by David Owen
‘Why are you so bothered about this march, anyway?’ asked Safa.
‘I believe in it,’ said Kat. ‘And I know it’s exactly the kind of thing that would piss off the guys whose car we stole last night.’
‘I definitely support pissing people off.’ Safa put her feet up on the seat opposite as if to prove the point. ‘But it’s not like it makes any difference if you’re there or not.’
‘If everybody thought that there’d be no march at all.’
‘No, I mean literally nobody but me will know you’re there.’
This had already occurred to Kat, and it was probably why she had the courage to go in the first place. After all, nothing could go wrong if nobody could see her. It was frightening how liberating that could feel.
‘I’ll know I’m there,’ she said.
Safa smiled in return, and Kat wondered if her heart would ever stop tripping over its own feet.
As they drew closer to central London the train steadily filled with fellow protesters chattering excitedly and snapping photos of signs, alongside weary weekend workers and befuddled tourists. Every seat was taken except for those beside the invisible girls. It would have been lonely, if Kat hadn’t already been completely happy with who she was with.
‘Do you believe in an afterlife?’ she asked.
‘I keep telling you we’re not dying.’
‘You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it during all this,’ said Kat. ‘My mum believed that when we die we go back to the time we were happiest and just . . . stay there for ever. That’s what heaven would be.’ Absentmindedly, she ran a finger through the cold condensation on the window. ‘I asked her where she would go, and she said back to when she was a teenager, in her final year of school. I remember thinking it was messed up she picked a time before she met my dad, or had me and my sister. Maybe that was a warning.’
Safa pushed herself higher in her seat. ‘I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t want to ask about her in case she was dead.’
‘Not quite. She left.’ No point saying more than that. ‘Where do you think you would go?’
Across the aisle a man began hissing into his phone – you said it would be done by Thursday! – as if that was quieter than shouting. Safa watched him closely, tilting her head quizzically.
‘When I was a kid, I had this friend for one summer. We spent every day together, riding bikes, watching TV, begging money for sweets. It’s the last time I can remember not having to worry about anything.’ Safa sighed, and it sounded more angry than wistful. ‘Good memories are bullshit though, aren’t they? I was probably bored, and we probably argued, but you don’t remember that stuff. Maybe I wasn’t happy at all.’
Kat waited a moment before she asked, ‘What happened to your friend?’
Straightening up as if she’d been caught slacking on a job, Safa frowned. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘You must—’
‘Did you know scientists have been tracking a single whale since the 1980s because it sings at a frequency no other whale in the world can hear?’ Safa kept her eyes on the foggy window. ‘It swims across the world, singing out to any other whale it meets, but nobody will ever reply. It’s been lonely far longer than we have.’
There was an edge to her voice that made Kat wonder if she had pried too far. The thought of scaring Safa away was unbearable. She needed to set them back on course.
‘The whale was your friend for a summer?’ she said, forcing lightness into her voice.
A weight was lifted when Safa smiled. ‘We’re off at the next stop,’ she said, and nodded to what Kat’s drifting fingers had drawn in the condensation.
It was the symbol of the Lonely People, a rogue droplet carving open the nesting doll to free the stick figure trapped inside. Kat shivered, and as they left the train she erased it with a swipe of her hand, the moisture shining through her skin.
The Trinity Church stood around the corner from Aaron’s house, a short, broad tower rising into a tiled spire, the nave following the line of the pavement until it broke into a small cemetery. A pathway through the headstones brought them to arched double doors, open and welcoming, soft organ music and choral voices spilling into the morning.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever been inside a church,’ said Wesley.
‘Sshh, don’t tell him,’ said Aoife, pointing to the sky. ‘He’ll smite you down.’
Robbie huffed and pushed past them. ‘Let’s just go.’ He had been in a bad mood since they first met up, determined to make it clear that he was against this idea.
They crossed the threshold – Jae hastily pulling off his beanie hat and whispering an apology to the ether – and passed through a small, chilly lobby into the church itself. It was surprisingly bright, late-morning light streaming down from high windows spaced along the entire length to illuminate thick wooden roof beams, rows of sparsely populated pews, and a choir assembled between twin pulpits on a raised chancel at the front, the organ pipes on the wall behind them. The hymn they sang was slow and exultant, their voices rising and falling like the breath of a slumbering giant.
The congregation was spread out in couples and small groups, standing for the hymn, so the four of them shuffled along the central aisle and settled into a space a few pews from the front. A few people eyed them curiously, but weren’t put off their song.
‘That’s him,’ said Robbie, pointing to a boy at the back of the choir.
There were around twelve of them arranged into two rows and led by a conductor, a mix of men and women, young and old. Lukundo appeared to be among the youngest, though his smart shirt and straight-creased trousers could have belonged to a much older man. He smiled while he sang, eyes never once flicking to the hymn book in his hands.
‘What do we do now?’ whispered Wesley.
Robbie pressed a finger to his lips, and they settled into the hard-backed pew to listen. It was peaceful, letting the soft music wash over him. Wesley almost closed his eyes to enjoy it better, but was worried the others might notice.
The hymn wound up with a grand organ crescendo that made the subsequent silence feel like the air had been sucked from the room. The choir took a moment to catch its breath while the congregation settled back into their seats. A minister rose to the left-side pulpit to give the final blessing.
‘I’ve been told I have a nice singing voice,’ Jae whispered.
‘We’ll make sure to ask if you can join the choir,’ said Aoife.
The minister finished the blessing and bowed her head. ‘Amen.’ The congregation around them answered the same, before people began to talk or collect their things to leave. The organ spiralled up to play them out.
A few people moved to the front to speak to the minister. After a moment she broke away from them and stepped down to approach the group of newcomers, smiling kindly.
‘I don’t think I’ve seen you here before?’
‘No, sorry,’ said Wesley, before pointing to Lukundo. ‘We actually came to see him.’
‘All right, give me a second and I’ll get him for you.’
They watched nervously as the minister pointed them out, Lukundo’s brow furrowing before he came down and edged into the pew ahead of them. ‘You’re waiting for me?’
‘Yeah,’ said Wesley, wishing he had planned what to say. ‘We actually came to ask about someone we think you know. Knew. Aaron Musley?’
‘Ah,’ said Lukundo, his expression brightening as if the name had jogged a pleasant memory. ‘Let’s go somewhere we can talk privately.’
The march was larger than Kat expected. The square from which it was due to start was already a sea of banners and placards. Chants bounced back and forth, jostling for air time with whistles and loudspeakers. Together they weaved through the bodies, pressing as close as the forcefield would allow. She wouldn’t turn back from the noise and the heat. Before, when all these people would have seen her, she couldn’t have been here. The beast of panic caged inside her wouldn’t have allowed i
t. Now she could. She would raise her muted voice as if it mattered.
Having pushed ahead, Safa now reached back to grasp Kat’s hand. Electricity seemed to leap between them, all the confirmation she needed that it wasn’t the touch of just anyone she craved; it was Safa, alone.
Protest signs ranged from the hastily scrawled and barely legible to carefully crafted works of art and catchy slogans destined to become memes. Safa proudly hoisted her own.
‘I’M PROTESTING!’ she bellowed.
‘At least pretend you’re taking this seriously,’ said Kat.
Safa shrugged, but stayed quiet. Somebody had taken to the makeshift stage at the far end of the square, but their words were lost over the heads of the crowd, chants rising up to swallow them.
‘Hey hey! Ho ho! Patriarchy’s got to go!’
And
‘What do we do when they attack? We fight back!’
‘So many people turned up!’ said Kat, breathless with it all.
After a few minutes the crowd shifted, and began to slowly move away across the square. The route of the march was little more than a mile, ending in front of Downing Street, but with this many people it was bound to take hours.
‘You okay?’ shouted Safa over a woman beside them banging a drum.
Kat beamed back. ‘I’m great.’
Here was everything she believed in – tolerance, diversity, equality – being celebrated in public, where trolls couldn’t isolate and punish her. For years, Kat had searched for her people close to home and online, and here they were at last.
Beyond the square, the crowds narrowed into a procession as they took to the closed street. The chanting resumed, and Kat lifted her voice to sing along as loud as she could.
‘Hey hey! Ho ho! Patriarchy’s got to go!’
‘Hey hey! Ho ho!’ sang Safa. ‘Check out that protesting doggo!’
Waddling beside them on the end of a lead was a sausage dog with a Bitches Got Rights sign strapped across its back. Safa snatched it up, bouncing it in her arms, while the owner stared in confusion at its apparent levitation.
‘Put it down!’ hissed Kat, snatching the dog and plopping it back beside its owner. Startled, it sniffed at the air before it was dragged unceremoniously away.
‘This is supposed to be fun, isn’t it?’
‘Not if you don’t care about why we’re here.’
Safa sagged her shoulders. ‘Sor-ry, it’s just hard to care about anything else right now, don’t you think? We’ve got more important things to focus on.’
‘What caused this for me in the first place is happening to thousands of women every day,’ said Kat. ‘Maybe I can do something to stop any of them fading too.’
There were so many different people here: groups of women marching together, parents carrying their children, people on crutches and in wheelchairs. A boy, maybe a few years older than them, was taking photos of the march on his phone and grinning as people posed for him. He wore a bright orange T-shirt and jeans artfully torn at the knees, and when a message arrived on his phone he laughed at it openly, like he wanted to bring the whole crowd into the joke. It baffled Kat, how anybody could be so comfortable in their own skin. She couldn’t stop herself moving closer to him, close enough to smell his cologne.
‘You’re going to have a very hard time chatting anybody up,’ said Safa behind her.
The boy was attractive, but only in a way that made Kat envy him. Made her want to be him. That strange yearning tugged at her again, made her take another step closer and reach out shaking fingers to touch him.
The organ reverberated as they moved to the back of the church, where crooked stacks of hymn books teetered and children’s distractions lay scattered across the floor.
‘I haven’t seen Aaron in . . . I don’t know how long,’ said Lukundo, a soft southern-African accent doing little to disguise the tension in his voice, as if he was being confronted with a secret from his past.
‘How did you know him?’ asked Wesley.
‘From here.’ Lukundo held up his hands to the building around them. ‘We had both attended this church since we were little. We were good friends, until he decided to stop coming.’ He spoke tentatively, like he was remembering their history as he went.
‘He just stopped?’
‘I remember, he told me he had stopped believing. I’m sure we promised to stay friends, but you know what happens.’
Wesley looked to the others for help, but they appeared just as uncertain how to continue. They had all seen how Aaron’s family reacted to being confronted with a truth the fade had worked to scour clean. Still, Lukundo seemed different, pleased to be reminded of a friend he had lost.
‘You seem to remember him really well,’ said Wesley.
Lukundo frowned. ‘It’s strange. It wasn’t that long ago he was my best friend, but until you said his name I don’t think I had thought about him in a while.’
Aoife leaned forward. ‘Do you know what happened to him?’ she said delicately.
‘I know something happened,’ he said, eyes flicking quickly between them. ‘I know he’s . . . gone.’
The fade seemed to erase its victims from the world, do everything it could to omit them from the annals of reality, until even their loved ones learned not to question their uncanny absence unless compelled. The simple act of reminding them felt like bestowing a gift.
‘Look, we spoke to his brother and he told us you were hanging around his house around the time Aaron disappeared,’ said Robbie. ‘We want to know why.’
‘I think he visited me,’ said Lukundo, unflustered by this sudden frankness.
‘You saw him?’
‘No, I felt him. It’s hard to explain. At first I thought he had died and come to say goodbye before he moved on.’
The boy cupped a hand to his chest, as if covering a hole there.
‘He was right here. Aaron was inside my body.’
Kat’s fingers hovered inches from the boy. What would it take for her to become like him? Surely she was well past the point of no return. Mum gone; Suzy refusing to answer her messages; Dad holding conversations with her bedroom door; her empty online life destroyed. This crowd would never be her people. Somehow, she would always be separate.
There was hardly anything of her left. Why shouldn’t she just . . .?
The boy glanced behind him, and Kat lunged. In that moment she was empty, unravelling like thread caught on a nail, and this time no barrier stood in her way. Her hand was on his skin. The yearning beckoned harder, and her hand was inside his body. In one swift movement, she pulled the boy around her like a shroud.
21
Internal Landscapes
The purpose of the fade was to allow somebody to choose a Cradle, a host person to reside in before their own body ceased to exist. That’s what the Lonely People had told him. Wesley grabbed Lukundo’s broad shoulders and peered into his eyes, trying to see if anybody else lurked behind them.
‘What are you doing?’ he said, as the others leaned closer and gaped.
‘Can you speak to him?’ asked Robbie eagerly. ‘Can he hear us?’
Lukundo shook himself free and held up his hands. ‘You don’t understand. It was only for a moment.’
The Lonely People looked at each other, shell-shocked, as they struggled to realise what this might mean.
‘I’m sorry if this is a surprise,’ said Lukundo. ‘I remember feeling strange, and I think by the time I knew what had happened he was already gone. It was like he was inside my mind, trying to talk to me. Asking for help. It felt . . . like he needed to cling onto something. He wanted something to live for.’
Wesley laughed before he could help it. ‘Try before you buy.’ It made sense, inasmuch as any of this did. If the fade offered the power to slip inside the bodies of others, why shouldn’t it allow them to do it temporarily before they had to make a choice that would decide the rest of their life?
‘We had no idea,’ said Aoife.
It wasn’t like anybody who faded was ever able to report back.
‘When I realised he wasn’t dead, I kept it to myself. I suppose I stopped thinking about it. It didn’t seem so strange until now.’ Lukundo smiled uncertainly. ‘You believe me?’
‘It’s a bit mind-blowing,’ said Jae.
‘But we believe you,’ finished Wesley.
A jolt, the sensation of being dragged across a great distance. Kat buckled with something like vertigo. She had split in half: one seeing the ongoing march through eyes not her own, moving with feet not her own, participating at a remove in the world as she knew it.
The other was pushing through a rainforest, skin slick in the humid air, nudging aside the rope-like vines that hung from trees filled with flowers of red and yellow and blue. Birds whistled from branches. Unseen creatures stirred amongst the leaves.
When she lifted a hand to clear her path she found her flesh stubbornly whole, the fade repealed. It was a shock, like finding an extra limb.
The forest was inside the boy . . . no, it was the boy, comprised of everything he felt: happiness at being surrounded by people just like him, pride at joining their number, lending him the confidence to strut between them and ask for their photos. She even heard the swirl of his thoughts, most of them centred on a boy he would meet later that day for a second date, who had sent him a gift basket of jams after a shared joke. Whose voice made his heart pirouette and his knees tremble.
Invisible antibodies, a familiar barrier force, were trying to push her out, but she had grip enough to push against it and walk further into the trees. Underneath this lushness, other feelings vied for attention. Whenever she tried to read them the colours of the canopy flashed brighter in distraction.
It made her feel dizzy. She had never felt anything so strongly as this, had never come close to being so happy or confident. Surely she never would.
The repelling force grew stronger, and in moments every step seemed like fighting hurricane winds. Those other feelings were so close. They hid in the underbrush ahead, just out of reach.
There. A box, sealed tight amid the decay of fallen leaves. It leaked, but just what was escaping she couldn’t identify, never mind how familiar it felt.