Tourmaline

by James Brogden

  Steve made a half-hearted attempt to bar his exit. Ennias looked surprised. ‘Really? Make up your mind, Mr McBride. Do you want me in or out?’

  ‘Out. But only in the back of a police van.’

  Ennias raised his hand as if casually inspecting his nails. ‘Mr McBride, you’ve seen what I can do with just one of these. How curious are you to see what I can do with five?’

  Not very, as it happened. Steve let him go. ‘You’re not really her ex-boyfriend, are you?’ he asked.

  In the hallway outside, Ennias paused and looked back. ‘You might not be so quick on the uptake, but you seem like a decent fellow, for what it’s worth. My advice to you? Walk away. She’ll drag you down with her like a sinking ship, Mr McBride, whether she loves you or not. She won’t be able to stop herself.’

  Then he was gone, and Steve was rubbing the centre of his chest, where a large bruise was starting to appear.

  8

  Allie took Bobby to her bed on the night that the rains came.

  There was nothing especially dramatic about it – no sudden torrents of passion or burning, savage embraces – and afterwards, no embarrassment or awkwardness. In the end, neither of them could clearly remember who had made the first move. It seemed that with the opening of the clouds, some unspoken consensus had been reached, an agreement made on a level so removed from their conscious thoughts and feelings that it was absolutely authoritative and unquestionable. It was as if they’d done this a million times before and only temporarily forgotten about it.

  He’d been brooding over the contents of the chest which had been rescued from his raft – the cuff-links, the shoes, the book with its inscription from a woman he had no memory of – while half-listening to the music of Stray shifting against itself in an atonal chorus of creaks and subsonic groans, like whale-song. Was any of this his? Or if not his, then whose? He was so wrapped up in his own spiralling uncertainties that he didn’t realise she was standing by his hammock until he felt her warm, dry hand reach to take his own.

  He rose. Before he could say anything she laid a long finger on his lips and just looked at the shadow of him, liking what she saw. She led him a short way along the Charm boom, completely sure-footed in the dark, to where her boat was moored, and on a bed of sailcloth and fishing nets she took him to herself without saying a word, communicating what she wanted with her hands, her legs, her mouth. As the first older woman he’d ever slept with, she was stronger than he’d expected and nowhere near as soft or passively yielding as the diplomats’ daughters he’d bedded – she took what she wanted from him without apology and encouraged him to take her in return. He had enough presence of mind, at the end, to force himself to pause and say ‘I don’t want to… you know… get you…’

  ‘You won’t,’ she whispered, her eyes dark, drinking him in. ‘You can’t, not on Stray.’

  So he finished inside her, and in the end there were no doubts or questions or fragments of other people’s thoughts cluttering his brain. Just the absolute certainty of her: the taste of her skin, the smell of her hair, the sound of her quickening gasps as she came a second time in response to him.

  Later, without thunder or lightning or even a strong breeze, it began to rain. They gathered their clothing and dashed back for the shelter of Stray, laughing as clean, fresh water streamed from their naked bodies.

  Chapter 10

  Degan

  1

  The wake caused by Sophie’s intrusion from Tourmaline was large enough to be detected by every single one of the Hegemony’s buoys within a two-mile radius of Vessa’s bedsit; compared to the v-shaped trail which had followed her out of the gallery, this looked like the result of a hand grenade being thrown into a swimming pool. The cascade of notifications bumped the incident straight out of the Hegemony’s autonomic data-trawling systems and onto the desktop of an actual live, human supervisor, who farmed the process of putting a name and a face to the disturbance out to half a dozen operatives.

  Very few of even the most paranoid conspiracy theorists had any clue about the Hegemony’s existence, and contrary to some crackpots’ Hollywood-inspired imaginations there were no massive high-tech bunkers or central control rooms with large banks of gleaming computer consoles. Working from phones and laptops in their homes, on trains, park benches, school classrooms and government offices, these Hegemony operatives – who in most cases didn’t even know that this was what they were – proceeded to electronically scour the immediate geographical vicinity of the disturbance through a number of legal and semi-legal information systems ranging from Tesco Customer Services and the Yellow Pages up to the Inland Revenue, the police’s own Holmes2 criminal database, and even the Global Terrorism Database; for the Hegemony, even international terrorism was merely one of many tools of governance.

  Within twenty-four hours, the result was delivered to an individual whose name would not have appeared in any newspaper, Hansard archive or police report, and who was, at that very moment, holidaying on a beach in Montenegro, allowing an extraordinarily expensive Russian prostitute to massage sunscreen into his back. The report was pinged to his phone using an intelligence service app which would have made civil libertarians run screaming for their lawyers. It read simply:

  > vessel pn07139/cond.7 – marchant.sophie.r (alt: gail.vanessa)

  > manifest: araka (cat.: d3)

  > status: abscondment/fac.uk249/reacquisition pending

  > prosecute? y/n

  He pressed Y and settled back with a satisfied sigh to let the Mediterranean sun soak into his flesh; it was always pleasing to account for one’s wayward charges. He briefly considered bringing forward his return flight to the UK but dismissed the idea. It was only one girl, after all, and Maddox was more than capable of dealing with it. He let the call-girl’s talented fingers work their magic on his scapulae and dozed.

  2

  After her curfew had passed the following morning, Vessa tried to explain.

  ‘I told you once that She Shall Be Called Woman was a favourite of Sophie’s when she and I skived off school to visit London together.’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’ Steve’s tone was guarded. He’d made it clear that whatever explanation she was about to give, it would have to be full and honest; he would have to be able to ask her anything about it, or he was gone. Surprising herself, she’d agreed.

  ‘The first time, Sophie was on her own. I think I also said that she had a terrible home life. Her parents did really awful things to her – the kinds of things for which people get locked up for the rest of their lives – so she stopped sleeping when the nightmares became too much to bear. Simply stopped altogether. The doctors tried giving her drugs and shocks and all kinds of different sleep therapy, but she just refused to sleep. The problem is that the human brain isn’t designed to survive without sleep; chronic permanent insomnia will kill you in about two weeks. One day she escaped the hospital where she was being kept and ran away to the Tate, where the painting is normally kept, and she sat there looking at it and just cried and wished that there was someone who could look after her – somebody older and wiser, somebody more capable, who could sweep in when things got too rough and take over so that she could hide away from what was being done to her. She wished so hard, with all of her pain and loneliness fuelling it, that I came.’

  ‘What – you mean you found her there?’

  ‘Sort of. One moment I didn’t exist, and the next I did. Her mind simply wasn’t strong enough to contain all that it had to cope with, or what it needed, so it spun off another person who could. Me. I am what the psychiatrists dismissively refer to as a “secondary personality”.’ She hmphed in disgust. ‘As if Sophie is more worthy simply because she came first.’

  She could see Steve struggling with this, having to rearrange assumptions and re-evaluate countless tiny details of things she had said and done while they’d been together. She
let it be.

  ‘So,’ he said eventually, ‘you’re one half of a split personality?’

  ‘No!’ her anger flared up instantly, frightening them both. ‘I’m not half of anything! I am me! I have my own thoughts, my own memories, feelings, ambitions, hopes, fears, everything – none of which she shares! I don’t need her! She may have been born in this body, but it’s mine now.’

  ‘Okay, I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to offend,’ he said, backing off, hands in the air. ‘It’s just… I don’t know the right words. I’ve never… you have to admit that from my point of view, this is pretty weird.’

  ‘I do, I know, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to blow up at you. But it’s not easy for me either. For ages I’ve done what needs to be done, including sleep for her.’

  ‘The curfew?’

  ‘Exactly. It’s the one thing I have no control over – and believe me, I’m working on that. At first Sophie was happy for me to take over in stressful situations, and mostly that was okay, but sometimes it pissed me off. I sat all her exams, for example, and the certificates were all awarded in her name. Can you imagine how unfair that feels?’

  ‘That’s why you’re studying,’ he realised, another piece of the puzzle slotting into place.

  ‘And after a while she found it easier to let me take over pretty much everything. She came out less and less and eventually stopped altogether. She hasn’t been conscious for over a year now.’

  ‘She’s unconscious.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In you.’

  ‘In this body,’ she corrected him.

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Think of it as a pilot and co-pilot of a plane. The pilot has fallen into a coma, and the co-pilot has been left to fly the plane single-handed. How long does the flight have to last before ground control acknowledges her as the new pilot as opposed to the useless lump of meat sitting next to her?’

  ‘Interesting point,’ he said. ‘Am I ground control in this analogy?’

  She stroked his cheek. ‘If anything, you’re a frequent flier. The painting is important to me because it’s the first thing I ever saw. When I’m feeling wobbly or out of control, seeing it helps me strengthen my sense of myself. Touching it is better, but we both know how that goes.’

  He thought about this, remembering how stressed out she had been the third time she’d come to the gallery. There was also that nagging memory of the painting seeming to have moved in response to her nearness, but of course that could never have happened, just like the incident with Ennias could never have happened. That must have been some kind of martial arts thing, the kind of thing that Caffrey knew all about. That wasn’t what was really nagging at him, however. It was something she’d just said – something small hidden away behind those huge revelations.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘are you on any kind of medication for it?’

  ‘Am I on drugs, do you mean?’ she bridled again. ‘Are you afraid that you’re taking advantage of a mentally ill person or just that I’m going to turn psycho on you?’

  ‘Come on, Vessa, that’s not fair. Can you really say it’s an unusual thing to ask, given that little bombshell?’

  ‘I’m not the one who’s ill. Sophie is. She was on beta-blockers for anxiety attacks, but they ran out a couple of weeks ago. I can’t get a prescription for myself because I don’t have a doctor, and I can’t get a doctor because I don’t have the right kind of ID. Yet.’

  Ennias had said something about a fake ID being given to her, which presumably she was refusing to use because it wasn’t her, Vanessa Gail. The older and wiser friend that Sophie Marchant had called into being to help her cope with the un-cope-able. The one who had dealt with all of her stressful situations – like sitting exams.

  That nagging suddenly ballooned into a vast, horrifying suspicion which filled his chest and made it difficult to breathe. ‘Vessa,’ he asked slowly, ‘you know how you told me that you’re twenty-three years old?’

  She stared at him without reply, waiting for him to ask the rest. Daring him.

  ‘How old is Sophie?’ he finished.

  ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘How old, Vessa? And don’t lie to me. It’d be so easy to find out.’

  ‘You think I’m lying to you? How dare you!’

  ‘Don’t change the subject. How old?’

  ‘You’re not sleeping with her. You’re sleeping with me.’

  He slammed the table. ‘How old?’ It was his turn to be angry now – angry at her evasiveness and at the fear that this might not be the only thing she had been lying to him about during their short time together.

  Defiantly, Vessa raised her chin and replied, ‘She’s eighteen.’

  The balloon inside his chest burst, but it wasn’t filled with air – it was filled with toxic gas; heavy yellow poison which clouded his head so that everything swam, and which corroded his limbs so that when he tried to stand up, he staggered and had to clutch the chair for support.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ he moaned to himself. ‘Oh Jesus Christ, no. You stupid son of a bitch. You stupid, stupid…’

  ‘I don’t see what your problem is,’ she protested. ‘It’s not as if it’s even illegal.’

  ‘Illegal?’ he yelled at her. ‘You think I give a shit about whether or not it’s legal? You’re a teenager!’

  ‘I am not Sophie!’ she yelled back at him.

  ‘Maybe in your own twisted, fucked-up head that’s true, but not as far as the rest of the world is concerned – not as far as I’m concerned! How could you not mention this? How could you think that it wouldn’t matter?’

  ‘Because for one stupid, idiotic second, I actually thought you were different!’ She laughed bitterly. ‘But you’re not, are you? You’re just like all the rest.’

  He shook his head in angry denial and began gathering up his coat. ‘I don’t know what else you could have expected. For someone so smart you’re unbelievably naïve.’

  ‘Well what do you expect from a fucking teenager?’

  He slammed his way out of her bedsit so hard that the door bounced halfway open again, and her shout echoed after him as he lurched like a drunken man down the stairwell and out into the street. He was so angry that he didn’t notice how many people on the street weren’t moving at all, but simply watching the house with expressionless eyes.

  3

  The Passenger from Elbaite stared morosely through the hotel window’s chintz curtains, waiting for his captors to return. Below, past the hotel’s truncated grounds and the cliff edge beyond that, the Channel’s grey swell wandered up and down a rubble beach as if it couldn’t be arsed to summon up the strength for a decent wave, and seagulls wheeled like windborne litter in a sky the colour of lead. This wasn’t what he’d been promised. He was going to have words.

  The old Park Royal hotel – known simply as the Park to its desperate inhabitants – was one of the few remaining buildings in the village of Lyncham, a village which didn’t exist on maps any more, perched on a crumbling lip of Dorset coastline with a dark tangle of woodland separating it from inland and nothing ahead until France except the crawling shapes of distant, unreachable ships. Most of the rooms above and around him were empty, but enough were inhabited for him to know that he was not the only castaway to have been caught. He heard the screams and the noises they made at night, which also told him that not all of them were human, despite their outward appearances. The Tourmaline Archipelago was very wide – some said endless – and if half the stories he’d heard about the nightmarish creatures of its furthest islands were true, then he shuddered to think what lived in those rooms. Below, one of them shambled along the scree-shore, set to guard this shabby gulag from intruders. It felt like being in a zoo. He’d seen a zoo once, while on shore leave at the Royal Gardens on Blent, and the memory made his heart lurch with homesickness for turquoise waters.
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  He squashed it. That kind of thinking was apt to drive him insane. Sometimes they let him go walking on the beach, and he collected fossils which he lined up on the windowsill: ammonites and trilobites and echinoids, oh my. Things that had once been alive but were now stone. Like him.

  Time settled in flakes of dust on his windowsill. He couldn’t tell where the sky ended and the sea began; the world was a continuum of grey. Even the man he’d surfaced into had been a passionless button-pusher. Sometime he thought he could feel that man, deep inside, struggling and screaming to be free, but mostly he was silent, as if he knew that even this state was preferable to what his life had been before.

  The Passenger heard it, then: the faint rumble of lift doors opening, footsteps on thick pile carpet, the jingle-slap of keys being tossed and caught.

  Maddox, the Custodian.

  Keys rattled at his door, and it opened.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Simkin,’ said Maddox. ‘Ready for another outing, are we?’

  The Custodian was a large, genial-looking man, well fed without being overweight, and always impeccably groomed. He gave the impression of having risen through the ranks of a career which had once involved the frequent application of physical violence, and that even though it wasn’t part of his job description anymore, it lay close beneath the surface, like a reef under shallows. It was in the way his eyes flicked quickly around the room’s interior before he entered, and the way he twirled a large bunch of keys around his forefinger, letting it thump heavily into his palm with each revolution. The Passenger had learned to be wary of Maddox the hard way.

  ‘My name is Degan,’ he replied. ‘I am a naval rating aboard the Elbaite frigate Suzerain. How many more times?’

  ‘As many times as it takes. Thanks, by the way – I’d love a cup.’