by M. T Hill
‘Does it hurt?’ she asks. ‘Do you hurt?’
Shep shakes his head.
‘Will you be yourself again?’
But he can’t answer that, and she knows it.
‘You should get going,’ Shep says. ‘Before my jab.’
Freya pictures herself lying on his bivouac, just holding him. Or throttling him.
Shep sniffs indifferently and spreads his gnarled fingers across the bag’s outer layer. Tentatively, she reaches over and touches the ends.
‘When’s your flight back?’ he asks.
‘Tomorrow.’
He sighs. ‘Okay.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
Freya frowns, strokes the back of his hand. The grazes between his knuckles. Is it forgiveness? Or shame? She shakes her head. ‘Where do I start?’ she asks. ‘How do I tell people?’
‘You’re the hack,’ Shep says.
Freya looks at the ceiling.
‘Start like I do. Ignore the map. Cross a boundary. And don’t get caught.’
His machine timer clicks off, and an automated syringe draws up liquid.
‘Hopefully see you around,’ Shep says. And he squeezes Freya’s hand and gives her a smile. There’s sadness in it.
The needle slides into Shep’s thigh. His eyes flare and ease shut. Freya strokes his face as his body relaxes, draws a finger across his patchy stubble, the crags of his cheekbones. She cups her hand under his nose like she’s trying to collect his breath.
She leaves him with a tap on the forehead, walking in rhythm with the anesthetiser’s compressor. She exits the ward into the infirmary garden. She sits on the flat lawn in the shadow of the tower. Soon, the other journalists will be up to watch the supplies boat, and she’ll go and join them at the docks. She’ll apologise for yesterday evening, try to explain herself. Every outlandish detail, every theory. It’s all here, see. Go and visit the man in the infirmary.
The panic rises again. She lies back on the grass, dew in her hair. She has the compulsion to write in one of her journals. Stephen and Alba and Oriol’s story. Or Shep’s story. It might be pleasant, that, sitting cross-legged on her bed. Her mother bringing in the odd cup of tea, moaning about their malfunctioning fridge. But she knows it wouldn’t be enough. Writing her stories about the bunker was never a means to process what she saw inside it. It was a way to evade it. Here on Vertex, it’s inescapable. The bunker is contagious, and now Freya has to prove it.
Cross a boundary.
Freya clutches the Dictaphone through her pocket. A sensation like falling out of orbit. She stands up, dizzy. She’d only need a head camera. A good rucksack. Dark-coloured, decent waterproofs. And a map of the Lakes. A drone operator from a forum could show her the way…
She brushes the dry grass from her backside. High cloud has given way to a heavy bank the colour of gritstone. Vertex Island smells a little like petrol. She runs back to her cabin as warm rain starts to fall. On her bunk, surrounded by clothes, hydration sachets, and with rain against the cabin window, Freya buries her face in her pillow and cries. She knows how to break the story. She knows exactly where to go when she gets home.
• • •
The next morning, Freya is the only person at the dock. There was nobody in sight coming over here, not a soul working at any stage of the tower, not on the base pad, not in the outbuildings or by the drone warehouse. No transfer jet waiting. The PR, in her unmissable shoes, is conspicuously absent. Freya stands at the island’s sharp edge and holds her hair off her face.
They were meant to meet here this morning, and here she is, having missed the show somehow, alone and fatigued, and frightened. No boat. No sign of a boat – nor its cargo. Only a pile of Vaughan-branded umbrellas.
Freya walks along the artificial coast. The path has been depressed into the sloped concrete that forms a kind of beach. Heaving waves for company. She checks the tower, stands there for a time, wet hair and lashes, face in the spray. This solitude – even the gulls are missing. Maybe it’s the weather after all? Maybe the supplies boat is struggling out there, in the pall, slowing off until the weather eases. Maybe she ought to go back to Shep’s cot and wait.
She calls: ‘Hello?’ Polite at first – cheery almost. Then louder, coarser. ‘Hello?’
Freya can survive in her own company. What’s difficult is to feel vindicated but isolated with major information in another time zone, trying not to succumb to panic. She reminds herself that when you’re an adult you can’t be lost like the little girl in a supermarket whose parents have taken too many turns; that as an adult, she’s accounted for and missed; that she’s here on Vertex and a paper trail marks her spot. Someone will come along this path any minute, and the whole episode will be forgotten in an instant – a warm drink, a fake laugh. Silly Freya.
‘Hello?’ she calls again.
This time there’s a reply. It comes from above – as if the sky tears open to respond. Freya gasps: three black aircraft pass over in a tight V, banking hard before they start looping the tower at different heights. Closer and closer they circle the scaffold, like spiders wrapping their prey in silk, before they spread out to follow the island’s outer edges.
Hypnotised by their terrible elegance, she doesn’t call again.
Now one of the drones dips and buzzes the ground at dangerously low altitude – close enough for Freya to see the star on its belly, the US Navy markings. It makes another circuit of the island. She wonders what they’re doing. What they’re for. Why there’s still no one else here to see.
The three drones return to a holding pattern: an evenly spaced wheel revolving the scaffold tower’s peak. How long they’ll stay there, she can’t begin to guess. They remind her of scavenging birds, graceful but menacing, strangely languid.
The rain begins to clear, the heaviest front rolling east. Freya turns from the drones. Visibility has improved out to sea, and she spots a set of green and red lights flashing just this side of the horizon. Red to her right, green to her left. Relief: this must be the supplies boat coming in.
The old sirens from last night whir. Time to welcome the crew. Freya expects the port will fill with dockers. A lot of action. But as the boat closes, takes on a more defined shape, the port stays empty. Pieces of paper turning over in the calming wind, fresh heat as the sun starts to burn through.
Freya checks behind her. The drones are still up. Then back to the supplies boat, which has altered its course slightly, turned sufficiently to starboard that only its port lights, the red lights, are visible. If it stays on that course, it’ll miss the island completely.
Freya stands on tiptoes, as if the extra height will make sense of things.
The ocean flashes, and a second later a terrific pressure wave sends Freya sprawling to the ground.
There’s another boat out there. Another boat, much larger, grey and low in profile, spined with antennae, is crossing the sea laterally. Flickering light springs from its bow. A flat, percussive roll – a firm shove in her solar plexus – and the water close to the supplies ship erupts in spray. The supplies ship is turning hard to starboard, and the darker ship is cutting it off. It’s a warship, she realises. It’s firing on them. And as if arriving from the sun itself, the three navy drones are out at sea.
There comes a staggered, high-pitched rattle from the air. The navy drones are also firing on the supplies ship. The ocean surface is seamed along three straight lines. The warship bears down, implacable. The supplies ship carries on turning as the Vertex sirens blare.
Freya breaks for the edge of the island. Her shoes are gone, and her legs can barely carry her.
The supplies boat’s red and green lights have swapped sides. It’s facing the horizon. The supplies boat is going away from her. But don’t worry, she tries to reason – this must be routine. Training, or a drill? The navy testing countermeasures? And isn’t she early, anyway? Their transfer plane hasn’t arrived yet, and the rest of the press attachment must be tuck
ed up in their cabin bunks, enjoying childless lie-ins, lazy mornings, extra rest to compensate for island time, for jet lag…
She tells herself the other journalists can’t all be padlocked inside their cabins with those neat red crosses taped over their doors. She tells herself that the old man in the garden centre was making threats, not warning her.
She watches the departing supplies ship, the approaching navy drones, the hulking navy warship, and tells herself not to turn around when heavy-sounding boots reach the concrete shore behind her. The click and squeak of uniform, weapons. These are the workers. The dockers. They’re as confused by this as she is. The supplies ship will turn back in a moment, and the drones will come in to land, and the press tour will go on. Tomorrow, after two long flights home, her father will collect her from Manchester Airport, and her mother will have tea on the table for seven. She’ll apologise, and they’ll accept it, and she’ll tell her story. She’ll tell the world what really happened to Stephen Parsons.
‘Ms Medlock?’ a man says. It’s an American voice, muffled by breathing gear.
She turns to him. The air is still. She turns back to the ocean. The reality of the situation finally inundates her. Vertex Island is already lost. What Shep carried here has contaminated all of it. She considers jumping into the water, then – swimming after the supplies ship in the hope it might see her before the shelf drops away and the water turns cold. She doesn’t begrudge it for leaving – we have to look after ourselves. It should’ve been more obvious, after all. No press. No plane. No supplies boat.
Quarantine.
How foolish, how blinkered she’s been. How wilful.
‘Ms Medlock,’ the American says, much closer. ‘Did you come into physical contact with Billy Shepherd?’
Freya sits down on the concrete lip. The breaking waves send foam over her feet.
A heavy glove on her shoulder. ‘Ma’am?’
A bird is drawn to fruit and gorges happily. The bird doesn’t ask why the tree offers its treats. But the carrying of a seed is a process. It’s how the tree lives on.
‘I had this,’ Freya says. ‘I had it.’
The American pulls Freya up and away from the water. The breeze draws her requiem from the steel of the tower scaffold.
HOME BY THE SEA
The Landowner
Em and Ted move their little family to North Wales, new bearings fifty miles along Anglesey’s coastal path. ‘The market’s really developing here,’ the agent tells them. ‘Your money’ll go a lot further.’ And it does go further: an overinflated payoff from the council nets them a charming beachfront cottage with whole-bay views, a handsome garden. A rickety workshop is taken up by the previous owner’s loom, but easily convertible – a granny flat for Ted’s mum, say.
So the Irish Sea displaces Lakeland forest, and with it the girls forget their Seelie Court between the trees downhill from the old garden. It turns out there’s plenty to distract the girls out here, and they take instantly to the beach. It helps that Em and Ted bribe the girls with a rescue dog – a dopey mutt the girls insist on calling Dragon. Dragon, this great daft animal who tries to eat the sea foam and brings great clods of beach into the house when you’ve walked him.
Some afternoons, Em will stand at the edge of the garden and watch the three of them playing in the breakers – the girls rolling about and kicking the water and laughing at each other, the dog sprinting gamely over the flats. The mountains of Snowdonia, shrouded, out of reach, always over there. These are the times she questions whether the council’s compulsory purchase order was so bad after all.
Ted, though, is slower to adjust. He’s often sad, occasionally angry. In the swell of his mood swings – between the sad smiles and silent, barely contained rages – Em senses his resistance to their new life. When it happens, Em endures withdrawal; knows their hearth is still in the Lakes, that their taken-away land is still the crux and the crutch of her. While Ted goes on denying it, there’s no question he feels that way, too.
So it’s all they can do to try and forget. Overwrite the place. Suppress their pangs for it.
Still, by the time the girls have started at their new primary school in September, Em is adjusting nicely. To the sea and its reach. She likes the way the waves follow you back inside: that brisk, fresh spray at your heels, the stubborn grains of wet sand in your boots, on your scalp, under your watch strap. The colour of the bay in the early morning. Buoy bells ringing as the whole family lounge about and barbecue in dreamy light, late summer, as she and Ted learn to rinse the sand from the girls’ clothes before they put them in the washing machine. Dragon, lying down in the patches of sun that waltz round the garden.
And even Ted, struggling Ted, seems to be getting his head around things. A peace about him, where before the same quietness was a symptom of what he probably saw as capitulation.
So it goes, then, that something should happen to rupture this delicate state.
* * *
The blank postcard comes early. The reverse addressed to the girls in crimson ink. Em is the one to scoop it from the welcome mat.
Em skim reads it there in the hall with a hand on her chest. She takes it to the kitchen and reads it again, slower, colder, and this is appropriate: the stamp in the corner depicts a polar bear adrift on a tiny floe, and it’s postmarked Svalbard, Norway. Vaguely, Em remembers the name. Up in the Arctic – that’s the one. One of her spy novels concerned a plot against the Global Seed Vault.
Em puts down the postcard. No doubt about its sender, its veracity. The round body of the initial – the G that signs it – is the very same G she’d seen on their gardening invoices. But she doesn’t understand how he’d have their new address. Why he’d wait so long to get in touch. What he’s doing in Svalbard.
Em reads the postcard back. One more time, whispered aloud. Her response isn’t relief but crawling flesh. Her neck and back. Under her skin.
Ted comes in to find her hunching over the breakfast bar. ‘Morning, trouble,’ he says.
‘Hey,’ she says, with a quick, habitual hand squeeze.
‘What’s burning?’
Em can’t smell any burning. She looks at the toaster, the Aga. The sockets. Then at her palms.
‘Em?’
‘It’s… we got a postcard.’
‘Oh?’
Em turns it on the breakfast bar. ‘From him.’
‘When?’
‘This morning. Sent six days ago, the postmark says. From Norway.’
‘Norway?’ Ted gapes. ‘Have the girls seen it?’
‘Still in bed.’
‘Let me.’
Em pushes the postcard tentatively across the tiles. She scrapes the hair out of her face. It’s not yet six-thirty and she could murder a drink.
Ted reads the postcard. Enunciates the lines. ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ he says.
Em’s holding her face when he finishes. ‘All those ideas he put in the girls’ heads last time… And if he writes again, what’s to stop them seeing? I can’t do this, Ted. We can’t. You know what it did to Damson, all that bloody stuff and nonsense. How the hell’s he got our new address?’
Ted starts to read the postcard aloud:
The girls never did lie. There’s a queen for me and a queen for you and a queen for all of us. They want most of all for cold. They can breathe, then. They make you want for cold. The cold’s all right. Have to like it, this line of work. Em, your girls did not lie. But they are not fairies. You watch. G.
Em’s shaking when Ted puts down the postcard.
‘He’s gone,’ Ted says. He touches his temple. ‘In the head.’
Em takes back the card, turns it over. ‘And the thing is—’
She stops. There are more words imprinted on the picture side. Not with ink, but as if pressed in with an empty nib. Like he’d written another letter while leaning on it. She holds the card to her face.
‘Oh my God,’ she whispers. ‘Ted. Look. It’s the girls’ names. Over
and over.’
Ted comes closer. Pulls Em’s hand, the card, into focus.
‘Overwritten,’ he says. ‘Another note to someone else. A separate postcard, maybe?’
Em can’t accept that. And Ted won’t have it, either. She saw the thing burning in the greenhouse, the line scoured in the grass. She can see what’s happening here. Damson. Dolly. Dolly. Damson. Damson. Dolly. Damson. Dolly. Em rubs the indentations.
‘What’s that on your thumb?’ Ted asks.
Em looks at it. Brownish. The initialled G has smeared, and she’s surprised to find it powdery to the touch. A deeper colour than the red ink of the rest of the message. Em scratches lightly and more of it flakes away.
‘What?’ she asks, looking at her nail.
Ted stands there.
‘He’s not signed it in—’
‘Don’t,’ she says. Because why? Why would he? Proof of life? Some sort of cruel joke? That Graham’s had some sort of breakdown is plausible. But to sign… No, worse, to do it so neatly—
‘He must be in a bad way,’ Ted says.
Em shakes her head. ‘What are we supposed to do?’ she asks. Graham never spoke of family or friends, and his flat was repossessed shortly after he absconded. Ted had kept various court processes at bay for months, but slowly gave up as the chances of Graham resurfacing diminished.
‘I don’t have a clue,’ Ted says.
‘I’m scared,’ Em tells him.
But Ted isn’t scared – he’s angry. ‘Give it here,’ he says. ‘I’ll fucking burn it. Then – then we forget about it. It didn’t happen.’
‘Till he sends more,’ Em says. ‘My God. It’s like he’s back here.’
‘Well he isn’t,’ Ted says. ‘Only thing I can think is that he’s reaching out. Some people, you know, before they take their own… some people, they, ah… they get ready. You know? Writing to their nearest and dearest. Settling accounts. You know?’