Nina looks around her. ‘What if I start screaming?’
‘Then I’ll start screaming too,’ says Elizabeth. ‘And, believe me, I may never stop.’
It is somewhere below freezing, a sheeting rain is falling, and Mitch Maxwell is clambering up an enormous pile of waste at the Tunbridge Wells tip. A mountain of metal and slime, the smell clinging to him as he slips and slides his way up and across. Unable to wipe the appalling sweat from his brow, because of the unspeakable smears on his gloves. All the while searching, burrowing into the depths, looking for the box that will save his life. He is, in this moment, a frightened animal, scavenging for survival. He thinks about his yacht, moored in Poole Harbour. He’d once had Jamie Redknapp the footballer on board for a barbecue. He thinks of the stables at his house, his daughter’s horse, the ski trip they have planned for the half-term holidays. He thinks of touch-screen TVs and cashmere sweaters, and premium vodka in gold bottles and front-row seats at the boxing. He thinks of first class on British Airways, of dinner at Scott’s, of being measured for suits at Oliver Brown on Sloane Street. Of castles with helipads and nightcaps. He thinks of ease and comfort and quiet, expensive luxury.
He thinks of his children and their schools, and their friends with pools. A shard of metal slices through his jacket and cuts his arm. He swears, and slips, and falls. Blood starts to seep through as he makes his way back up the pile. The stinking mass of everyone else’s lives. Somewhere in this pile is the box. Somewhere in this pile, his salvation.
He is seeing Hanif at two, at an airport hotel next to Gatwick. Hanif has asked him to bring the box, and has said that if Mitch isn’t there, he will find him and kill him.
But Mitch is not going to die today. Not after everything he has been through. After the life he has made for himself – from the home he grew up in, to the home his children enjoy. He wishes it hadn’t been heroin that had brought him such success, but he wasn’t from a place that gave him a great deal of choice. It was what he grew up with, what he was good at.
But, after this, if he finds the box,
And if he doesn’t find the box? Well, then, a change of plan. He will still go to Gatwick, but instead of heading to the piano bar at the Radisson he will head straight to check-in and he’ll be on the three p.m. flight to Paraguay before you know it. He knows people out there.
His wife and kids flew out this morning. Kellie has been around long enough to know that if Mitch tells her to pack a suitcase and get the kids out of the country, he’ll have a good reason. She texted him as they were about to take off. The Afghans won’t catch him in Paraguay, that’s for sure. They’d have to get through the Colombians, and they won’t have the heart for it.
Mitch continues to clamber up the slope of rubbish, arm bleeding, clothes soaking, legs bruised and aching. He’d gone straight to the tip after leaving Joyce’s flat, but they don’t let you climb the rubbish piles. So a couple of calls and a contact in Kent County Council have bought him ninety minutes in which to search today. A group of men in hi-vis jackets are sheltering in a Portakabin with tea-steamed windows, wondering what the Scouser in the padded jacket is up to. One of the more enterprising ones even offered to help, but Mitch wants to do this alone. None of them recalled seeing a small terracotta box coming in on a Kent refuse truck.
Mitch steps on a doll that says ‘Love me’ in the deep, slow voice of a toy with low batteries. The wind blows a KFC box into his face. He bats it aside and keeps climbing. He is nearly at the top now, the wind howling around him, carrying the smells of everything that has been left behind, everything that has been discarded. Still no box. Mitch knows he is not going to find it. He knows he is going to have to flee. To take his wife from her job, his kids from their friends, to start anew, somewhere unfamiliar. He breathes in the stench and welcomes it. For a moment his heart skips as he sees a box. He digs down, through nappies and toasters, clearing a line of sight. He imagines, for a bright moment, some kind of glory, but, as he dislodges a spaghetti of coat hangers, he sees that this box is simply an old orange crate. Of course it is. Mitch starts to laugh.
Up and up he climbs, no longer really looking, just anxious to reach the top. Why? Who knows? We all want to reach the top, don’t we?
