TWICE

by Susanna Kleeman

  ‘Seems clear. For now. Though you can never tell.’

  I watched him as if for the first time, all past baggage junked. Something Chris-shaped, I couldn’t tell. We drove too fast over a bridge, through a Christmas-decorated empty town, festive menus, through countryside beyond in silence, me oiling blood on the ropes, trying to breath and find morsels of buzz, trying to forget my opened cheek. A thin, dark, open country road, no signs, him driving, staring straight ahead, white fingers and stump gripping the steering wheel, not reaching for the atlas. In the grip of something, me needing to take charge if I could pull it together, me having to pull it together, there being no choice, my life depending on it.

  ‘Where are going? Where are we, Chris?’

  ‘The old Bath Road. The road west to Wales from London before they built the M4. A Roman road cut on purpose through the landscape to desecrate it. We’re driving into charged land.’

  ‘Really,’ I said.

  ‘Sure. This bumpy landscape? The little hills? If it was day you’d see them. Take my word: the landscape here’s small hills. Slice the tops off and you’ll find dead kings and queens inside, or their looted traces, curled up on their sides like babies in wombs, waiting for rebirth, aligned to the sun or moon or some personal star. Though the stars are in different places now to how they’d be back then, long slow rotations. This is ancient altered land we’re driving through, a valley of kings as built as Giza or any modern city, coded with secrets for those who can read them.’

  ‘We can sort this.’

  ‘Where d’you think we are?’

  ‘The A4?’ because of a stone marker.

  ‘We’re on the White Road, heading for the fire. We’re in Hyperborea,’ he said.

  The White Road was from Alan, part of the Chinese map we played with in Scritch, a map of Britain thousands of years ago when the Chinese ruled it which Alan had up in the bus. Which Chris had never had much time for. But now things had changed, it seemed.

  We were driving, he said, towards the meeting point of three natural chalk ridges packed with flint. ‘The one we’re on starts in Norfolk, one comes east from Dover, one comes up south from Weymouth and the Isle of Wight.’

  ‘There’s just one White Road, straight north-south,’ I said, to be chatty. The White Road was Dorset up to John O’Groats, not three roads sideways.

  ‘This is the real one. A Stone Age motorway, for Romans and Vikings, for much earlier people. The ways into Britain, a way into Britain, to the bits that matter, the matter of Britain. White from the bones of tiny dead sea creatures, from when this whole landscape was underwater whatever millions of years ago. And what d’you think’s at the point where the seams meet?’

  ‘No idea,’ hard at it with the ropes.

  ‘The ritual lands,’ staring ahead in his dark dream or its impersonation. ‘Avebury. Stonehenge.’

  Ever since ever I hated this type of guff and he ought to have known it. The Merrie Folk section of the Covert, trees decked with ribbons by bearded druidessess—desperate naffery.

  ‘Silbury Hill. You been there? You should. No one does, a pyramid in Wiltshire, older than the Great Pyramid in Egypt. White once, now overgrown. A built thing, like everything round here, made by people who made this landscape: stripped the trees, brought the sheep, shaped the hills. One huge earthwork, this part of Britain is. Neolithic Disneyland up ahead. Silbury Hill, the great white lie in its moat, the moon in its reflection. A white island, a spiral castle—you know spiral castles? Where you die and get reborn? Take the dumdums to the underworld, sell them the moon you made with your mirrors, stun them with fake magic, so they’ll do what you tell them, high on your potions.’

  ‘What are you now,’ a friendly chide: ‘crank Wikipedia?’

  ‘What do you think Wikipedia is? Who d’you think wrote it?’

  ‘Let me guess.’

  ‘Independent, free, massive, global. An inclusive force for good. Anything like that’s bound to have Don and chums behind it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To be the word. To control knowledge, present their fake version. There’s only one place people look for anything these days. Your one-stop-shop. Who reads books anymore? Not that they didn’t write the books too, back in the day.’

  ‘Why control knowledge?’

  ‘Don’t be dumb. They’ve always been in control, from way back, of everything, your mind, what goes into it. All post-truth, always has been. Fuddling you with their big news, outrageous presidents, viruses. Wikipedia, phones: just their latest thing. At it forever, thousands of years. Spinning you crud while they’re up to their stuff: duping delight, global theatre. That’s what I found out, that’s what I got to tell, that’s what this is.’

  ‘Come off it,’ I said gently after a while. Secret techno elites I could just about take but thousands of years? ‘Ancient too? That’s what this is? I’m sure you’ve got good reason but I feel sorry for you, if you really believe this kind of crap now, if this isn’t some joke.’

  ‘Joke’s on you.’

  Which it was, me in my burka. ‘But,’ I said, and told him what I always thought when I heard people spout this type of conspiracy thinking: that they were sweet innocents who wanted to feel there was some kind of order out there in our crazy pointless incompetent world where’s there’s nothing but everything falling apart.

  ‘That’s what they want you to think,’ he said. ‘Not believing in the world is the greatest taboo, right? It’s about class and taste. Things are arranged so you get marked out as lower if you look at things this way, refuse what’s on offer. It’s only small secrets that need keeping. Big secrets keep themselves, by public incredulity. But let me tell you some things you won’t find on your Wikipedia. What d’you know about electromagnetics? Bioelectricity?’

  Not much, shitting Nora. Soon he’d have to sleep, we both would, it was so late, there’d be some chance. Until then: step back, nod, smile, compassion, build those bonds, work the ropes, don’t fight back, don’t get caught up, one swift blow, let him do his haunted jumble.

  ‘Electrical paths criss-cross the Earth,’ he said, speeding us down the dark glitter. It was to do with Earth’s magnetism and the reactions of everything to each other: the electric pop as cells grow, the sizzling contact of protons and metals. ‘All official unarguable dumdum “scientific facts”. But if you’re sensitive—and many animals are,’ he said: pigeons or those talented cats and dogs who, when lost, find their way back to homes and owners across continents, or sharks who sense their prey by the merest electric charge, one careless fish wink—then electromagnetic paths also became a guide.

  ‘One thing about chalk: it’s the great insulator. Walk the chalk even in blackness and feel yourself swaddled from the crackle in a great safe tunnel. If you’re attuned to these things—and some people are and were—you close your eyes and use your nose, as they used to say, and flow through the chalk and know at once if other creatures are near or if you’ve strayed off-path. Feel the land inside you. Helped by smell, that other great lost sense, also located in the nose.’

  ‘Are you attuned?’ I said. ‘Did Don attune you?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said and smiled. ‘Don and others. Look,’ he said closing his eyes: ‘I can drive with my eyes closed.’

  ‘Don’t,’ I screamed. ‘Jesus,’ I shouted when he opened his eyes after ten pure terror seconds of him fast faultless driving with his eyes scrunched tight shut—he was laughing.

  ‘Sorry,’ squeezing my bound knee. ‘I won’t hurt you,’ stump to nose.

  Jesus fucking Christ, gimped there next to that loon. The road was straight, it wasn’t so hard, I supposed—once I could breathe—to drive with your eyes shut for a bit on a straight Roman road, and he was pretty good at driving, always had been, if totally reckless.

  Or schooling you to fear him so you do what he says.

  Grag Medusa.

  ‘Come on, Chris,’ I said, mustering a lighter tone. ‘I thought we didn’t have ti
me for this. Flora’s in danger. Right? Let’s stop messing around. Let’s get to her. Let’s do this.’

  ‘Humouring me.’ He shook his head, the words coming out in chokes. ‘So bad, being with him, but so good, the privilege of finding out. Thinking of you the whole time, what you’d do, telling you one day. Never thinking it would happen. And here we are and it’s so fucked up and you’re so closed and smart and sly.’

  He was crying, I’d never seen him cry, the whole time I’d been with him.

  ‘Miss-Clicky-Normal, picking up your pay cheque, suckered like the rest of them,’ tears running down his cheeks. ‘You’re prepared to accept electricity and magnetism in their light bulbs and machines, inanimate things—you have to accept it: you see it and use it every day. You can probably even accept some animals and plants are tuned into it, to sense prey or navigate, their sixth sense. But start talking about it naturally streaming over the planet and us being able to sense and harness it and navigate by it? Watch them laugh, watch the dumdums scarper. Unplug yourself, understand the lie. Why are we so exempt? We’re animals too. Once the greatest animals, kings of the senses. That’s how we got to now: where we rule and can tap away on phones and don’t need senses at all. Except sight, that’s how they’ve got you.’

  ‘Chris…’

  ‘All those dumdum scientists denying there’s anything magical going on—apart from that one moment once in the barren universe when life started. They’re forced to admit one single magical thing happened once. Right?’

  I didn’t know. I didn’t have a fucking clue. ‘I guess.’

  ‘But what if it always happens? What if everything, every single rock is alive and fizzing on an endless pulsing mesh that people before knew and used, that Don knows and uses, that Don and the Dons have cut you off from, kept for themselves?’

  We were on a tree-lined stretch just before Marlborough, according to the signs. ‘Steady,’ I said, us weaving all over the road.

  ‘I might need a break,’ he said, holding his head.

  You might indeed, mateykins. He lurched left, we swerved off-road, ploughed down some track into woods. The car jolted, we nearly hit a tree, came to a halt nose-deep in branches, yellow berries, vines. Then he cut the engine so we sat there in the dark. I screamed. He moved towards me, down to my footwell, to his bag of brown stuff, grabbed some, stuffed it into his mouth.

  ‘Mushrooms.’

  ‘Not what you think. Not magic mushrooms.’ He put his head in his hands.

  ‘Chris…’

  ‘Shut up. Shut up. Do not speak.’ He stuffed his mouth, sat there chewing and rocking, the tears gone, a low voice now. ‘I’m a shit. I lied to you tonight and you know it. You’ve seen through me, you always did. I’m a fucking sham.’

  9

  I breathed and watched his profile from my burka in the car among the old bare trees.

  ‘I told you I didn’t know about the book. I lied to you. I knew about it. I wanted it myself. I’ve got a message I need to decode. I need the book to decode it, I knew you had it. That’s why I came to you. To use you. Again. But I didn’t want to admit that. I set them on you, they must have been following me, I didn’t know that, that’s why they set Sean on you. They must have the message too and now they’re heading to Flora so they can decode it. I led them to both of you. I’m sorry. I’ll never lie to you again.’

  We sat among the moonlit trees.

  ‘It’s a message from Alan. There are old networks and resistance. He taught us how to contact them, how to contact dead people. Do you remember?’

  And he told me about what I’d forgotten: the Cuckfield Board, a place in Scritch with crooked trees and globe-shaped hedges where you went to talk to the dead.

  ‘It’s a real place,’ he said: a church in a village in Sussex called Cuckfield. ‘Easy to figure out Scritch once you know it’s for real. Very old, the trees in the graveyard. Inside the church: thirteen arches, a carved skull, a visitors’ book on a black wooden board,’ like in Scritch. ‘I knew I had to get out, I knew only Alan could help me. I sensed he was alive. I remembered Cuckfield. I escaped there, opened the visitors’ book, wrote some comment, signed it Boyd Parsons like he taught us. I went away, waited three days. I come back: there’s a message for me there, from “Leslie Snags”,’ one of Alan’s Scritch names. ‘A message written in Scritch, for me, from Alan, telling me what to do now, I need the book to decode it. I tore it out, but Don must have been there before me, waiting for me, recording it, following me to you so they’d know how to decode it, knowing enough to know the book will crack it, so they can track Alan down and get what they want.’

  Mad bollocks. ‘Why lie? You swore on your life.’

  ‘I had to. My life’s finished. This is the last thing I’ll do. I got the message in Cuckfield, couldn’t understand it, knew it was in Scritch, knew I needed the book, knew it was with you. Didn’t want to bring you into this, knew the risks, that bringing you into it was killing you. But. Can you imagine how much I’m looking forwards to turning up at yours and asking you for it? And then—I don’t have to, cos he’s been before me and you’re already talking about the book and I can…use that.’

  ‘Use that?’ Icy feelings, established techniques. A liar who’d lied to me before. Shifting stories, like the old days, exploitation, hard cold cunning, nothing crazed about it. What the fuck was he up to?

  ‘I know. It’s bad. I’m sorry. But. Plus: I wasn’t really sure about you, if you were you, who you were by now. Perhaps they’d got to you. But. I know now, who you are, that you’re you and I can trust you.’

  ‘How do you know I’m me and you can trust me?’

  ‘I just do. Cos I’ve been with you. Again. Cos I can feel you, the real you. Cos I can still feel. Can you? That’s all we got in the end.’

  Silver words.

  ‘You lied to me. So you could just pretend—what?—that you were back cos you were sorry, desperate? Not just cos you wanted something from me. And introduce the book stuff bit by bit? And so what?’

  ‘Not much. Except that I am also sorry and desperate. But that doesn’t matter.’

  Oh yeah, I knew by now: the stakes were much higher than piddling old scores between him and me. Vast ancient conspiracies we were talking here.

  ‘But what about “Sean”?’ I said. My supposed first visitor, full-fingered ‘Sean’ whom this lying stump Chris swore was a whole separate other person, his long-lost clone if you please, someone cleaner and healthier and fatter, stuff you couldn’t fake except maybe you could. ‘Sean’, who’d swaggered in and straight-out asked for the book—so he could track down and wipe out Alan and some kind of resistance to the world’s secret rulers? ‘So how come “Sean” knew about the book?’

  ‘Cos they’ll’ve got Tal somehow, Tal told them. Or I did—they’ve had me in comas, harvested me over and over. Every bit of my mind and memory is mirrored in some satellite or data hub in Antarctica, you betcha. Plus their other ways. They always know everything, almost everything. Except what the message means, how to find Alan. Hidden by old ways. Which they probably know by now, he’ll think it was a trap, that I tricked him.’ He clutched his head. ‘We got to get to Flora before they do.’

  Flora, whom he was so concerned about. Asleep in bed in Wales now, I hoped. Or with Sean, was it even possible? And us driving to her, maybe even getting there, then what? I sat there among the trees. Him versus Flora and Rhodri, her boyfriend. Him with his sticks and lord knew what else.

  ‘Bollocks. You pretend. You kidnap me and tie me up and lie to me and hurt me. Fuck off, fuck off, whoever you are.’

  He turned his white hollow face to me. ‘Cut me some slack. You don’t know what I’ve seen, I’ve seen everything. I’ve peeped into everyone, every last text. The mystery’s gone for me. I’ve seen what people are, endless duplicity, even from you. I can’t trust anyone now, even you. I hate myself, I hate everyone. I’ve told you everything now. I wish it had never happened. But it’s the trut
h.’

  I looked away down the avenue of trees.

  ‘Put yourself in my place,’ I said. ‘We grow up together, we run away, you lie to me endlessly, you belittle and betray me, make me feel bad about myself, string me along, you fuck me over, you treat me with contempt, you slink off without saying, I never see you again. Then you turn up out of the blue and do all this to me and tell me this beyond bullshit story about the book and clones and tech and electricity and Alan and secret world rulers. And then you tell me it’s not exactly the way you said it because you can’t trust anyone cos you’ve read all our texts. Face it: you came cos you want the book, for whatever reason. You came to use me again.’

  ‘I came cos I had to. No choice. This is worse than me lying to you. This is me drawing you in. I’ve sacrificed you, you have to know that. And you’re the only thing I care about.’

  ‘Don’t even.’

  ‘For real. It doesn’t matter now but you’re the only one and I’m so selfishly glad to be here with you to say all this to you after all this time. For real, no cams, no screens. I’ll say it, you can’t stop me, nothing to lose. You and me. Fuck everything else. The only true thing: growing up with you, the feeling between us. That I betrayed. Watching you for years, through your cams. Your every move but not able to talk to you. Haunting your screens. Getting to know you so well, better than I knew you before, better than anyone knows you, better than you know you. Yeah, super creepy. The old bad dream of being with you again. And you feel it too, you can’t lie to me: searching for me through the screens. Talking into the ether and I heard you, did you think I might?’

  So twisted. Don’t fall for it. A deep dark creep of the internet, unhinged by the tech he’d got mangled in. Or a networked prince, knowing just what to say.

  ‘Yup, I’m a creep, but who loves like that anymore? Now he’s plugged you all into your mirrors? Glutted you with porn? Did you sense me, did you hope? In bars and movie theatres. In the background. In your dreams—I know how you dreamed of me, like I dreamed of you. In the flesh—the only thing that matters. Fuck tech, fuck dreams. The risks I took. Once in that Uber? That was too much—I thought you recognised me, did you recognise me? So intense. Sourcing and fucking women who looked like you or seemed like you or were nothing like you, faces, behaviours. My whole-world catalogue. You don’t know, where I’ve been, what I’ve done, the power I’ve had, looking up every dirty thought of everyone, rifling through kinks, source whatever itch. Hook up by seeming chance with anyone anywhere, knowing all about them up front, engineering the meet. Scanning for faces that look like you, don’t look like you. And not one of them meaning anything. And no going back to you, I knew that. But here I am back and it’s the last thing I want and I don’t care anymore, if you believe me, if you don’t. And you don’t, you can’t, it’s too big. And it still hurts, it clouds you, what I did to you not just in the end but always: lied, not loved you like I should have loved you, like I learnt to love you when I lost you. Cold little empty boy drunk on ambition, craving the world to fill my nothing. That’s all gone now. But for you the dent’s still there, you can’t open your eyes, even to this. You’ve shut yourself up, you’re warped, you can’t chuck it off and see this clear, you never will. And his tech hooking you, blurring you, you aren’t even you any more, no one is. But it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t stop me loving you, even if you don’t exist, I should never have brought you into this. I’ll manage alone somehow. I’ll set you free. You can go.’