Submersion

  I nodded, and that was the last we spoke of it.

  The day then continued on its regular pattern – Jerry and Shirley arrived, supposedly holed up in a meeting till then, and I was given paper files to review, until it was time for my short day to end.

  That night, Tristan left on his trip east with Jessie and the first of Esther’s regular welfare calls began.

  The next day produced very little progress. The files were not as organised as the ones we kept in the food administration department. There was no date order, for instance, so it wasn’t just a case of skipping to the end of folders and scrolling to the very bottom. Policy documents from five, ten years ago adjacent to even older items, including those from my childhood years. I declined to open these; I knew enough already about the atrocities it would document, I didn’t wish to know more. At the end of computer time that day, I did stumble across one folder that intrigued me, entitled correspondence. But my time was up by then. I could hear Tony shuffling about in the room next door, making an unnecessary amount of noise. Any minute now, he would be coming in and giving me his customary nod.

  After work that day, I rowed by the Cadley residence on my way home. I hadn’t heard from Old Merlin for a while and wondered if he had made further progress on that tape. I’d played that previous snippet of Elinor and Tristan so many times on the small cassette player he’d given me, I feared it would break. It appeared so thin and fragile. The phrase brought to mind the physical state my missing daughter might be in. Oh, Elinor, where are you? My internal ache must have been present in my face, as opening the door, the old man said:

  ‘Now there’s someone that needs a bit of hope.’ He said it softly, welcoming enough that it suggested he had some. ‘I do,’ he answered, when I posed that question to him.

  He led me back up some metal spiral steps to his room on the second floor that housed the equipment for listening to music and invited me to sink into the luxury of one of the stout chairs therein. I did with pleasure and I realised just how tired my bones were, as they were enveloped in comfort.

  ‘Okay, it’s just a bit more. Not much.’

  With that, he pressed a button and voices fell from hidden speakers in the ceiling.

  ‘Door-to-door salesmen were still in high supply and medium demand. Cars were a familiar sight on the road: being driven, parked, washed or some abandoned – just not all abandoned. Children could play in the street too – kicking balls, skipping with ropes, throwing off their coats and jumpers when they got too warm. It wasn’t the better days; the money times were over and the riches were with the few, the remaining scraps with the many. But the floods were yet to come; a river was still an isolated, controlled area and small rowing boats were not common place. Indeed, it was rare or considered quite unnecessary to own one.’

  ‘Tristan,’ I confirmed to the old man, who put a finger to his lips, expressing a silent listen.

  Next came what I was really hoping for.

  ‘Why have you stopped?’

  Elinor, her voice booming down upon me, distorting the sound a little. The old man adjusted the sound. ‘Should be better now,’ he said, very quietly.

  I listened out for more of her, my heart breaking at every sound. Was this the closest I’d ever get to her again?

  ‘Thought I heard something. A noise. A whirring sound. You not hear it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll continue. Now where was I? Oh yes. But the floods were yet to come. A river was still a river, and a road was still a road…’

  He stopped the tape.

  ‘Do you have anything else?’ I asked, no attempt to mask my desperation.

  ‘Yes, there’s a little bit more I’ve managed to retrieve, but nothing that really tells us anything. No more of her,’ he concluded, adding yet when he saw my face fall. ‘There’s a conversation between you and Tristan, voicing concerns about Elinor’s gallivanting.’

  ‘Can I hear it?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  And so listened to myself and Tristan and was reminded of another absence.

  ‘Nothing is going to happen to her. She’s a good girl. And it’s safe.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘There’s nothing out there but water.’

  ‘What if she drowns?’

  As soon as I began to cry, the old man stopped the tape and sat beside me. He reached out for my hands and I let him take them. They were surprisingly soft and warm, without being damp, which I had somehow expected.

  ‘I’ll keep trying and I’ll keep looking for clues, just like the rest of us.’ He paused, searching for the right words. ‘You know, I think there’s something on this.’

  I looked up, wondering what he meant.

  ‘It’s clear she’s recording people in secret. You, herself and Tristan and his dark tales.’ He smiled at that, lightly, and I joined him. ‘So, maybe she recorded something that will give us a way forward. A clue to where she went, why she left.’

  ‘Left?’

  ‘Why not? We’re all assuming Elinor was taken, but what if something made her leave. It’s possible.’

  It hadn’t occurred to me before that Elinor would want to leave, but it was possible, even if I suspected that the old man was simply trying to give me hope.

  ‘What about you – how is your search going?’

  I didn’t think for a minute that Old Merlin had any insight into my clandestine activities at the Food Administration Board, but it amused me that he might. He did look a bit like a wizard and his towering house was built like a modern day castle.

  ‘Is that amusing?’ he asked, as a grin crawled across my face.

  I dropped it quickly and decided to share what I’d been up to. Not having Tristan to share my progress with meant I was carrying the stress myself. It also meant I had no one to help me reflect; no other view to consider. So, I took a deep breath, decided I could trust the old man and gave him a reduced version of the last four days.

  Once I had finished, he took a minute or two think it all over, before he spoke.

  ‘So, you’re getting about an hour a day?’ he said and I nodded. ‘Um,’ he hummed, giving nothing away. Then he stood, indicated that I should stay where I was and left the room, calling back as he descended the spiral steps. ‘Won’t be a minute!’

  After much crashing about and a little cursing, he returned after five, looking a little flustered, but pleased with himself.

  ‘Here.’

  He was holding out his palm to me and in it he held a flat, white oblong, with a small lead dangling off it.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, puzzled, taking it from him, turning it over in my hands. It was thin, smooth and solid. To me, it was just a lump of plastic; there were no buttons, no suggestion of its function.

  ‘Storage,’ he announced, a beam in his tone. ‘In simple terms, you can use this to copy and store that entire archive you have access to.’

  ‘And then?’ I asked, feeling I hadn’t got the entire picture.

  ‘You bring it here. I have a room of old computers,’ he explained. You would have, I thought. ‘So, I’ll be able to download the entire lot and you can keep looking, but in your own time. I could even help you search. I could put it on more than one computer.’ He paused, letting it sink in. ‘So, what do you think?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Thank you. Yes, this will help.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, taking the white oblong back into his own hands. ‘Right, I suppose I’d better tell you how this thing works…’

  Returning to the office the next day, I set about following the old man’s instructions straightaway. Plug this into the desktop box, open the computer folder, select this item – Merlin’s cache – and right click. Then press copy.’ He had warned me that it might not work. Might not be compatible with the soft- or hardware, so don’t get your hopes up. But, whatever that meant, I didn’t have any issues at all. It wa
s easy, too easy, in fact. He said it might take a few minutes to copy all the information and he wasn’t wrong in that. It was still copying the documents when I heard Tony shuffling about, beginning his ritual of coughing and banging objects in the build-up to his return. I wondered if I’d have to stop the operation and whether that meant aborting the whole extraction. But, in the final seconds a dialogue box appeared on the screen informing me that the process was complete. So, I pulled the lead out of the desktop box and dropped the white storage gadget into my bag, out of sight.

  I spent the rest of my morning there completely distracted. What if I had wasted my hour that morning? I hadn’t been able to view a single document whilst I had been copying the files, as the computer had been running too slowly. What if, when I got to the old man’s house, his computers weren’t compatible, as he put it? And I was desperate to know what was in the correspondence folder I’d stumbled upon the previous day.

  ‘Why don’t you just take yourself home?’ Jerry offered and I looked up to find all three of my companions staring at me, their expression a mix of bemusement and concern.

  ‘Away with the fairies,’ Shirley tutted, pointing at a mug of watery tea I’d let go cold.

  ‘She’s right,’ Tony added. ‘You’re not good for anything today.’

  ‘So, looks like that’s decided,’ Jerry concluded and, between them, they all but carried me out to my little wooden boat. ‘Row safely,’ were my boss’ parting words, as I began my journey home, a combination of delight and agitation spurring me forward. For all my gratitude at being released early and being able to continue my search for the rest of the day, I kept returning to one nagging thought: it had been far too easy.

  ‘Never look a gift-horse…’ the voice of Reuben reasoned in my mind.

  ‘I know,’ I replied aloud, pushing the oars through the choppy water, edging my way towards the Cadley place.

  ‘Ah, I’ll take that,’ the old man said, as soon as I was out of my rubber suit and able to retrieve the white storage item from my bag. ‘Follow me!’ he instructed, climbing those curling stairs again with a youthful spring, taking us up another floor. ‘In here,’ he called out, as I stepped off the steel flight onto the fourth level of his house.

  There were two rooms there – one locked, one with the door wide open, from which the old man’s voice emitted.

  The room was occupied by four desks in total, each with a stout monitor perched upon them.

  ‘Come on in,’ he encouraged, fiddling about under one of the desks. ‘Take a seat. You’re in luck, you know, because I’ve only just got these up and running. Missing parts, you see. Young Jessie has been very resourceful, though. Knows what to look for. Smart one, that.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, slipping onto a seat that had been patched up with brown tape. It swirled slightly and I had to steady my feet to stop it rotating.

  ‘Right,’ he continued, coming up for air and taking a seat himself. ‘That’ll take a good hour, I’m afraid. Let’s pop back downstairs. Have some coffee. I’ve got something else to show you, too.’ And, trailing hope behind him like breadcrumbs in a fairy-tale, the old man descended those steps once again - steps far too treacherous for a man of his age – and I followed him like an obedient heroine.

  Two brutally strong cups of coffee later and we were heading up again, this time to his music room.

  ‘You’ve got more of the tape?’ I asked, eagerly.

  He pulled a plain face that instantly managed my expectations.

  ‘A little, not much. It’s your girl and Tristan again, Agnes,’ he said, before turning away, pushing and buttons, turning nobs.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, still impatient to hear it.

  ‘Maybe nothing,’ he informed me, still with his back to me. ‘Why don’t we listen and then see.’

  He pressed a play button on his machine and the sound reigned down from the ceiling as before.

  ‘When they took me, they kept me isolated at first. The idea was to break me in some way. Remove contact with other reasonable humans with the view of removing humanity from me entirely. During that time, they continued to test me. In between meals and trips to the bathroom, and sleep, of course, they brought me papers to complete, or lists of questions I had to answer. And once we had gone through all that, they introduced the experiments.’

  ‘Experiments?’

  ‘Yes, but that wasn’t the worst of it.’

  ‘It wasn’t?’

  ‘No, that came later. You see, I was compliant at first. Tests, questions, experiments – I went along with it all. But then I was introduced to him and that’s when the real terror began.’

  Tristan. Beginning one of his dark tales.

  ‘Him? Who do you mean?’

  Elinor. Her questions, her eagerness. My heart thumped wildly as I continued to listen.

  ‘It’s a secret.’

  ‘A secret?’

  ‘A secret name.’

  ‘Tell me. Please. Tell me his name.’

  The old man paused the tape.

  ‘Why are you stopping it?’

  ‘I want to make sure you are ready for this.’

  ‘I’m ready!’ I insisted and the old man nodded, pressed play again.

  ‘What’s the secret name, Tristan?’

  A heavy, drawn out pause.

  ‘Xavier. Xavier Riley.’

  As the name played out, I pointed my look of surprise in the old man’s direction and saw he had anticipated it. I instantly remembered what had caught my eye on my last visit – the train set Billy was playing with; the name Xavier painted on each of the carriages.

  ‘You know him, don’t you?’ I said, certain it wasn’t coincidence; assured of a connection.

  He nodded, keeping his responses simple.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  ‘If I tell you – which I will if you insist – I may put you in danger. You may want to do something with the answer. So, you’re certain you want to know?’

  ‘I do,’ I confirmed, anticipating something big, something unsafe, but unable to withdraw my assault.

  He nodded again, cleared his throat, adding to the suspense I felt.

  ‘My name is Augustus Riley,’ he said, calmly, simply. ‘And Xavier Riley is my son.’ He allowed a moment for this to reach my ears and sink in, before adding. ‘She’s my grand-daughter, Agnes. I came looking for him, and I found her.’

  I was stunned. Not only by his name – I had seen it only a day or so before in the files about St Patrick’s. Wasn’t he a sponsor? Yet, also by the connection. Whilst I’d suspected there was one, the proximity of this familial link left me speechless.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s all too much at once. I never told Agnes who I was – she genuinely believed I was called Old Man Merlin.’ He emitted a small chuckle. ‘Young Billy knows my true name – but he’s sworn to secrecy and it has no meaning for him. Why don’t I leave you to think all this over? I could go and check on how those files are downloading?’

  I nodded, still too astonished to converse. I needed time to download some information myself – a minute or two to organise the information I’d received, a chance to formulate questions, consider all the implications.

  He hovered by the door, picking up on all my emotions; I could read this in his expression.

  ‘I’ll just be up a floor, okay? And when I return, I’ll answer any of your questions.’

  The old man – Augustus, as I could now call him – was gone for five, maybe ten minutes. It was hard to tell, as I lost all sense of time in my dumbfounded state. On his return, Augustus announced the files were ready, but suggested more tea and something to eat before we continued.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and for the first time saw a fragility about him. His eyes emitted genuine concern and I sensed that this old man had a lot about his shoulders. ‘I am in shock,’ I added, feeling the need to reassure him, ‘but I’m okay. Maybe a bit of refreshment and a few answers would go some way to bring me back
to normal.’

  I threw him a gentle smile and he accepted it with one of his own.

  ‘Down we go then,’ he said, heading back out to the stairs. ‘I’ve got a few things out the back. Bit of bread and cheese, kept in an old fridge I’ve rigged up.’

  We ate just that – bread and cheese, soft and creamy, definitely not courtesy of the Food Administration Board – standing in his small kitchen/lab out the back of his house. Another pot of strong coffee accompanied that.

  ‘Go on then,’ I encouraged once we done eating, inviting him to surrender the facts of his case.

  ‘I haven’t seen Xavier in years. He was one of the taken, which I’m certain you know. When his mother and I got him back, we were overjoyed, but he was damaged by the experience. Restless, too. He wanted revenge, and sought no comfort in being at home. So, he left, went about his business of putting right what had gone wrong. And, every now and then, he would come home, act as restless as the last time, and flee again. I knew about you – eventually. He came to his mother’s funeral, about seven years ago. Told me your name, but little else. Then he vanished. Stopped calling and writing. I had no idea where he was. Then, an old friend of his called to say he was safe; didn’t give their name, but said the church were looking after him. It seemed unlikely and it was very little to go on, but I pursued it all the same. Pulled some strings – I know a few people – and I found out the telephone call had come from this district. So I came looking for him. Bought the old Cadley residence as it was the only one that was big enough to keep all my stuff. Then I stumbled across you and Elinor, and when I saw her face, learned of her age, I knew you were the Agnes he had talked about.’

  ‘And she doesn’t know?’

  ‘No, not my place to tell her – that’s yours and yours alone.’

  ‘And no one else knows?’

  ‘No. And just Billy knows my name – but, like I said, it means nothing to him. Just a fun secret between us.’

  I paused, thinking, sipped coffee to buy time.

  ‘You have more questions, I can tell.’

  I conceded with a nod.