Fragments

by Caroline Green

‘Yeah. I could tell something was weird about her,’ says the bloke I tried to hurt. ‘Still took me by surprise, though.’

  ‘When I think what could have . . .’ The woman bites off the end of her sentence. I don’t know if Dan is her boyfriend but I don’t blame her for hating me. I can almost feel her self-control in not going for me. I almost wish she would.

  ‘The question is, what are we going to do with her now?’ says the man called Dan. ‘She knows this address. She’s a liability. Best thing would be to chuck her in the Thames.’

  ‘Stop it,’ says Nathan sharply. ‘We’re better than that, remember?’

  The tiny sliver of kindness in his voice reaches inside me.

  Nathan walks over and squats down in front of me, looking right into my eyes.

  ‘Kyla, I remember you. And I’m very surprised at what you have become. I need to ask you something very important, OK?’

  I nod, a bit bewildered by where this is going.

  ‘Where did they train you?’

  I’m so confused by the question I don’t answer. He continues. ‘Was it Birmingham? Or Cardiff?’

  My lips move but no sound comes out. It feels wrong to tell them, despite everything. Like something bad will happen if I let the word out.

  ‘What?’ he says gently. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Scotland.’ The word rides on my breath like a sigh.

  There’s a pause.

  ‘Was it a place called . . . Area Six?’

  I hang my head and then nod once. I don’t want to talk about any of that.

  ‘Oh, dear God,’ says Nathan heavily and swipes his face with a meaty hand. He rocks back on his heels and then gets to his feet, huffing a little. ‘You poor kid.’

  ‘What is it?’ The blond woman asks sharply.

  ‘I’ve heard what they do there,’ says Nathan. ‘They call it Commitment Training.’ He pauses. ‘We would call it brainwashing.’

  The word makes me flinch.

  ‘Brainwashing?’ says Dan.

  Nathan heaves a heavy sigh and gets up, before sitting down on the opposite chair. He leans forwards and clasps his hands between his knees. He studies me so intently, I feel like an exhibit in a glass case.

  ‘What do you remember about it?’ he says, ignoring Dan.

  I try to find the words for something that’s buried so deep, you’d need a surgeon’s knife to get to it.

  ‘I know they did something,’ I say shakily. ‘In fact, they did it twice. I don’t really remember too much. The rest of the time we were just taught to do useful stuff.’

  He nods. ‘And after this . . . something,’ he says, ‘what did you feel about us? About Torch?’

  My sight blurs as tears crowd and drip down my hot cheeks. ‘I hated you,’ I whisper. ‘I hated you and I was trained to kill you.’

  ‘And now, Kyla?’ says Nathan. ‘Do you still want to kill us?’

  I look up and meet his eyes then shake my head emphatically, side to side. It’s the truth. I don’t. It’s crazy, but I don’t. How can things have changed so suddenly?

  ‘Come on,’ says Dan to Nathan, scornfully. ‘You’re not serious about this?’

  Nathan looks at him. ‘I’m deadly serious. It might surprise you to know that in the last five years they’ve been reprising and improving some of the basic techniques that have been around since the 1950s.’

  ‘What sort of techniques?’ says the woman. She sounds scornful and I see her exchange a loaded look with Dan.

  Nathan grimaces. ‘Sensory deprivation, disorientation. Drugs. Repeated negative imagery. Lack of sleep. The CIA had a major programme called MK-ULTRA for about thirty years. They explored just about every aspect of brainwashing. Even back in the 2010s they were using the drug Sodium Pentothal on Al Qaeda suspects.’

  ‘Why?’ says Dan sharply. ‘What does that do?’

  ‘They tried it as a truth drug,’ he says. ‘But it didn’t work that well. The idea was that you got the subject into a raw state with all the other techniques and then opened up their minds with the drug. I’ve heard they’ve developed things a little since then.’

  He looks at Dan. ‘There’s a thing called the Box. They keep them in absolute darkness so they are disorientated. Drug them up. Then they bombard them with imagery and give them shocks. It’s nasty stuff, from what I’ve heard.’

  Everyone stares at me. Silence cloaks the room.

  Those bastards brainwashed me?

  No wonder I felt so strange for so long . . . like I’d lost a piece of myself and couldn’t get it back. And now? I don’t even know what to feel now, except that I can’t stand all their eyes on me. I’m not on any ‘side’ now, am I? I don’t even know who the good guys really are any more. I stare miserably down at the purple carpet, which is pocked with crusty fag burns and crumbs.

  ‘So what the hell do we do with her now?’ says Dan after a few minutes. ‘Is she still dangerous?’

  I look up and meet Nathan’s eyes.

  ‘No,’ he says quietly. ‘I don’t believe so. I’ve heard that the effects of the brainwashing are only temporary. That’s why so many CATS’ Eyes get eliminated after they stop being useful.’

  Eliminated?

  I suck in my breath. Nathan sighs.

  ‘I don’t suppose they made that clear in your,’ he makes air quotes with his fingers, ‘training, did they?’ He runs his hand over his beard and blows out air again. ‘The brainwashing is intense and effective . . . temporarily. It can be undone by a bout of sickness, certain medicines . . . possibly even by emotional stress or shocks. CATS’ Eyes are what’s known as “expendable”. I’ve never heard of a one who has worked for longer than a year at most.’

  ‘What happens after that?’ My lips feel stiff and strange. But I have to know.

  Nathan shrugs. Then speaks again. ‘I feel very sorry for you, Kyla, for what it’s worth.’

  A flicker of hope flares inside.

  ‘But I’m afraid it is a risk we can’t take,’ says Nathan. The hope is replaced by a stab of cold fear. ‘We’ll have to move on. Dismantle everything here and find somewhere else. And you,’ he says, looking down at me, ‘can’t stay.’

  ‘I won’t say anything.’ I sound young and pathetic, like I’m promising not to tell on the person who stole the last biscuit.

  ‘We’re not taking that chance!’ snaps the woman. ‘I’ll have to take you away to make sure you’re gone.’

  I cringe into myself. My tough shell seems to have cracked. I want to see Cal. I also don’t want to see him. I keep remembering his face when he left. Like I disgusted him.

  I don’t want to go anywhere with her, anyway. Thankfully Nathan comes to my rescue.

  ‘She’s as much a victim as Dan nearly was, so I’ll thank you to calm down a bit. Isn’t this what we are for? To try to fight back against a regime that treats people like lab rats?’ He runs his hand over his beard again. It’s like a nervous tic. I remember he used to do this, but not as much. So many damaged people . . .

  ‘Kyla, will you be expected to check in tonight?’ He’s all brisk efficiency now.

  ‘No,’ I say quietly. ‘I’ll have twenty-four hours’ grace, because I’m meant to be on a . . . um, job.’

  Dan makes a disgusted sound and the woman’s face tightens even further. But it’s clear Nathan is in charge.

  I keep thinking about what we learned in History of Terrorism. Can it all have been lies? The words come bursting out of me, unexpectedly.

  ‘They told me you are behind all those attacks. Torch.’

  Nathan regards me and sighs heavily. ‘Of course they did.’

  We all turn at the sound of the front door opening and closing. Cal comes into the room. The rain must have stopped. Although his hair is still stuck to his face a little and his trainers are darkened around the toes, he isn’t noticeably wetter than he was when he got back here. For a second I have a fierce, powerful wish that I hadn’t come here. Hadn’t found out about any of this. It
was better, thinking he was dead. Simpler.

  He can’t even look at me now.

  ‘You OK?’ says Nathan brusquely. Cal looks dazed as he nods. ‘Come on,’ says Nathan, gesturing to Dan and the woman. ‘Let’s give them a minute to talk?’

  Cal turns to him. ‘It’s OK,’ he says coldly. ‘I don’t need to talk.’

  I catch the eye of the blond woman and wish I hadn’t. Her face is bright with malice. Cal’s words hurt. He walks out of the room and Nathan looks at me and then shrugs.

  ‘OK, well, I’m sure you’ll understand, Kyla, that we have to take certain precautions. We don’t want you wandering off before we’re ready to let you go.’

  He looks at the woman.

  ‘Tilly,’ he says, ‘put her in that small bedroom at the back. And lock the door please.’

  She almost clicks her fingers at me and I stiffen. I’m somehow coming back into myself. She’d better not touch me. I glare back at her, contemplating whether I should just run for the front door but I don’t really have the strength for it. My limbs feel weak and wobbly. The shock of finding out that Cal is alive and then all those feelings being stirred up by him again, attacking Dan and then finding out what really happened to me in Scotland. Losing Cal again. Because I have. I know I have. It’s all too much to take.

  I muster as much dignity as I can and follow the woman called Tilly out of the room. I can just see a small kitchen at the end of the corridor where Cal is standing, his hands down on the counter and his head bent. He looks so sad, as though an unbearable weight is pressing on him. I want more than anything to be allowed to touch him but I know I never can again.

  My eyes blur with hot tears.

  I’m so sorry, I say, but only inside my head. No one wants to hear it. Being told about the brainwashing hasn’t stopped the feeling of shame that I almost killed a man. Would I have tried to kill Cal too?

  I follow Tilly miserably up the bare wooden stairs. The banister is splintery and rough under my fingers. We walk down a short landing past a few rooms and stop outside a bathroom. The door is open and I can see a bath that looks like some horrible green plastic. Better than the bathroom at the squat, but a far cry from the luxury at the flat. Expendable? Is that what I am?

  ‘Do you need to go?’ she says coldly. I nod, feeling stupidly ashamed again. She even comes in with me and I have to clench my fists not to lose my temper about the way she’s enjoying me being a prisoner.

  After, she slightly pushes my shoulder towards a room at the end of the corridor and I whirl round.

  ‘I’m doing what you want,’ I say in an icy voice. ‘So keep your hands off me.’

  We meet eyes. Hers are so cold and hard, I feel loneliness like a hollow ache in my stomach. I can tell she’s dying to say something and then it bursts out of her.

  ‘Why didn’t you resist them?’ she hisses. ‘I wouldn’t let them do that to me.’

  I drop my eyes and ignore her. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I was weak and pathetic and that’s how they managed to turn me into a CATS’ Eye. If Tilly had been in the situation I was in and had to make that choice, she would have taken prison. Well, bully for her.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ I mumble and she snorts.

  ‘Clearly not,’ she says and then unlocks the door in front of us.

  I follow her in. It was obviously a kid’s bedroom at one point because there’s a line of painted animals around the middle of the wall and some tatty remnants of what looks like football stickers around the doorframe. The room is bare apart from a mattress on the floor, covered in a couple of blankets. Lace curtains the colour of old nicotine hang limply from the windows and the room smells musty and damp.

  ‘Don’t even think about going anywhere,’ says Tilly. ‘The windows are barred. Make no mistake, we don’t want you here – but we will choose when you leave.’ She stands a little straighter and her gaze scours me. She tuts. ‘The truth is, you disgust me.’

  She walks quickly out of the room and I hear the key clunk in the lock.

  Join the queue, I think.

  I sit down on the lumpy mattress, which is old but clean. I hold my hands, which are untied now, in front of my face and stare at them. My nails are clean and tipped white after having spent a night in the riverside flat. But they came close to being covered in that man’s blood. I clench them into fists and press them into my eye sockets until crazy psychedelic colours swirl before me.

  CHAPTER 21

  their people

  I’m lying on the mattress with a rough blanket pulled over me. Grey daylight seeping through the curtains gradually begins to fade. The rain patters against the windows. There are other noises inside the house too. Quick footsteps and the sound of the front door opening and closing. I think they are moving out of this place. I wonder if they will leave me in here. It’s hard to care all that much.

  Curled in a ball, I try to ignore the smell from the blanket and after a while I start to shiver. I keep picturing how it felt when I lunged at Dan with the knife.

  I wish I could make them understand that it wasn’t my fault. If the farmhouse hadn’t been bombed, I would have stayed and fought with Torch.

  Should I have resisted what they did in Scotland? I’m sure I couldn’t have. But maybe I was just too tired to fight. All this goes round and round in my head and I start to feel angry again rather than afraid. Angry that Mum died. Angry that Zander turned me into a thief. Angry that Jax was taken from me. And angry that Cal has been taken from me again. Maybe some of my spark is still there inside. A weak spark, but there all the same.

  After a while a woman I haven’t seen before unlocks the door and gives me a tray with a plate of beans on toast and a mug of stewed orange tea. She stares at me as though I’m something in a zoo before carefully placing the tray on the floor and then scurrying away again.

  I’m hungry, despite everything. I eat every last scrap, gulping down the metallic-tasting tea to the very bottom of the cup and holding it upside down to catch the dregs. Feeling sleepy then, I pull the smelly blanket around me again and close my eyes.

  When I was little and something had scared me, my mum would say, ‘Think of something happy, baby.’ I’d scrunch my eyes tightly closed and remember ice lollies in the park, or the time we went to the Notting Hill Carnival and I sat on her shoulders, feeling like I was queen of all I could see, as noise and smells and colours whirled around me.

  But too much has happened since then. I can’t think of anything any more that would take me away from this. Maybe I stopped being capable of happiness a long time ago. Maybe I just don’t deserve any. Still, as I drift off to sleep, the scene that plays through my mind is when Cal held me. A few hours ago. A lifetime ago.

  I wake up with a jolt. My heart thrums against my ribs as my eyes adjust to the dark room. The pale glow of a streetlight seeps through the badly fitting curtains, which splash stripes of shadow on the wall opposite. A car alarm is wah-wahing somewhere in the street. Maybe that’s what woke me.

  My arms ache from where Dan pulled them behind me and I wince as I wriggle them in slow circles. A gentle knock at the door makes me stop, mid-movement.

  I don’t answer but watch as the door opens, feeling a weird sense of dread. For just a second, I’m convinced someone has come in here to kill me. I pull my knees up to my chest in a defensive ball but I haven’t the stomach to fight any more.

  ‘Kyla, are you awake?’ says Cal quietly. I mumble an answer.

  He sits down against the opposite wall, stretching his long legs out in front of him. The broken patch of light on the wall bathes half his face in shadow.

  ‘You all right?’

  I don’t answer him. I literally have no idea how to talk to him after all that has happened.

  He brings one knee up and rests his elbow on it, threading his fingers across his forehead. He’s watching me. I’m self-conscious: unsure what to do with my limbs and hands. I clear my throat and pull my knees in closer to my chest, pr
otecting myself, although from what, I’m not sure. I look at a patch of wall just past his face. It’s easier than meeting the full beam of his gaze, dark though it is. It’s like he’s trying to work out who I am. I don’t like how this feels.

  ‘I understand about hate,’ he says after a few moments of thick silence. I glance at him, confused and surprised by his words. ‘It’s what keeps me going sometimes,’ he continues, ‘the idea that we might beat these people someday. After what they did to me . . .’ He pauses and I see him swallow. ‘You see, I was lost for a while. I was completely alone in the world. Then I met you and Jax and I felt like I belonged somewhere, even if it was temporary.’ He pauses. ‘And even if it meant working for that creep Zander.’

  I don’t know what he wants me to say so I say nothing at all.

  ‘And then they killed Jax . . .’ He hesitates again. ‘See, that’s what I don’t understand,’ he says, his voice rising in volume. ‘How you could join them after that? Can you help me understand?’

  My eyes brim over and a hot tear skates down my cheek.

  ‘So you don’t get it either,’ I say, and my voice is thick now. ‘You think I chose for any of it to happen? I didn’t choose to get brainwashed. Didn’t Nathan explain about the brainwashing? That I’m a victim in all this too?’

  He makes a dismissive noise. Angry heat creeps up my neck and cheeks. ‘I can’t make you believe me, Cal. Although I could tell you that I ended up in that place because I’d been arrested for attacking a man who wanted to rape me.’ I hear him gasp at this and know I’ve hit home.

  ‘What happened?’ he says and I shake my head.

  ‘It doesn’t matter now. OK, I chose to go become a CATS’ Eye rather than go to prison. But when I was there, I was brainwashed. And you, Cal Conway,’ I jab a shaking finger in his direction, ‘are the one person in the bloody world who should understand!’

  ‘Why?’ he says.

  Fury surges up at how stubborn and thick he’s being. I’m sick of feeling guilty. I couldn’t help what they did to me. They were too powerful. I couldn’t fight back.