Concrete Island Read online

  He lifted his injured leg and placed it in the grass in front of himself. He thought of the wine in the Jaguar’s trunk, but he knew that the Burgundy would go straight to his head. Forget the wine, he told himself. Collapse into this long grass and no one will ever find you. You’ll lie there and die.

  Swinging his arms out, he managed to jump forward around the injured leg. He grasped at the long grass to steady himself.

  ‘Maitland, this is going to take all day…’

  He made a second step. Gasping for breath, he watched an airline coach move westwards along the motorway. None of the passengers looked down at the island. Gathering himself, Maitland made three more steps, almost reaching the blue hull of a saloon car lying on its side. As he stretched out a hand to the rusty chassis his injured leg tripped against a discarded tyre. His left knee buckled, dropping him into the long grass.

  Maitland lay without moving in this damp bower. As he caught his breath he wiped the moisture from the grass on to his bruised mouth. He was still twenty feet from the embankment – even if he were to reach it he would never be able to climb the steep and unpacked slope.

  He sat up, lifting himself on his hands through the grass. The rusty axle of the saloon car rose into the air above his head. The tyres and engine had been removed, and the exhaust pipe hung loosely from the expansion box. Maitland reached up and began to shake the pipe with his hands. He wrenched it from the bracket and pulled the six-foot section of rusty tubing from behind the rear axle. His strong arms bent one end into a crude handle.

  ‘Right…! Now we’ll get somewhere…’ Already Maitland felt his confidence returning. He hoisted himself on to this makeshift crutch and swung himself along, his injured leg clearing the ground.

  He reached the foot of the embankment, and waved with one arm, shouting at the few cars moving along the westbound carriageway. None of the drivers could see him, let alone hear his dry-throated croak, and Maitland stopped, conserving his strength. He tried to climb the embankment, but within a few steps collapsed in a heap on the muddy slope.

  Deliberately, he turned his back to the motorway and for the first time began to inspect the island.

  ‘Maitland, poor man, you’re marooned here like Crusoe – If you don’t look out you’ll be beached here for ever…’

  He had spoken no more than the truth. This patch of abandoned ground left over at the junction of three motorway routes was literally a deserted island. Angry with himself, Maitland lifted the crutch to strike this meaningless soil.

  He hobbled back towards his car. Twenty yards to the west of the breaker’s yard he mounted a slight rise. Here he paused to examine the perimeter of the island, searching for a service staircase or access tunnel. Below the overpass the wire-mesh fence ran in an unbroken screen from one concrete embankment to the other. The slope up to the feeder road was more than thirty feet high and even steeper than the embankment of the motorway. Where the two roads met, at the western apex, the earth slopes gave way to vertical concrete walls.

  Maitland swung himself back to his car, stopping every few paces to beat down the long grass that thrust itself at him. When he reached the car he unlocked the trunk and methodically counted the five bottles of Burgundy, lifting each one from the carton in turn as if this potent liquor represented the one point of reality left to him.

  He reached for the heavy spanner. Well, Maitland, he told himself, it’s a little early for a drink, but the bar’s open. Wait a minute, though. Think, you need water.

  As the morning sunlight steepened, warming his cold body, he reminded himself again that even a few mouthfuls of the wine on an unfed stomach would throw him into a drunken stupor. Somewhere among these cars there would be water.

  The radiator. Slamming down the lid of the trunk, Maitland picked up his crutch and swung himself to the front of the car. He edged himself under the fender, with his bruised hands searched among the brake lines and supension units for the lower edge of the radiator. He found the stop-cock and forced the tap, cupping the liquid that jetted out.

  Glycol! He spat away the bitter fluid and stared at the green stain on his palm. The sharp tang of rusty water made his throat ache.

  Already he sensed his reflexes quickening. He leaned across the driving seat and released the hood catch. He pulled himself upright, lifted the heavy hood and searched the engine compartment. His hands seized the water reservoir of the windshield washers. With one end of the crutch he twisted off the metal armature and ripped away the leads from the plastic canister.

  It was almost full, holding nearly a pint of clear water. As he tasted the cool stream Maitland rested against the car, waving the crutch at the vehicles moving along the motorway. Small achievement though it was, the discovery of the water had recharged his confidence and determination. During his first hours on the island he had been too quick to assume that help would automatically arrive, that even a feeble gesture such as waving to a passing car would bring instant rescue.

  He drank half the water, carefully bathing his injured mouth. He felt pleasantly light-headed, the water exciting his nerves and arteries like an electric stimulant. Hobbling around the car, he tapped the roof with almost child-like humour. He eased himself on to the trunk and sat there, looking across the uneven surface of the island at the wire-mesh fence. There were more than enough tools in the Jaguar’s kit to wrench a hole through the mesh.

  Laughing quietly to himself, Maitland lay against the rear window of the Jaguar. For some reason he felt a sudden and overwhelming sense of relief. He raised the canister into the air, and shook the clear liquid. He was certain now that he would escape. Despite his injuries and the damage to the car, his fears that he might be stranded for ever on the island seemed almost paranoid.

  He was still laughing several minutes later when a passing driver in an open-topped car slowed down along the westbound carriageway. The driver, a uniformed American serviceman, looked down good-humouredly at Maitland, whom he clearly assumed to be a tramp or drifter enjoying his first drink of the day. He gestured with his thumb at Maitland, offering him a lift. Before Maitland could control himself and realize that this was the only motorist since his crash prepared to stop for him, the driver had waved courteously and accelerated away.

  5 The perimeter fence

  TAKING himself in hand like a weary drill-sergeant, Maitland clambered down from the trunk of the Jaguar. He ignored the pain in his thigh and propped himself roughly against the car, waving the crutch and trying to call back the vanished driver. Sober now, he looked with disgust at his injured leg and ragged clothes, angry with himself for having given way to a moment of juvenile hysteria. As well as breaking up his car, the crash seemed to have jolted his brain loose from its moorings.

  Maitland leaned his right armpit on to the metal crutch. He realized that he was unequipped to carry out any but the simplest physical activities. The grimy and crippled figure whose distorted reflection glimmered in the trunk lid exactly summed up his position on the island, marooned among these concrete causeways with almost no practical skills or resources.

  Few psychological ones, for that matter, Maitland reflected. These days one needed a full-scale emergency kit built into one’s brain, plus a crash course in disaster survival, real and imagined.

  ‘Wrench, box spanner, wheel brace…’ Maitland searched methodically through the tool-kit. He spoke aloud to himself as if bullying along an incompetent recruit, exploiting his irritation with himself.

  When he had loaded the tools into his jacket pockets he straightened the crutch and set off towards the overpass, ignoring the cars that moved along the motorway. It was shortly after nine o’clock, and the traffic had slackened after the morning rush-hour. Already the warm sunlight was drawing from the damp grass the faint yellow haze that had hung over the island the previous afternoon, blurring the perimeter walls.

  As he swung himself along, Maitland remembered that Catherine was collecting her new car that morning from the Japanese dis
tributors. Helen Fairfax would be busy in the paediatric clinic at Guy’s – ironically, neither would try to telephone him, each assuming that Maitland had spent the night with the other. For that matter, no one at his office would be particularly alarmed by his absence, taking for granted that he was ill or away on some urgent business. Maitland had trained his staff to accept his comings and goings without question. Several times he had flown to the United States, deliberately not notifying the office until his return. Even if he were away for a week his secretary would not feel concerned enough to call Catherine or Helen.

  Painfully, his swing upset by the uneven ground, Maitland hobbled towards the wire-mesh fence. Below the grass he could identify the outlines of building foundations, the ground-plans of Edwardian terraced houses. He passed the entrance to a World War II air-raid shelter, half-buried by the earth and gravel brought in to fill the motorway embankments.

  By the time he reached the fence, deep within the shadow of the overpass, Maitland was exhausted. He leaned his crutch against the fence and sat down on the black earth. From his pockets he took out the wrench, box spanner and pliers. The heavy metal tools had dragged at his shoulders, bumping against his bruised chest and abdomen.

  No grass grew under the overpass. The damp earth was dark with waste oil leaking from the piles of refuse and broken metal drums on the far side of the fence. The hundred-yard-long wire wall held back mounds of truck tyres and empty cans, broken office furniture, sacks of hardened cement. Builder’s forms, bales of rusty wire and scrapped engine parts were heaped so high that Maitland doubted whether he would be able to penetrate this jungle of refuse even if he could cut through the fence.

  Still sitting, he turned to face the wire. High above him, almost contiguous with the clear April sky, was the concrete span of the overpass, its broad deck reverberating faintly under the pressure of the passing traffic. Holding the pliers in both hands, he worked away at a metal link, testing the steel cord against the teeth. In the dim light he saw that he had made only a faint notch. Maitland shivered in the cold air. Moving the wrench and box spanner along the ground, he edged towards the steel post ten feet away. Here the adjacent sections of wire were pinned to the post by a continuous steel flange bolted on to a backing plate by self-locking nuts.

  Adjusting the spanner, Maitland worked away at one of the nuts. He was now too weak even to get a secure grip on the head, let alone put any pressure to bear. He looked up at the high wall of the fence – ten years earlier, perhaps ten days earlier, he would have been strong enough to climb the fence with his bare hands.

  He threw down the spanner, and scratched with the wrench at the damp ground. Although slick with oil, the dark earth was as impenetrable as sodden leather. To dig a trench below the fence he would need to excavate at least a cubic metre of stony soil, force his way through a ten-feet-high pile of truck tyres, each of which weighed a hundred pounds.

  The dark air bit at his bruised lungs. Shivering in his damp clothes, Maitland replaced the tools in his pocket. As he emerged into the sunlight, the deep grass waved around his thighs, as if trying to transfer some of its warmth to him. Maitland stared unsteadily at the distant embankments of the motorway system. He had not eaten now for nearly twenty-four hours and the first severe hunger pangs, so far blunted by the shock of the accident, made his head reel. With an effort he focused his eyes on the roof of the Jaguar. The car was barely visible above the grass, which seemed to have grown several inches during his abortive journey to the wire-mesh fence.

  Rallying himself, he set off across the island towards its southern perimeter. Every ten paces he stopped and beat a pathway through the heavy nettles with the crutch. He reached a low wall, and climbed a flight of steps that lifted into the air from the remains of a garden path. These ruins were all that remained of a stucco Victorian house pulled down years earlier.

  The surface of the island was markedly uneven. Covering everything in its mantle, the grass rose and fell like the waves of a brisk sea. A broad valley ran down the central spine of the island, marking out the line of a former neighbourhood high street. On either side, the grass climbed over blunted ledges and parapets, overran the empty area-ways.

  Maitland crossed the central valley and mounted the slope on the southern side, picking a defile between two small elders that struggled with the invading nettles. The crutch rang out against a metal object underfoot, an iron plaque set into a fallen gravestone. He was standing in an abandoned churchyard. A pile of worn headstones lay to one side. A series of shallow gullies marked the row of graves, and Maitland assumed that the bones had been removed to an ossuary.

  The high embankment of the feeder road rose above him. The traffic moving past thirty feet above his head was concealed by the crash barrier. The drone of engines blended into the distant sounds of the morning city.

  Maitland swung himself along the foot of the embankment. The ground was littered with cigarette packs, stubs of burnt-out cigars, confectionery wrappers, spent condoms and empty match-books. Fifty yards in front of him the concrete caisson of a traffic sign protruded from the embankment.

  Maitland quickened his step, jerking himself across the soft soil. As he guessed, a gutter ran along the foot of the caisson. The narrow gully, washed clear of all refuse by the rain, led around the concrete wall to the mouth of a drainage culvert. Behind its cast-iron grille the storm-tunnel ran into the embankment, emerging a hundred feet away.

  Maitland tapped the grille with the crutch. He accepted without comment that he would not be able to unbolt the heavy metal structure. He stared down at the bars, for some reason wondering if they were wide enough apart for him to slip his hands between them. He turned and hobbled away through the refuse, stirring the cigarette packs with the crutch.

  As he plodded along, head down, he broke into a flat and unemotional rage, ranting to himself at the unseen vehicles overhead.

  ‘Stop…! For God’s sake, I’ve had enough…!’

  When there was no reply he calmly continued on his way. The light air swirled the candy wrappers around his injured leg. As he crossed the island the grass weaved and turned behind him, moving in endless waves. Its corridors opened and closed as if admitting a large and watchful creature to its green preserve.

  6 The rain-storm

  DURING the warm noon, Maitland slept inside his car. On the rear seat beside him were the water canister and a fresh bottle of Burgundy. He woke at two o’clock, as the driver of a dumper truck crossing the overpass switched his air-brakes on and off in a series of sharp detonations. Although the exertion of crossing the island had re-inflamed his injured leg, Maitland’s head felt clear. The sharp hunger pangs reached up from his abdomen into his throat like a steel hand, but he sat quietly in the rear seat. Resting through the early afternoon, he took stock of himself.

  He realized, above all, that the assumption he had made repeatedly since his arrival on the island – that sooner or later his crashed car would be noticed by a passing driver or policeman, and that rescue would come as inevitably as if he had crashed into the central reservation of a suburban dual carriageway – was completely false, part of that whole system of comfortable expectations he had carried with him. Given the peculiar topography of the island, its mantle of deep grass and coarse shrubbery, and the collection of ruined vehicles, there was no certainty that he would ever be noticed at all. Given, too, the circumstances of his private and professional life, that once-so-convenient division between his wife and Dr Helen Fairfax, it might be at least a week before anyone was sufficiently suspicious to call the police. Yet even the most astute detective retracing Maitland’s route from his office would be hard put to spot his car shielded by this sea of grass.

  Maitland loosed his trousers and inspected his injured thigh. The joint had stiffened, and the heavy bruising and broken blood vessels gleamed through the overlay of oil and dirt.

  Nursing his injured mouth, he drank the last of the tacky water in the windshield reservoir. He sca
nned the office blocks visible through the haze over central London. A conference he had been due to attend would now be re-assembling after lunch – did any of the delegates have any idea what had happened to him? Even if he were rescued now, it would be several days at least, and possibly weeks, before he returned to work. He thought of the chain of appointments missed, cancelled client meetings, a committee on which he sat. Like a tocsin warning him reprovingly of all this, Maitland’s leg began to throb.

  ‘Right – let’s see what we’ve got…’ Maitland roused himself, mastering the mounting urge to sleep all the time. He swung himself round to the rear of the car. He could hear the traffic moving along the motorway, but he ignored the vehicles, knowing that he would only tire himself by trying to wave them down.

  He lifted the lid of the trunk and opened his overnight case. The vivid scent of his after-shave filled the air. He took out his patent dress-shoes and dinner-jacket. The overnight case was almost literally a time capsule – he could easily reconstitute a past world from these scents and surface textures.

  He unclipped the blade from his razor, and cut his blue towel into strips. He soaked one of the strips in his after-shave. The tart Cologne stung his injured hand, biting at the dozens of minute cuts and abrasions. Maitland cleaned away the dirt and oil that clotted the kidney-shaped wound running from the knuckle of his wrist to the ball of his thumb. He bandaged the hand with the towelling strips, locked the trunk and hobbled through the grass around the abandoned cars.

  Five vehicles, wrecks left behind in the breaker’s yard, lay in a semi-circle around the Jaguar. The grass grew through the gaps in the rusting body panels, sprouting through the empty engine compartment of the overturned taxi. Dented fenders, a pile of bald tyres, a single bonnet hood, lay among the nettles. Maitland moved among them, now and then looking up at the embankment as he estimated what he would need to build a ramp.