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  ‘Yeah, they’re like rabid dogs.’

  Lottie pushed her playfully on the shoulder. ‘You can almost see Dove and Tache riding over the horizon,’ she said, gazing around her.

  ‘We’re not in Landing Rock territory yet.’

  ‘But there’s a sense of it here – the sweep of the horizon and the dust and the colours. You can imagine seeing the shapes of men on horses suddenly appearing on hills and hearing drumming music. You know, that scene where they’re tracking the man who murdered their father and the world around them feels so wide and lonely, and although they are tired they can’t stop.’

  ‘Spike let me down badly,’ Tina said suddenly. ‘Just when I needed him the most.’

  ‘How did he do that?’

  ‘He didn’t want our baby,’ Tina said.

  Lottie turned and stared. Just then Spike appeared from behind one of the rocks. He looked wild-eyed.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Tina asked.

  ‘I’ve been bitten. By a rattlesnake.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Tina asked.

  ‘I saw it a second too late,’ Spike said. His face was white. Blood was pouring down his leg.

  ‘Where’s your phone?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘There’s no signal here,’ Spike said. ‘I’ve tried.’

  ‘Should we bandage your leg up?’ Tina said, helplessly. She was never good with injuries and the sight of blood made her feel sick.

  Lottie was already bending over to examine Spike’s leg. ‘I can see the three puncture marks. We should let the wounds bleed. Some of the poison might come out. Sit down, Spike. You need to stay as still as possible.’ She led him over to the mattress and he collapsed on it.

  ‘You are sure it was a rattlesnake? Could it have been a prickly cactus or something?’ Tina asked hopefully.

  ‘I heard the bastard rattle,’ Spike said. ‘It had an unmistakable looping motion. Like a slinky toy.’

  ‘You could die, right?’ Tina said in a panicked voice.

  ‘Only if it’s left untreated,’ Lottie said. ‘Then the poison can start to affect vital organs. We have to get him to hospital as quickly as possible.’

  ‘How much time have we got? Do you know, Spike?’

  ‘I think it’s about an hour before it starts to do serious damage,’ Spike said. He had started to sweat profusely.

  ‘We could try walking him between us,’ Tina suggested. ‘We’re bound to reach somewhere with mobile phone coverage.’

  ‘I don’t think we’re supposed to move him – the poison will get round his body quicker,’ Lottie said. ‘There’s a road near Zabriskie Point. The other side from where we came in. I remember a car park there on the map. It would be better if one of us walks that way until they get mobile coverage. The other could stay here and look after him.’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ Tina said. ‘You have a better sense of direction than me. I’ll probably wander around in circles.’

  ‘OK.’ Lottie grabbed her rucksack and a torch. It was already getting dark and, although she had a pretty good idea of where she had to go, she didn’t want to wander off the trail and get lost or fall off a cliff. ‘Make sure you keep his leg lower than his heart. In a few minutes, bandage him lightly – there’s a first aid kit in the tent.’ She looked down at Spike. ‘I’ll get help, I promise,’ and she set off at a run.

  ‘Watch where you’re going!’ Tina shouted after her, sounding so terrified that if the matter had not been so serious, it would have made Lottie smile. A few moments later she was completely alone and the light was draining away. She tried not to think about coyotes.

  Chapter 16

  ‘TALK TO ME,’ SPIKE SAID. His eyelids had started to droop and the area round the bite on his leg had already become red and swollen. Tina got the first aid kit and took out a bandage.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ Tina asked.

  ‘Like fuck,’ he answered.

  ‘Lottie will get help,’ Tina reassured him as she wincingly placed the dressing against his skin. ‘She’s just about the most reliable person I know.’

  ‘How come you find it so difficult being together?’ Spike asked. ‘It seems to me that you are always on the edge of pulling away from each other. Come on, keep talking. Distract me.’

  Tina hesitated. ‘I think we blame each other for Mia’s death.’

  ‘What happened exactly?’ Spike asked.

  ‘Shh, don’t speak. You’ve got to stay as still and calm as possible.’

  Tina was talking to herself as much as she was talking to him. She wished she had her sister’s fortitude. She was pathetic in a crisis. Tina poured some water onto a T-shirt and placed it against Spike’s forehead. He was burning up.

  ‘I’m thirsty,’ Spike said, and so she fed him a few sips from the bottle.

  ‘Lottie didn’t say whether you should drink or not, so don’t have too much.’

  ‘You’ve kept these nursing skills hidden up till now,’ Spike said. ‘When I had dysentery after a trip away you told me to stop being a wuss.’

  ‘Men always make a song and dance about being ill,’ she said.

  ‘So beautiful, but so hard-hearted,’ Spike said.

  ‘Stop talking,’ Tina said.

  Spike was trying to get to his feet. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

  ‘Don’t move. If you have to chuck up, do it from a sitting position. I knew I shouldn’t have given you that water.’

  It was dark now, and the sky was studded with stars. In the distance, Tina could see the green glow of Vegas. She thought about Lottie, blundering her way through the dark. Spike lurched sideways on the mattress and lay down with his eyes shut. He looked as if he had fainted.

  ‘You’re not going to die on me, are you?’ Tina asked, her terror rising. What would she do if he slipped into unconsciousness? What would happen if Lottie wasn’t able to get help in time?

  Spike opened his eyes. ‘Would you even care?’ he said.

  ‘Of course I would,’ she said. ‘Keep your eyes open. I need to see your eyes.’

  ‘Always been my finest feature,’ Spike said. His speech was a little slurred.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ Tina asked desperately. ‘Should I suck the wound?’

  ‘I’m cold,’ he said, although he looked feverish, and so she laid down with him on the mattress and put her arms around him to keep him warm.

  ‘Almost like old times,’ he said.

  ‘Shut up, fuckwit,’ she said, although her heart was beating so fast she thought it must be audible. While she hadn’t been watching the moon had slid above them, and shone with an implacable blue light.

  ‘In other circumstances, this would be quite romantic.’ Spike tried to laugh, but instead leant over the edge of the mattress to be sick.

  ‘There, there,’ she said to him, as if he was a child. How long had Lottie been gone? Ten minutes? Twenty? How far into his body had the poison reached? She had a sudden vision of the way Spike used to come up behind her and rest his head on her shoulder as if there was no more comfortable place in the world.

  ‘Tell me the story of Landing Rock,’ he said.

  So she told him the tale of two brothers who set out to avenge their father’s death and retrieve his stolen gold, but who ended up going on another journey altogether.

  ‘They didn’t get the gold back, and killing their father’s murderer brought them no satisfaction – he was a pathetic little man – but they found an abandoned baby and they saved each other. It’s like Mia used to say, the quest is always different from the one you imagine you are on.’

  At some point in her narrative, Spike had slipped into unconsciousness. She carried on lying beside him, praying to the moon that it might sway the tide of Spike’s blood and keep him safe.

  *

  Lottie kept running, the torch held out in front of her. Every so often, she would stop to catch her breath and check her mobile. She looked at her watch. She had already been gone for at least three quarters of an ho
ur. A tiny, pale antelope looked at her from behind a rock, and she could hear the sound of creatures flying above her – ravens probably, or maybe bats. She was sweating. Although it was cooler than it had been during the day, it was still warm enough to hamper her progress.

  She could feel something sharp in her rucksack bumping into her back. Why had she brought it? Tina was right, she was too cautious. It was not as if she was going to need to stop and make a fire or use her penknife to fillet one of the big horned sheep that clustered on these hillsides. She had always been prepared for every single potential emergency, except the one that really mattered. When it had come to the crunch, she had fallen so far short. She felt the desert around her – the sinking valley and the warped, slowly shifting mountains, the borax and the gold still in the hollow spaces beneath her feet. When it came right down to it there was nothing to hang onto: everything was unsafe and unpredictable. Everything changed. Maybe even her feelings for Dean. As she ran she thought of the way his face had looked after the first time they made love. He had been shining as if he had lost his old skin and found a whole fresh layer underneath. He was the one for her. It was decided.

  The phone was still obdurately giving out its no coverage message. It was now over an hour since she had left the camp and she had run a lot of the way. She didn’t understand why she hadn’t reached the road yet. On the map it had looked fairly straightforward. Just as she was deciding that maybe she had taken a wrong turn, she heard a car horn in the distance. It was the most comforting sound in the world.

  *

  ‘Are you still with me?’ Tina asked Spike. He didn’t reply.

  He’s going to die, she thought. He is going to die on this mattress with the stars and Las Vegas shining on, oblivious. She felt for the pulse in his neck. It was faint under her fingers. It reminded her of another pulse she had sensed deep inside her, many years ago. At the time she had told herself she was imagining it. It had only been a scrap of something at that stage, after all. A little bundle of DNA, intricate and folded, like noodle strands before they separate in boiling water.

  ‘Is it even mine?’ Spike had asked, his face strange and hateful.

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘How can I possibly believe you?’

  ‘Because it’s the truth.’

  She would have preferred his anger. This muted, disdainful version of him hurt her more than any other incarnation could have.

  ‘I feel sorry for you,’ he said, turning away from her with his arms crossed. He looked out of the window as if he was praying for a diversion – a sunset they could wonder at, a passing carnival float or the march of an invading army – but they were stuck with themselves and this room and a terrible pressure in her throat and chest. The ragged, rising pain gave her something to push against. It kept her upright. It made her find the words.

  ‘I want it,’ she had said. ‘I want to keep it.’

  ‘Do what you want. You usually do.’ His face was flushed, the anger more visible now. She made some sort of move towards him, but he put out his arm to fend her off.

  ‘I don’t ever want to see you again,’ he said.

  She had slept with Rory the day after she had discovered she was pregnant. She hadn’t even liked him particularly. She found his loud confidence and the way he kept touching her arm almost offensive. In the restaurant, his bluish jaw and straining shirt had turned her off, and yet she had maintained a façade of beguiled interest – laughing at his terrible jokes, acquiescing with a little flirty purse of her lips to a dessert she had no stomach for. She had worked wilfully through the dreary tropes of seduction, despite her lack of desire – the brush of his foot under the table, the touch of his hand on her thigh, the tucking of a strand of hair behind her ear, the terrible, grim, twinkling emptiness of it all. He had pushed her against the washbasin in the restaurant bathroom, his blunt fingers eager and his cock straining against his shiny trousers. She had let him fuck her in a public toilet and then again the next day in the bed she shared with Spike. And all the while, through the grunting skirmish of it, she had wondered why. After Spike had burst in on them and she’d sent Rory, noisy and peevish, away, she had wept as she washed herself between her legs, feeling a new tenderness that went beyond the soreness of unwanted sex all the way inside to the little nub of him and her.

  After she’d told Spike about the baby, she had gone back to England. For a month or so she’d waited, thinking he might contact her. When he didn’t, she phoned him every day for a fortnight, but he never answered her calls. She changed her mind almost daily about whether or not to have an abortion. It was clear that Spike did not want to be part of her, or their baby’s, future. She was scared of the thought of becoming a mother with no one to support her and yet she couldn’t, somehow, relinquish the possibility. She put her palm to her stomach as she lay in the bath one night and felt her child floating with her, and she understood that what she really wanted was to love and care for this scrap of her, however difficult it would be.

  When she was about ten weeks pregnant and she had started in a tentative way to look at other babies in prams and imagine her own as flesh and bones rather than a phantom, she woke to terrible period pains, which were so hard and fast they felt like contractions. In the toilet the blood of what she and Spike had made trickled down her legs. She reached automatically, well trained as women are, for tissue to stem the flood and to clean the floor – just a mishap, a girl thing – and the staggering weight of her loss caught her by surprise. Her sorrow made her mad for a while, in that quiet, almost unnoticeable way, easily hidden behind laughter and activity. It made her feel all the time as if she was falling. Even now, when she allowed herself to think of it, her heart flinched at the memory of lying in bed, her hands on her stomach, feeling emptied and ashamed.

  The silence was suddenly filled with sound and light. The dust rose so that it filled her nose and mouth. The sparse vegetation trembled and then flattened. A little distance away a helicopter wheeled, searching with efficient lights and movie razzmatazz. She got to her feet, waving her torch in the air.

  ‘We’re here!’ she said, as if they could hear her. ‘We’re here. He’s still alive.’

  Chapter 17

  HOSPITALS ARE STRANGE PLACES AT two in the morning. The pain and panic is still there, tangible in the drawn curtains and the occasional, ominous swing of a door, but it takes on a quiet, night-time aspect, as if illness too has to obey the sun. Tina and Lottie were on their third cup of lukewarm coffee.

  ‘You were like Lara Croft,’ Tina said. ‘Running through the desert and then hitching to Furnace Creek to ring for help.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Lottie said, smiling. ‘I thought for a while no one was going to stop for me on the road. In the end I had to stand in the oncoming traffic, waving my arms around.’

  ‘I might even ease up on the challenges,’ Tina said. ‘But only for today.’

  Lottie dug her in the ribs, making her coffee spill on the floor. ‘It can’t have been easy staying with him either,’ Lottie said, wanting to make Tina feel as if she had played her part. ‘Were you scared?’

  ‘Shitless,’ Tina said. ‘I thought he was going to die.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘I told him the story of Tache and Dove.’

  ‘Thank God the rattlesnake bite was as shallow as it was, otherwise he might not have made it.’

  ‘Would you have run so fast if it had been Dean’s life at stake?’ Tina asked slyly.

  ‘Of course I would!’ Lottie said, indignant. ‘I would even have run fast to save you.’

  ‘Just admit you fancy Spike.’

  ‘I’m not a teenager, Tina,’ Lottie said. Yet she had to admit to herself (but never to Tina) that she had felt a bit like one over the last couple of days. She was alarmed by how terrified she had felt at the sight of Spike, deathly pale, hooked up to all sorts of machines. His naked chest had made her want to put her hands on him. She didn’t kn
ow what had got into her. She hardly knew him. It was probably something to do with being away. People always behaved strangely on holidays. One of the three men she had had sex with was someone she had met on a holiday in Paxos. He had taken her snorkelling and fed her raw sea urchin with a little spoon he kept in the pocket of his trunks. She had known as soon as she had seen the spoon that this was a well-worn ritual and that the man lived tidal fashion, taking his pick from the over-sunned women who came on the boat from Corfu to spend a day or two on the tiny island, buying linen tops and staring longingly at the brown-legged men washing down the decks of Russian yachts. And yet she had gone with it. She was just a bit dazzled by Spike. That was all. It was a road trip crush and when the road trip was over, it would pass. Dean was reality. Spike was just a holiday hologram.

  ‘I’m not sure there’s any point hanging around any longer,’ Tina said. ‘The doctor said he was comfortable and the best thing was to let him sleep.’

  After alerting the medical team, Lottie had been taken back to the car park by an obliging ranger and had then driven to the hospital. ‘Shall we go back to every room a work of art?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m absolutely knackered. I might even be able to sleep beneath the Weeping Woman.’

  Back at the motel, Tina and Lottie ate the burgers they had picked up on the way, sitting cross-legged on their beds.

  ‘This is the most delicious burger I have ever eaten,’ Lottie announced, her cheeks distended with bread and pickle.

  ‘It’s because you’ve had a brush with death,’ Tina said. ‘It sharpens your senses. What we should really do after eating this is get some dope off the creepy bloke in reception – he’s already offered me some, along with the somewhat unappetising prospect of sex – and have a swim in the pool.’

  ‘We should really wait until we’ve digested our food. We could get cramp,’ Lottie said. ‘Anyway, I thought you said you were tired.’

  ‘Right there you’ve lost your Lara Croft crown,’ Tina said. ‘Do you think she ever says, “I can’t swim across this alligator-infested swamp because I’ve just nibbled on some pulled pork”?’