The Returners

by Gemma Malley

  ‘The UN will protect us. They will come,’ the father says quietly. ‘They told us to come here. They will come.’

  Another shakes his head bitterly. ‘We have been in this building for two weeks. The UN are not coming. If the UN were coming, they would be here by now. If the UN were coming, there would not be disease in this building and starving children. If they were coming, my son would be alive.’

  ‘But,’ the father says. ‘But . . .’ He is trying to think of rational reasons for the situation he finds himself in. He cannot – will not – accept a version of events where they are helpless, where there is no hope. He is a businessman. A logical man. The UN told them to come here. They would not do that unless there was a plan.

  ‘But nothing,’ the other man says. ‘Why will you not see? They don’t care about us. Nobody cares about us.’

  ‘It isn’t about whether they care,’ the father says staunchly. ‘It is about right and wrong. It is about . . .’

  He is interrupted by a sound. Doors opening. He has never known such relief. ‘You see?’ he says. ‘You see? They are here. They have come for us.’

  But even as he speaks he can hear that things are not as they should be. A scream. Another scream. No reassuring voices telling everyone that the emergency is over. Instead, there is shouting. Angry shouting, the sound of . . . of . . . The father’s chest constricts. He knows the sound. He heard it before, in his village.

  ‘They are here. They are here with machetes. They are going to kill us all.’

  The men look at each other. Then without a word they leave each other; they must return to their families. The father leaves the group and runs; he finds himself in the corridor with others, moving as fast as they can, falling against the wall, moaning as they slip to the floor. He finds his family where he left them; they are sleeping. So peaceful. He turns his wife over.

  ‘My dear wife, you must wake up. There is something going on. There is . . .’ He feels something wet against his leg. And when he sees what it is, he does not see. He will not. It is red paint. It is . . . It is . . .

  ‘There. There is one.’ He hears the shout too late, but he has nowhere to go to anyway. The man rushing towards him is a boy, younger than his own sons. He lunges at the father with his machete. ‘You must die. Like vermin, you must die.’

  The father nods and closes his eyes as he falls back against his wife, against his family.

  The boy with the machete. He was in the van. Waiting. He has been waiting all this time.

  I know this. I have been watching, waiting with him. Far from him, but with him all the same.

  I am that boy. No, not that boy. I should have been him. I wouldn’t go back. But I was meant to be there.

  I am . . .

  I get out of bed, somehow manage to pull on some clothes.

  I can’t close my eyes. Can’t ever close my eyes again. Each blink is torture. Each blink takes me back, falling, into the abyss.

  I was there. The place with the ash. The place with the piles of bones, piles of belongings. The places where humanity had ceased to exist long before. The places that suck the soul out of you.

  I was there. In the other places, I was there . . .

  But it’s worse. So much worse.

  My destiny is to suffer. To be a Returner. To feel man’s pain, to absorb the desperation and the agony. That’s what they said. That’s what I was told.

  No.

  No, they didn’t tell me the truth.

  I do not suffer. I did not suffer.

  I am on the ship. I look down and see the whip in my hand.

  I am at the settlement, surrounded by dead bodies. Dead at my hand.

  I am at the camp. I am in Poland. I am not in the line. I am not to be tortured, to be gassed to death for nothing but my very existence. I am the torturer. I am the murderer. I am the one sending them to their deaths.

  I scream. My scream is silent. My tears are dry and yet my body shakes and shudders. I wrap my arms around myself. The horror. The horror. It was me. I am the horror. I am the devil. It was me.

  I close my eyes. Immediately more images flood my mind.

  I am the leader. I am at a march. Britain for Britons. Foreigners Out. British Jobs for British Workers. I am leading the rally. The time has come for change, the time has come to reclaim our lands. I am the designer of a new system of taxes, a new social strata. Different rules for immigrants, make it harder for them, make them want to leave. No access to services, no benefits, no healthcare or education. Turn the indigenous people against them. Blame them. It is their fault we are in this mess. They should go back to where they came from. We will make them. And if they don’t go we will make them sorry. They will die here, in the land they have stolen from. They will be a lesson to the rest of the world. Great Britain will be great again. We will rise up triumphant.

  I blink. I see it now. I am the leader of a holocaust. A future holocaust. I believe I am right. I convince others. I see the woman looking at me with hatred. I kill her. I burn the camp. I can hear the screams . . .

  The woman tries to hand me her baby. I stare at her. Then I shoot.

  I am at school. Yan’s brother is looking up at me fearfully as I smash his face with my fist. Desperately he presses money into my hand – a five-pound note.

  I am downstairs. Dad is on the ground; I have knocked him down.

  I fall to my knees. I thought I was ready for the truth, but I was wrong. The truth is worse than anything I could have imagined.

  I am the horror.

  This is my destiny.

  This is what I am.

  g

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Semi-dressed, I stumble downstairs, and go straight for Dad’s drinks cabinet. Whisky. Whisky is what I want. I grab the bottle, tear off the lid and gulp. It is like fire in my throat, it tastes like petrol. I drink some more. I want the oblivion, want the denial that alcohol affords. I retch, but carry on.

  I walk out of the house, carrying the whisky bottle at my side, bringing it to my mouth every few seconds.

  ‘You didn’t tell me the truth,’ I shout. ‘You told me I would suffer. You told me I was one of you.’

  I continue to walk, continue to drink. My head is softening, my words blurring, dissolving into the night. I want to disappear. I want to go back to where I came from, back to nothingness. Fifty years wasn’t long enough. I can see her eyes, staring up at me, the ash circling us. It was not the despair; it was not the desperation; not the pain or the final understanding of what was happening to her, to them all. It was the hope. In spite of everything, in spite of all my brutality, she was offering me her child. Hoping that I would take it, look after it, save it.

  Me.

  I remember it all now; remember how in that moment the ice cracked; the horror began to seep in, slowly, then more quickly, insistently. I couldn’t keep it out, couldn’t fill the holes it was flooding through. It was consuming me. I could remember too much, had seen too much. Too much for one soul.

  An argument. I am shouting. Too much. I can’t go back. I won’t. I can’t take it.

  You must take it. That is what you are. You will find a way.

  Why did I come back? So I could send some more people to the gas chambers? I don’t know where I’m going; I’m walking unsteadily down the street, bumping into lamp posts. No, walking into them. I need the crash, need to feel the pain. Inhumane. I know what the word means now.

  It means me. It defines me. I am evil. I am the bogeyman Mum was so afraid of.

  I stop dead. Mum. I am clutching the bottle, gripping it tightly. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me who . . .

  Was it?

  I fall to my knees. I cannot cry; I can only groan silently, my stomach full of bile. Did I kill her? Or did she kill herself becaus
e she knew, because she could see what I was?

  I am in the middle of the road, but it’s late – there are no cars. I pull my knees into my chest and rock slowly. I am crumbling. There is nothing to hold me together, not any more. Did Mum look at me and see the devil? I was her boy. That’s who I was. But now . . . now I am something else. Now there is nothing good in me, nothing at all.

  I rock, back and forth. If I rock hard enough, I will cease to exist. If I rock hard enough, everything will stop.

  That is how the man finds me – the man from the coffee shop, the man from outside the school. He crouches next to me. His name is Douglas, he tells me, although only in this life. Returners have no given names; they track each other across time by feeling their presence. They don’t need to be labelled. There is no gender. Returners can come back male, female, rich, poor. It is their soul that is the same. It is their soul that the others look for.

  He tells me this softly, gently, as I rock forward and back. I listen as though I am eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation. He puts his arms around me; I shake them off.

  ‘Get away from me. I don’t want your sympathy. I don’t deserve it. You know what I am.’

  I hate him for knowing, for not kicking me when I’m down.

  ‘It’s natural to hate yourself,’ he says.

  ‘You didn’t tell me,’ I say, my eyes shut now. If I cannot see, I am nearer to oblivion, closer to not existing at all. ‘You didn’t tell me the truth.’

  ‘The truth?’

  ‘About who I am.’

  Douglas digests this. ‘You had to remember,’ he says eventually.

  ‘You said I was away for fifty years because I’d suffered. Not because . . .’ I grapple for the right words. For any words. Words aren’t up to the job, though. ‘Not because I did that . . . I was the person who . . . who . . .’

  ‘People suffer in different ways, Will,’ Douglas says. ‘You suffered terribly.’

  ‘I killed her. I killed her baby.’

  He nods. ‘You did what you did. What you had to do. What you were there to do.’

  ‘I exist to be evil?’ I ask angrily. ‘You think that’s OK?’

  ‘You are who you are.’

  I turn this over for a few seconds. ‘Am I? I didn’t want to come back. I should have been there, shouldn’t I? In Rwanda? The man in the van, that was supposed to be me. Killing those people. Locking the doors and waiting for them to die. But it wasn’t me. It was some other Returner. I wouldn’t go back.’

  ‘You are who you are,’ Douglas says again. ‘Your soul needed to rest. But that does not change your destiny.’

  ‘You should have told me the truth.’ I want to be sick, want to empty out my insides, leaving a hollow shell for someone else to inhabit. Someone who isn’t me.

  ‘You weren’t ready for it,’ he says. ‘You had to get there in your own time.’

  ‘Get there?’ My voice is sarcastic, icy. ‘Oh, I got there all right.’

  Douglas sits down next to me. ‘You are not evil. You simply occupy human evilness. You absorb the evil just as we absorb the pain and suffering. You remember, like us.’

  ‘I remember killing people. I remember watching people queue up as those first in line were gassed to death and burnt. I remember . . .’ I can feel my nails digging into my palms. ‘I’ve been bullying a boy at school. Every day. Punching him senseless for money. I didn’t know . . .’ I cannot finish the sentence. He’s right. I am who I am. I didn’t come back for over fifty years, but I am back now, and I am evil. I have not changed.

  ‘Yes, you are back,’ he says. I can hear the relief in his voice.

  ‘I want to be dead.’

  The thought has been in my head since I woke up; only now does it find words.

  ‘No, Will. You don’t want that.’

  I don’t answer.

  ‘You suffered trauma. That’s why you were away for so long.’

  ‘I suffered trauma?’ I can’t accept it. I pull away. ‘I wasn’t the one who suffered. Don’t you understand that?’

  ‘I understand, Will. You will too, eventually. We all have a role to play. Each relies on the other. Each is an important part of the jigsaw.’

  I stand up. ‘A jigsaw? That’s what you think this is?’ My face is filled with disgust. ‘This isn’t role play. Role play is make-believe and this . . . This is very far from make-believe. Don’t you understand? If I don’t kill people, if I don’t torture them, they don’t suffer. You don’t suffer. Nor do the others. It ends. It’s over.’ I’m staring at him, looking for a reaction, but he doesn’t give me one. What did I expect? ‘It’s almost as if you want people to feel pain. It’s almost as if you enjoy this,’ I say accusingly.

  Douglas smiles. It just makes me more angry. ‘This isn’t a game,’ I say.

  ‘No, not a joke. I’m not smiling because this isn’t serious, Will. I’m smiling because you and I . . . we have discussed these things many times before. Usually we are arguing the other way round.’

  I regard him stonily. ‘We have not,’ I say. ‘You have, with someone, some other person, but not me. Not with Will Hodges.’

  ‘No,’ Douglas concedes. ‘Not with Will Hodges.’

  He stands up and walks towards me. ‘What you are facing is the reality of human existence,’ he says softly. ‘The human condition. Great joy is tempered by great pain, good deeds by terrible ones. All predetermined, all set out like milestones on a journey we haven’t yet made.’

  ‘A journey I’m not going to make,’ I say through gritted teeth.

  ‘A journey that is inevitable, Will. A path that you must go down.’

  I turn and stare at him. ‘That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say? You’ve lived a million lives and still you think this is just the way things are?’

  ‘I have lived many lives,’ Douglas agrees. ‘As have you. That does not make me an expert. But it does make me understand that this is the way things are, Will.’

  ‘Then you’re as bad as me,’ I say angrily. ‘You’re part of it. You just sit there passively and let stuff happen to you. You’re complicit. I mean, what’s the point? What’s the point of remembering if it just happens again and again? What is the point of you? Of all the Returners? I mean, you don’t fight, you don’t even try to stop the evil, do you? You just let it happen. You’re pathetic. You’re pointless.’

  Douglas takes a deep breath, then lets it out slowly. ‘You’re right,’ he says eventually. ‘You’re right in some ways. We are passive, Will. Returners cannot change humankind. We can only inhabit the souls of humans, to absorb their pain, to remember it. Only humans themselves can fight their enemy, fight their instincts. We can only be there for them, a hand on their shoulder, by their side on their journey. We can stand in front of them and take the blow; we can protect them from themselves and inflict the agony. But we cannot change them. Only humans can change themselves.’

  ‘And me? I don’t take the blow. I inflict it.’

  Douglas nods slowly. ‘Yes, you do. But you also protect. You are not evil, Will. You inhabit the souls of men and women who turn to the dark side, who lose their morality, who are consumed with greed, with anger, with bitterness. Those who lose their humanity.’

  ‘But why? They don’t need protection.’

  ‘They need a different sort of protection,’ Douglas says gently.

  ‘Sounds like a cop-out to me,’ I say bitterly.

  ‘It isn’t for us to tell people how to live their lives, to force them to do as we think they should do.’ I look up sharply; someone else is talking – someone else has joined us and I hadn’t even noticed. It’s the girl. The girl from the shopping centre. She walks towards me, hand outstretched. ‘Will, no one can do that. We can only protect, as best we can –’

  ‘
Yeah,’ I interrupt, ‘I get it. We protect. We absorb.’ I turn away; I can’t bear to look at her, at Douglas, to see their eyes filled with pain, with passive acquiescence. ‘Have any of you tried to stop me? To stop us? How many of us are there anyway – the bad guys, I mean?’

  ‘It is not about good and bad, Will; they are two sides of the same coin.’

  ‘Well, it’s a stupid coin,’ I say, walking away. ‘It’s a pointless coin. It’s a pointless, pointless world and I don’t want anything else to do with it. Or you. Don’t talk to me again, Douglas. Don’t talk to me or look at me or follow me around. I’m done, OK? I’m done.’

  But I’m not done. Of course I’m not – how could I be? My head, for so long like a jigsaw with hundreds of missing pieces whose absence I chose to ignore, is now flooding with memories; they crash like waves, swirling around, making me seasick, filling me with terror. With horror.

  How long have I been doing this? How many people have suffered at my hands? Who brought me back – whose sick idea was it to create me in the first place?

  And of all the memories, amongst all the horror, there is one image that brings sweat to my forehead, dries my throat to a desert. Yan’s brother.

  Because he is now. Because he is real. Because what has happened to him did not happen a long time ago. Because what attacked him was not another soul. It was mine. All this time I didn’t get the look he was giving me. Reproach. Fear.

  It was me attacking him. My hand. My fist.

  Have I chosen not to remember? Do I have such a choice? Is it easier that way?

  I’m feeling sick, nauseous – I don’t know if it’s the whisky or the knowledge of who I am that’s doing it. A car drives past and narrowly misses me; for a moment I’m sorry it didn’t hit me full on.

  I didn’t ask for this.

  Nor did the people I gassed to death. Nor did the people I tortured.

  This isn’t who I am.

  But I know that’s not true. I’m a freak. An evil, sadistic freak.

  I put my hand in my pocket. Five pounds. Does he bring it every day? I wonder where he gets the money. Does his father know about it? Does Yan?