Prologue

Prologue

 

There were a thousand dead flies dashed across the windscreen of that car, bodies smeared by the wipers, a thousand little sparks of life snuffed out right there on the glass.

“Without this man you wouldn’t f*****g be here Elizabeth, you know that? Changed my whole f*****g perspective, I’d still be stuck in Creswick, Lloyd’s f*****g TSB you know?”

“You might want to watch the road, babe.”

“F**k watching the road Elizabeth, live dangerously.”

Elizabeth was stretched out in the back seat, bare feet resting on the window and one cappuccino arm draped across her body. Noah had twisted round in the driver’s seat to speak to her, ash from the cigarette between his fingers dropping onto the steering wheel. She could see his sunglasses, half hidden by his hair reflected in the rear view mirror. The clear Spring air was blown viciously through the open window as the car sped along the coastal road.

Elizabeth sat up to look outside. She could see the sea sparkling on the horizon, a million dancing rays of light, a million waves. Particles of hydrogen, oxygen, sodium. The sea was made of the same things that she was. The sea looked alive, and she felt real and solid and impenetrable.

Noah switched on the radio. A classic, from the sixties, a real driving song. They both screamed along out of tune, and halfway through Elizabeth climbed into the passenger seat and pressed her lips against his neck. He let out a cackle and swerved into the opposite lane. Elizabeth squealed and sprang back into the seat, allowing herself to get caught up in his manic laughter. Blood, salt and sea rushed to her head and made her dizzy. Noah threw his cigarette butt out the window and took her hand in his. She closed her eyes, let the sun and the breeze wash over her, let the heat creep inside her pores and curl up there, make a home for itself.

“I feel real, Noah.”

“Gorgeous, today you’ll feel more real than you ever have before, I promise you.”

“I hope so,” she smiled.

“I know so.”

Elizabeth yawned, stretching herself out like a cat. “How far away is Leo’s place?”

“Five or ten miles, I reckon, shouldn’t be too long.”

She wanted to get to the house, wanted to meet the man Noah spoke so highly of, but she wondered if she wouldn’t prefer to keep driving like this forever and keep the excitement locked in her stomach. She though of an interview she had read once in a newspaper supplement. It was with a man with an Eastern European name, she couldn’t remember what it was or what he did, but he has said that he enjoyed remembering or anticipating happy moments more than experiencing them. Elizabeth couldn’t help agreeing.

The car was going a little too fast and the wrenching of her gut and the flutter in her chest made it feel like she was being pulled back by G-force. She gripped Noah’s hand harder and looked straight into the sun for as long as she could handle. Would she go blind in seven years? In seven years she’d be thirty. It might be better to self destruct once she hit thirty anyway, she thought. It seemed impossibly far away, like the glittering ocean rushing past on the horizon.

A few months before Elizabeth would have sold her soul to leave Creswick, but luckily it had turned out to be much easier than that. She’d known Noah in passing years previously, a sixth form boy at the local private school while she was still in uniform. They’d run in similar circles at times but had never really spoken. In Spring of that year he’d reappeared after a long absence, breezed into the café where she worked and swept her away with radical ideas and new experiences. She and him were different to the others, he had said, they were better. They didn’t have to live the same way or by the same rules as anyone else. They could shape their own existences to suit them. They could stop thinking about other people. Elizabeth had been floating in space, desperately trying to seek some kind of direction for herself, and Noah gave her exactly what she had been looking for. The sudden whiplash break from the routine shattered her apathy. She felt hungry, for life, for him. He stole things he could have easily afforded if he didn’t feel they were worthy of his money.

Elizabeth quit her job and spent the next four months living with Noah. They moved around the country, staying in cheap hotels for a couple of weeks at a time before moving on again, keeping all their belongings in a few tattered suitcases and changing town when the impulse took them. She told him he’d changed her life and he told her that one day he’d take her to meet the man who had changed his. So there they were, miles away from Creswick, in a part of the country which she’d always loved and always made her feel free. Her heart always beat a little faster nowadays.

She hadn’t slept most of the previous night, she had been too excited, and now, using her jumper as a pillow, she leant back and fell asleep for the rest of the journey.