Cambridge Blue - Alison Bruce [19]
‘Yes, go on. It’s clever, I promise.’
Lorna wrote in Biro on her left palm, the blue ink looking black under the thick light from the sulphurous streetlamp. She used capitals and the letters stretched across, from the heel of her hand to half an inch short of her middle finger.
‘Like that?’ She held out her hand.
‘That’s it. Now the same on the other one.’
Lorna gave a short, nervous laugh. ‘These things always catch me out, so even when you get to the punchline, you’ll have to explain it.’ In truth, she hated looking stupid, and didn’t want to take part at all. But the atmosphere between them was curiously fragile; it made more sense to go along with this and avoid anything nastier. She wrote slowly on the other palm in jerky lower case. ‘This isn’t so good, it looks like a four-year-old’s written it.’ She forced a grin.
‘No, that’s fine.’
‘Now what?’
They were facing on to Midsummer Common with their backs to the non-existent 1 a.m. traffic. ‘I love it here when it’s quiet and, once the weather’s warmer, that’s only at night. And in the summer it’s never quiet – the fair’s here, then the circus and all those hippies camping out.’
‘So what about this writing?’
‘Hold on.’
Lorna squirmed like a child. ‘Can we go now?’
‘No, please, let’s stay here for a minute or two.’
Lorna peered at the ground on the other side of the railings. ‘We’re standing right next to a load of rubbish sacks. And I’m getting cold.’ She sounded sulky.
‘I said you’d get goosebumps, didn’t I?’
‘Clever you.’ Lorna sniffed. ‘And when are you going to explain this?’ She waved her hand, palm upwards. ‘Why are you smiling? Have I missed something funny?’
‘I guess so.’
Lorna reran her last sentence in her head, realizing she’d slurred it, and for some reason ‘have-I-missed’ had coalesced into a single word. She straightened and turned her back to rest against the railings. She gazed in the direction of the Four Lamps roundabout and tried to work out what felt wrong. It couldn’t be just cold, fog and tiredness that were making her suddenly disorientated. She wanted to go home but her feet wouldn’t move.
Instead of walking away, she stood fixed in the same spot, a look of mild bewilderment dawning on her face. ‘I feel ill,’ she muttered, but her companion never even replied. Lorna wanted to repeat herself, but was overtaken by the feeling that her brain could no longer connect with her mouth.
She felt giddy and needed to steady herself. Her left hand moved, it rose from her side and drifted back towards the top rail. And like the slow topple of a felled redwood, the rest of her followed, staggering back, the railing all that stopped her from hitting the ground.
It was then that she had a moment of clarity, an instant where she knew how and why she’d been drugged, and the enormity of her fatal miscalculation. She tried to reach out, to beg for her life. She managed to gasp, ‘I’m sorry,’ just as two hands flew forward and, with a single push to the sternum, sent her toppling over the railings and on to the pile of rubbish.
She landed on her back in a crumpled heap, almost parallel to the footpath, with her head nearest the ground and her hair trailing in the mud. The other figure squatted and they stared at each other from either side of the bottom rung.
Lorna heard the words hissed at her: ‘Do you know why?’
She knew, but she couldn’t reply. She attempted to nod instead, but her head wobbled through an uncontrolled arc and her arms and legs twitched with a life of their own. Lorna tried to stay conscious, guessing she’d been overdosed and hoping that she would be found before it killed her. To stand a chance now, she just needed to be left for dead.
But no one was going anywhere. Lorna watched as first a plastic carrier bag, then a length of string, were brought out of a pocket. A little more consciousness suddenly returned; her eyes widened and her breath came like the little huff children use to steam up windows. A pair of hands reached through the railings and dragged the plastic bag over the top of Lorna’s head, like a swimming