A Question of Time

“We’re running out of time.”

I say that under my breath as I read the latest news, a plume of steam billows out from my pursed lips and into the cold city air. I stand there and watch it rise and dissipate, just like my chances of making this work. If anyone hears me, they are too savvy to acknowledge my words. I’m on my own and I think I always will be.

I slump into the seat of my car and slam the door shut, even then it doesn’t sit right. Nothing sits right, but that’s fine by me, or if it isn’t then I don’t care, not anymore. 

She’s here. I know she’s here. I have to find her before they do. It’s that simple. Them or me. What’s making it difficult is that she’s running from the both of us, all of us. You see, they’re my kind and I get that she ain’t gonna know the difference. Sometimes I’m not sure I do, or I didn’t. That’s splitting hairs and it’s wasting time. Fact is, I need to find her and I need to find her tonight or they will and then she’ll be theirs, always and forever. Amen.

Carrie.

I say the name as I turn the engine over on my decrepit car and I smell meadows and honeysuckle and the scent of hope that only lasts that last Summer before a person heads out into the world and nothing is the same again. She’s everything I dreamed about and then a little more. She took me in and she patched me up and when I was good enough to leave she asked me to stay.

Why did she do that?

I think I know, but all the same I don’t have a clue. 

Maybe that’s why I have to find her. I need answers and she needs me, if only for tonight. 

Carrie, why did you have to go back to that place? I told you I could look after you, but you went all the same. That’s when he saw you. That’s when everything changed. I thought it had changed in our favour, but that’s not how these things work. We found each other and then you had to go to that place and in he walks and once he saw you, well, that was a game changer and the stakes went way too high for the likes of either of us. I will find you though. I have to. That’s also how this works.

I owe you.

I also owe me.

Once, long ago, I had something like honour, but this city it sucks the life out of a person. The city is a vampire and you don’t feel it’s teeth grazing your skin let alone piercing your flesh, but in those teeth go all the same and what the city takes is your humanity. It takes and it takes and somehow you keep going. Whatever it throws at you, you keep going and you don’t even notice that it has you in its grip and what its taking is the best part of you so all you have left is the dark side of what you once were, and what is left, that darkness, it serves this city well. You may tell yourself that you’re not a part of this city’s underbelly, but if you’re having to convince yourself of that, then it’s already far too late.

It’s too late for me Carrie, but it ain’t too late for you. I’m coming for you and the gods help anyone who stands in my way, cos they won’t be standing after this night is out. This is my last stand and I’m going to stand for something and if I’m gonna stand for anything, then it’s you.

I drive. I know this city inside and out. We’ve been intimate and sometimes that intimacy has been immediate and rough whether we liked it or not. We’ve grown on each other and we’ve grown into each other. I’ve tried to leave, believe me, I have, but the city dragged me back however far I managed to get. Now we’re under each other’s skins and there’s no separating us. 

You’re not having Carrie though. She’s off limits. There is time for her and she is taking that time someplace else. You can have me, but there has to be limits and tonight I’m going to show you those limits.

I drive the same greasy streets I’ve driven a thousand times. The city is mine at this time of night. All the gods fearing people have taken themselves away to some place safe. Anyone with any sense doesn’t live in the city, it’s a place to visit during the daylight and flee before the darkest hours transform it into the dragon that lays beneath.

My car bucks and skips as I urge it on. I know where she is and I know what I have to do. Carrie, I’m coming. Hold on, I’m coming and everything is going to be OK.

Three blocks more and I’ll be there. I know where she is, and I will stop this. Only I can stop this and I will stop it tonight, and then it will all be over. 

The last stretch is long and straight, but the gates are side on to this road. I have to mount the pavement and bring my old crate of a car around in a wide arc to smash through those big old gates. The impact is worse than I had anticipated and I come to with blood blinding my left eye. I roll out of my already open door and I ache in places I can’t identify and I ache in ways I didn’t know possible.

Only one of the big, wrought iron gates has capitulated and it lays over my car like an exhausted lover. I’m standing, but I’m not steady and something makes me dance sideways like a drunken crab.

“Stop!” says a voice off to my side. 

I think he’s supposed to say more than that. He has a script for a situation like this, but he’s forgotten it. Good. I turn my head in his direction and see him with my right eye. I’m going to have to do something about my left eye, but there is no time right now. I close the distance between us and I see he is about to say something else, but I don’t give him a chance to. I slam the heel of my palm up into his nose and he travels upwards a little and then he falls in that sad and clumsy way that people do when I put their lights out.

He should have a colleague somewhere nearby. There are always two. I look around the slumped body of this man and there is no second guard. I turn and look over my stricken car, but there is no one over there either. Then I see it. I see her. 

Her.

That hits me. 

If it was a him, then it would have been OK with me. This is war. This is what we sign up for and this is what we do. She looks so small on the bonnet of my car with that big iron gate on top of her. How did I miss that? I didn’t see her. I didn’t know I’d hit her.

I think I’m sorry, but there’s no time for that now and I am already walking away. There is just enough of a gap for me to slip through, so I do. On the other side, I wipe my forehead with the sleeve of my jacket until I’ve cleared a bunch of the blood away, then I pay particular attention to my eye. I need to see clearly. I don’t want to stuff this up. I have no time for that. I might be too late as it is.

When they show this place on the TV there is another guard at the front door. Not at this time of night there isn’t. That door is big and it is sturdy, but then so am I. It takes three goes and on the third something gives. 

I’m glad that it isn’t me. 

I don’t know exactly where I am going, only that she is in here and I need to get her out. I go upstairs. It’s late. People will be sleeping. Most people will be sleeping. 

It is behind the third door that I find her and I am almost too late. He’s with her and I don’t know what I would do if I hadn’t got here just in the nick of time.

Carrie, it never needed to be like this.

Carrie, I’m sorry.

I say these words and words like them as I deal with him. He needed to be stopped and I have stopped him. He was supposed to be our saviour. He was supposed to be the solution. He was supposed to be my friend. But he’s just like all the rest of them, only worse. Politicians, they’re greasy and untrustworthy, barely human. The structure that surrounds them is corrupt. This needed to be done Boris, you needed to be stopped. You had your time and you blew it. Just like you always have.

Carrie is trying to tell me something, but I don’t hear it all properly. All I know is that I did what needed to be done and not before time. I was almost too late, but it’s OK now. She’s safe. We’re safe and it’s all going to be OK now.

She’s pulling me away and pushing me through the door to the rear. I go, thinking she’s coming with me and she does all the way to the rear door, then she shoves me again before I can open it. In the back, like she’s pushing me off a cliff or something, and I have this strange detached feeling like I’m falling from that cliff, and I must’ve fallen because I’m lying on the floor and she’s looking down at me. The look she gives me is cold and I feel that cold spreading out from the place in my back where she pushed me. My legs have gone numb and my breathing is ragged.

What did you do, Carrie? What did you do?

The last words I ever hear her say are, “You shouldn’t have come back Dom, but I’m glad you did…”

*

News just in. On the eve of his intended resignation, the Prime Minister has been killed in what appears to be an act of revenge by his former chief advisor. Carrie Smith, the Prime Minister’s wife narrowly escaped with her own life and in a struggle with the assailant he fell upon the kitchen knife she was using to hold him at bay. One police officer was killed in the attack and another was taken to hospital and is said to be in a critical, but stable state.

In an unprecedented step, Carrie Smith, the Prime Minister’s wife, has been appointed temporary Prime Minister, and from the reaction and support of the cabinet and wider political party, and even from across The House, it seems that she is a likely shoe in for the position on a permanent basis, which will make her only the second female Prime Minister in history.

*

“Armed police!”

The room is bathed in blue light and the noise and commotion is like a tidal wave. 

All the same, Carrie has the presence of mind to pick her Dear Boris letter up from the floor and slip it back into her handbag. Fate is with her on this day and in what seems like a breach of procedure, no one asks to see what is in her bag.

The rest, as they say, is history.

And timing.

It was just a question of time.