Mike

by Andrew Norriss

  “He was with you yesterday as well, wasn’t he?” said Charity. “But then he went away as I came over.” She smiled up at him. “You’re not going to run away too, are you? In the next ten minutes?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Floyd.

  Charity was back, changed and clutching a bag of sandwiches, in slightly less than ten minutes, and Floyd took her to the beach where he had seen the loggerhead turtle. Although the turtle was not there, they found the marks of its movement in the sand above the high-tide mark, so they sat at the base of the cliffs with the sun in their faces to wait for a while in case it returned.

  They sat side by side, Charity leaning her body against Floyd’s for shelter from the wind, and they talked. Charity talked about her home in Boston, her school, and her father’s work for the university, and Floyd talked about Sheffield and about tennis and, finally, about Mike.

  He told Charity how his friend had first appeared, about the match when he had first stepped onto the court, and how Floyd had then discovered that no one else could see him. He told her about the trips to Dr. Pinner, about projection and about what had happened at the championship at Roehampton. It was a long story, and all the time he was telling it, Charity spoke hardly a word. She sat beside him with her chin on her knees and listened.

  “So,” she said when the story was finally over, “you are, at this moment, the best under-eighteen tennis player in the U.K., right?”

  “Right,” said Floyd.

  “But you’re not going to play tennis anymore, because Mike doesn’t want to.”

  “Well …”

  “Even though he’s not a real person.”

  “No … well, he is … sort of. But only to me.”

  “So why could I see him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’s not here now, is he?” Charity looked hopefully around the beach.

  “No,” said Floyd, “not at the moment.”

  “That’s a pity.” Charity sighed.

  “Is it?”

  “Oh, yes.” Charity was looking out to sea. “I quite fancied him, you know.”

  On the way back to Bude, Charity said her parents had suggested she invite Floyd to join them for dinner that night at the hotel.

  “Only if you’re not busy or anything,” she added.

  “I’m not busy exactly,” said Floyd. “But my grandmother will have cooked a meal and I … could we do it tomorrow?”

  “I’m going home tomorrow,” said Charity. “We’re flying back to Boston.”

  Floyd absorbed this information, and also absorbed the fact that somehow he and Charity were now holding hands as they walked.

  “I’m sure Gran won’t mind,” he said. “I’ll just go home and tell her.”

  Floyd’s grandmother did not mind at all, though she did insist on walking with Floyd to the Falcon Hotel that evening and being introduced to Charity and her parents. Charity’s mother invited her to join them for dinner as well, but Granny Plum declined. There was a particularly exciting story line on Eastenders that week, she said, and she needed to get back.

  At dinner, there was a certain amount of talk about tennis but much more about fish. Floyd talked about his tanks of tropical fish at home, and Charity’s parents talked about how they had studied many of the same fish in their natural habitats on the reefs of the Caribbean or around the atolls of the South Pacific. Charity’s mother, it turned out, was a marine photographer whose specialty was larger sea mammals. At the time, she was working on pictures for a book about beaked whales, and both she and her husband had an endless supply of stories of strange discoveries, near disasters, and weird accidents.

  After dinner, Charity said she wanted to take one last walk along the beach, and Floyd offered to go with her. The tide was in and they walked in bare feet through the surf in the moonlit warmth of the night and Floyd realized that he was happy. Happy in a way that he had not been since the whole business with Mike had started, and as he held Charity in his arms, the impossible happened.

  For a good half hour, he didn’t think about tennis or invisible friends at all.

  Three days later, Floyd went home.

  His grandmother drove him to the train at Exeter, and there were tears in her eyes as she hugged him good-bye, told him for the umpteenth time how wonderful it had been to have him to stay, and made him promise to come back as soon as he could.

  Coming home was not quite as difficult as Floyd had feared. His parents asked at supper that night if he had changed his mind about playing tennis but did not seem particularly surprised when Floyd said that he hadn’t.

  “Well, you know what we think,” his father had said. “But it’s your decision and we won’t try and make you change it. If you do decide differently, though, anytime in the next year or so, it’s not too late. Not by a long way.”

  His parents kept their promise and the subject of tennis was not mentioned again, which was a relief, but it still was not easy. It felt very strange to be at home but never going out to the court in the backyard, never going off to training sessions before and after school, never spending long hours practicing volleys and serves and backhands, never even picking up a racket.

  It was not just strange at home either. Schoolwork had never held much importance in Floyd’s life—good grades are not needed to become a tennis champion—and the whole business of reading, studying, and writing essays was not something to which he had given any particular attention. Now, however, it was necessary that he did.

  Charity was the one who had persuaded him that it was necessary. She had suggested that it might be kind of fun if they went to college together and, in some of the emails she sent him on an almost daily basis from America, would remind him that this would only be possible if he passed his exams.

  So he began to take schoolwork seriously. There were still nine months to go before he took his exams, and he asked his teachers what he needed to do to catch up, worked out a timetable, and … got on with it. It wasn’t, he discovered, all that different from preparing for a tennis competition. In fact, compared with getting up at six and practicing backhands for two hours, schoolwork was a lot less demanding.

  In her messages, Charity asked occasionally about Mike, wanting to know if he had reappeared at all, but the answer was always the same. There had been no sign of him since the day on the beach when he had told Floyd to wait, and as the months passed, Floyd began to think that perhaps this time his friend had disappeared for good.

  Then one evening in early December, when Floyd was coming out of the main library in Sheffield—his English teacher had told him he should try to read at least one novel a week—he saw Mike standing on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the road.

  Mike gave a little nod of greeting and, gesturing for Floyd to follow, set off briskly down the street. Floyd had to wait for a gap in the traffic before running across to join him, and by that time Mike was fifty yards farther ahead. Floyd followed him as he turned left, then right, then left again, always staying about the same distance ahead, and they had been traveling like this for a good ten minutes when Mike stopped. He looked back to check that Floyd was watching, before entering one of the buildings. Floyd hurried up to the spot and found himself in front of a doorway with a sign above it that said:

  NEWLY OPENED! WATERWORLD!

  THE PERFECT FAMILY OUTING! Admission £3.50.

  When Floyd stepped inside, there was no sign of Mike, only a bored-looking girl in the booth waiting for him to pay his money. Floyd gave her three pounds fifty, took the ticket, walked in and found himself in a corridor with glass tanks running from floor to ceiling on either side of him. The tanks were lit from inside, and the fish they contained were interesting variants of the ones he had at home. Floyd, however, ignored them and pressed on, looking for Mike. He walked to the end of the corridor, which led to another corridor containing more tanks, and then into another and … halted. Ahead of him, a man on a stepladder was lowering a plastic bag cont
aining several fish into the top of one of the tanks.

  “No! Stop!” Floyd found himself calling out without thinking. “You can’t put those in there!”

  The man ignored him.

  Floyd stepped closer. “Honestly … If you put them in there, you’ll kill them.”

  The man looked at him. “They’re fish,” he said. “They’re not going to drown.”

  “I know,” said Floyd, “but those are saltwater fish. And judging by the species you’ve already got in there, that is a tank of freshwater.”

  Slowly, the man pulled the bag out of the water and thought for a moment. “Chief!” he called, and he stood there, looking at Floyd and waiting.

  An elderly man in an old-fashioned suit and with an old-fashioned drooping mustache appeared. He gazed quizzically up at the man with the fish, who pointed to Floyd.

  “He says if I put these fish in the tank, it’ll kill them.”

  “They’re green puffers,” said Floyd. “They live in brackish water. If you put them in freshwater, they’ll die.”

  The Chief did not answer immediately. Instead he reached into a pocket of his jacket and took out a well-thumbed copy of The Handbook of Tropical Fish. He turned the pages slowly, found the place he wanted, and passed the book to Floyd. A finger pointed carefully to one of the pictures.

  “That’s a Congo puffer,” said Floyd. “The ones in that bag are green puffers.” He flicked quickly to the back of the book, turned the pages, and passed it back to the Chief. “See? They’re both spotted, and they look very similar, but one lives in freshwater, one in salt. Those are green puffers and they need to be in salt water.”

  The Chief carefully studied both pictures in his book, and then the fish in the bag. Finally, he turned to the man on the ladder.

  “Put them in tank number four,” he said, then looked thoughtfully at Floyd. “You got a minute?”

  “What for?”

  “Like to show you something.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he turned and led the way down the hall between the tanks. Floyd followed him as he turned right and then left before stopping in front of a large tank containing three or four dead cherubfish bobbing gently on the surface in the bubbles from the oxygenator.

  “Lost twelve fish in this tank in two days,” said the Chief. “Just … died. Any idea why?”

  Floyd peered closely at the tank. “You’ve got aiptasia.”

  “Got what?”

  “Aiptasia,” repeated Floyd. “Those anemones on the bottom. They’ve got a poisonous sting. There’s various ways to get rid of them, but the safest thing is to throw everything out, sterilize the tank, and start again.”

  The Chief pulled thoughtfully at his mustache and stared at the dead cherubfish for several seconds before turning back to Floyd.

  “You want a job?” he asked.

  It was seeing Mike again that made Floyd decide it was time to contact Dr. Pinner. He was not worried exactly—the appearance of his invisible friend no longer bothered him in the way that it had six months before—but he did want to know why Mike had come back, and Dr. Pinner was the only person Floyd could think of who might have the answer.

  When he got home, he dug out the letter the psychologist had written at the start of the summer, found the email address he had given, and tapped out a brief message on his laptop. He didn’t go into detail, simply saying that Mike had reappeared that day outside the library, and that he would like to talk about it if that was possible. He was not at all sure that the psychologist would remember his promise or that he would still be willing to reply, but in fact it was barely half an hour later that his father pushed open the door to his room.

  “Dr. Pinner just called,” he said. “He says you’ve seen Mike again.”

  “Yes,” said Floyd. “I was going to tell you at supper.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Nothing really.” Floyd shrugged. “After school I went to the library, and when I came out Mike was standing on the other side of the road.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He didn’t say.” Floyd gave what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “It’s all right. He wasn’t trying to persuade me to murder anyone. But I thought it might be good to talk to Dr. Pinner. If that’s all right?”

  His father nodded, but with no real enthusiasm. “He says he’ll be at the Sheridan Hotel tomorrow at four o’clock.”

  “Really?”

  “I asked him how much it would cost, but he said he wasn’t coming as a therapist. Just as a friend.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I told him if you ever felt you had to go back to him, you know, for more of those sessions and things, we could … we could probably pay for them.”

  “Right,” said Floyd. “Thank you.”

  There was a long silence while his father stood in the doorway, staring down at the carpet.

  “I don’t know why,” he said, before turning to leave, “but everything was a lot easier when you were ten.”

  The Sheridan Hotel was only a short walk from school, and Floyd found Dr. Pinner waiting in the hotel lounge with a pot of tea and a plate of cake already on the table in front of him.

  “So,” he said cheerfully as they settled into their chairs, “Mike came back?”

  “He’s come back a few times, actually,” said Floyd. “I saw him while I was on vacation in the summer, as well.”

  “Oh, yes?” said the psychologist. “I would very much like to hear about that.”

  For the next forty minutes, he listened closely while Floyd described what had happened when Mike had appeared outside the library the day before, and then went through each of the times he had appeared in Cornwall, and finally—because it was a part of the story the psychologist had not heard before—about Mike’s appearance in the locker rooms at Roehampton before the match against Barrington Gates. It was the first time Floyd had shared these details with anyone apart from Charity, and describing it all was a sharp reminder of how odd the whole story was.

  Dr. Pinner, however, did not seem to be bothered by any oddness. All he said, and he used the phrase a good many times, was how interesting it all was.

  “Very interesting,” he repeated, when Floyd had finished. “It is a remarkable story.”

  “So do you think I should be worried?” asked Floyd.

  “Worried?” Dr. Pinner looked at him over the top of his teacup. “Why? You’re not worried, are you?”

  “Not exactly,” said Floyd. “But I am … puzzled. About what Mike wants. And why I’m still seeing him.”

  Dr. Pinner gave a little shrug. “I should imagine that there are still things he wants to tell you.”

  “Like what?”

  Dr. Pinner made a gesture with his hands. “I’m sure he’ll make that clear. In time.”

  Floyd considered this.

  “You still think Mike is a part of me?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Dr. Pinner, and then added, “though I’m beginning to wonder if it might not be more accurate to say that you are a part of him.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Doesn’t it seem that way to you?” The psychologist helped himself to another slice of cake. “I mean, he’s the one who seems to know things, isn’t he? He’s the one who’s telling you what to look out for, where to go, what to do …”

  “I suppose.” Floyd frowned. “But how does he know those things? I mean, how did he know the difference between a porpoise and a dolphin? Or that I should look on page one hundred seventy-three of a book I haven’t opened since I was five? And how come Charity could see him? Because she did. She described him perfectly.”

  “I know!” Dr. Pinner was nodding sympathetically. “And how can he speak Greek and quote Xenophon? It is all most mysterious!”

  Floyd’s frown deepened. “He speaks Greek? When did he do that?”

  “Thalatta is the Greek word for the sea,” said Dr. Pinner. “And ‘Thalatta! Thalatta!’ is a famous quotation from Xenoph
on.”

  “Who’s Xenophon?” asked Floyd.

  “He was a soldier,” Dr. Pinner explained. “One of the leaders of a Greek army that invaded Persia in about 400 B.C. They got cut off and Xenophon found himself leading these thousands of men through deserts and mountains with no idea where they were going. They were completely lost, until one day they got to the sea … and Xenophon triumphantly shouted, ‘Thalatta! Thalatta!’ because that’s when he knew they’d be all right.”

  “Did he? Why?”

  “Because once they’d found the sea, all they had to do to get back to Greece was follow the line of the coast. There were still plenty of battles and fighting and hard journeys ahead of them, of course, but the point was they weren’t lost anymore. Finding the sea meant Xenophon knew that the army would get home.”

  There was a long moment of silence while Floyd thought about this.

  “Can I ask,” said Dr. Pinner, “if you took the job? At Waterworld?”

  “I said I’d think about it,” said Floyd. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea, though. I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on at school and …”

  Dr. Pinner did not let him finish the sentence. He reached across the table and put a hand on Floyd’s arm to emphasize his next words.

  “Take the job,” he said. “Trust me on this one, Floyd. Take the job.”

  If, as Dr. Pinner believed, Mike’s words on the shore at Bude had somehow meant to imply that Floyd had reached a place from which, like Xenophon, he could safely navigate his way home, that was certainly not how it felt. Not to Floyd anyway. It was more than two years before he saw Mike again, and they were years when, far from being triumphantly sure of the direction he needed to go, Floyd felt increasingly uncertain and … lost.

  He felt lost at home, watching his parents’ sadness as they slowly came to accept that their son had meant it when he said that he never wanted to play tennis again. Floyd’s father kept his word, and neither he nor his mother ever attempted to persuade him to change his mind, but their unspoken disappointment was not easily hidden or ignored. The pain of that decision was something they all still felt on an almost daily basis.