss David had left them alone while she made sage tea in the back of the shop. The hard floor of the airport seemed to be rolling away under Ace"s back, like the swell of the sea. Ace floated, dreaming sunlight on her face under the three a.m. fluorescent light of the airport.
She woke up instantly when her flight was called. All around her dazed pa.s.sengers were getting up like the recently raised dead, groping for their belongings. Ace walked down the sloping umbilical tunnel to the jet, feeling numb. Tired stewardesses stood in the doorway of the plane, smiling and welcoming pa.s.sengers on board while jet engines screamed beyond the thin plastic membrane. The plane smelled like hotel carpets and air conditioning. She found her seat and leaned over to the window, trying to look out at the dark airstrip. All she saw was her own breath fogging the plastic.
"I"m sorry but there"s been a mistake with your ticket."
The steward had to repeat himself twice before Ace realized he was speaking to her. People in the seats nearby were beginning to turn around and look at her. She could feel their eyes on her as she fumbled in the overhead locker for her carryon bag, then followed the steward up towards the front of the plane.
The firstcla.s.s compartment was a small bubble set into the top of the jet. You entered it by climbing a thickly carpeted spiral staircase. Inside it was dimly and discreetly lit, like an expensive bar, and half empty. Ace didn"t have to check her ticket to find out where she was sitting. He was waiting for her, looking up from a book he was reading. She sat down beside him, trying to get a look at the t.i.tle of the book, but he"d put it away already.
"They serve free champagne up here. You can have mine as well if you like."
"Thanks for the ticket," said Ace. "I a.s.sume you were behind that scam."
"I just asked the airline computer nicely and it upgraded your reservation."
"Didn"t expect you to meet me. I dreamed about you, though."
"I thought I"d come to see how you are."
"Knackered."
"I can imagine," said the Doctor. "You"ve done very well. While I was talking to their computer I checked the cargo manifest. The item you obtained for us is secure in the hold."
Secure? Secure from being damaged or doing damage? This was news to Ace. She"d imagined the "item" travelling back by some separate route. A slow pa.s.sage by sea, perhaps. Now she could see the ribbed grey plastic barrel in the belly of the plane, not at all far from where she was sitting. She suppressed the image.
"You were showing me carpets. In my dream."
"Really? That reminds me. How is Miss David?"
"She can keep her ada gayi ada gayi. I"m dying for a decent cup of tea."
"She used to have a different name, you know. She"s an old friend of mine."
The plane was moving now, taxiing for take off. A stewardess patrolled the aisle, checking that seatbelts were fastened. She gave Ace a mechanical smile, her eyes cold. Ace saw herself from the stewardess"s point of view. The sunburnt young woman with dirty feet and beatup clothes, sitting beside the neatly dressed old gentleman, drinking his champagne.
Well, cheers. Ace poured the complimentary champagne into the plastic airline tumbler and drank the bubbles off it. They burned in her nose and throat as the huge aircraft gathered speed, engines audible now through all the firstcla.s.s soundproofing. Gravity pushed Ace back in her seat, a big gentle hand. She sipped the last of the champagne as the plane came off the runway and kept going, rising into the night.
"In my dream the designs on the carpets were really complex. I was trying to make them out."
"And could you understand them?"
"Not very often." Ace set the plastic tumbler down on the highfriction coaster and put the empty champagne bottle into the pocket of the seatback. "But when I did, I didn"t like what I saw."
"Sensible," said the Doctor.
11.
The slab of stone was split in two. It lay in deep weeds like an open book left on the ground by a giant. One half of the slab was angled on a rise of ground so that it caught the sunlight throughout the day. It was warm to the touch from midmorning until late evening. When you put your hand to its rough surface and pressed hard you could feel a faint vibration. Probably just the blood drumming in your own fingertips, but it was like touching the warm hide of some ancient creature, sleeping under the ground.
Justine liked to imagine a beast buried in the earth. Not buried like the dead but hibernating, sleeping, ready to wake up one day. She enjoyed sitting here on the stone and eating her rations at midday. The slab lay in the centre of a clearing in the woods, high on the slope of the hill. It was a good place to sit, with a clear line of sight through the trees down to the big house below. There were other, smaller, stones and the remains of a wall in the adjacent woods. Justine had studied them and decided that some of them, the newer ones, were merely the ruins of an old farm. The old farm was the best place to be when she wanted shelter, the smells and shadows of the trees. When she wanted to feel the sun Justine preferred the slab.
It was warm now under the torn denim of her Levis. Sitting here she would read poetry, lying back, a tuft of weeds for her pillow. Her disc player ran on solar power and she set it out in the sun beside her head, listening to the few CDs she"d brought with her. Other times she would read the magazines.
Justine was strict with herself about reading the magazines. When she read about the house in them her excitement would begin to grow and sometimes she couldn"t contain it. The desire would rise in her to see the house. Not the way she could see it now, from the treeline on the hill. But up close.
Without conscious thought she would find herself walking to the edge of the woods. Once she had even come out of the trees, through the gardens, right up to the old Victorian greenhouse. She had stood there on the overgrown lawns looking up at the house. That had been unwise.
So Justine rationed the reading of the magazines and kept her excitement under control.
The sun was high now and she lay back on the stone watching coloured shapes chase each other behind her eyelids. The shapes were vivid splashes of green and blue on a field of radiant orange. They were unreal colours, romantic colours. Like the colours of tattoos. Justine watched them until it was time to eat. Today"s rations consisted of charqui. She chewed each mouthful slowly, trying to work moisture into the tough strips of dried beef. There was almost no water left in her canteen. Tonight she would have to buy some from a village shop. Their rations were holding out well but water was heavy to carry and she"d brought only the minimum with them on their overland trek from London across the North Downs.
The walk had taken them three days. They could have made better time if Justine had been willing to let Sammy off the leash, a crude length of leather she"d fashioned herself and knotted loosely around his neck. Several times she"d seriously considered dispensing with the leash but ultimately decided the risk of Sammy running off was too great. Sometimes Justine wondered if she was cruel, but she always dismissed the thought from her mind. Sentimentality could get her killed.
Justine began to plan the shopping expedition. It would have to wait until nightfall. She kept a watch on the house during daylight. Each evening when the sun went down she abandoned the vigil and went back to her encampment. She read by the campfire while Sammy lay on the ground beside her, whimpering and snorting in his sleep. When the campfire burned low she would put all thoughts of the house from her mind. Even if the opportunity came, she wasn"t crazy enough to try to enter the place after dark.
Now despite herself Justine found her thoughts focusing on the house, imagining exactly what she might find in it. She forced herself to concentrate on the shopping. It would have to wait until nightfall and it would have to be a long walk. It was tempting to go to the nearest village to buy water, but she didn"t want the presence of a stranger to register with the locals. Word might somehow get back to the house.
Justine chewed the strips of spiced dry meat and carefully planned her walk that night. She would find an offlicence or latenight video and grocery store. She"d buy some food for Sammy in addition to the water. She wasn"t cruel. This morning when she"d left their tent she"d weighed her canteen and poured most of the contents into the old battered tin bowl that Sammy drank from. Now there was only a sip left in the canteen for her and the charqui was dry in her mouth. The muscles in her jaws ached but she didn"t mind. She didn"t begrudge the water left in the tin bowl. Sammy was tied to a tree by the tents and he"d need it. Lapping it up with his big pink tongue in the noon heat.
Justine swallowed the charqui. It went down a little painfully, but it did go down. Before she unwrapped the next piece she opened her leather ammunition bag and took out the magazines. When she had bought the bag in London the man had told her it was a relic of the Spanish Civil War. But that wasn"t why Justine bought it. She bought it for the silver skull and crossbones and the silver lettering that said Clean Up Or Die Clean Up Or Die. Inside the bag were the covers for the CDs, the rest of her dry rations and the magazines. She told herself she wouldn"t read the magazines yet, but she found herself looking at the covers.
The magazines were thin, forty or fifty pages each. Printed on cheap paper which had begun to swell with damp after a couple of nights in the woods. The pictures in the magazines were all black and white. Some of the covers were in colour, but not the one Justine was interested in. On the cover was a grainy monochrome photograph of an old house set in wide overgrown grounds. Justine looked up from the magazine and through the trees. The photograph had been taken with a long lens, from a position very close to where she was sitting right now. Did the thought frighten her? No. It was exciting.
She leafed through the magazine, glancing at the article that went with the cover photograph. She didn"t read the article. She knew it word for word.
Justine unwrapped the second strip of dried meat and put it in her mouth. Her mouth was dry meat too, she reflected as she began to chew. She"d allow herself a sip of water with this one. As she reached for the canteen she became aware of a faint background buzzing. The sound was so constant it was like silence. She couldn"t say when it had started or how long it had been going on. It was a fierce buzzing and Justine instantly thought of a machine of some kind. She drew the knife from her boot.
The line of fracture between two halves of the stone slab was filled with vegetation. Weeds, gra.s.s and thin bushes had found their way up to the sunlight through the dividing crack and over time had widened it, the ma.s.sed tiny strength of roots and stems shifting the thousand kilos of stone. Justine moved silently up her half of the slab, crawling over sunwarmed stone mottled with fungus. She couldn"t see through the growth at the broken edge of the stone. Justine extended the knife and carefully divided the foliage, taking five minutes to create a gap she could see through. She spent another ten minutes looking through. The sound continued all the time, but as she watched it grew steadily weaker. Finally Justine stood upright and stepped over the bushes to the other side of the slab.
There by her foot was a bee. Its black and yellow stripes reminded Justine of the black and yellow capsule she carried with her, sealed in the locket she wore around her neck. The bee was lying on its back on the hot stone, kicking its legs helplessly in the strong sunlight, buzzing as it writhed. Justine studied the insect for a moment, then leaned forward with her knife held out in front of her.
Using only the very tip of the blade, with utmost care, she gently tipped the bee over. It crawled around groggily, then lay still. Justine considered for a moment then went back to get her canteen. There was even less water in it than she"d thought. It made the pale surface of the stone a deep rich grey as she poured it around the bee, careful not to pour any directly over the insect itself. She kneeled and watched while the bee moved around on the wet patch of stone. For a time it seemed the bee was growing weaker. At one point it stopped moving altogether and she held her breath. Then the buzzing started again, louder than before, and the bee jigged sideways, hovered and lifted into the air. It floated above the stone then shot away like a bullet. Justine smiled. She lifted the empty canteen to her lips and licked a final drop off the screw thread rim. Taste of metal in her mouth. She breathed the residual cool moisture from the dark tin interior. It didn"t matter. It was almost three o"clock.
At three o"clock and then again at seven it would rain.
The rain began two minutes late, a drumming on the leaves above her. The leaves of her tree. She was halfway down the hillside now, deep in the middle of the woods. Justine had found the ruins on the morning of the second day of her vigil. Not really ruins, just the traces of foundations and two crumbling fragments of drystone walls. The trees were thickest here and Justine had found one particular tree that became her own. She estimated that the farmhouse had been abandoned two or three hundred years ago.
There had been a mill here, too. She knew that because of the stone. The big circular millstone which someone had left leaning against a tree one afternoon in another century. Leaning against her tree. A weathered old millstone. It was evocative of an older, saner world. Farms and the sort of farmers she a.s.sociated with pastoral ad campaigns for wholemeal bread. Justine wasn"t fooled. A mill was a machine. It was part of a system of exploitation. A rape that had begun centuries ago and was slowly turning into murder. But there was still a chance to resist. The way the tree was resisting. It was absorbing the stone, the bark slowly enclosing and swallowing it. One day there would be only the tree and you"d never know the stone had been there.
The leaves were heavy with the continuing rainfall, branches bowing down with the weight of it. As Justine moved through the trees some of the high leaves shed water, a secondary rainfall soaking her combat jacket until it was heavy and cold across her shoulders.
The rain had fallen at three o"clock, seeded from the clouds by small aircraft. In four hours they would fly again. Fertilizing the sky. It was a sort of machine, really, a water pump in the sky intended to replenish England"s parched aquifers. It wasn"t natural rain. And it wasn"t working.
Justine grasped a handful of twigs and pulled the branch down to her face. She held it carefully so as not to tear the leaves off it. Rainwater streamed off the waxy leaf surfaces, spilling down to her open mouth. The leaves were soft on her lips and fragrant. The water was cold on her tongue and had a faint bitterness. It was acid rain from the industrial heart of the continent, the Ruhr and Rhine, carried back across the English Channel by the new weather systems. A reversal of the old order. Justine remembered the days when the acid rain had come from England and drifted to the woods of Scandinavia. She thought of days before that when the rain had come at random and you could drink it. Really drink it. Days before she"d been born. The rainwater she was tasting now contained tiny but measurable amounts of cadmium, dioxin, lead, and plutonium. She drank until her thirst was gone. There were some new poisons in her blood now and her life was a little shorter. That didn"t matter. Justine didn"t expect to live long anyway.
She wiped the moisture off her mouth and smelled her fingers. After a day in the city her fingers always stank. Here in the real world, deep in the wet green it was different. Justine liked the smell of her hands. She didn"t like the way they looked though. The crude tattoo Isabelle had done for her at school with a Bic pen. Ugly and blue on the back of her hand. She had long ago acquired proper tattoos.
Her first contact with the movement, the real movement instead of the kids playing games, had come through a tattoo artist who had a damp studio above an indoor market in Hastings. There among the biker posters on the peeling wallpaper, with the smell of vegetarian food from downstairs and the pounding of music through the floorboards. He had showed Justine how he traced the tattoo designs off paper from magazines and the covers of old 33 rpm records. And he"d shown her other things.
Standing in the woods with the rain falling around her Justine thought of Alec and the way she"d felt about him at first. She"d been surprised at his pale skin. Unmarked. No tattoos on his own arms. He"d lacked the commitment. Just as she discovered that he"d lacked the commitment to the movement.
She remembered the way he"d looked at first, face close to hers as he put the tattoo on her shoulder with an old electric needle. Then closer still, in bed together. And the way he"d looked at the end, eyes open as he sat on the floor with his shirt off, back against the black iron radiator. After he was dead the radiator had slowly burned deep into his back, sending a smell of cooking meat drifting down to the vegetarian cafe. Justine sometimes had dreams about that. Sometimes she cried over Alec.
It was quiet in the woods now. The rain had stopped. It would fall again at seven o"clock. There would be another hour of light after that and when the light faded Justine would give up her watch for today. She rolled a cigarette and smoked it. She sat under the canopy of trees, waiting for someone to return to the house in the valley. Waiting for them and waiting for the automatic rain.
12.
At Heathrow Ace hung back while the Doctor bartered for a taxi outside the Arrivals building. The Doctor had a knack with taxis. Within five minutes they were riding out of the airport on the back of the motorcycles, diving down a long concrete tunnel and angling low to the ground as they swept on to the curving orbital roads. Armoured cars lined the escape lanes and khakiuniformed squaddies stood smoking and talking on the gra.s.s verges beside them.
As soon as the taxibikes were past the airport perimeter, they hit the traffic. A solid column of locked metal, cars extending back along the approaching roads as far as you could see. Some of the lines of traffic were moving. Most weren"t. Gipsylooking roadsiders moved up and down the stalled columns selling food, newspapers, themselves. Ragged children tagged along with some of the roadsiders. A whole subculture that had grown with the traffic problem, their numbers rising in symmetry with the falling average speed of cars in urban centres.
Ace had her arms wrapped around her taxi driver, a Sikh in a red and white leather jacket with heavy shoulder pads. In front of her she could see the Doctor sitting on the back of the other motorcycle. For some reason his hat hadn"t blown off.
The bikes reduced speed as they entered the traffic pattern, slowing, dodging, threading through the motionless lines of vehicles. The fumes were thick around them now. They accelerated again, hitting a stretch where there was clearance for the bikes. Ace"s driver offered her a mask, holding it over his shoulder, dangling by its strap. Ace shouted that she was all right. They"d be out of the worst of it soon, and she liked to feel the slipstream on her face. The cars on either side of them blurred as the speed of the motorcycle picked up. Ace looked at the endless stalled traffic. Pa.s.senger vehicles, giant container trucks; even some of the oldfashioned taxis. The ones that were black cars. Ace could remember when London had been full of them. Some of the drivers in the pa.s.senger cars were using phones or watching television. Some had computers on, doing work ready for when they eventually reached their offices. But most just sat pa.s.sively, their engines churning exhaust and their air conditioning carrying the fumes back in to them. Ace could hear a sound, swept back to her by the wind over the driver"s shoulder. The Sikh was laughing. He made a rude gesture at these sheep sitting in their cars, twisted his throttle and they roared away.
The taxis carried them down the old M2, bouncing over the ruts in the broken road surface. The air was clean and Ace was enjoying the cold sting of it on her face when the Doctor signalled, waving his arm in a slowingdown signal to Ace"s driver. Ace found herself looking for a place where it would make sense to stop. They"d travelled for about ninety kilometres down the old ruined motorway heading due south. They were in the heart of Kent now, the green hills and afternoon sun a little unreal to Ace. She still felt vaguely disoriented by fragmented sleep and airline champagne. She saw the Doctor tap his driver on the shoulder and the driver handsignalled. They slowed and pulled over to an escape lane on the left and Ace"s driver followed. Up off the weedgrown band of the motorway and along a slip road. Ahead of her Ace saw the red and yellow symbol of McDonald"s. The two bikes coasted into the parking lot and switched off.
The restaurant had been built as part of a complex intended to serve the motorway. It was adjacent to a service station and a modular hotel. These were all abandoned now. Ace was looking at the fuel pumps outside the service station, automatically wondering if there was any petrol left in the underground tanks and how difficult it would be to ignite. Perhaps someone had already made use of it. The sidewall of the McDonald"s had the distinctive scorch patterns Ace a.s.sociated with Molotov c.o.c.ktails. The restaurant had been closed down even before the motorway had died, the traffic siphoning off into the new routes south. Ace remembered the headlines in the tabloids about it at the time. An attack by Witchkids throwing petrol bombs. The tabloids were still big on the Witchkids and this had been their biggest atrocity to date. Details had been suppressed under the Official Secrets Act, but whatever had happened it was evidently enough of a disincentive to make McDonald"s abandon the franchise. Now the place looked strange, its brightly coloured plastic trim holding up well against the weather but most of the gla.s.s smashed and the interior of the restaurant burned out and gutted. The wall surfaces had been covered with spraypainted hex signs.
The Doctor was paying the taxi drivers. Both of the men were Sikhs, their helmets especially adapted to accommodate their turbans, official Hackney carriage licences clamped to their handlebars. They stood beside their motorcycles, stretching their legs while the Doctor searched through a large oldfashioned wallet. Ace crossed the parking lot, feeling pins and needles in her thighs, circulation returning after the long bike ride. She looked at the bombedout building and felt an impulse to go into the darkness and explore. There were dead leaves piled against the doors by the wind. She put her hand to the cool gla.s.s of the undamaged door. There was a decal above the handle which read Push Push.
"Watch out for gla.s.s," called the Doctor, without looking around.
Inside there were ragged patches of sunlight on the floor, coming in through the holes in the ceiling. Dirty puddles of rainwater had collected in the seats of the plastic chairs attached to the small tables. From one corner of the roof came the crying of a small bird she couldn"t identify. A brittle food carton split and shattered under Ace"s foot. In the kitchen area beyond the service counter she could hear something dripping, steadily and endlessly. Bright laminated miniposters on the table tops still offered Turkey McGuffins and Veal Nuggets. One wall was dominated by a mural of Ronald McDonald in the rainforest, helping the Indians. The dripping was louder towards the back of the restaurant. This was the area where the kitchen staff worked, unwrapping and heating instant meals. There were wide black fanshaped burns on all the surfaces around the cooking units. The grills were thick with old congealed grease. The gla.s.s door of every microwave oven was smeared, as if something had burst during heating. Someone had cooked a final chaotic meal here, before they blew out the windows and set the place on fire. Ace stumbled over an object behind the counter. A child"s high chair. She set it upright, the brightly coloured plastic toys rattling as they settled into place on their wire. In an open s.p.a.ce on the floor there was evidence of other fires. Crude campfires built directly on the tiles. Ace was beginning to realize that the place had had visitors since the night it was destroyed. Perhaps on a regular basis. Perhaps quite recently. The wind howled around the roof and the rhythm of the dripping changed.
All the spots of sunlight on the floor vanished at once as a cloud ma.s.s drifted over the Kentish hills, cancelling the sunlight above the restaurant. Inside Ace was peering at the hex marks on the walls. These consisted of various occult symbols, each particular gang having its own set. It was the fashion to use them to mark the site of a successful attack. Ace studied them, feeling old and a little sad. When she"d been a kid she could recognize almost every spraypainted tag on every graffitiscrawled wall in her neighbourhood.
Ace identified the sadness. She felt left out. These symbols meant nothing to her. She noticed that one was smaller than the others and more sloppily executed. Leaning close she could see that it had been daubed in something other than spray paint, dark and dull. Ace was aware of the silence now. The wind had fallen, the bird had stopped crying. The dripping had ceased. She stirred the remains of a fire with the toe of her Doc Marten shoe.
The fires on the floor actually weren"t so crude. Someone had known what they were doing. This one was a wellbuilt pyramid, wooden brands leaning in against each other, coals or small wood chips and twists of newspaper underneath to get it started. The burned wood had collapsed inward and one blackened piece protruded from the pile, a segment of branch about the length of her forearm. As Ace nudged the dead fire the piece slid out, striking the toe of her shoe. She expected it to collapse to ash. But the brand rolled out of the fire and hit the floor with a hard brittle rattle. It looked like wood but it didn"t sound like it. And Ace had misjudged the length of the piece. It was more the size of the long bone in her leg. Now she looked at the remains of the fire more closely. There was something in the centre of it, half buried in ash, the burned wood covering it. About the size of a football.
The sound came abruptly from behind her, rattling off the metal edges of the cooker. A staccato spattering sound like a machine gun. Ace jerked away from the fire, getting ready to run, remembering the tent on the island, even as she realized it was just the sound of motorcycles. The taxis leaving. She turned to look across the counter, out towards the parking lot. Standing there on the other side of the counter, just a metre away from her, was the Doctor. The sound of the bikes echoed on the concrete of the car park and faded away. North, back towards London. Ace stood by the broken cash register, facing the Doctor.
"Do you want fries with that?" she said.
"What does this place remind you of, Ace?"
Ace looked around. Sunlight was coming through the holes in the roof again. The small pools of rainwater in the rows of chairs were glowing cheerfully, still and golden. A paper cup rolled in a draught, ricocheting off the legs of the tables and ending up spinning under a large hex sign by the entrance. She noticed that on the big mural at the back of the restaurant someone had added a rainforest arrow, going through Ronald"s head.
"McDonald"s," said Ace.
"It reminds me of a deconsecrated church." The Doctor walked away to stand in the centre of the restaurant. Ace slid across the counter and followed him. "Perhaps one that has been put to a new purpose.
"That would be the altar over there." The Doctor pointed to the scorched kitchen section, with its dead campfires. "Those are the new decorations." He indicated the hex signs. "Spray paint instead of stained gla.s.s or carved stone."
"Some of it"s not spray paint," said Ace.
"These are the benches for the congregation." The Doctor scrambled across a plastic table top. Now he was standing in the middle of a s.p.a.ce on the restaurant floor where several tables had been torn free and removed. "And this would be..."
"The dance floor."
The Doctor looked at Ace as if he"d just remembered she was there. "Why not?" he said, and smiled.
"Because you don"t have dance floors in churches," said Ace.