Chapter 50
Josh
‘Wilf? Wilf. For Christ’s sake, I know you’re in there.’
After five minutes of banging on Wilf’s front door and disturbing his neighbours and attempting to say, It’s okay, I’m a friend in Spanish, it inches open, just a crack.
‘Go away.’
‘I can’t,’ I say, resisting the urge to shoulder-barge my way in. ‘I’d have to catch a plane. And I’m not doing that for another forty-eight hours.’
‘I don’t want to see you. I’ve put all that stuff behind me, Josh.’ Wilf lowers his voice to a hiss. ‘Do you know how hard it was for me to hide from them?’
‘Yes, because it’s taken me this long to track you down.’
In the end – and I will never admit this to a soul, not even Rachel – I paid a private investigator an extortionate amount of money to do in a matter of weeks what I’d failed to do in four years.
I doubted the guy at first. Told him all about Wilf’s IQ, then grilled him on exactly how he planned to find him. To which he said in a withering monotone, ‘Does he cope well with uncertainty? Can he deal with a life entirely lacking in routine?’
‘Er, no. The opposite, actually.’
‘Then that Mensa membership means fuck all, mate.’
As soon as Wilf lets me in, my relief pivots without warning to anger. So much time spent worrying about his welfare, being stalked in my own home, abruptly cut off and unable to talk to him. I shove him, hard, both hands to his chest. ‘You fucking abandoned me.’
Red-faced, and apparently equally furious, Wilf shoves me back, with surprising force. I have to grab the edge of the doorway to keep my footing.
I straighten up and we regard each other, breathing hard. It’s my move, now, apparently.
Tension sharpens the space between us. For a moment, this could go either way.
No. I shudder out a breath, turn my back. I didn’t come all the way out here to have a fist fight with the guy who saved my life.
Without invitation I move into Wilf’s living room, the ceramic tiles chilling my feet through my socks.
‘Seriously, did our friendship mean nothing to you? You knew people were after me and you slunk away like a fucking coward. They broke into my flat three times. I was followed home from work, I got silent phone calls—’
‘That’s why I left, you idiot.’
I turn to face him. ‘What?’
‘They gave up after that, no?’
I sit down on his sofa, put my head in my hands. The rage has begun to recede. ‘I’ve been worried about you. I thought you were dead.’
‘No, you didn’t.’ He straightens the collar of his polo shirt. ‘You knew I’d gone into hiding. Why the hell else would you pay a private investigator to track me down?’
I sigh guiltily. ‘How did you know?’
‘Because he was an amateur.’ Wilf rolls his eyes. ‘I’d save your money in future.’
‘He found you in about five minutes.’
‘Not very subtly. Was he a trainee?’
‘Why are you being an arsehole?’
Flush-cheeked, he spreads his hands. ‘Because. I had a good life, Josh. None of this had to happen. I was only trying to do you a favour.’
‘It’s not my fault if you failed to cover your tracks at work.’
‘I didn’t fail,’ he snaps. ‘I was considering pitching it, remember?’
My heart is still pumping hard, from relief, or anger, who knows. ‘Okay, then it’s not my fault you changed your mind.’
He flops heavily down on the sofa next to me, then – to my bemusement – pulls a pack of cigarettes and lighter from his pocket.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
He shrugs. ‘Tar’s transient now. They can’t kill me.’
I take him in for a couple of moments. And, perhaps for the first time, it occurs to me that his youthfulness does hint at a kind of invincibility.
It’s over four years since I’ve seen him, and nearly eight since we took that pill.
And he hasn’t aged a day. The thought is unsurprising and staggering, all at once.
I never doubted Wilf’s genius. Not in my gut. But, even now, I don’t think I’ve fully processed the enormity of what he invented. Of what we did.
Still. Guilt-free smoking seems dubious, as perks go.
‘Transient tar,’ I say. ‘Yeah, I can definitely see the appeal.’
Wilf lights up, exhales a plume of smoke, then offers the packet to me.
‘No, I was . . . Never mind.’ I shake my head. ‘Am I allowed to ask how you’re surviving, these days?’
‘I play poker.’
I almost laugh, but save it just in time. ‘Really? For money?’
He nods. ‘Turns out I’m quite good.’
I enjoy for a moment the idea of someone sitting down with Wilf for a game of poker, believing they have even the remotest chance of outmanoeuvring Mr Mensa.
‘Can you even speak Spanish?’
He looks at me witheringly. ‘Yes, fluently. I learnt when I was ten.’
Of course you did.
Through his open window I can see a raft of rooftops, the silver score of Mediterranean on the horizon. The weather’s in the low twenties, the air blue and breezeless. A world away from the slate skies and unbroken gloom of home.
‘Wilf,’ I say, after a while. ‘I wanted to ask . . . if there’s any chance the pill can be reversed.’
He takes a few moments to respond. ‘Is that why you’re really here?’
Up to a point, perhaps. But it wasn’t my sole motivation. ‘No. I wanted to see you. To check you were okay. Like I’ve been trying to do for the past four years.’
‘Fine.’ He drags then exhales, shakes his head. ‘You can’t reverse the effects. I did make it clear they’d be permanent.’
I try to ignore the wrenching feeling inside me, as if someone is trying to crowbar my heart from my body. ‘But that was nearly eight years ago. Could the science not have moved on since then?’
‘You’re forgetting that “the science” doesn’t technically exist, Josh.’
‘It does in your brain. Please, Wilf.’
‘What – you want me to mix something up in my rented kitchen-cum-pharmaceutical lab?’
‘Just tell me if it can be done.’
He retrieves an ashtray from the floor, taps a long worm of ash into it. ‘Is this to do with Rachel?’
‘Partly,’ I admit.
After Rachel made it clear – again – that she wasn’t interested in taking the second pill, my mind drifted once more to the idea of reversal.
I think this might be my only chance, Wilf.
‘Are you saying you regret taking it?’ He sounds indignant, as though I flew all the way out here with the sole aim of affronting his genius.
I frown. ‘It’s not as simple as that. I’m grateful it saved me, but .
. .’ It’s hard to admit I’ve been questioning again lately the reality of that long-ago fear.
Whether it was all in my head. A bit like waking in the night to see a hooded figure in your bedroom, then snapping on the light to realise it’s just a chair piled with clothes.
‘Sometimes I think that if I’d just hung on, everything would have been okay. ’
Wilf shrugs. ‘Or you might be dead in a box.’
Touché.
‘Do you ever worry about the future?’ I ask him.
‘What about it?’
It’s hard to articulate, exactly. The idea of still being here a hundred years from now, all the people I love, dead. Just me and Wilf . . . doing what, exactly? What if we are both tired of living by then?
It’s ironic, I sometimes think. That I swapped fearing one future for another.
So maybe the hard truth of life is that there is always something to fear.
It’s not long before Wilf asks me to leave. He says he’s got things to do, poker to play. I decide to comply, since my vision of sitting reconciled together in pavement cafés was evidently just fantasy.
I can’t stay here any longer. I feel too bruised to hang around.
So I buy an extortionately priced last-minute plane ticket home, then head to a beach bar to fill my last few hours of time.
I take an outside table, order a vino tinto and watch the sun melt into the Mediterranean.
The fronds of the palm trees turn to flames, the warm air cooling against my arms.
Of course, I then get drunk, miss my flight and kiss goodbye to hundreds of euros I did not have. I end up aimlessly wandering the back streets of Torrevieja as the alcohol burns off and its various toxic by-products kick in.
At the airport the next morning, while I’m waiting to board the third flight to Luton I’ve now bought a ticket for, a message comes up on my phone from an unknown number.
Try Hester Carver, if you must. She’s the only person I trust. But you’d need to give her the other pill. Assuming Rachel hasn’t taken it.
Head pounding, I text a reply – saying thank you and sorry – but my message bounces straight back.