I was horrified and tried to stop him.
‘We don’t need their lies,’ he said.
‘We don’t know where we are.’
‘I do,’ looking up at the sky.
This crap clone. Broken dashboards meant nothing in this cammed world. ‘It’s not going to work like this. You got to tell me. Before you do stuff like this. We’re in this together or we’re not together.’
‘Look,’ he said, nodding at black clouds at the horizon, smiling. ‘They’re pissed. You don’t need subs if you control the weather. We’ll use it against them.’ He pressed his finger to the smashed control pad, to start up the engine again? But nothing happened.
The reckless dick.
‘It’s fine,’ he said, getting up, going back down the stairs into the berth again, coming back up with a key: ‘Analogue back-up.’
He put this key into a slot, the engine revved, all panels blank. His keys. He pressed levers by the steering wheel, we set off, towards the dark clouds this time, into rain.
I pulled my hood up. ‘Where are we going? Are there covers? Can we put up covers?’
He didn’t answer, just sailed us faster. It started to pour, a real storm at sea: choppy water, thunder, boats smashing against waves. I looked for covers. I was scared.
‘Stop.’
But he sailed on and on, right up into high waves and wind, drenching us.
‘Stop!’
He cut the engine again, let go of all controls, reached over and grabbed me tight round the neck, suffocating me, making me thrash, his terrible Chris-face dipping and rising, lit by lightening: ‘Their cams won’t work in this storm. Now tell me who the fuck you are.’
35
His crazed white face on top of me, previous calm wiped, true aim revealed: ‘Are you Nim? Or what thing?’ Water everywhere, nature in charge. ‘Scream all you want, they can’t hear you. Let’s see what they send in to save you.’
‘I’m me,’ I babbled under him, gulping salt waves. Trying to show him the scar on my thigh, the—I didn’t know—cut on my hand from when I was nine that he wouldn’t know because he wasn’t Chris.
‘Yeah all that. Even if: what are you up to? Why did Chris come for you that night in your flat?’
‘No clue.’ Didn’t matter what he did to me, I was the dumdum, Scritchwood Nim, the Alphabet monkey, trained up to be full of what I didn’t know, to be used by them all. ‘Stop it, get off, control the boat, we’re going to die. You’re the one who knows. What’s your real story?’ Not Chris but he could pinch and knew everything? ‘You’re so full of lies you think I’m the same.’
‘Don’s fault,’ he screamed in my ear. ‘Don’s genes, nature and nurture. Pure con: growing up with that, having that turn on you. You wouldn’t trust anything and you’d be right.’
‘Maybe. But that’s not me. And you know it, that’s why you’re talking to me like this. Feel the twitch, right? What does it say about me? Be honest, if you can.’
We slid together on high waves, him trying to X-ray me with his fixed eyes, bruising each other as the boat tumbled down steep walls of water.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘But.’
But what? His hands still squeezed my neck.
Squeeze harder. Kill me in this nowhere. Except you won’t will you? There’s still stuff you need me to decode for you, right?
‘But,’ he said, still squeezing. ‘Maybe you are you,’ the same body he’d taken from Archway under false pretences. ‘But what have they done to you? On their boat? Do you even know? Programmed to kill by one word, the trigger of a gesture? What did they whisper to you in your sleep? You’re a timebomb, detonate when I most need you, like in Vengeance Street, betraying me.’
‘You know what?’ I said, mangled with him, rising and falling in the water. ‘Maybe you’re right. How would I know? How does anyone know anything about anyone in the end? Cross your fingers, watch for triggers, take the risk. Or just kill me now. And what have they programmed you to do? Drive me where with your shiny new eyes? Fuck you,’ I said and headbutted him: someone had to control this boat, sailing it couldn’t be that hard.
He rolled off me and lay next to me panting, laughing, rubbing his head, putting his arm out to stop me getting up.
‘One thing’s for sure. You definitely do have a trigger,’ he said, lying there in thunder. ‘Real Chris. That’s why you went along with me in Britain in the first place.’
Excuse me: I hadn’t gone along with him, he’d taken me: here, everywhere. I was here, about to die, because of him. Real Chris was the warm-up act.
‘Easy meat,’ he said. ‘Led through the nose. Willing to go along with any old bullshit if it meant I was your Chrissikins come back to you so sorry.’
‘Fuck you,’ I said. The pair of them.
‘Major weakness. We’re up against the darkest forces including your Chris. But one look from him—or someone who seems to be him—and you’re floored, I know it. They don’t need to do anything to you.’
‘I listened to you cos you said you were with Alan. Where’s Alan?’
‘Fuck knows. You can’t shit me. I know more about you than you do. I’ve crunched you. I smell you. Why did you even rescue me now?’
‘I didn’t.’ The lock had just opened. He’d come up there with me. ‘Look,’ I hissed. ‘Even if I was still in love with real Chris, at least I’ve got a good reason to be here with you wanting to believe you. But as for you: who are you?’ New eyes, a rebel versus Don, here to save the world: I only had his word for it. ‘Everything up to this point between you and me: total lies. The only truth is you’re their clone, you’re the same as them, you are them: will do or say anything to get what you want, right? And what do you want? You don’t say.’
He rolled back on top of me, eye to eye. We rose and fell in the waves.
‘I can’t tell you till it’s safe,’ he said after a while. ‘Not even here. Not till I am sure of you. How much did you tell them?’ moving off me, crawling for the controls, revving the engine. ‘About Scritch? About Vengeance Street? In their boat.’
‘Pretty much everything,’ I said, gulping, panting, feeling—what?—relieved? that he was starting the engine back up, that some part of this seemed to be over? That he wasn’t strangling me anymore? ‘They drugged me,’ I said and told him about Ramona, the Alphabet etcetera, the fake Vengeance Streets. ‘What else could I have done?’
‘Killed yourself.’
‘With what?’
‘Anything. We both should have. In the ceiling, let it run us over, crush what we know. So he can’t get his hands on it. They wouldn’t have let us.’
‘What do we know?’
Terma, tertöns. Secret knowledge buried round the world by old sages. If all that was true.
He shook his head. ‘You didn’t tell them everything,’ he said, the engine on but us not going anywhere, still smashing from side to side. ‘Or else we wouldn’t be here, carrying on their job for them.’
‘I told them every single thing I could think of.’
‘There are ways of burying things in people.’
‘Is Alan alive?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What about the code?’ The one in his ceiling, the buttery lock that maybe the whole ship was built round. ‘Didn’t I already give it to them?’ That’s what he’d said back in the ship.
‘Their set-up. That code’s for shit. Sinister prop. To get me to come up there with you, take a look at what you’d done, get trapped up there, end up on this boat with you. Otherwise, they know me. Nothing personal, but I’d have resisted you. The only thing that could have lured me up there, that number.’
‘What number?’
‘Later. When we get to where we’re going.’
‘Which is where? We do this together, Sean.’
He pulled me close, spat into my ear over the waves. ‘Here’s the deal. We’re fucked. You fucked us, you might have fucked everything. It’s on you. You got us in, I’m getti
ng us out, my way. I’m in control. I’m taking us where we can talk. Back to Vengeance Street but via a detour. Use their plans against them. But first we’ll go somewhere, have a conversation, get back-up. There are still some places in the world Don doesn’t own. But before we get there you’ll nod and do what I say and say nothing and ask no questions and not pinch. I know the deal, you don’t. Even if what I do or say seems bad or freaky. You shut up and trust me.’
‘Or else?’
‘We cut the engine and die.’
Some choice.
Nod away, get to dry land then ditch him. There’d be some way.
Sunny Nim. My glass-half-full nature.
But. Clutched onto the sides I looked into his new eyes, the flecks of gold.
‘They won’t let you take this “detour”. If what you say is true, if they control the weather. They’ll kill us in storms first. They’ll capture us.’
‘They won’t kill us. They need us. They need you, what you know. They’ll let us go, they have to. They couldn’t get it out of you when they captured you, they need you to think you’re free, solving of your own free will. And they need me, to drive you. They know where we’ll end up. They’ll bide their time.’
‘No more violence, I’ve had enough violence.’
‘Sometimes there’s no choice. But I hear you,’ beginning to move us off. ‘It’s a long way. We’ll have to use the wind, ration fuel. Go down and switch everything off,’ nodding at the stairs leading down into the berth.
Ordered about, I didn’t like any of it. Space away from him to think. I went down the stairs, into a luxe white leather cabin with bathroom and kitchen, closed the door behind me. Dry, muffled, away from him, out of the storm. I huddled on the rolling floor. After a while I took off the soaked coat, fiddled about looking for knives or weapons, found towels, switched things off: music player, coffee machine, oven, fridge containing chocolate, caviar, champagne, shrink-wrapped steak, pomegranates. Their food, which I’d been eating for lord knew how long on their ship, had already swallowed all the microphones.
I was starving. A bit more wouldn’t hurt, unless it would: mesh my unconscious with deeper triggers.
I didn’t eat. I found a dry waterproof and went back up and sat with him, watching for dry land. Their storm was behind us, he’d got up a sail, was trying to find the wind, he said: the right one would whizz us where we needed without fuel or navigation instruments. Wormholes, zephyrs, he said. He knew that kind of thing.
Bully for him.
‘What’s your Atlantic map,’ I said, ‘the shape of Mickey Mouse?’
He laughed and started telling me about the Atlantic, that had once been a river, and the Iapetus Ocean before that, an old sea with its different names that kept closing and opening over its fault line, banging things into each other, and how many times had that happened? How north Scotland was made of America, the bit above Loch Ness. About how Loch Ness was full of monsters, prehistoric sea creatures, the last trace of the Iapetus. And Don’s islands in the mid-Atlantic that you don’t find on dumdum maps. Where he’d grown up, in part, this Sean I was beginning to have the pleasure of knowing for real. Don’s desert islands, where he’d got trained, where the Skidblad docked, where the Company had homes and hospitals, from whence the world was ruled, the new isles of Man. The flowers and herbs and ancient caves and temples of those islands, Phoenician and older, from the first guys, before the wipe-out. The old ways to America—they’d always known about America and its properties.
I reached for his hand, even though we weren’t supposed to pinch: ATLANTIS?
NO.
TRUE?
SOME.
REST?
BABBLE.
And so we zipped over water somewhere carried by wind towards the golden dawn.
36
When I woke it was hot, sweaty late morning under grey clouds on the swell. I got up, went down to the berth for water and towels, came back up, took my waterproof off. He sat at the controls in his white shirt and some hat munching their coffee beans. He hadn’t slept but was OK, he said, knew which pressure points to press to stop tiredness.
Lucky old you.
I joined him, sore and bruised, drank their water and watched him: fixed eyes, hands at the controls, the hands from round my neck.
He seemed calm, whoever he was.
‘Sean Thabbet. That’s your name?’
‘What Don calls me.’
‘What should I call you?’
‘Fuck knows.’
I sat with him in blank sea, watching for dry land, the immense freakery we were caught up in making it hard to breathe. I felt almost shy, sitting there, next to the non-Chris I didn’t know, the water-boarder who’d made tramp champagne for me.
‘How much of what you said in Britain was a lie?’
‘Lots. Not all.’
‘Why did you lie?’ No answer. ‘Is Alan alive?’
Reaching for my hand: SHUT UP.
‘Where are we?’ No reply. ‘Is this your old boat? Or a clone boat?’
‘Clone I think. Accurate though. Pixel-perfect, down to the scratches.’
‘How can you tell it’s not the real one?’
‘Cos of how it drives. Tiny things. You can replicate objects down to the nano-level but you can’t control how energy flows through them. Yet. Some clones are better than their originals.’ He smiled at me. ‘Sometimes. Look.’ He pointed at birds in the sky, a few at first, then flocks, dark vectors. ‘Know what that means?’
‘Don?’
He shook his head. ‘Land. See how many there are?’
‘Where are we?’
‘Coast of West Africa. Western Sahara? Mauritania? What you call Mauritania?’
‘How do you know?’ I’d vaguely heard of Mauritania, had no idea where it was.
‘Because of the birds. Going south for winter? You must have heard, in your dumdum education, with Alan, in New York, wherever? About the birds?’
I knew birds flew south for winter, unimaginable distances, from Britain, from the Arctic. I didn’t know this was where they ended up.
‘One big party. Largest bird sanctuary in the world.’ Sandy islands and shore all the way from south Morocco to what was known as Senegal, Gambia. ‘A haven for birds, for other things.’
Whatever. Dry land coming up, that’s all I cared about. Dry land in West Africa, maybe.
‘What do you know about West Africa?’
Not much. Ebola. Terrorism?
He snorted. ‘Diseases he made. People he’s trained you to think of as terrorists.’
‘Where are we going?’
He shook his head.
Watching birds in the hot air, watching him. Looking for a life vest, something inflatable, so I could jump off. Picturing him bear down on me with the boat. Trying to comb through any useful Scritch.
I saw flashes of land, small islands at first. ‘So-called nature reserves,’ he said. Spits of land covered with birds, where they bred, swarming there now because it was the end of March and the hot season was coming. Time to go back north. He said.
The end of March. Three months their prisoner aboard the Skidblad. If I could believe him.
Sandy islands thick with birds. We got closer. He pointed out things: breeds, middens—which were man-made mounds and even islands made of old shells poking out of the sea from thousands of years of people eating shellfish here, throwing the shells away.
‘That’s why the birds come. Rich pickings.’ Because of the fish, who came for the shellfish, who came for the plankton who came because the water was warm and rich with minerals leaking up from the crack beneath, the same crack as Britain.
‘We feel it like they do, when there’s metal. We’re attracted to it, we connect to it in the land. Our bodies know what we need, to get us to the next level.’
Whatever.
We saw boats, small coloured wooden ones at first, with sails. The people nodded at us in our ultra-modern speedboat, dark fisher
men in rags who watched us.
‘Do we have weapons? Knives?’ I said because the men scared me. ‘Did you have them before on your real boat?’
‘Look,’ he said.
Ahead, shimmering in the heat: a weird modern city, a jumble of spiky orange metal on the shoreline.
He smiled, really pleased. ‘Ship graveyard,’ he said.
We sailed closer. It looked like a city but was a junkyard of massive old boats on their sides, broken and rusty.
‘Scrap metal,’ he said. So-called rogue states let lazy owners junk their old ships here, just roll up and beach them, for a fee. ‘Yup, an eyesore, but quite good for the birds and ecology in the end. Ironically.’ Shellfish ate the metal from the boats, fish ate the shellfish, birds ate the fish and did their droppings, the seas got richer. ‘Maybe that’s what’ll happen to the whole world after Don’s new apocalypse’: shellfish getting fat on the steel of sunken cities, earth bouncing back and adapting like it always did, nothing wrong with a bit of climate change.
I’d heard climate change was dangerous, I said.
‘Course you have. More con. Like we mere blips have control over climate, vast forces, always changing. The arrogance. Something for rich dumdums to protest, let them think they’re good people. Divert attention from the real issue which is unequal wealth distribution, elites living well off millennia of exploiting other people’s resources. Protest marches are easy. Sharing your actual money is what’s hard. Especially now we can all see into everyone’s lives via Don’s magic mirrors. There has to be a rebalance, the poor world won’t stand for it, that’s why Don’s so scared of the realm, wants the control. That’s what the fight against Don’s all about.’
And then pulling me close so I could feel his heat and salty Chris smell, he whispered something else: that there were people in the rusty boats, that we were sailing towards a secret border, that beyond was a different world with different people I’d been conditioned to fear, people I’d been taught were terrorists, drug dealers, smugglers, warlords, pirates, traffickers. So-called ‘bad guys’ who were watching us right now, Don’s enemies, who could help us.
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