The Returners

by Gemma Malley

  ‘So why?’ I ask. ‘Why don’t I?’ I am still wary, still want to run. But I know I can’t. I know I won’t.

  He looks bewildered. ‘As I’ve said, Will, it is unprecedented. But perhaps . . . perhaps it was too much for you. Perhaps you are trying to escape from your fate.’

  ‘You think I’m running away? You think I’m pretending?’ My anger flares up.

  ‘No.’ Again, a hand on mine. Soothing. Calming. ‘No, Will. It’s not you. It is your subconscious, your inner Returner. It’s not running away. Perhaps you still need time, that is all.’

  I digest this for a few minutes.

  ‘So you’re all like normal people? When you’re not doing this Returner stuff.’

  ‘Doing this Returner stuff?’ The man looks perplexed.

  The girl from the shopping centre smiles. ‘It’s not Doctor Who,’ she says. There’s a twinkle in her eye. It looks strange. Strange but in a good way. ‘We don’t “do Returner stuff”. We just live. And . . .’

  She looks around the table.

  ‘And what?’ I demand.

  ‘And absorb,’ one of the other women offers. She’s older. Fifty or so. Speaks with a foreign accent.

  ‘Absorb the horrors. Yeah, you said that.’

  The girl swallows awkwardly; the woman looks away. I stare at the man. The man who brought me here. ‘I still don’t know what you’re on about.’

  He looks at me gravely. ‘Where there is distress, where there is cruelty and desperation, there are Returners, to absorb it, to remember it, to protect humanity from itself.’

  I don’t say anything for a few minutes. ‘You mean I’m here to suffer? You mean I’m going to suffer? That’s what I’m here for? That’s why I exist?’

  I notice bruises on the girl’s hand all of a sudden. Why didn’t I see them before? I pull up her sleeve – more bruises. Burns.

  The woman with the accent. She hasn’t got a hand. She’s missing one.

  My eyes move from one to the other, jumping, afraid to see, needing to see. The man leans forward.

  ‘Suffering is relative,’ he says. ‘Some of us suffer the pain of a thousand small cuts, others . . .’ He smiles sadly. ‘We cannot know when or how . . .’

  I see my dream again. The last one. The one Claire couldn’t place. Screaming, shouting. A loud bang. Something falling against me; a woman. A woman with long hair, she looks like my mother. No, not like her. Just the hair. She is looking at me, she is bleeding, clutching at me, her face full of shock, of fear. ‘This must end.’ She is sinking down to the floor. I can’t help her. I am hot. I am sweating. I am screaming. No. No! NO!

  Is this my fate? Is this where I’m headed?

  I bang my fists on the table. I stand up again, boxing the dream, the emotion, the fear. ‘Well, thanks for this.’ Cocky. Sarcastic. It feels good, like I’m wresting control. I’m myself again. Me, Will. Outsider, freak maybe, but not one of them. I’m my own person. ‘Really enlightening. So glad to have met you all. But to be honest, I’m not interested. I don’t want to be a Returner. Doesn’t really fit with my life plan, if you know what I mean. So thanks for the water and for the . . .’ I glance at the girl and flinch slightly. ‘The information,’ I say. ‘But I think I’ll be going now.’

  ‘You can go, Will, but you can’t change what you are. You can’t change your destiny.’

  ‘A destiny which involves hideous pain? Yeah, well, I’ll take my chances,’ I say. I push the table a little too fiercely; the man is forced back on his chair. He stands up; the others shift so that I can get out. I walk to the door, not looking back. Then I open it, feel the fresh air on my face. And then I run. I run as fast as I can. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know what I’m running from. I just know I cannot stop until my chest constricts, until I am gasping for air, until my body can’t run any more.

  g

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I walk around for a while. I think at some point I eat something. I’m not really aware of time passing, but I must be at some level because at four fifteen I’m at the school gates waiting for Claire. She’ll have just finished History of Art. Soon I’ll see her coming out of the swing doors to the side of the main building, walking towards me, her hair streaming out behind her, tamed but only slightly. She has red curls; she plaits them sometimes but usually lets them do their own thing under a hairband that keeps them off her face. She straightened it once – it looked awful and I told her. I like her hair the way it is. I like that it doesn’t obey the rules.

  She sees me and I see something cross her face. Pleasure? Surprise? I’m not sure. I want to know. I walk towards her.

  Not pleasure or surprise. Concern. Her brow is creased. It makes my stomach lurch. It’s creasing for me. Just for me.

  ‘Will? Are you OK? Where have you been all day?’ She walks towards me quickly.

  ‘You know you’re meant to go to school and go to lessons,’ she says archly.

  I shrug. She takes my arm. ‘Will, what’s going on?’ She’s peering at me; I look away. I’m conscious of my eyes, don’t want her seeing that I look like them, like the freaks. I can’t call them by their name.

  We walk along the road and pause at the junction. Left is home, right is into town. We turn right. Then we head left out towards the river. Neither of us says anything. We walk until we come to the bench I always sit on. She sits down first; I wait a moment, then follow. I take a deep breath.

  ‘So?’ she says.

  ‘So,’ I say. I exhale loudly, put my elbows on my knees. Then I look at her tentatively. ‘Do you think I’m a freak?’

  She frowns. ‘I think you’re a bit freaky sometimes.’

  There’s the hint of a smile on her lips. It immediately reassures me, calms me. She is normal. If I hold on to her I will float, I will stay on the surface.

  ‘And . . .’ I hesitate. Once I start this, I won’t be able to go back, won’t be able to erase it. I tell her and that’s it. ‘Do you believe in reincarnation?’

  Her frown deepens. ‘Reincarnation? You mean people coming back as flies if they live a bad life and as a princess if they’re good?’

  ‘Just coming back,’ I say. ‘Do you believe humans – some humans – can come back? That they return?’

  ‘That they return?’ She’s trying to take me seriously, trying to come up with a considered answer. ‘Have you found religion, Will?’

  I shake my head. I’m getting agitated. ‘Forget it.’ I stand up; her hand pulls me back down.

  ‘Explain,’ she insists. ‘Tell me what you mean. Give me context.’

  Context? I sit back against the back of the bench, close my eyes, let the late afternoon sun warm my face. Sitting here I can almost forget. I open my eyes again. And then I see him, on the other side of the river. He was there this morning, at the coffee shop. One of the older men. He’s looking at me, the usual mournful expression on his face. He turns and walks slowly away.

  I am short of breath. I grab Claire.

  ‘He’s one of them,’ I say, pointing.

  ‘One of who?’ she asks.

  ‘The Returners,’ I say. ‘The Returners.’

  It takes me a long time to explain it. I make a few false starts – Claire’s looking at me like I need to be put away, locked up somewhere. But then she starts to listen properly. I tell her about the people following me around, about the eyes, about this morning. I tell her what they told me, tell her they knew about my dreams. I don’t tell her I am one. I’m not. But I do tell her that they think I’m one of them. I say it in a way that leaves a way out, that waits for her to tell me it’s preposterous, that I couldn’t be one, that they’re freaks, just like I’ve always thought.

  Instead, she looks out over the river.

  ‘Mum has always said you’re an old s
oul,’ she says quietly, thoughtfully. ‘She always says you’ve lived more than a boy your age should have.’

  I stare at her. ‘You believe them? You think I’m a freak?’

  ‘Do you?’

  I look away irritably.

  ‘You used to tell me about the people watching you. I remember seeing them, Will.’

  ‘You saw them?’ My throat feels constricted all of a sudden, strangled. ‘You never told me.’

  ‘I thought you’d get even more upset. But I did, I know I did. What you said about their eyes, it made me remember.’

  Claire looks strange. I feel strange. I swallow with difficulty. I open my mouth to speak, close it again then gear up and force myself to speak. This is worse than talking to the shrink. With him I was all front. Now I have no front. Now I have nowhere to hide.

  ‘They said,’ I say carefully, ‘that they’re here to suffer. They basically lead hideous lives, full of pain and agony. Then they die and come straight back for more crap.’

  My voice is shaking slightly. Cracking.

  Claire puts her hand over mine. She presses down, calms me. ‘And you don’t remember anything?’

  I shake my head. ‘Just the dreams.’ I have never felt so vulnerable. I feel like I’ve taken off my skin.

  ‘The dreams.’ Claire nods as though it all makes sense.

  ‘You actually believe all this crap?’ I ask, a last stand against defeat.

  ‘Do you think it’s why you’re so angry?’ she asks. ‘Because you’ve suffered so much?’

  I pull my hand away. ‘I’m not angry.’

  Claire says nothing; her silence is enough.

  ‘I’m not,’ I say again.

  ‘The other dream, the one we couldn’t place. Do you think it’s . . . ?’

  She doesn’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t need to.

  ‘My destiny?’ I ask.

  She’s silent for a moment or two. ‘The future,’ Claire says quietly.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I stand up. ‘I don’t care. I don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t want to be a Returner. It sucks. It’s the shittiest job in the whole world. So I’m not going to. I refuse. OK? I refuse.’

  ‘You think it works like that?’ Claire asks, standing up too.

  ‘I don’t care how it works.’

  ‘Why did you forget, do you think? They said you were missing for fifty years?’

  We’re walking now, back towards town.

  ‘Yeah. I wish I’d stayed away for longer.’

  ‘Did they say where you were? Before?’

  I smell the dust, see the piles of bones, the trinkets. Her eyes are no more and yet they still bore into me. I am winded. I stop, bend over, catch my breath; my head is pounding. I crouch down on the ground. I want to cry out, to roar. No more. No more. Never again. I run. I throw myself against the fence. A jolt, a current. Then release. I won’t go back. I won’t Return.

  ‘Will? Will?’ Claire is on the ground next to me, taking my hand, feeling my head. ‘Will, what’s happening? What’s the matter?’

  I breathe: in and out. Push the images from my mind. I let Claire help me up.

  I look at her. I can feel my expression. It’s like theirs. Sad. Reproachful. Tired. Heavy. I don’t want to remember. But I know they are coming, know the memories are waves that cannot be stopped. I have built a dam and now it is breaking, bit by bit. They will wash over me, they will carry me away, and I cannot escape from them.

  ‘They think it might have been Auschwitz,’ I say, as lightly as I can. The word is a flash in my head, a flash of white light, of pain, excruciating pain. ‘They think that whatever happened, they think I took a long time to get over it, to come back,’ I say. The waves are coming. All I can do is prepare myself. All I can do is try my best to surface.

  People think Dad started drinking after Mum died. By ‘people’ I mean Grandma and Grandad. They used to come round a lot after, but then they stopped. I think Dad fell out with them too. Even though they’re his parents, not hers. Mum didn’t have any parents. Not since I was born anyway. Her dad died of a heart attack when she was pregnant and her mother went soon after. Went. That was Dad’s word, the word he used when he explained why I only had one set of grandparents. It was an odd word to use, I remember thinking. When you die, you don’t go anywhere; you do the opposite. You stop. There are no more journeys.

  Little did I know. Guess back then I hadn’t figured on being a Returner.

  Anyway, it wasn’t true, about Dad and his drinking. The drinking started earlier. When he lost his job, when he stopped being the man in the smart suit and the smart car. It happened a few years after we moved here. A year or so before Yan moved next door. Back then, no one really noticed the large glass of whisky sloshed down before dinner, the bottle of wine drunk during. But then, then the conifers came and our bin clinked all the time with empty bottles, bottles he’d stuff at the bottom but which were still there, even if you couldn’t see them.

  He was better for a while after he got a new job. Mostly, anyway. He only really drank when he went out with Patrick. And then he only did it to be sociable, he said.

  But after the big fight with Yan’s dad, you could smell it on his breath again a lot of the time. He’d be more erratic – happier sometimes, which was great; he’d pick me up and swing me around his shoulders, which he never used to do because he had a bad back, but sometimes not happy at all. He started to get into moods – not the white anger I knew and could deal with, but worse, like dark clouds were sitting on his head and he couldn’t see past them. He wouldn’t notice if I walked into the room, or maybe he chose not to notice. He’d notice soon enough if I changed the channel on the telly, would stand up and swipe the remote out of my hand, giving me a clip round the ear at the same time. Mum would leave him alone; she’d talk in hushed tones, and would pretend that everything was OK, that he was just stressed because of work, but I knew that wasn’t true. I saw the empty glass bottles on the floor next to him, knew that drinking straight out of the bottle was wrong, that it meant something even though I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what.

  The first time I saw a bruise on Mum’s face, she said she’d been clumsy like always and she rolled her eyes at herself. I believed her too. And the time after that. And then one day I came back from Claire’s early and Mum and Dad were having a big fight and I saw him. I saw him hit her and she fell down, but then she saw me, through the window, and she got up quick as she could and smiled and made out like nothing had happened.

  Later that evening, when I was having a bath, she told me that Dad just got upset sometimes, that he misunderstood things and got the wrong end of the stick. But he didn’t mean to get angry. It just wasn’t easy being a dad when the world was such a difficult place. He was doing his best for us.

  And I remember nodding and thinking about it, and thinking that maybe it was hard but if he ever hit my mother again I would kill him.

  g

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I get back home, eventually, my mind in a blur. I have to get upstairs. Have to get to my bedroom, to safety. I am scared. No, not scared. It’s something deeper. Everything is going to change. I am like a caterpillar – I need a cocoon, need to find somewhere safe to go for my metamorphosis. Into what? Back to who I am. What I am.

  ‘Will? That you?’ Dad is at home. I open the door to the sitting room – he is on his chair. He has been drinking; I smell it immediately. I glance at my watch – 8.45 p.m. He sees my eyebrows shoot up. ‘And where the hell have you been?’ he asks angrily.

  I avoid his eyes. I need to curtail the conversation. ‘Just out with a couple of mates,’ I say evasively.

  ‘You? Mates?’ He is joking, laughing at me, and I am immediately flooded with resentment. It’s his fault. It’s all his fault.
But I bite my tongue. ‘Which mates?’

  ‘Greg. Tim,’ I lie. There’s a Greg in the year above me; I’ve never spoken to him. But he will do.

  ‘Greg?’ Dad doesn’t believe me. I should have picked another name. ‘School friends, are they?’

  I nod.

  ‘So you’ve been at school then?’

  ‘Yeah. Look, Dad, I need to –’

  ‘So why the bloody hell did I get a call from the head’s office?’ Dad interrupts. ‘Telling me this is the second time this week you haven’t been in at all?’

  His eyes are flashing with anger, not black humour.

  ‘You’re a bloody waster.’ He is on a roll now. ‘You’ve got exams next year. Think your mother would be proud of you bunking off school like this?’

  I close my eyes. Don’t listen. Cut this short and get away.

  ‘She thought so much of you. But she never saw the real you, did she? Will the loser. Who can’t even go to school, let alone pass an exam. What do you think she’d have made of you, Will? What do you think she’d say now?’

  He’s been drinking. I try to breathe, try to contain the anger welling up inside me. I can rise above his words. One of us has to rise above it. Otherwise we both know how this is going to end. It’s not even the hitting I’m worried about – it’s the sobbing afterwards, the apologies, the telling me it’ll never happen again when I know it will. Because it always does.

  ‘This has got nothing to do with Mum,’ I say, controlling my voice as best I can. ‘I’ve had some . . . some stuff going on. I didn’t go to school today. I’m sorry, Dad. But I’ll go tomorrow. I’ll be OK.’

  ‘You’ll be OK?’ He rolls his eyes. ‘You think I’m worried about you being OK? All the years I’ve sacrificed, looking after you. And for this? This is how you pay me back?’

  I edge backwards. I have to get out. The walls of the sitting room are pressing in on me.

  ‘Where d’you think you’re going? You’re not going anywhere, my boy. You’re going to tell me what you’ve been doing. Who you’ve been hanging around with. Have you been breaking the law? Drinking? Taking drugs? Have you?’