The Other People: A Novel(3)

Back then, the thin man had hope. Of a sort. The insane kind of hope that fuels people like a drug. It’s all they have. They draw on it like a crack pipe, even when they know that the hope itself has become an addiction. People say hate and bitterness will destroy you. They’re wrong. It’s hope. Hope will devour you from the inside like a parasite. It will leave you hanging like bait above a shark. But hope won’t kill you. It’s not that kind.

The thin man had been eaten up by hope. He had nothing left. Nothing but a lot of road miles and coffee club points.

Katie picked up his empty cup, wiped down the table.

“Can I get you another?”

“Table service?”

“Only for regulars.”

“Thanks, but I have to get going.”

“Okay. See you.”

He nodded again. “Yeah.”

That was the total sum of their conversations. Every conversation. She wasn’t sure if he even realized he was speaking to the same person each time he came in. She got the feeling that most people were just background to him.

Katie had heard that this was not the only coffee shop he visited, nor the only service station. Staff moved around, and they talked. So did the police officers who often came in. The rumor was that he spent every day and night driving up and down the motorway, stopping in different service stations, looking for the car that took his little girl. Searching for his lost daughter.

Katie hoped it wasn’t true. She hoped that the thin man could eventually find some peace. Not just for his sake. Something about him, his quiet desperation, scraped at a raw nerve. Most of all she hoped that one day, she would come into work, he would be gone, and she’d never have to think about him again.





Night driving. Gabe never used to like it. The flare of the oncoming headlights. The patches of unlit motorway where the road ahead seemed to melt away into infinite nothingness. Like driving into a black hole. He always found it disorienting. Darkness made everything look different. Distances changed, shapes distorted.

These days (nights), it was the time he felt most comfortable. Cocooned in the driver’s seat, playing something low and ambient. Tonight, Laurie Anderson. Strange Angels. It was the album he played the most. Something about the otherworldliness, the weirdness, resonated with him. Seemed to fit his journey up and down the black tarmac.

Sometimes, he imagined he was cruising along a deep, dark river. Others, he was drifting through space, into eternal blackness. Strange, the thoughts that sleepwalk through your mind in the small hours, when you should be putting your brain safely to bed. But although he let his mind wander, he always kept his eyes firmly on the road, alert, on the lookout.

Gabe didn’t really sleep. Not properly. That was one of the reasons he drove. When he needed a break, more because he felt he should than because he felt tired, he pulled into one of the service stations he had come to know so well.

He could list them all, up and down the M1: the facilities, the ratings and the distances between them. They were, he supposed, the closest things he had to any sort of home. Ironic, really, considering how much he used to dislike them. When he wanted more than just a refuel of black coffee, he parked his camper van in one of the HGV bays and lay down in the back for a couple of hours. He often resented the time he was wasting, not doing anything, not searching. But, while his mind never rested, his eyes, wrists and legs needed the respite. Sometimes, when he climbed from the driver’s seat, it felt as though he were a stooped Neanderthal attempting to stand vertical for the very first time. So he forced himself to close his eyes, stretch out his six-foot-three frame as much as he could in the camper van for a maximum of 120 minutes every twenty-four hours. And then he got back on the road.

He had everything he needed with him. Toiletries, a few changes of clothes. Sometimes a trip to the launderette necessitated a small detour off the motorway and into a town. He didn’t like these trips. They reminded him too much of the normality of most people’s everyday lives. Shopping, work, meeting for a coffee, taking the kids to school. All things he no longer did. All the things he had lost, or let go.

On the motorway, in the service stations, normal life was suspended. Everyone was on their way somewhere, at a point in between. In neither one place nor another. A little like Purgatory.

He kept his phone and laptop close, along with two spare chargers and several battery packs (he would never make that mistake again). When he wasn’t driving, he spent his time drinking coffee, scanning the news—just in case there was any news—and checking the missing-persons websites.

Most of these were little more than noticeboards. They ran appeals for the missing, posted updates on progress, held events to raise awareness. All in the desperate hope that someone out there might see something and get in touch.

He used to trawl them religiously. But after a while it got to him: the hope, the desperation. The same photographs again and again. The faces of people who had been missing for years, decades. Preserved in a camera flash. Their hairstyles becoming more dated, their smiles more frozen with each missed birthday and Christmas.

Then there were the new faces that appeared almost daily. Still with an echo of life. He imagined that a dent remained in their pillows, a toothbrush hardened in a holder, and the clothes in their wardrobe still smelled of fresh laundry and not yet of mold and mothballs.

But it would happen. Just like the others. Time would roll on without them. The rest of the world would continue to its destination. Only their loved ones would remain on the platform. Unable to leave, unable to abandon their vigil.