TWICE

by Susanna Kleeman

  ‘You saying dragons exist?’

  ‘I’m saying dragons are code for something they don’t tell you about what this land is, marking the land if you can read it. Guarding treasure. Fire coiling up through their bodies, blazing out of their mouths. Dragons are volcanoes. And all these hills?’ nodding out the window at a line of hills next to us, the ruin now behind us. ‘That you think are hills? They’re volcanoes. Or they were once. Now they’re extinct, chuffed out. Everything here? That you can see? The whole west coast of Britain? From Cornwall to Shetland? The husks and plugs of a line of dormant volcanoes, cooled goo from inside Earth. Full of metal. Very useful. Top secret. That’s what Britain is: the fire line. Beyond the wind, off-limits. Hyperborea, they called it, in those myths you think are Greek. Treasure island, secret land of the dead, where heroes slay dragons, where Oillipheist the dragon lives, where Jason stole the Golden Fleece from a sleeping dragon, where monsters get turned to stone.’

  ‘Steady,’ I said, looking for the mushrooms.

  ‘Britain,’ he said, ‘west Britain and Scotland? Stashed up to the gills. They tell you about water rivers, horizontal, but there are vertical rivers too, some even have names, on maps that aren’t for you. Fire rivers bursting up from the sludge they say we float on. One long seam from when the land got stretched and cracked. When it pulled apart to make the Atlantic. That’s always pulling apart and pushing together, making different oceans and mountains again and again, very slowly. Like Earth is breathing.’

  ‘Don’t get lofty.’

  ‘When all this was underwater, millions of years ago. Britain’s rare. It’s not like that in other places, France. France is limestone, dead sea creatures. Can’t make swords and cell phones out of that. Except the very west of France, Brittany. And west Spain and all down the Atlantic coast, where the volcanoes were, before the crack shifted. Celtic places, Phoenicians or Venetians. Iberia, Hibernia, the Hebrides, Hesperides, Hyperborea, the Hebrews. Where the stone circles are, all the way down into West Africa, from those so-called cavemen of so much earlier who hoisted their massive immovable stone circle maps into the earth from Nigeria to Iceland, to show the next guys where the treasures were. Signposts tattooed into the land for privileged eyes. Laid by metal-mongers, from way back, with deep connection to the land, sifting it for ingredients. People from before, with deep animal knowledge of the world, who got wiped out, almost wiped out, left their traces if you can read them. And whoever told you any of that?’

  ‘So what?’ Tech, secret internet: fair enough. But this pseudo-ancient—what?—geology?

  ‘You’re dumb. That’s how he likes it. Understand: west Britain’s got the shit to rule the world. What Gold and Bronze and Iron and Silicon and Bio Ages are built from. Packed into these hills here: portals to the inside. Imagine what it was like here once: heavy nuggets lying around, before they got snuffled up. Your matter of Britain right there. Inner goo. Imagine when people handled the gold, picked it up, turned it into coins and jewellery, felt the weight of it. Before the Dons locked it up, palmed you off with plastic. Golden apples—gold has properties you know nothing about. Not on the syllabus, not for you to know. It’s for you to dig. Still is. His slaves. Why’s everyone in Britain called “Smith”? The stuff they still dig up here, bleach the land dry for, things you don’t know, not in your periodic table, so much you take on trust. How many elements are there really, what are their powers, have you tested it? Wi-Fi, TV, radios, electricity: how does that really work? Do you know? Do you care? Can you build a computer? Can any dumdum? What goes on down the Works-Only access roads? What’s in all those lorry canisters, oil drums? What’s really going on with the wires, windfarms, pylons, cooling towers, power stations sucking up what from the gash? Look there.’

  16

  He was pointing to something out of his window: an isolated farm, a house and some barns, rusty machines at one side. And a dirty old blue Ford Fiesta parked next to them.

  ‘Perfect,’ he said and made me brake. And then jumped out of the car and, keeping to the edge of the fresh green field, crouched low and made his way to the blue Fiesta and stole it, with his useful wire I guessed: opened the door, started it up, drove it slowly through the field towards me in the car, drew up alongside, engine humming.

  ‘Drive behind me. Quick.’

  The new car he wanted, to cover our tracks, in case they were on to us. If they ruled the world then they’d be onto us. But I did what he said, followed him in the white Nissan for maybe twenty minutes down the single-lane empty road, turning off into something more foresty by a lake.

  It had stopped raining. Nothing but nature, no signs of other machines or humans, not even a track. We halted the two cars among trees and piled all his stuff out of the Nissan and into the new filthy dumb car which smelt of manure. Flora’s note and pencil case, rank clothes and burkas, the green box, the duffle bag, plastic bags and sleeping bags, crusty rugs, bits of tarpaulin, damp maps, the atlas, books, his mushrooms, big plastic water bottles, his big heavy sticks, apples, chilli plant, plastic cups, packs of mouldy white sliced bread, the rest of his worldly goods. And four or five licence plates: he unscrewed the Fiesta’s with his wire and replaced it with one from his stash, put the old plate into the Nissan’s boot. Then we managed the Nissan through thick trees to the steep bank and heaved it into the water, watched it splash and sink.

  ‘They mustn’t find a trace.’

  I lay on the bank knackered, feeling bad and starving, aching all over. I was filthy and damp. I went behind a tree, wiped my hands with leaves. He gave me dry clothes to dry myself with and a pair of his jeans that were shiny with ingrained filth and much too big for me. I put them on, rolled up the legs, pulled a long rag through the waistband as a belt, bunched up the waist and folded it over.

  I tried to squeeze water out of my slippers, it was useless. He gave me more socks and I layered them up. He gave me plastic bags and told me to tie them over my socks as makeshift shoes which would make it hard to drive, slippy on the brakes. But maybe it was his turn now to do some driving, in the keyless new car only he could ignite with his hot wire, my brain gone.

  I sat on the ground trying to get red earth out from under my nails and cuticles with bits of twig. He tossed me something out of one of his plastic bags: an oldish Chinese paperback, poor quality, flimsy cover, but inside good coloured plates. He made me flick through them till I came to the one that was a reproduction of Alan’s Chinese map.

  ‘They call it the Neijing Tu. It means Map of the Inner Flow. A body and Britain.’

  I stared at the familiar picture, smaller than Alan’s, the details hard to see but I knew them in my mind. A Chinese painting of Britain with the west exaggerated, Cornwall, Wales and Scotland the main zones of interest, Chinese people busy at work all over the land, ploughing and spinning, downwards Chinese writing at the side. Jenny was a person, Queen of where Wales was, a Chinese lady with the hair and silk dress, sat at her wheel spinning red yarn which spooled up from Wales over and underground to northern Scotland where it wrapped round behind a mountain to emerge as a rainbow enveloping Bill and Ben, Alan’s names for the wise old men playing ball on either side of Loch Ness. But before Jenny’s red yarn reached Scotland it flew over the two main bulges of the north-western English coastline. The first bulge was kind of where Liverpool and Blackpool are—we called that first bulge ‘Fylde’. The second bulge was the next bit north: the Lake District, known in Scritch as ‘Furness’. That’s where Kraton the centaur was born, in a place called the Ickthwaite Barn, which turned out to be real. Jenny’s second bulge, Jenny 2.

  He gave me apples and bits of stale bread, water from a big plastic bottle, chillies, a pack of mints from the new car. Then he scabbled about by trees and dug up tree roots, shaved them with his knife, brought them to me, told me to suck them, packed with nutrients, something else they didn’t tell us, better for me than my ready meals, even the posh ones. Telling me this was how he’d lived for months afte
r his great botched escape.

  Tough bitter roots, they weren’t doing much for me. He brewed Nescafe on his stove, sparked the flame with flint, metal and dry grass in a tinderbox like Alan’s, poured in sugar from a plastic bag. I drank it from a foam cup, Flora’s note in the folded pencil case jammed into my new jeans pocket, watching him and his survival skills.

  ‘So who’s my mum?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Why do they clone themselves?’

  He shrugged. ‘To pass it on. To live forever through us. To set it up for the future, bypass nature, maximise us, long term. They’re always at it, cloning, their way, before the tech. Pharaohs marrying their sisters, ruling classes marrying each other, keeping the bloodline. Don’s just perfected it—or his grandpa before him. Don’s a clone too you know. The tech trickles down to dumdums in the end.’

  We got into the new old farm-smelling blue Fiesta, he drove us away over dragons. I sat there in the passenger seat with the Chinese map nestled open inside the atlas on my lap, the green welly box at my feet, my dirty grey face in the mirror.

  Two Chrises, gone houses, books, games, red warns, codes, boxes full of messages in tree hollows, Scritches where we had to spy on Covert newcomers, report back to Alan, the cogs of the past meshing together. The old man sitting atop his treehouse, watching out for what, or wrapped in sleeping bags on the torn Chesterfield outside the bus, warming his hands at the brazier crammed with his lit scribblings, making me remember his bus off by heart. The Corpse Dog Clan: relentless enemies bent on total destruction, seeking to find all the terma then torch Britain. Ann Wynn hanging the washing in the backyard facing the Fall. Rain beading down the windows of Merriweather on a grey winter’s afternoon, some pale stew on the hob, me staring out beyond the fence to the bus, Chris and Alan inside. ‘I got nothing for you.’ Tracing my finger up Jenny’s red yarn instead of the atlas, spooling north to merge with the White Road past Bill and Ben up to the mountains of north Scotland and the big crystal on the map there. Which was what, according to him, if it was also a map of the human body? Was Scotland the brain? The old man reeling me in.

  When I woke up we were back in the world on a busy motorway. The M6, the signs said. He was nudging me.

  ‘We need petrol. We need to eat. I need a break.’

  I stretched: stiff and sore. A double-sided service station ahead of us, an old one, built on both sides of the motorway, linked by an overhead bridge. We took the turning into the car park, drove round slowly, parked towards the back by the berm. I unbuckled my seatbelt, put my left hand on the door handle, to exit. But he took my right hand and held it and pinched: SOS.

  17

  We sat there.

  THEY HERE, his left hand pinched into my right hand while the rest of him did other things: looked at me, smiled, told me he was sorry how crazy all this was and we’d be with Flora soon, he could just feel it, I shouldn’t worry.

  NOD, his hand pinched while his mouth said he needed food, petrol, a wee.

  I looked round to try to see who or what he could be talking about.

  STOP, he pinched, meaning I should stop looking round, and jolted his right arm just a fraction so I could see his right hand in his right jeans pocket bunched up and moving as if it were writing something inside the pocket.

  STOP, he pinched, meaning I should stop looking at his hand writing inside his pocket, and he carried on writing or doing whatever while his mouth told me he was so glad to be with me after all this time.

  I sat there, holding his hand, doing nothing, us having our moment to all intents and purposes, to anyone watching from cars or via CCTV or a drone or things hidden in trees. A large Asian family got out of their hatchback, lots of children. He was still writing or doing whatever in his pocket, this Chris-not-Chris with the hole in his head.

  ‘I’m starving,’ he said. ‘Service station burger, you want one?’ giving me a big smile. ‘Food of the realm, I can stretch to it, this once, fortify us,’ his ridiculous coin sticks. ‘Put the burka on, cover your face, hide from the cameras, no bolting. You promise, if you go to the loo?’

  Going to the loo without him. Out of the car, back with other people, built places, back in the world. A burger I could certainly deal with. A burger and a realm service station and a read of whatever he was writing, if he was writing something. A warm full belly and the eye on whatever new spin this was. Then we’d see. People all around.

  ‘Be natural,’ he said, looking at me, meaning all sorts of things.

  I pulled on the burka over my hoodie and big jeans and plastic bag shoes and got out the car, watching for watchers. Innocents in bright clothes bumbled about in cars, chatted on phones, headed inside for burgers. What I’ve seen, I wanted to tell them, my realm fellows. Scritch was real. Disappearing homes.

  He pulled his hood down and got coins out of one of his sticks, then locked the car doors. We walked together in our odd outfits, joined the throng. He reached for my left hand with his right stump hand as if we walked hand-in-hand now, as if things had changed between us, a tight high feeling in my throat, the fear and special knowledge. He passed something into my left hand: a wad of paper from his pocket, spooned my fingers tight round it as if to say don’t read yet.

  ‘Desperate for a wee,’ he said.

  Into the mill of other people and shops, gaudy plastic, screaming children, magazines, fast food, wires, cameras, infra-red, the people on their phones. I clutched his wad in my hand. Neon, cashpoints, massage chairs, the hum of machines, blank kids hollowed by games. Me not running to them, feeling estranged and in his separate story, secret danger. A number well done on me? Read the note, let’s see. Twelve bad hours, maybe, since he’d come for me in my flat, it felt so much longer. We glided for the loos, he gave my hand a last squeeze, turned left for the Men’s, set me free for the Ladies’, his note in my hand.

  Bright white walls, warnings of a male attendant, women coming in and out of cubicles washing their hands, doing their make-up, tending to children, chatting on phones. Guess what about dragons, I wanted to tell them, the slit of my eyes in the mirror, cameras above the tampon machines.

  Inside the cubicle I opened his note. Bad pencil scrawl on two cramped pages of torn lined paper, words written on top of each other cos he’d written it blind in his pocket in the car.

  They R on to us. Being followed. Pinch not speak. Bugging me or car.

  A white van, did U C it? Since B4 Chester, you asleep. Saw inside, know the guy, one of Don’s.

  We R fucked. They R seeing & hearing us.

  Can’t let on that we know.

  May have bugged my eyes or skin. Tech U don’t know about. Trust me please. Don’t write or speak 2 me, real things. Pinch or nothing. I’m contaminated. They may C & hear through me. Don’t speak real.

  We drive on like we haven’t twigged. Stop pre Ickthwaite. I write U new note then, say what next.

  I have plan.

  They need us, what U know, how 2 find Alan.

  Never speak it or write it to me. Pinch only. Like I’m them. Don’t let on. I’ll just speak ancient history to U, nothing of interest 2 them. Do what I say, 4 Flora & Alan. Please.

  Now tear this up, flush down loo.

  We just parked & van parked next to us. So I’m sure now. Check it out when U come back if U don’t believe me, bet it starts up when we do, follows us all the way.

  So, reading this, sitting there on the loo.

  At least there was some external truth validation possible: the white van, checking it out when I came back.

  If I came back. Do a runner.

  To where? Up to Ickthwaite to find Flora and maybe Alan? Find some way to do that before he did, get some car, get clawed up by some machine?

  The maybe, just maybe, that he was telling the truth.

  Letting Alan down, before, disobeying messages. Being closed and smart and glib, being dented and cloudy, at the end of my tether, exhausted.

  Keep it simple. Look for the whit
e van, wait and see it with your own eyes, see if you think anything’s following you. Then decide.

  I tore up the note, flushed it down the loo.

  He was waiting for me outside the Ladies: ‘You didn’t run?’ Grinning but extra desperate behind his face now, scouring my face to see if I was swayed. He took my hand: FLUSHED?

  YES, I pinched back.

  ‘OK?’

  I nodded. He stuffed a fast food bag at me, took my hand, pulled me on through plastic and neon to the outside. ‘Eat up,’ he said in the car park, giving me his new secret look: eat up, we need strength for what may come, this might be our last chance, our last meal.

  ‘OK,’ I said about the food—at least he hadn’t prepared it, ‘at least it’s not mushrooms.’

  ‘You wish,’ he said. ‘This muck?’ holding the bag. ‘Don’s population control.’

  I tugged down my veil and shovelled the slop down right there, wolfed the steaming grease and chemicals, stuffed my face with tumours as we walked back to the car. Parked right next to us: a dirty white van. And dirty, it seemed to me, in a way I’d seen before, the streaked lines. But I couldn’t trust my memory, I couldn’t trust anything.

  NO LOOK.

  But I couldn’t help it, and then had to grab his hand hard because a figure in a black anorak came from behind past us, went over to the van, unlocked it via a remote key, opened the door and climbed in, shut itself off behind tinted windows. Someone not recognisably tall or short, thick or thin, male or female, whose face I hadn’t been able to see hidden in their hood.

  The Chris yanked me towards him, made me walk with him away from the van and car so we sat on the berm for a bit finishing the mulch together while the van sat there. As if we were having another new special moment together, instead of it being because he didn’t want me staring at the van with the black figure inside.