by Rob Kinsman
“Tell Cynthia Harrison that. She’s fuming that it wasn’t her Claudia that got picked.”
“I wasn’t picked. It just… Oh, it doesn’t matter.”
“Where are you, love?”
It was with a heavy heart that Zoe realised she couldn’t trust her own mother.
“Laying low,” she said. “I’ll be in touch soon.”
She put the receiver down and turned up the sound on the telly. Her parents were physically fine, if unhinged, so she could go back to procrastinating. It was the next call she had to make that she was truly dreading.
It didn’t take long for the media to find people able to identify Zoe as the woman in the dream.
“She’s always been a queer one.” Julie gave the TV reporter her sickening flirty smile. It was just the sort of grotesque sight Ofcom was invented for.
“I always thought she’d do something like this,” an ex-boyfriend told a different channel. “She was so repressed, you know?”
Just because I wouldn’t go three way with you, git.
She changed the channel again.
“When we were in the fourth year she used to steal chocolate biscuits from the other kids’ lunch-boxes.” Zoe didn’t even remember this so-called ‘school friend’. He looked liked he’d escaped from a public awareness campaign about the perils of heroin abuse.
Some old photos of Zoe had been unearthed, and were being regularly flashed up onscreen. None of them were flattering, they were more like the first few images which get repeated over and over when someone is identified as the perpetrator of a terrible massacre. Even Zoe found herself peering closer at the screen to see if she could spot any visible sociopathic tendencies in her twelve year old self.
She’d put it off as long as she could. She needed to investigate Nick’s story, to make sure she could discount it as the ramblings of a sleep-deprived serial liar. There was no way round it, she was going to have to risk turning her phone on. The number she needed was definitely not one she knew by heart.
The chunky old phone flashed slowly into life and then beeped. A lot. Missed calls, missed texts, voicemail messages. It seemed the whole angry world had somehow gotten hold of her number.
She flicked quickly through her texts. They included a wealth of abuse blaming Zoe for, among other things, sleepless nights, cheating spouses, Brexit and the monarchy. Eventually Zoe found the message she was looking for, scribbled down the sender’s number and turned the phone off again. She sat for a few minutes, listening to the sounds of the city outdoors, half expecting the SAS to come crashing through the window at any second.
I haven’t done anything wrong.
She picked up the hotel phone and dialled the number. It was answered before she’d even heard it ring.
Skyhawk brought a box of cheap and tasteless beer with him.
“You shouldn’t have turned your phone on,” he said, opening his first can. “Anyone could have traced you.”
“I didn’t know your number.”
“You should have sent word through the network.”
“What network?”
Skyhawk tapped the side of his nose, which didn’t really throw any light on the matter.
“So my intel was good?” he asked. Zoe stared at him blankly. “He was he there? Loverboy?”
“Yes. How did you know where to find him?”
“Deduction.”
Skyhawk stretched out, giving Zoe a little more time to bask in his genius.
“Just tell me how you did it,” she sighed wearily.
“Spotless Supreme.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“High class cleaning company.” Skyhawk paced the tiny room, like a detective addressing the survivors at the end of a murder mystery. “They keep details of the houses they look after on their computer database, including the dates when clients are away. Each day they send out an email to the people allocated to each house, including the alarm codes.”
He produced a Kit-Kat from his pocket and tucked in, showing no sign of being about to offer Zoe any. She thought about asking him for a finger but decided she couldn’t face the inevitable schoolboy retort.
“So Nick broke into their system?” she asked instead.
“More likely that he got hold of administrator privileges and used them to log in. Humans are always the weak spot. Unless he’s as good a hacker as me, which frankly he can’t be.” Skyhawk snorted like a pig being water-boarded. “The flat he first took you to was owned by a guy who does a lot of business abroad. The whole system is automated, so your fuck buddy just reallocated the cleaning shifts to make sure no-one would disturb him while the owner was away. Instant, high-class bachelor pad. Didn’t take long to spot the pattern, realise he’d done the same trick again. Hence the address.”
Skyhawk visibly resisted the urge to bow. He waited for Zoe to, at the very least, applaud.
“He wasn’t a ‘fuck buddy’,” said Zoe, peeved.
Skyhawk shrugged, and crumpled up his chocolate wrapper.
“Anyway, you said you had news.”
Zoe nodded her head, dreading what lay ahead.
She told him Nick’s story.
“Yeah, sounds plausible enough,” said Skyhawk when she had finished.
“Oh,” said Zoe, sarcastically. “That’s ok then.”
“I reckon so.”
He reclined onto the bed, satisfied.
“Just how mentally ill are you?” snapped Zoe.
“It’s an explanation, seems to fit. What more do you want?”
“The truth.”
“Do you know what he told you isn’t?”
“Yes. Of course all this isn’t a dream. I grew up in a dreary village, not a bloody magical castle. I used to go on holiday to Morecambe. Nobody in their right mind would invent Morecambe. They used to have a Mr Blobby theme park, for Christ’s sake.” Skyhawk looked unmoved by her passionate rant. “I had a shitty time at school. A real school, full of horrible real people.”
“Can we get room service?”
Skyhawk started nosing through the menu next to the phone.
“All the things I went through, they’re not just someone’s dream. They have to be real, otherwise…”
Otherwise I’ve no excuse for being such a fuck up.
“Stop flapping and have a toastie.” Skyhawk picked up the phone. Zoe stomped over and pulled the cord out the wall. “Hey!”
“I’m talking! This is important.”
“So is breakfast. Most important meal of the day.”
“It’s 3pm and you’ve already had a Kit-Kat.”
“I don’t let society dictate meal times to me.”
“Listen,” said Zoe, baring her teeth like a wolf. “If Nick was right then all of this only exists in my mind. You, me, this hotel.”
“So I guess we could screw, and it wouldn’t count?”
“That is never going to happen.”
“If the world was real then I wouldn’t suggest it,” said Skyhawk, with a not totally convincing air of innocence. “But if it doesn’t count then we may as well. I mean, you’re getting on a bit but you seem well maintained.”
“I’m not a bloody National Trust property. Well maintained?”
“Is that a no?”
“I’d sooner die.”
“Oh well. Let’s see what the grub’s like then.”
He started fumbling around, trying to reconnect the phone cable.
“Jesus Christ! You’re supposed to be the paranoid conspiracy nut. Haven’t you got anything a bit more insightful to offer?”
He sighed, feeling the solemn weight of his demographic.
“Well,” he mused, “if it’s all a dream then basically everyone’s fucked.”
“That’s your expert opinion, is it?”
“On the other hand it could just be that something has gone wrong with the whole of existence, and that guy who was boning you decided to feed you a different kind of porkie at the same time.” He grinned,
all adolescent and slimy. “Personally, I’m hanging out for that theory.”
“Why?”
“Because that way maybe it’s only you who’s fucked and the rest of us can get back to normal sooner or later.”
There was a complex series of arrhythmic little taps at the door.
“It’s the feds,” squealed Skyhawk, looking for somewhere to hide.
“We’re in Outer East London, not the Bronx,” said Zoe flatly. “And I don’t think SWAT teams knock.”
“That’s what they want you to believe.”
The knocking was repeated. Zoe got up to answer the door. “It’s Maja. She works here.”
“We must limit civilian contact.”
“She’s a friend. We can trust her.”
“Under no circumstances can we trust anyone.”
Maja began her knocking routine again. This, at least, seemed to please Skyhawk.
“You gave her an entry code. Very sensible.”
Zoe, in fact, hadn’t. The rhythmic knowing was just one of those things Maja seemed to do for reasons unknowable to anyone outside her head. Zoe opened the door. Skyhawk’s jaw nearly dropped to the floor at the sight of the tall, elegant Polish woman.
“Yeah, she’s pretty. Get over it.”
“I bring you more coffee. And pastries.” Maja’s nose crumpled up in her adorable way when she saw Skyhawk. “I did not know husband was here.”
This was possibly the most insulting thing anyone had ever said to Zoe.
“This creature is not my husband.”
“Yeah, I’m available. The name’s Skyhawk.”
“So you are friend of Zoe?”
“We’re colleagues.”
“Ah. You work at pissing council?”
Zoe hoped she’d made it clear that this wasn’t her employer’s actual name or function.
“No. I’m more on the”–Skyhawk tapped his nose yet again–“undercover ops end of things.”
“Oh,” said Maja, with the politeness of a foreigner used to not understanding what most people were talking about most of the time. Zoe envied her that. “Mr Hawk…”
“Skyhawk. Not Mr.”
“Can’t you just tell us your real name?” sighed Zoe.
“Does she know about you? I think we should trust her.”
“I thought you said trust no-one.”
Skyhawk shrugged, more than happy to cheerily discard this rule in the circumstances.
Maja’s cheery smile seemed frozen in place. Reluctant as she was to talk about it, Zoe supposed she owed her the truth. Friends were at a premium at the moment, and unlike Skyhawk at least she actually liked Maja.
“Sit down, Maja. I’ve got something to tell you.”
Every time Zoe told someone about her ‘condition’ it became harder to get the words out. It was as if the mere fact of admitting there was something wrong with her made the problem more real.
Maja listened to her story with quiet patience, asking few questions. It showed remarkable composure from someone who was essentially being told she was just a figment of someone’s imagination, although it was also possible that she just had no idea what they were on about.
Finally the room was silent and brains ticked over. Maja spoke first.
“Do you think Nick tells truth?”
“I calculate it as 67% probable based on the current evidence,” said Skyhawk.
“I don’t know,” cut in Zoe. “I hope not.”
The three of them talked in circles for some time, always arriving at the same inevitable conclusion. They needed to speak to Nick.
“I could try and trace the origins of his alias with the cleaning company,” said Skyhawk. “It may be possible to find the IP address he last used to log on, and then I can follow the trail back to his laptop. From there we should be able enable direct communication with him. Subject to all the normal difficulties around firewalls, aliases and false accounts.”
“Yeah, good plan,” said Zoe. “Oh, or we could just call him. He gave me his number.”
Skyhawk ignored her superior smile.
“We need to bring him in for questioning immediately.”
“For the hundredth time, we’re not the bloody FBI, MI5 or the police,” said Zoe, exasperated. “We don’t even have as much authority as the cub scouts. At least they’ve got a uniform.”
When they’d finished bickering, Zoe called the number Nick had given her. It went straight to a generic voicemail.
“Do I leave a message?”
“Do not under any circumstances give away our location.”
“So how’s he meant to get in touch?”
Nick’s answerphone beeped. Zoe hung up.
Evening came, and still Nick refused to answer his phone. Every time, the same story: straight to voicemail.
While they waited they watched television. People were queuing up to tell the reporters about the hardships they’d suffered as a result of the 36-hour sleepathon. From bedsores to missed episodes of favourite programmes (even though they hadn’t been broadcast) everyone had their own, largely petty, hard luck story about how they’d been affected. Fortunately, they had a new scapegoat. Zoe was blamed for everything under the sun, largely on the grounds that people wouldn’t have lost a day of their lives if she hadn’t angered the king.
She was just getting used to the idea that half the planet wanted to kill her when the man who’d actually had a pop at it turn up on a chat show. As the frontman for Waking Dream, Thomas Knight was slick and smooth, a natural public speaker with a beguilingly gentle voice.
“The king has given us a clear message,” he told the host. “His realm of wonder is available to all of us if we return his queen to him. He offers us his protection and guidance. I’m happy to be the first to bend my to him.”
A touch melodramatically, he fell to a single bended knee. Online, people mocked him for it. But not for long.
Within an hour of the interview the news carried pictures of all sorts of people kneeling in the streets, mimicking their leader. Zoe shuddered, he was mobilising an army against her. The news paid lip service to the human rights groups who protested that if the queen was seeking asylum then it was unethical, and probably illegal, to send her back to a clearly dangerous partner. Their message didn’t spread as fast as Thomas Knight’s however. What people wanted were easy solutions, not thorny issues of morality. Even the politicians rolled over, trying to lap up the popular sentiment of obeying the king rather than questioning whether a violent control freak was really the best person to be telling everyone on the planet what to do.
After a while Maja had to go back to tending reception. When night came, Zoe rejected Skyhawk’s arguments that he should share the bed with her ‘for security reasons’ and sent him off to wherever it was he lived when he wasn’t pestering her.
Zoe barely slept that night. During the odd moments that she did doze off, she dreamt of her flat. Of Sid’s lifeless eyes staring up at her.
Another day came and went. Skyhawk took the opportunity to ask Zoe further questions for his ‘research’. Infuriating as he was, she humoured him.
For hours he quizzed her about whether she might have been subjected to secret scientific testing when she was a child. Zoe maintained the view that it was unlikely as that just wasn’t the sort of thing that went on in East Anglia.
Round and round they went.
And still Nick didn’t answer his phone.
By the following day the press had made the link between Zoe and the murder which had taken place in her flat. She sat dumbstruck as she watched a Channel 5 reconstruction of events no-one but her had witnessed. The actress playing Zoe had obviously invested rather more time developing her mammary glands than her acting technique, but the implication was clear: dead men don’t turn up in your flat for no reason.
By lunchtime Zoe was getting cabin fever from being locked away in the small hotel room. She was grateful to Maja for her kindness in letting her stay for free, all
organised strictly off the books of course, but the crushing loneliness of being the woman everyone wanted to kick was getting her down. She yearned for some sense of normality, to have a taste of the old life she’d so hated.
She tried to phone Nick every hour, his number now firmly committed to memory. Around four in the afternoon her fingers danced over the digits yet again, calling without any real hope of a response.
This time it rang.
She made eye contact with Skyhawk. Nearly ten seconds had gone by before she realised that she’d stopped breathing. Every ring felt like an eternity, and she waited for the familiar voicemail message to kick in.
“Hello Zoe.”
She went to speak, but realised her throat was dry. Nothing came out.
“Are you there?” asked Nick.
“Yes.”
Skyhawk started blabbing out instructions, commanding her to establish a regular channel of communication, to get a fix on his location, and endless other things Zoe had no intention of doing.
“We need to talk, you’re in danger,” said Nick.
“Yeah, I kind of figured that bit out for myself.”
“Where are you?”
Zoe gave him the address of the hotel.
“Are you alone?”
Zoe looked at Skyhawk, who was still impotently mouthing orders.
“Yes.”
“I’ll be there soon.”
The phone went dead.
Skyhawk wasted no time in preparing the room for Nick’s arrival. He’d brought a bag full of tiny cameras and recording equipment with him, a complete home surveillance kit.
“We’re not spying on him,” said Zoe.
“Better safe than sorry.”
“Why do you even have all this stuff?” Skyhawk flushed a bright shade of red. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
“I use them when it is necessary to conduct surveillance on a subject for the greater good,” muttered Skyhawk.
“You watch people having sex.”
“No.” Zoe gave him a look. “Although I have sometimes been required to watch the human mating process for the sake of the mission.”
“You are a disgusting little creature.”
Despite that, she wanted him to stay. He was a narcissist, obsessed with his own inflated sense of self, but these days anyone who wasn’t actively against her counted as an ally. Nick wouldn’t be happy that she’d lied about not having company, but she was fed up of being pushed around. It was time she acted a little more....