by Liz Jensen
Yes, I think. Freddy’s is another world. A parallel world with its own rules. A world with no adults, no toilets, no fresh food, a world with its own landscape and props, its minerals, its food sources, its rites and rituals, its gestural password, its hierarchies, its own unassailable imperatives.
Stephanie comes home late, exhausted. She heads straight for the kitchen, opens a bottle of wine, and pours herself a glass. She nods at me. ‘Want one?’
‘No. But there’s some dinner if you want it.’
‘I’ve brought you Kaitlin’s car,’ she says, tossing me the keys.
‘How about checking on Freddy? He might still be awake.’ He fell asleep on the way home. When Miranda dropped us off I woke him briefly to get him into the house, then took him straight upstairs.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m human, Hesketh. This is hard for me. Don’t expect miracles. Let’s eat.’
I’ve defrosted one of Kaitlin’s aubergine bakes from the big freezer in the cellar. I hand Stephanie a plate. We consume our food in silence, not looking at each other. But I can feel my anger building.
Finally I say. ‘He’s just a child. He was in a dissociative fugue state when he attacked Kaitlin. Being a psychologist you’ll be familiar with that? As in, he was unaware of his own actions, and therefore not entirely responsible for them?’ She toys with a forkful of food and doesn’t answer. ‘He’s still Freddy. His DNA hasn’t altered. He’s the same boy.’ She finishes her glass of wine and pours herself another. ‘Take a brain scan and there’ll be nothing new, nothing that wasn’t there before. It’s a new phase. He’s talking less, that’s all.’
She slams down her glass. ‘Christ, have you quite finished? Listen to yourself! He tries to kill his mother and your only observation is that he’s talking less? I’m sorry Hesketh, but Freddy’s not the same. None of them are. You know that. If anyone’s deluding themselves here, it’s you.’
‘No. That’s not in my nature.’
‘Oh no?’ her face is flushed from the wine. Or rage. Or both. ‘Then how come you failed to include crucial information in your Dubai report?’ She glares at me. ‘Come on, Hesketh. The girl on the skyscraper site.’ She is right. I committed what is called a sin of omission. But I knew I was doing it. I was fully aware. I don’t speak. ‘And you still have that bruise, don’t you?’ You’d think it would have faded by now. But it’s as clear as a fresh tattoo. ‘Which didn’t go in your report either. Have you told Victor Whybray that yet?’
I look at the swirls of grease the aubergine has left on my plate and begin to rock.
Kaitlin used to call me ‘waterproof’, referring to the ‘impenetrable skin’ she claimed I had: a heavy rind that protected and distanced me not just from her, but from life itself. If I am ‘waterproof’ I am thankful for it now. But Stephanie’s mention of Dubai unsettles me. She is right to imply I am guilty of evasiveness. Or worse.
I saw the child-sized figure.
But was she or wasn’t she real? And if she scared de Vries and the others so much, why didn’t she scare me?
My contract with the world holds that there are no secrets we can’t unlock, with persistence and time, because everything has a precedent. But now it is beginning to seem that there are two worlds: the world I have known and inhabited all my life, and still cling to, and the world beneath it, which I have glimpsed through myth and legend, but never perceived as a whole and never believed to be anything other than one of the multiple explanations man gives to ascribe meaning to his existence. But now this shadow-world – vivid, irrational, primitive – has begun to take a grip. Not just on those around me, but now, in a way that defies all I know – on me.
Awareness of the dividing line between facts and conjecture, science and faith, is part of my hard-wiring. Or has been. I have seen and studied the titanic power of the human mind to create and give succour to monsters.
All I can conjecture is that whatever is shaking the foundations of the reality we know, it is something we have summoned.
CHAPTER 11
The practical side of looking after Freddy was never my forte, but when he joins me in the bathroom the next morning, after I’ve emerged from the shower, it’s clear he needs cleaning up. ‘Freddy K, you’d better wash your hair. And then brush it. It’s filthy. And it’s getting all matted.’
‘Mum does that.’
I stop drying my hair and look at him. Has he forgotten what I told him? That Kaitlin has brain damage and might not wake up again?
I crouch down to his height and observe his freckles. ‘Well Freddy K, the thing is, Mum’s not here.’
He shrugs and mutters, ‘Mum does it.’
‘Freddy Kalifakidis. Aged seven. Old enough to do it himself. Official.’
He shouts: ‘I said Mum does it!’
‘Freddy K, Freddy K, Freddy K. Why do you think Mum isn’t here?’
He shrugs. Then his lip wobbles. ‘I’m not washing it. Or brushing it either.’ His voice is shaky. ‘My mum does that. That’s what my mum does. My mum. My mum.’
I finger the tangled black mass of hair on his head. ‘Freddy K. Mum’s in hospital. In fact, I’m going to visit her there this morning to say hello from both of us.’ Stephanie wants me to see the extent of the damage. Last night, during our uncomfortable meal together, she insisted on it, and I acquiesced. ‘Do you remember why she’s there?’
‘No!’ His eyes open wide, then squeeze shut. Big tears burst from the corners and trickle down his cheeks. The slight curve of their surface magnifies the freckles. He wipes his face with his hand. It comes away covered in snot. ‘I don’t want you to tell me, OK? So don’t tell me!’ he shouts. ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, don’t tell me!’ He covers his ears with his hands and a shudder works its way through his small frame.
I hug him. ‘OK. It’s OK, Freddy K. We don’t have to talk about it.’
We do, of course. If not now, then sometime soon. He buries his face in my stomach, his body still racked with sobs. But when he pulls away after a few moments, he’s smiling.
‘Oom not whooshing moi hoor! Ooom not whooshing oot, oom not whooshing oot!’
‘Well I’m glad you stopped crying, Freddy K.’
He frowns. ‘I wasn’t crying. What are you talking about?’
‘You were crying, Freddy K.’ I lift him up, show him his face in the mirror and point out the tear tracks. They’re still glistening. ‘See? We were talking about Mum.’ I sit him down on the tiled surface next to the basin. ‘We were talking about how ill she is. And you cried.’
‘That wasn’t me.’ He leans across to the basin, opens the tap, and splashes cold water on his face.
‘Who was it then?’ I ask, passing him a towel. He used to like applying the shaving foam to my face. I hand him the can. He presses out a squirt of foam and pats it over my face, then puts a blob on his own nose, just as he always used to. ‘I said, who was it then?’
‘Who was what? What are you talking about?’
I persist. ‘Who was it? You said the person who got upset about Mum wasn’t you.’
But he’s adamant that he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. A hole has formed in his memory. I have lost him.
I start to shave. I always start on the left side and work my way up. Left chin. Awkward place under left lower lip. Upper left lip. Awkward bit under left of nose. My father taught me to do this, just as I might one day teach Freddy.
‘When do you start growing hair on your face?’ he asks. ‘Does it itch?’
And for a slice of time, it’s a normal Saturday 29th September and we are back in the world of who we once were. I am rinsing off the stubble and watching it spiral down the plughole and providing Freddy with information, and he is sitting by the washstand pulling grotesque faces in the mirror and mucking about with foam. And then I am shampooing his hair and he is complaining about it stinging his eyes and it is as if the clock has rewound to five months ago and his
mother is downstairs listening to Any Answers on Radio 4 with a fully functioning and uninsulted brain.
A light rain is falling. On the way to the Unit we pass a group of kids openly scavenging in some dustbins near a mini-roundabout on the A3304. Most are in T-shirts and jeans, but one stands out: she is clad in Battersea’s distinctive Empire red uniform. I tilt the rear-view mirror to look at Freddy. He has a little DVD player in the back and he’s been watching The Dry World again, but I can hear he has paused it: he’s watching the group intensely, twisting his head to stare back after we have gone past. Some of the children have tilted their faces to the sky and stand with their mouths open, catching raindrops.
‘What is it, Freddy K?’
‘Some of us can go wherever they like. Outside.’
‘But so can you. In the playground. And at home there’s the garden.’ He says nothing, but folds his arms and juts out his lower lip. ‘Didn’t you like it there yesterday? I saw you playing with Hattie.’ The little insect-catcher.
‘It wasn’t playing.’
‘What was it then?’
‘I have to do stuff for her.’
‘What sort of stuff?’
‘Just whatever she wants, that’s what she said. It’s a majd.’
I tighten my grip on the steering wheel. ‘Freddy K, do you know what majd means?’
I watch him in the rear-view mirror. He shrugs. ‘Not really.’
‘It’s an Arabic word. It means honour.’ I’ve heard other children using it too. It always has the ring of a threat. ‘Does it feel like an honour, doing what Hattie says?’ In the mirror, a look I don’t recognise crosses his face. Nervousness? Fear? ‘Freddy K? Do you know what an honour is?’
But he’s turned the DVD back on, and he’s off in a world of lizards and scorpions. When I drop him off in the playground, he doesn’t even turn to wave goodbye.
Half an hour later I’m at St Thomas’ Hospital. The Reception area is milling with people, most of them in what I interpret to be states of distress. Long queues for specialist departments line the corridors.
It is one thing to know something. But quite another to see it made flesh.
Vegetable: a vitamin- and fibre-rich edible plant product.
Kaitlin is in a ward on the fifth floor. She’s lying on a high bed with railed sides, her head fastened in a padded clamp that forces her to look straight up. It is strange to see her in the daytime without make-up. Her expression is so blank that her face seems more like a photograph than the real thing. Or it would, were it not for the movement of her left eye, which has an energetic agenda of its own, its gaze wandering about as though looking for a place to settle. Her hair is no longer dark: it is five or six kinds of grey. This change must have occurred in the hospital. You hear about that, though mostly as a phenomenon in ghost stories about haunted mansions with creaking doors. Her hair turned white overnight. A single lock, lighter than the rest – Pale Ash – snakes back from her forehead. I am reminded of Indira Gandhi. Her skin shines clammily. It used to look like this just after she applied moisturiser. But I don’t think she has done that now. She’d be incapable, and anyway, I’d smell it. Before I officially became a cuckold, I used to like kissing her forehead, then her cheek and then her clavicle, before ‘working my way down’ to more erogenous areas. Nothing could tempt me to do such a thing now. A snail-trail of saliva to one side of her chin catches the light. Stephanie smiles stiffly and wipes it off with a tissue. Kaitlin doesn’t react, though her left eye fastens on her briefly before veering off again. She is on a drip. Various other tubes snake away into plastic receptacles under the bed.
‘Hello Kaitlin,’ I say. My voice catches in my throat. Something’s blocking it.
She doesn’t reply. I wasn’t expecting her to. But Stephanie has insisted I behave as though she can understand. It is quite clear to me that she can’t because she is the human equivalent of a vitamin- and fibre-rich edible plant product.
‘There darling,’ says Stephanie. ‘Look. It’s Hesketh.’ She strokes Kaitlin’s hand. When I used to picture Kaitlin and Stephanie together, the images I conjured made me violent and ashamed and overloaded. Not now. Stephanie is much thinner than before, and there are new lines. She must have lost three kilos since this all began. We sit in silence for four and a half minutes. All in all, there is little to be had in the way of conversation. I don’t feel anything. Maybe I will later. Maybe I won’t. An ex-lover becoming a vegetable is not something you would think to factor in, when flow-charting the future. Churchill was once asked what he most feared, as Prime Minister. He replied: ‘Events.’
I pull out some origami paper from my briefcase – a deep strong purple called Thai Orchid – and begin a lotus flower. They were always Kaitlin’s favourite.
‘Freddy’s missing you,’ I tell her, as I begin folding. ‘I washed his hair this morning. He’s fitting in well at the Unit. I think he’s enjoying it.’ I can’t think what else to tell her, so I carry on folding for a while and when I have finished, I hold it up in front of her face to show her. ‘This is for you. A gift. Look, I’ll put it here, where you can see it. I’ll make you some more at home, and Stephanie can bring them in.’ Stephanie forces a smile. ‘Freddy might make you something too.’ But I do not say this with confidence, as I’d guess there’s less than a 5 per cent chance of this happening.
I place the lotus flower on top of one of the machines she’s attached to. Its lights are winking green.
‘That’s a nice gesture,’ whispers Stephanie. ‘Thank you, Hesketh.’
‘Well, goodbye then, Kaitlin,’ I say, when we have sat there another three minutes. ‘Get plenty of rest. I’d better go now. See how Freddy’s doing.’
I am hoping that will be the end of it, but Stephanie follows me out into the corridor.
‘They’re letting her out soon. She’ll need round-the-clock care. My sister’s going to help me. Ashok’s agreed to give me leave. So you and I have to discuss where we go from here. My starting point is, I refuse to put her in any more danger. I meant what I said about Freddy. He can’t stay in that house.’
I say, ‘Freddy’s a child. There’s no—’
‘No danger? Were you about to say Freddy’s no danger?’
I say, ‘Kaitlin won’t be at risk. I’ll be there.’
‘She was at risk before. You were there then. The only thing that’s changed is that she’s now ten times more vulnerable. Christ, Hesketh. I thought if you saw her in this state, you’d realise that.’ I watch her mouth as she speaks. Her lipstick is Plum and there is a little scrape of it on her left incisor. ‘He nearly killed her. You’ve seen for yourself what he did. She’s pretty much a vegetable, Hesketh. Her life is effectively over.’ I don’t say anything. ‘And who’s to say he doesn’t go for you or me next?’
‘He won’t.’ I turn to go. I have been in this hospital for twenty-four minutes in total and I am ready to leave.
As I walk down the hospital corridor she calls after me: ‘I heard today that fifteen children have attacked a second time.’
Humans cling to their hopes, Professor Whybray told me, when his wife was dying. They forget their nightmares, if they can. Or at least refuse to relive them. They tell themselves stories for comfort.
Is that what I am doing? I wonder, as I drive back to Battersea through empty streets. Or is Stephanie simply in the wrong? She wants to be loyal to Kaitlin. This involves trying to honour what she would have wanted. But she has admitted herself that she is ‘finding it hard’. Each time I see her the tendons of her neck fan out more sharply from the clavicle. She leaves early on her bike, long before Freddy wakes. She is still avoiding him, and doesn’t bother to pretend otherwise. She must be trying her best to quell her distaste for the children, and not call them Creatures, like the public has begun to do.
But later that night I overhear her speaking to her sister on the phone. And that is the word she uses.
She is right. Our awkward domestic arrangement can
not last.
CHAPTER 12
‘It was a disgrace,’ Professor Whybray fumes. ‘Human beings at their panicking and ineffectual worst.’ He’s talking about the EU teleconference he participated in earlier this morning. He has another meeting later today at the Home Office. He looks tired: I wonder when he last slept. ‘Posturing politicians, power-hungry bureaucrats, the press baying for blood, NATO doing some very shameful muscle-flexing, and scientific hubris levels that were off the scale. And everyone wanting funding. Christ, Hesketh. Look at our species. Seven billion of us living in a fouled nest. And now this. If it is an anarchist uprising, it’s succeeding. No wonder Better Without Us is doing so well.’
He flicks on the news. Acute gastroenteritis in Venezuela has claimed up to a thousand lives. It’s been linked to ‘organic substances’ traced to a bread factory. The mass poisoning is being treated as an act of terrorism. A plane has crashed in the United States, killing over three hundred people. The disaster is ‘believed to be the work of anarchist sympathisers’. The wave of sabotages which has hit industry worldwide is condemned by world leaders as ‘an obscene terror campaign’. In view of the increasing disruptions, supermarkets will be limiting sales of certain commodities to prevent a run on goods. A rationing system is likely to be announced in the near future. Meanwhile, a decrease in attacks by children in Britain, which mirrors a marked decline worldwide, has led to speculation that that particular aspect of the pandemic has peaked. However, there are new reports of violent children running wild and forming gangs of up to fifty strong.
He sighs. ‘OK. The world these kids are living in. What characterises it?’