TWICE

by Susanna Kleeman

‘You drugged me.’

  ‘I didn’t drug you,’ staring ahead, stump to nose.

  Something subtle, feelgood, more than coffee or endorphins. Liquid cosh, new ways to control me if old ways wouldn’t. I wanted to shit myself.

  ‘What was in the coffee?’

  ‘Calm down Nim.’

  ‘What have you done to me?’ I said, twisting my ropes, out of control, suspicious of everything I was feeling and also floating free above it all, wanting to laugh more: me in my burka. ‘You fuck.’

  He nodded. ‘Calm down. I didn’t drug you. Don’t lose it. You need to hold it together.’

  ‘Don’t tell me how to feel.’

  He nodded again. ‘They’ve been good for you, for us both, your forums. I even pitched in sometimes, different usernames, sorry, keeping in touch. Insider tips, for the community, the very least I could do. Learnt lots about myself. Some things can’t change but some things can, especially when you’ve seen and done what I have, bottomed out. I’m sorry, Nim. I’m not who I was.’

  This utter shit. ‘Untie me Chris.’

  ‘Not now. Not yet. I’m sorry.’

  Silence for a bit on the empty road. A line of tall lights cast veils in the mist. Imprisoned by him, controlled by him, possibly drugged.

  Take control. Build those bonds.

  Me at my ropes double-time with my new buzz, riding the wrong warm bubble inside me, using his drugs against him.

  ‘So, Chris. Tell me about clones. What are they? Robots?’

  ‘No. People, like anyone, real bodies, grown embryos, cultured in labs to be someone’s copy.’

  ‘How many of you are there?’

  He shrugged. ‘It changes. Accidents, experiments, botches, corporate terrorism, upgrades, clean slates. I don’t know. We’re not a family, as such. We don’t all hang out, count each other. Hospitals of spare parts, I know that much. There were lots of us, once. There’s a selection process. Sean and me were the first good batch.’

  I twisted and bled and rubbed knotted wrists against the back of my chair under the burka, pictured tiny fibres fraying one by one with my new energy.

  ‘Any younger ones?’

  ‘Lots of babies. We’re the oldest surviving, me and Sean. No other adults. That I know. Us and the babies and Don, nothing in between. Except the organs. That I know about. Ever met a baby-you? Ever met your liver? Pretty freaky. A batch of teens got destroyed, I know that much. In what you call the Iraq War.’

  ‘What do you call it?’

  ‘Something else.’

  ‘How come Don lost you? How come you ended up with Alan in Scritchwood?’

  He nodded, stump to nose. ‘Alan stole me in my test tube then hid me out somewhere Don wouldn’t find me. Deep cover in crank camp with the ex-airmen and crusties. No schools, no doctors, no hospitals, no blood. Alan used to work for Don once. Chew on that. I was so right. Nothing’s what it seems.’

  I pictured old Alan warming his hands at his brazier outside the battered green bus. Sticks at his side, foul dressings sellotaped together under long socks, old rum empties stacked in wobbling pyramids. Mahogany Alan of the long-curved fingers and nails and matted white beard and afro, in his rag nappies, his junkyard, muttering his songs. Unlikely ex-henchman of California techno kings.

  ‘What did Alan do for Don?’

  ‘Stuff.’

  ‘Why did he steal you?’

  He shrugged. ‘Found out what Don was up to, turned against him, joined his enemies, wanted me for leverage. I dunno. There’s lots I don’t know.’

  Ah yes, the holes in the story. I could definitely move my hands more freely now in my blood-slickened ropes. I twisted more to make more blood. In front of us: the turning for the M4 and signs: ‘The West’, a picture of a stag, a warning: ‘Adverse Camber’. We turned.

  ‘And what’s the deal with the book?’

  ‘I don’t know. You tell me. What is the book?’ he said.

  I looked at him. ‘The book.’ But he still looked blank. ‘Come off it Chris.’

  ‘I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about. It wasn’t me up there with you in your apartment, flat. I don’t know what he said, what book he wanted, he’s not me. I swear on my life.’

  Yes but. Because my Chris, my real Chris, the one I’d grown up with, would have known what I meant when I said the book. Because only one book was the book when we were growing up. Because of Scritch, which we played with Alan and Flora and Tal and other kids—the book was how we coded up secret messages, ‘Scritch notes’, for Alan’s secret agent world, clues and mission hide-and-seek laid out by Alan in the Fall and down by the water. And the book was at the core of it.

  He saw me looking at him, whoever he was with his stump. He saw my eyes.

  ‘What’s the book?’

  ‘Shh. Hold on. Do you hear sirens?’

  I couldn’t hear anything. I could only sit there trying to see him behind his Chris mask. What if there were two of them and I was strapped in here with the other one? ‘Grag Medusa,’ I said. And he looked blank at that too. Pure ice chill cutting through my buzz, bringing me to. I couldn’t move. He was a void, like Chris but other. With his stump, up to what? Looking at me, doing the maths, purest coldness, some robot? And the first one in my flat: him too or Chris or something else?

  My dead phone.

  Then I did hear sirens: an ambulance, coming fast towards us the wrong way up the hard shoulder.

  ‘OK, the book, since you’re testing me.’ And he pressed his foot down and speeded up and overtook and put space between us and sirens and ambulances and told me all about the book: correct info, what it was, how we used it, stuff any Covert kid would know, stuff only he and I would know. Private games, between him and me, triple meanings, when we were trying to outfox Alan who never wanted us together, ways we used the book to give each other secret messages: when and where to meet up in the broken house, stuff I’d forgotten, lovers’ codes. Nothing ever recorded or written down, nothing the internet could have told him. I felt.

  ‘Don’t test me,’ he said. ‘I’m me. Feel it. You know me. You really think I’m that cold fuck up in your flat before? What did he know? Not much. Primed, sure, piped info, chitter-chatter. But no real details, not what I know, you and me deep. There’s only so much you can fake. Feel it, if you can, if you can feel anything. I’m me. Cut me some slack if I forget things, if I’m confused. They did things to my head, so much’s happened, I forget things, you help me remember. And I’m always half listening to you and not listening to you, listening for them. The motherfucking book. Of course.’

  The sirens were gone. I stared at him addled from my burka. Gaunt scratched face, bits of bush in his hair, cockamamie tales, him knowing all the deets just not straight away, the same but different to the first debonair Mr Finger-Perfect up in my flat the first time. Pale, thin, ill, smell, clothes, stump, stubble, aura, desperation. If he’d said ‘the book’ to me I’d have known which book right away.

  But all that meant more to me than it had to him. He never loved Scritch like I did and had grown to hate it, because it was Alan’s game and he’d grown to hate Alan and any restriction. Plus he’d been busy since then, formatting our new world. Scritch would be some blip on his landscape, there’d been plenty of games for him since then. And maybe they had done things to his head, would make sense.

  And that moment before of pure coldness: of him being other, doing his maths: wasn’t that just him, hadn’t I had the exact same feeling during our last days? In the forest in Oregon, our last trip, among the redwoods, when I looked into him and saw only nothing, sensed he might kill me to blot me out, so he could start fresh without bother. And he’d definitely been Chris then, a long slow few years of whittling down to his core. His face that day among the huge trees, watching me search for him from up on a boulder above me, gripping a rock in his unstumped hand. A mask with utter chill behind it, me feeling I knew nothing about him at all despite growing up with him, always loving
him, what I’d thought was him, the void he’d become. And still was. Doing all this now, pretending to be mad, tech conspiracy, saying anything, to get his hands on the book again for some reason. Insane power greed. Insane ambition. Typical Chris.

  ‘Why the fucking book? Are you OK?’ because he was driving with one hand on the steering wheel and the other clutched to his left temple like he was in pain and he was sweating.

  ‘Yeah. They…did stuff to me. It comes on sometimes. It’ll pass in a minute.’ Then he lunged across me, still driving but reaching for something in my footwell: a plastic bag.

  We swerved.

  ‘For fuck’s sake.’

  Lucky it was late and the roads so empty.

  ‘Sorry.’

  He grabbed a handful of whatever was in the bag—brown dried twigs, plant stuff, bad-smelling, Chinese medicine perhaps—and shoved it into his mouth.

  ‘Pull over. Let me drive.’ A surge of excitement: my big chance.

  ‘I’ll be OK. This…helps.’

  ‘What is it? It smells disgusting.’

  ‘It is disgusting. But it works. “Herbal medicine”. My last bag. It’s been six months: rationing this, hiding out in woods, eating plants, stealing cars, scraping cars, running from people you can’t run from. I’m sorry I’ve messed you in this. It’s fatal.’

  Six months during which he’d still been posting on social media, being charitable, doing press releases, I’d been following.

  Assistants. Schedulers. Bots. Any old way.

  ‘Pull over,’ I said sweetly when he’d calmed down, stopped sweating. ‘Untie me. I’ll drive. You’re sick. I’ll drive us to Flora.’

  ‘You won’t. I’m fine. I’m doing this. I’m sorry.’ He put his head in his hand again, we swerved again.

  ‘For fuck’s sake.’

  He sat back up. ‘I’m OK.’

  Him so out of control, driving me, killing us by accident

  Or just dodging the awkward questions?

  I breathed and watched him till he got steady.

  ‘Why does Sean want the book?’

  ‘OK,’ stump to nose. ‘It’s pointless but. This is how I think it goes. I wanted to leave them, needed help to make my plan. Where could I turn? Not you, you’re the last person I wanted caught up in this. Only one person, who stole me in the first place, set us up with all the games.’

  My stomach opened. ‘Alan’s dead.’

  ‘Bollocks. Alan’s not dead and you know it. So-called Alan. Not my dad. Your dad. Like I think you know.’

  ‘Fuck you Chris.’ Grenading me with any-old to keep me offkilter.

  ‘I saw you in the town halls. I went to Maldon in your phone.’

  The peeping Tom, scrying in at me just back from New York with my new name on my search for some kind of love and family, any trace of Alan or my parents. Trying to find Ann Wynn, my uncle’s widow, who they’d left me with. Lurking with me outside the newbuild in Maldon as I talked to her niece, finding out Ann Wynn was dead.

  A growth, the niece said. Eaten from the inside, her black bitterness. And the niece the same, leaning in the doorway: ‘I got nothing for you. And there’s nothing left from the old man if that’s why you’re here. Oh yes, he paid her.’

  Alan paid Ann Wynn to bring me up. The niece saying she didn’t know anything more and me not finding out anything more since.

  And this shit listening in.

  ‘You should know the truth about our past.’

  Alan’s your dad. The niece hadn’t said that, it was Chris now saying it, to play me for traction.

  Alan dark Indian or something, me pale northern, keep it simple.

  But Alan had said he was Chris’s dad and Chris was pretty pale and hadn’t I felt something down the years? Alan had been like a dad, the closest thing I’d had growing up. Until he vanished and I went along with what Chris wanted instead of what Alan had told us to do if he ever vanished: sold the bead, swanned off to New York.

  Alan and his games.

  Park it for now.

  The shape of Alan’s legs, the three moles on his dark left calf arranged in exactly the same pattern as the three moles on my light left calf.

  Coincidence, wish-fulfilment.

  You wanted a Daddy and he knows it. Don’t let him whet you with false papas.

  ‘Alan’s not my dad and he’s dead,’ I said on the big empty road. Fuck compassion, playing along. ‘Don’t try it, Chris. They found the body,’ when we were in New York, Flora told us. Face-down, bloated in a ditch, five months dead. His last bender.

  ‘Decomposed. He didn’t have a face. They ID-ed him by his buttons. Scritchwood, Alan, Scritch games—what d’you think all that was really? Parked you with Ann Wynn to have you close but apart, for your safety. Seeded all those games into us. You ever found any trace of your parents?’

  ‘It was him.’

  ‘It wasn’t. Some corpse dug up and left in his place. Alan’s not dead, or least he wasn’t last I checked, maybe he is now, your daddy. After tonight and Sean. I found out things, when I had access.’

  ‘You are such a fuck,’ the rough ropes sawing my flesh.

  ‘I have to find Alan and so do you, he’s the only way out of this. And they mustn’t find him, though they now will thanks to you when he’s dodged them all these years. Letting him down again. And now Flora’s in big danger.’

  This fuck. ‘You’ll say and do anything.’

  ‘It’s the truth. You can’t get your head round it, course you can’t. It’s too big. It’s taken me years. We need petrol.’

  In front of us: the turn-off for Reading Services.

  ‘We don’t need petrol.’

  The dial said we had half a tank left. ‘The dial’s stuck. You have to work it out with the mileage.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  But he swerved and turned us off the motorway through trees to the pumps. He didn’t look at me, just pulled his hood down low, got out and filled the tank while I sat tied there in my burka riding my panic and drugged buzz. Then he opened the back door and poured a stream of coins out of one of his ridiculous heavy sticks into a plastic bag, pulled his hoodie tight, told me not to scream or he’d gag me again, that he’d be back in five.

  ‘I need a wee,’ I said.

  ‘Do it in your pants. It’s dangerous, they’ll have cameras. And you’ll try something.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  But when he took the stick and the bag and slammed the door and locked it and his door with the key and pocketed the key and left me tied there to go and pay, walking with the stick, swinging his plastic bag, when he vanished from sight inside the neon shop in front of me to go pee himself, perhaps, I started to shout, with my ungagged mouth, I writhed around tearing myself, trying to loosen my ropes. I screamed and shouted—and his window was open, a sliver.

  But it was so late and there was no one else there at the pumps, except the guy in the shop and the shop wasn’t close and had thick glass windows and in my black burka in the car in the darkness no one could see me writhing there, screaming, trying my utmost with the ropes.

  Then I saw something—a fox? Some kind of animal flitting across the forecourt.

  Then I saw something else: a white shape. Someone coming towards me, an old woman nodding at me, in a light grey coat with a handbag, coming for me.

  I screamed for help.

  She came close. I nodded at his window, open a sliver. I shouted I was tied up, being held prisoner, that I was locked in but maybe she could force the window down.

  She came past the pumps and looked at me through the window. I looked at her: old dreamy, lost, thin, fragile. Not the sort to push things down.

  ‘Get the man in the shop,’ I said, breathing hard.

  But she slipped her thin fingers in the space between the pane and the frame and forced down and the window shuddered down a bit. Her face was silver, her white hair was short, her lipstick was on wrong, she was covered in powder, she had an owl brooch in her lapel
and the window shuddered down enough for her to lean into the car and with her long arm to reach me leaning towards her, to stroke my cheek in the burka, to shh me, to jab her long pink nail hard into my cheek.

  I screamed.

  Chris was behind her, pulling her off, prodding her with his stick: ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

  She had plastic bags, her coat was filthy, she was some kind of bag lady, a tramp. She started laughing, she was drunk: ‘Sorry, sorry.’

  He pushed her towards the pumps. She sank slowly down into a giggling heap.

  He unlocked his side, bundled in with his stick, breathing hard.

  ‘You OK? Did she draw blood? Let me see,’ coming in close with hankie, dabbing at me.

  A little blood. My cheek throbbed. How strange.

  ‘Are you OK? My darling. Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

  8

  I freaked out for a bit then. The broken window let in damp air, he blathered on: was I OK? Was the woman part of it or some random freak, he wasn’t sure. ‘Hope for the best, plan for the worst,’ which was from Alan.

  ‘The blood’s not good, I should have checked under her nails, I should have checked her. But we had to get out.’ He reached over, touched my cheek: ‘Does it hurt?’

  I flinched. My cheek stung and felt dirty: pierced by a freak. I wanted to touch and clean it. I had to get out. I was breaking down.

  ‘Untie me.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I won’t do anything. I’ll help you.’

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’

  Here after Reading the land was different, less flat. Cats’ eyes gleamed, lighted cones shed misty halos, red and white rivers of cars glittered up and down the hill before us. In the clearing sky you could see the nearly-full moon and stars—or were they satellites, capturing everything, brimful of data?

  ‘Let’s take the old road,’ he said.

  Closed, shut off in his own thoughts, not looking at me, staring ahead. We swerved fast and exited, took roundabouts, got onto smaller roads: single lane, fringed with fields and trees, the smell of wet earth wafting through the broken window, dark and empty, cats’ eyes glinting the path for us. Just us: no other cars, no copters, nothing and no one except me and him.