TWICE

by Susanna Kleeman

  ‘Our sign, to mark our stay,’ he said. ‘We’ll come back, bring real champagne,’ when all this was done and dusted, bring Alan too, the whole gang. Our haven, out of harm’s way, our tramp honeymoon suite in the tramp trawler, keep the champagne in the broken cold box in the corner. Our rendezvous, if things went tits up, if we lost each other: come back here, OK? If we could. The fallback, like you always did in Scritch, could never be too careful. ‘Tramp champagne’ would be our codeword.

  There were things he wanted to say but not now and not in words—which were also part of it, of course: alphabets, the deepest tools to control our minds, to prime us for their computers, get us before we were born.

  He took the lighter, some rags, nails and a bit of rusty metal from the deck.

  He helped me up and out, a bit steadier on my feet. We squelched across mud in the dark and then onto the orange-lit road in our coat-and-trash get-ups, hoods down, odd walks versus posture spies, poisoned tarmac, tampered animals, the whole shimmering coated watching world.

  There’d be a path along the coast, he said, there always was. He shuffled me past cars and innocents on their phones. We came to houses and a pub and a sign for a nature trail: bingo. We followed the sign behind the pub and found another sign: three miles to Barrow.

  I stood at the gate and he crouched and touched the trail. Probably a railway track once, he said, to shuttle apples. Other ways now: drones and tunnels—there were lots of tunnels, Britain was riddled with them, the world was riddled with them, cut into the limestone under us now even out to sea, if you knew which pub basement or Chinese restaurant backstairs to walk down.

  He pulled our hoods right down.

  ‘Don’t be fooled,’ he said. From here on in: say cheese for the cams, no talking, only pinching if I had to. ‘Close your eyes, you can always sense everything, if you’re being watched, if you’re being filmed. If it twitches.’

  I stood there holding his hand. The whole world twitched.

  We went through the gate.

  A country path, fringed with bushes and trees with last yellow leaves at tip branches. It was dark but not that dark even though there were clouds and not much moon. We walked, me with him in my sick trance. A few dog owners passed us and nodded and once a cyclist sped by, helmet and earphones on, a camera fixed to his forehead. Something strange started to happen: a white glow ahead and then orange flames jetting into the sky, and a bad smell and the sound of something.

  ‘Gas works,’ he said, and we came to them after a while where the trees went away and the path widened into a huge flat place. The lights of Barrow up ahead, mud sea to our left and to our right this bank of massive spaceship-looking metal monsters caged behind barbed wire, orange flames outside shooting up to the sky.

  NOT GAS, he pinched. Something else, which he knew about and I didn’t, which they were busy with up west Britain, gobbling away 24/7 sucking juice up from the crack.

  ‘What’s that?’ I said, slow and stupid, cos there was something else: music, drifting slowly at us from Barrow lit up to our left across the water.

  We stopped and listened to the slow haunted pop floating across the darkness of the bay under the massive sky.

  ‘From a boat,’ he said slowly. ‘I think. From a cruise ship, some party.’ He was shaking.

  We limped on, towards the music. A flock of birds flew up at the water’s edge. He dragged me on, not letting me rest, didn’t speak or pinch now. We came to a blue pill box and a sign and a choice of path: carry on up the road to Barrow or turn left for the docks?

  We stood there in light drizzle.

  ‘Hold on,’ he said.

  He wanted to check something by the docks. He had a bad feeling, needed to check something, wouldn’t say what. Him basically carrying me by then, pulling me down a slatted wooden path lit by orange lamps, the mud sea to our left, a wrecked car stuck in nose-down. To our right: a big calm field of water that was a dock, Barrow and the music twinkling ahead.

  And then something massive in front of us lit up.

  He gripped me to stop.

  Right there in front of us ahead, alongside the path a little way up, bright white and wrong. Huge, in the blackness, right up against the side of the path perhaps five minutes ahead, on a different scale, shining, playing sad Asian pop.

  ‘We’re fucked,’ he said.

  23

  Another secret gas works, I thought. But it was a ship, a lit-up massive ugly container ship, weirdly close to us given how huge it was, how deep a dock it would need. The path we stood on, I now saw, must actually be a super-high wall cloaked by water with this giant bit of lit-up industry at its side, ugly like a shark, wrung against the weeds of the path and the whole dark rotting muddy dockside.

  ‘Fucked,’ he said again. Then he dragged me back along the dizzy wall to the pill box and the signs and ran us up the other path towards the city. We stopped, doubled over, for a moment under the railway bridge.

  ‘Don?’ I said.

  He nodded, shaking and sweating.

  Don’s ship. ‘Don’s here? After us? What do we do?’

  ‘Run away.’

  CARRY ON, he pinched.

  WHAT DON WANT?

  His white eyes through the hood: ‘To gobble me up.’

  We raced through Barrow in the rain, past people in cars and on the streets on their phones, past squat red-brick houses, cranes, eerie looming massive zigzag hangars on the water that were huge rooms, secret enclosed docks for Don’s machines. Early evening in a city, maybe ten days since he’d come for me in London so long ago. Shops, the realm on their phones. They looked at us in our plastic bags with our hoods right down, filthy tramps in mad panic. He stopped people, asked where Vengeance Street was, they didn’t know. A young woman got out her sparkly phone. We shrank back but it didn’t matter now.

  ‘It’s on Walney,’ she said, showing us her screen.

  An island, at Barrow’s far west, joined to the city by a bridge, she showed us. You followed the road round past the superstore then over the bridge. Twenty-one minutes by foot.

  He studied her screen, turning the route into an animal shape or story in his head?

  We ran on, him pulling me past street lights, brick walls, massive warehouses, fences, mess, shops, docks, machines. We saw the island across the narrow mud then crossed a bridge with black-wrought spiked iron and upright barriers, got to Walney on the other side.

  Small boats, street lamps, small grim pebble-dash houses, empty roads. Him bearing me on round the encircling road and down residential streets with back alleys, turning to see what was following us but seeing nothing but the lit mess of Barrow proper behind us, the huge zigzag rooms where Don’s monsters got grown.

  We found Vengeance Street, saw the sign, followed it down. Blank small grey two-up two-downs, tiny windows, pointy black roofs, each one slightly different, ramshackle.

  ‘What’s the number?’

  I stopped outside number 226. A yellow door, no lights, net-curtained windows.

  HERE?

  Eyes watched us from a neighbouring window: a cat. Warning stickers: ‘My terrier lives here’, ‘Beware of the tortoise’, which Alan used to hang on the front door of his bus. I saw the door knocker: a black metal head of a bulldog wearing a baseball cap, tongue out, neckerchief knotted round the neck. Alan’s shed knocker, except this one looked proper, shop-bought, not carved out of wood and painted like Alan’s one in Scritchwood.

  He saw where my gaze was. ‘What’s that?’

  He should know.

  He went up to the front door and knocked the bulldog knocker, the five and the six, looking at me the whole time, showing me he knew the score.

  No answer to his knock. I looked up, at the window of the second floor. There, stuck to the glass in front of the closed net curtains and lit by a street lamp, was the sticker of a rainbow, just like the rainbow painted by Alan onto the window of the shed.

  He looked at me looking at it.

 
‘What is it? Hurry.’

  He looked around and up at the sky, then knocked again, any old knock this time, frantic.

  ‘Nim. Wake up.’ He grabbed me, pulled me back up the street and round the corner to the back alley, counting down the back doors till we got to number 226.

  Empty streets, street lights, lights on in houses but not that house.

  A wooden fence, easily scalable. He hoisted himself up, I kept watch, he yanked me up.

  Silence. Utterly empty streets.

  A tiny back garden with dead plants in plant pots, a small shed painted the same pale blue as the chicken coop outside the bus. A small barred window with blinds down that wouldn’t open.

  He was fiddling round with the back door, trying to prise it open with his bit of rusty metal. At the window to the left dangled a big yellow wooden sun ornament like the sun ornament at the first window of the bus, carved by Alan, painted by me outside on the grass one sunny day with yellow acrylic got from Jassy, Flora’s mum. Except this one was shop-bought.

  The earth-ware plant pot to the left of the door was carved with two faces, one at each side. The Janus pot from outside Alan’s bus, except ours had cruder sillier faces. I knelt down to touch it, the Chris next to me panicking, hacking at the door in a frenzy. I slipped my hand under the heavy pot. Like in Scritchwood there was a key.

  He snatched it from me, didn’t say anything, turned the lock, opened the back door.

  We stepped inside.

  24

  Thick musty air, like Rhodri’s caravan but drier, mould at work for years maybe. It was dark, he felt for the wall, switched on a bare overhead bulb.

  We stood in the tiny kitchen of a two-up-two-down on Walney Island off Barrow.

  We stood in the tiny kitchen of Alan’s bus.

  We stood in a cobwebbed place of half-versions. A real-looking elephant’s foot full of umbrellas and golf clubs beside us. Plates with the same patterns except these were china and Alan’s had been painted wood. The pan hooks that were the number five screwed into the ceiling. A Victorian picture of a steam train at a station on a sunny day and milling ladies and gentlemen with tails, bustles and parasols, though this picture was a faded detailed print with many extras, instead of Alan’s crude Scritchwood painting, done from memory, perhaps, by Alan himself.

  We were in a place I knew because I’d grown up with its version and because I’d been taught to visualise it, by Alan: my mind bus, that I could close my eyes and see in my head and use it to lodge other information, for Scritch etc. Torts I knew, stored in the glassware cupboard next to the sink, the blue-and-white patterned floor lino. So freaky, seeing it for real again, a version. This one was filthy with dust and spiders.

  The lightbulb still worked, though. Something from Zita came back to me: her breaking into a seemingly abandoned house in search of her lost dad but the lights still working, someone still paying the bills, watching for those kinds of details.

  You were prepping me.

  Why not tell me?

  Are you here?

  ‘Hello,’ I called. No one answered.

  ‘Where are we? Quick, they’ll be here.’

  I glided into the next room, switched on the light, him behind panting. The big room in the bus, or a chintzier version: dark patterned wallpaper and carpet, tasselled lamp, sofa, chairs and table, bookshelves, mantelpiece crammed with better but familiar objects: curved sword Alan called the scimitar, the carriage clock, the three porcelain baby-faced Chinese wise men where we’d had three blue plastic Smurfs, a much scarier long-nosed black Venetian mask. The swan that was the number two, the snowmen that were the number eight, these were china, we’d made ours from white pompoms. An identical conch shell with its hole that was zero. A mantelpiece over a real fireplace made of real black stone instead of black-painted cardboard. The Chinese map framed behind glass on the wall. The crochet coverlet over the back of the sofa, the seeming same colour arrangement of the squares except our Covert one—made by Jassy, Flora’s mum, to Alan’s very exact instructions—had burnt in the fire that had destroyed the bus, I’d thrown away the charred remnant myself. Yet here it was again whole, or a version. Made before or after? Were these things the copies or the first ones?

  ‘What’s it saying? Which Scritch? They’ll be here. What’s this place, what’s here? Think.’

  He pushed past me, rushed upstairs, calling out to see if anyone answered. I just stood there in the gap between two places at once.

  The bookshelves: lots of stories and law coded in there. Some things were familiar and some not: Rupert the Bear annuals resurrected from the fire. Similar but not the same guides to stones and minerals, the coastlines of Britain, football annuals, stream ecology, knotcraft, A Little Key To Drawing.

  I reached for that book, pulled it off the shelf.

  The same blue leather binding, the identical gold lettering. But this one was different, this one was real. In Scritchwood this book had been a dummy: when you opened it up there was no book, just a wooden box that would often contain the first coded clue to a Scritch game. But this was a real book, very old, printed on gossamer paper with dark print that was hard to read and full of symbols, nothing to do with how to draw, it seemed, but about the properties of stone and water. It fell open at page fifty-six.

  It fell open because of a newspaper cutting left in there, from the New York Times, dated three weeks earlier, an article about a royal pregnancy printed on one side, part of a car ad printed on the other, slashed with a red line. Slashed with a red warn.

  I picked it up, felt bobbles. The cutting had been pricked with Braille that I ran my fingers over, Alan’s Braille that was a message to me:

  Darling Nim

  If you’re reading this you’re in terrible danger, especially if you’re with someone who says he’s Chris Kipp…

  ‘What’s that?’ He was back down the stairs next to me, snatching the paper from me, skimming the article, not noticing the Braille, seeing the red warn. He snatched the book, flicked through the weird pages, took the article again and ran his fingers over it, noticing the bumps now, not knowing what they were, though, not being able to read it, holding it up to the light. Not knowing anything about Scritch Braille, not knowing anything about Scritch at all.

  ‘What is this? Some kind of message? From who? Alan? What does it say? Tell me now,’ jabbing his piece of rusty metal at my throat.

  Noise outside, then the doorbell rang: one long ring.

  We froze.

  It rang again, then the knocking and a man’s voice: ‘Police. Open up.’

  We stood there, the sharp metal at my throat. He held up the article. ‘Please. What does it say?’

  I moved slightly. The metal nicked me. The bell rang again.

  ‘We know you’re there. Open the door or we’re breaking it down.’

  Silence, then the big thuds of them battering down the door.

  He came so close, his lips and mad wide eyes, grabbing my hand with his hand that held the piece of newspaper.

  ‘What’s the number? Say it. It’s all a trap, it’s a fake, Alan’s not your dad, he’s not here, that’s what they told me to say to get you. They control everything except what you know, that Alan buried into you, that he left here for you. What’s coded up inside you that they’ll do anything for. Tell me before it ends.’

  His grip round my wrist, his white face. Splinters at the edge of the door. His fast mouth so close to me.

  ‘OK you’re right. I’m not him. I’m not your Chris. I didn’t grow up with you. I’m the other one, I’m Sean, the freak from the desert. I brought you here for them. It doesn’t make me the bad guy. I went along and then I rescued us, tried to get us away for real. You know I did. Your one’s pure evil, Don’s sap. Beware. They know you from before. Tell me what this says.’

  I watched him, not Chris but the same apart from the stump and accent and head hole and the no foreskin or shoulder scar. A grown thing, a creature from the mirror rabbitting on
about numbers and Don and Chris and Alan and the end of the world.

  The door caved in. He let me go, grabbed the scrap of newspaper, ran his fingers over it one last time then stuffed it in his mouth and scuttled into the cupboard under the stairs, pulled the door closed. Covered people in yellow plastic swarmed in wearing gloves and boots, their faces covered with plastic and goggles, hazard suits against contamination, holding guns and truncheons.

  I stood there.

  ‘Where is he?’

  I pointed to the cupboard under the stairs.

  They went over, yanked it open. He was inside, whatever he was, hacking himself with his metal, hacking his body, hacking his eyes out, blood everywhere. They dragged him out, hands in his mouth, pulling out pulped newspaper and teeth while his cut red blank eyes bled and his body went limp. He moved his head wildly, calling out words for me, pulp on his tongue, filthy nails, his blood on their yellow plastic.

  ‘The boat. Sad nothing weed. Nim.’

  Calling out my name though we didn’t know each other, though I’d never met him or loved him, Chris’s shadow, something from the lab. A bloody pulped mess reaching out madly for me, no eyes now, blood running down its face like tears.

  ‘I’m sorry. The boat. Don’t fall for it.’

  I was screaming, they belted him in the face, scooped the pulp into bags. They yanked him up, pulled his wrists behind him, pulled his head back, did something to him. He flopped back, stump Chris, the no-eyed fake, cuddled into their arms, getting bundled out of the door.

  They cradled me in their yellow arms, told me it was OK, that they were with me now and I was safe and it was fine. Pricking my neck with the syringe.

  25

  I woke to terrible screams.

  I was propped up on a white metal bed in a small space hung with blue plastic curtains. I wore blue robes and a brace round my chest. A helmet attached to the bed locked me in place so I couldn’t move my shoulders or my head. Tubes jammed into my arms joined me to plastic bags on wheeled hooks by my side. My arms and legs were untied but I couldn’t move them either, they just lay there. Above me: bright lights, a filthy ceiling. Around me: wires, sockets, baskets of sickly-smelling creamy white flowers. The hum and vibration of machines, a bad lurching in my stomach. ‘Change me,’ a woman was yelling from beyond the curtain.