TWICE

by Susanna Kleeman

I didn’t like that. ‘Are Don’s enemies necessarily our friends?’ I whispered back. ‘Do Don’s cams still work here, can’t he still hear us?’

  ‘He can’t act here. Repercussions. He doesn’t control everywhere. Yet.’ Then taking my hand: I HAVE INS.

  What ‘ins’? Sailing closer to the rusting wrecks.

  ‘What about you?’ I whispered into his ear, specks of his salt on my tongue. If they were Don’s enemies they’d know his face the moment they clapped eyes on him: Don’s clone. Thinking ahead for this amateur.

  ‘What’s the choice?’ he whispered. ‘Given what you’ve half-told them. Trust me, shut up. You got us in, I’m getting us out. Like I said.’

  Ah yes, the mysterious thing I didn’t know I half-knew, that he’d tell at some point when we could talk and were safe, you betcha.

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

  ‘Do we have a knife?’ I asked, because a small wooden boat was coming for us, four dark men on board pointing long guns at us.

  ‘It’s OK. Don’t worry. I know them. Kind of.’

  37

  We put up our hands, they drew alongside, pulled the boats together, boarded ours. High-cheek-boned men in rags, dark hard-to-place faces, waving guns, shouting instructions I couldn’t understand. Sean, whoever, seemed calm, relaxed. He let them rummage and spoke to them in what seemed to be their language—Arabic? ‘Ahmed,’ he kept on saying to them. AOK to me in my hand. PALS. Then he was putting something secretly into my hand: a ring.

  ‘Put it on. So they think we’re married. Safer for you.’ Speaking out loud, in English—which the men couldn’t understand?

  Safer for me to wear a ring because we were in some place where Western women with men and no wedding ring weren’t respected?

  ‘From where?’ I said, about the ring.

  ‘Tool box,’ smiling, deft, pleased with himself.

  And where was the tool box? Down in the berth? Got while I was asleep?

  So he’d planned for this moment. What else had he planned for?

  ‘What’s going to happen?’

  ‘Trust me. It’ll be fine. Put on the ring. We’re already dead. Anything else is a bonus.’

  Great. I felt the ring in my hands, put my fist round it, put my fist in the pocket of my sweatpants, put the ring on, took my hand out to look. It fitted. A dull grey metal hoop. Did toolboxes contain rings?

  Guns in my face.

  Our shotgun marriage, my fake husband. He smiled and nodded at me, we sat there, they rummaged, collected up things, went down into the hold, brought up champagne, steak, the whole tainted feast. Then they made me sit on deck with two of them and their guns, and the rest took Sean off into their boat, towards and into one of the huge rusty ships nearby, hoisted him up into it, gun at his back.

  He turned and smiled at me, told me with his eyes it was OK.

  The duff clone, bundled into their rusty office, customs point, beheading / ransom zone. My last sight of him, this instance? It was bad with him, it was worse without him, sitting there on the boat with my gunmen wearing my ring so they’d respect me. Dark skin, fine features, torn white t-shirts, cloth round their heads, unreadable faces. I could duck and dive, go for the eyes. Seize the controls, jump overboard, beg for help, tell them I was as scared of Sean as I was of them, had nothing to do with him, wasn’t married to him.

  I couldn’t speak their language.

  I could mime it. They might understand.

  I did nothing. Mime what? Swim where? They’d just shoot me. The key wasn’t in the ignition, he must have taken it.

  Useless, hopeless, sweating with heat and fear under the white hot sky, almost wishing for the Skidblad. At least there was order there, solid planning. At least they needed me, cherished my special knowledge.

  Gunmen brought Sean back out of the big ship, put him on a small boat, rowed it over to me on the speedboat, forced me on too. He was smiling at me, thumbs up, glittering with excitement, the doofus, who I’d have to think for, grabbing my hand:

  AOK.

  The men were on our speedboat, shouting in their language, putting the key in the ignition, revving the engine, speeding away.

  ‘You gave them the boat?’

  ‘Small price.’

  ‘For?’

  ‘Our ticket. To where Don can’t hear.’

  Energised, powerful, proud of his cunning, getting us out of what I’d got us into, my fake husband, driving us blind into the fire. One of the men bowed to him. Then they handcuffed my right wrist to his left hand and rowed us to the shore.

  38

  A white tent facing sea and clouds on white sand in the heat. We sat together sweating, cuffed and bruised, arms touching, watching birds. Around the tent, men with black cloth wrapped over their heads and faces squatted with guns. Our armed guards, our new owners.

  ‘We’re guests,’ according to him. ‘Waiting. They’re sending a message—they don’t use phones. Someone has to go there in person, tell him our offer.’

  Tell some guy who was their leader, who was far away. ‘Ahmed’, except we couldn’t say his name either.

  ‘Call him “A”.’

  ‘What offer?’

  LATER.

  This dumbfuck. The cuffs were tight and heavy. I hated them. I hated everything. I wanted to run, was tied to this deadweight. Wrapped men in rags brought us black coffee and croissants.

  ‘We can eat them.’ He ate them. ‘French food,’ he said. French because Mauritania had been a French colony, didn’t I know? Not that we were in Mauritania, though we were close. This was still Western Sahara, he reckoned, which had been Spanish. Now it was nothing, claimed by Morocco. Lots of international interest because of the oil and other things recently found here, crack-fruit.

  So what.

  I couldn’t eat and couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten, was shivering though it was so hot. He sat closer to me which made me feel worse, made me drink water. They laid out new white clothes for us: loose shirts and trousers, tan canvas shoes. Then they uncuffed us and turned their backs to us and he turned away from me and told me to take off everything I was wearing, my tainted Skidblad gear, put on this new stuff instead, like he was doing. I did it, saw my bruised body from him in the storm. They turned back round, recuffed us, took our old clothes and underwear, ‘to burn’, he said. To burn away Don’s snitchers, except didn’t Don sprinkle everywhere, wasn’t here tainted too, wherever here was, West Sahara, Mauritania?

  ‘What about the ring?’ From Don’s toolbox, the dull metal band.

  He pulled it off me, called to them, handed it over, calm and lordly.

  ‘What about our skin and hair?’ remembering him basically scalping me in the lake, that horror, what you had to do if you really wanted to scrub Don off.

  ‘Later,’ he said. ‘They’ll have ways. Before we meet “A”.’

  We sat recuffed under the awning in our new loose white clothes. He scratched himself with sand to scrape off Don, told me to do the same. He stretched, cuffed to me, told me to stretch too, for my health. He scratched me, my visible flesh, scraped away cams as best he could while I sat there trying to think for both of us.

  TERRORISTS, I pinched.

  ‘What does that even mean? All your ideas about the world? Made for you by Dons. Lecturing values to lands they’ve sucked dry, trying to plug us all into their rigged set-up built by slaves from plundered goo. We’re safe here, among friends. They’ve helped me before. You don’t know these people, what they live by, how they live. Honour, valour, word as bond. Can you even imagine what that’s like?’

  He shifted into the sun. I stayed in shade. He lay on his back in sand and basked for a long time, soaking up sun.

  ‘Try it,’ he said. ‘Gives you energy. Recharge your batteries.’

  Elite super-knowledge, sun-soaking lizards. World-ruling yoga masters. I hated him, I hated my powerless self cuffed
to him, my bad choices, dry land, thinking for one second he might be a good bet. Just like real Chris—and where was real Chris? Out in the world, plotting against me?

  Unless—and this was super-creepy—that thing cuffed next to me on the sand was real Chris after all, up to something truly freaky, pretending for whatever reasons to be someone else, a dark hollow creature exploring his worst nature, triple-double crossing me?

  Get me out of this Alan.

  We lay on rugs in the tent and slept.

  When I woke it was later afternoon and cooler and he was whispering next to me:

  ‘Tell them anything they want to know.’

  There were new men in the tent talking. I smelt food cooking outside, it smelt good. I felt hungry and better though my wrists were sore. They took us outside, we ate fresh fish and bread cooked on a fire. We drank sweet tea, still cuffed. He watched me with his mended eyes.

  ‘I want us to mark ourselves,’ he whispered. ‘So we’ll know each other. Just in case,’ stabbing a white hot fish skewer from the fire into my cuffed wrist to make it char with pain.

  I screamed and tried to yank away, smelt burnt flesh, saw him do the same to his cuffed wrist so our burnt flesh bubbled and bled together.

  ‘You fucking freak,’ I screamed at him, trying to get up. His marks on me, his violence. ‘You got no control.’

  He yanked me down, men came over, he shooed them away in their language. I called after them, begged for help in English, they must have understood what I was saying. But they ignored it. Because this was how they treated women in the new world I’d entered? Take me back to Don.

  He tore strips from his shirt and bound them round our wrists to soak up blood and wad against the cuffs. I let him, blotted everything out, focussed on the pain.

  They came to us with black cloths, wrapped them round our heads and faces.

  ‘Protects against sand and wind,’ he said from behind his. ‘And it’ll hide us. Men’s clothes. Men wear the burkas here. Wards off evil spirits, lets you go anywhere undetected. Invisibility cloaks, free from Don’s made magic.’

  New armed men arrived and forced us into a jeep.

  39

  A low-tech army-looking jeep, plastic bottles and bundles lashed to the roof, windows down. No radio, minimal dials. A driver, someone else in the front passenger seat, both bandaged in the black so you could only see the eyes. Us cuffed together in the back, cuffed again on either side to two tall armed men in the bandages, men whose eyes were hidden by mirrored shades reflecting back my covered face.

  ‘It’s OK. We can trust them.’

  Oh yeah.

  He didn’t say anything more, didn’t spell. Powerless, I sunk into my cloth and the burn pain in my wrist. We drove away from sea on rocky sand, no roads. Through the left-hand windows the sun was setting, we were heading north, I could read things, plan-free, the sick lurch in my tummy, the wide blank useless dry land.

  We drove for about an hour through flat bare shingle, minimal plants and trees. Then on the horizon a set of squares became concrete bunkers, some kind of small modern village part-covered in sand. We drove in, down what might have been the main road, past empty ugly squat concrete buildings full of sand, sand up to their sides. Smashed windows, metal grilles, Arabic graffiti, no sign of people. Some abandoned fortification. We came to a grey building surrounded by barbed wire with bandaged men and guns at the gates. The jeep stopped outside.

  They uncuffed us from each other, kept us cuffed to our guards. They yanked us out, pushed us inside.

  His eyes smiled at me. ‘Cleaning time.’

  Inside: a semi-medical hive. Low ceilings, dirty walls, covered people in robes, machines, wires, syringes, tubes. Sean got bundled into one room, me into another. They uncuffed me from my guard, cuffed me instead to a chair. A woman wrapped in white cloth talked to me in some language, unwrapped my black cloth, took blood from my arm with what seemed fresh needles from a new packet, checked my eyes, tongue, ears. She uncuffed me, took the dirty cloth off my burn and put something on it that stung, made me take off all my clothes and strip-searched me, put her gloved hand inside me, swabbed around in there with a nice bright smile and apology cluck. Three white-robed women shaved my head then ripped every other hair out of me with wax except for my lashes and eyebrows which they cleaned one hair at a time.

  They put a bucket next to me and gave me a drink which made me vomit. They did this a few times, then took the vomit away. They made me drink lots of water, then took me into a small hot sauna, made me sit there sipping water for ages, to sweat the Skidblad out of me? Afterwards they scraped me with brushes and some kind of stinging scrub, then oiled and massaged me and put ointment on my bruises. They deep-cleaned my mouth and teeth with a tiny dental polishing machine, scraped my tongue with wood, gave me a new white-trousers-and-shirt set, brown canvas shoes, put gauze and plasters over the burn.

  I sat gleaming next to an electric fan in another room. A black-wrapped man questioned me in bad English. I told him everything he wanted to know, the whole crazy story. I was quite used to rattling it off by now, with the Skidblad escape as a new bonus extra. I asked him for help, to get away from Sean, he nodded and wrote things down. They brought Sean in and sat him next to me, pinkly clean too now. The man questioned him. They took him away and told me I was Sean’s prisoner and they’d rescued me and was safe with them and could tell them everything now. I told them I’d said everything before.

  They put wires and patches on my body and bald head, held my pulse. I told it all again and again, no change in my story. This went on for ages. They pushed me into a room with a white mattress on the floor. I slept and slept.

  I washed in cold water, put on fresh white clothes, ate hot bread and drank sweet black tea the women brought me. They wrapped me in the black cloth and pushed me outside into sharp blue heat. Sean stood wrapped in black, cuffed to his mirrored guard leaning against the side of the jeep. He smiled at me. His left eyebrow was cut. He saw me looking at it.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘You OK?’

  They cuffed me to my guard, pushed me back into the back of the jeep with Sean and his guard, cuffed me and Sean back together. Us four joined in our line, the wrapped driver and smaller man in the front seats, if they were the same people under the black cloth and shades. Impossible to say.

  The engine went on, we set off, my burn hurting under the plaster. I touched Sean’s hand. U FUCK, I pinched, extra-hard. A hot blue morning somewhere on shimmering gravel, me and him cuffed to armed guards driving off where, on no roads, in whose power? Him bumping along smiling, all jaunty and clean, thrilled with himself, touching my hand: IT’S FINE.

  Oh yeah, tickety-boo. Cuffed westerners in deserts with robed gunmen, no bad bode, right? Specially with him being Don’s clone and all. If that were true. But he was quite keen on death, seemed to be, this Chris version, if that’s what he was. Burning out, was this one’s motto.

  I shook him away.

  He reached for me again, force-pinched: AT LEAST I KNOW. U REAL. PASSED THEIR LIE TEST. DEAD OTHERWISE.

  I balled my hand into a fist he tried to stroke but I pushed off. Rising heat, crammed between salty men, digging metal on the burn. More heat coming through the rolled-down windows, sand and grit everywhere. No roads, no buildings, gravel bumps and hills, a few pathetic trees. I closed my eyes, pretended I was back in North London surfing the web, tried to find a Scritch to match this, anything from Alan. ‘Sean’ started talking to the men in their language. Monosyllables from them at first, then a few words. Building bonds.

  Good luck with that you turd.

  ‘Familiar land,’ he said to me, nodding at the nothing outside. Because of those Atlantic island deserts he’d grown up in as Don Junior, the training and languages they’d slotted into him there like the Arabic he spoke, though our guards’ version was a dialect.

  Lovely jubbly champagne bubbly. Like Jassy used to say.

  He told me about going wild in tho
se Atlantic deserts in four-wheel drives, teenage machine tournaments with other scions and instances. ‘Lethal fairs,’ he called them. ‘Where you learn. Get hardened by brute experience. Theory means nothing. You got to have blood.’

  I turned my head away but he went on: Don’s inner circle, company bigwigs and their offspring smashing into each other in armoured jeeps on no roads just for the hell of it, drawing blood, showing mettle, getting crowned, cracked bones and teeth, fame through peril. ‘Blood will out.’

  We drove into less trees, flatter land. The sun got high, our cuffed guards snoozed.

  ‘Watch Gramps,’ he said, nodding at the old small man in the front passenger seat with an old vertical scar cut down through his left eye. Our guide, Sean said, who knew the way through featureless desert even when sunlight masked the stars. Natural GPS, intact animal knowledge, that old gubbins: sun position, shingle patterns, faintest tracks, the smell of exposed minerals in the bare ground, flow hooked to Earth’s magnetism.

  ‘One-eyed. Sometimes they do it to themselves, to heighten their other senses. They say the best Saharan guides are blind.’

  Did they?

  He told me how the path we were on, and all paths across the Sahara and its network of wells, dated from earlier times, when the land was green, before the dry-out of the past eight thousand years. How you could find stuff from before the change: stone carvings, dwarf crocodiles in oasis pools, left-over Cyprus trees, arrowheads, terma, traces of paths tramped by humans and animals bringing cargo north-south along now-dwindled roads only sensed these days by trained heirs like Grandpa. A worldwide cargo network that was always there.

  ‘Timbuktu, Chinuguetti, Tingus, Carthage, Cyrene, Alexandria, Yanbu, Socotra, Hormuz, Basra, Gujarat, Calicut, Quilon, Jaffna, Nagapattinam, Tamralipti, Pegu, Takuapa, Lankasuka, Sumatra, Java, Brunei, Banda, Raja Amput Fuzhou, Xiamen, Hanoi, Guangzhou, Ningpo, Quanzhou, Nagasaki, Osaka, Monks Mount pyramid south of Chicago, Corvo, the pyramids of Tenerife.’

  Showing off his trained mind, information pegged to the stars and the whorls on his fingertips so he never forgot. He showed me the fingertips of his cuffed hand. ‘Like your mind bus, just much better.’