Mr Wrong Read Online Free Page A

such extreme hallucinations.’
    There was no mistaking the malice in his voice, and just as Meg was going to have one last go at his admitting that he
had
seen the girl, the petrol attendant finally reached her and
began unscrewing her petrol cap. He went, then. Simply withdrew his head, as though there were not more of him than that, and disappeared.
    ‘How many?’
    ‘Just two, please.’
    When the man went off slowly to get change, Meg wanted to cry. Instead, she locked all the doors and wound up the passenger window. She had an unreasonable fear that he would come back and that
the attendant might not help her to oust him. She even forgot the change, and wound up her own window, so that nobody could get into the car. This made the attendant tap on her window; she started
violently, which set her shivering.
    ‘Did you – did you see where the man who was in the front of my car went? He got out just now.’
    ‘I didn’t see anyone. Anyone at all.’
    ‘Oh thank you.’
    ‘Night.’ He went thankfully back to his brightly lit and doubtless scorching booth.
    Before she drove off, Meg looked once more at the back seat. There was no one there. The whole experience had been so prolonged, as well as unnerving, that apart from feeling frightened she felt
confused. She wanted badly to get away as fast as possible, and she wanted to keep quite still and try to sort things out. He
had
known that the girl had been in the car. He had enjoyed
– her fear. Why else would he have said ‘we’ so much? This made her more frightened, and her mind suddenly changed sides.
    The girl
could not
have got out of the back without opening and shutting– however quietly – the door. There had been no sound or sounds like that. In fact, from the moment the
girl had got into the car she had made no sound at all. Perhaps she, too, had been frightened by the horrible man. Perhaps she had
pretended
to get in, and at the last moment, slipped out
again.
    She opened her window wide to get rid of the smells in the car. As she did so, a possible implication of what the petrol attendant had said occurred. He hadn’t seen
anyone
; he hadn’t emphasized it like that, but he had repeated ‘anyone at all’. Had he just meant that he hadn’t looked? Or had he looked, and seen nobody? Ghosts
don’t talk, she reminded herself, and at once was back to the utterly silent girl.
    Her first journey north in the car, and the awful breathing sounds coming from its back, could no longer be pushed out of her mind. The moment that she realized this, both journeys pounced
forward into incomprehensible close-ups of disconnected pictures and sounds, recurring more and more rapidly, but in different sequences, as though, through their speed and volume, they were trying
to force her to understand them. In the end, she actually cried out: ‘All
right
! The car is haunted. Of course, I see that!’
    A sudden calm descended upon her, and in order to further it, or at least stop it as suddenly stopping, she added: ‘I’ll think about it when I get home,’ and drove mindlessly
the rest of the way. If any spasm about what had recently happened attempted to invade her essential blankness, she concentrated upon seeing her mother’s face, smelling the dinner in the
kitchen, and hearing her father call out who was there.
    ‘. . . thought he might be getting a severe cold, so he’s off to bed. He’s had his arrowroot with a spot of whisky in it and asked us to be extra quiet in
case
he gets a
wink of sleep.’
    Meg hugged her without replying: it was no good trying to be conspiratorial with her mother about her father; there could never be a wink or a smile. Her mother’s loyalty had stiffened
over the years, until now she could relate the most absurd details of her father’s imaginary fears and ailments with a good-natured but completely impassive air. ‘Have we got anything
to drink?’ she asked.
    ‘Darling – I’m sure we have somewhere. But