Being

by Kevin Brooks

  ‘Yeah, I suppose… but I was only a kid at the time, and we were never really that close as a family. My father was always working, my mother was always just waiting for him to come home… I mean, they didn’t treat me badly or anything, they were just a bit… I don’t know. They didn’t show much affection.’ Her face hardened at the memory. ‘They weren’t exactly the most loving parents in the world.’

  ‘What happened to you after they died?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Who looked after you?’

  ‘I went to live with an aunt in Guildford.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I grew up,’ she said simply.

  I looked at her. ‘What do you mean?’

  She shrugged again. ‘I just grew up, you know… went to school, got into trouble, got thrown out, moved to London when I was sixteen…’

  She started talking about something else then, and I knew she wasn’t going to tell me anything else about herself, so I didn’t bother asking. And, besides, I wasn’t really sure whether I believed any of the stuff she’d told me anyway. I don’t know why I doubted her story. There was just something about it, something about the way she’d told it… it just didn’t feel right.

  The odd thing was, though – it didn’t seem to matter. It was as if whatever we’d both been before, whatever we’d done – real or imagined – that was all gone now. It was history. It didn’t mean anything to us. We were here now, and now was all we had.

  So, most of the time, that’s all we talked about – now, today, tonight, maybe tomorrow.

  Every night, after we’d eaten, we’d sit in El Corazón for a while – Eddi drinking wine and smoking cigarettes, me drinking Coke or water – and then we’d wander back to the flat. As soon as we got in, Eddi would open a bottle of wine and roll a joint (she’d bought some grass in Nerja), and then she’d sit with her laptop for the rest of the night, drinking and smoking until she could barely see any more, and eventually she’d stumble off to bed.

  At first, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. After she’d gone to bed, I’d sit there on my own, wondering if she’d been like this before – getting whacked out of her head every night – or if it was something new. And if it was something new, why was she doing it? Was it anything to do with me? Was she scared, addicted, troubled by nightmares? I didn’t know, and after a while I realized it was pointless even thinking about it. She did it, and that was that. And it wasn’t as if it was a problem anyway. She didn’t lose control or anything. She just got a little bit quiet and sad… a bit distant, a bit lost.

  There weren’t any more kisses.

  After we’d got back from El Corazón one night, instead of getting straight to her laptop, Eddi said she wanted to talk to me. It was some time around the middle of December by then and the days were beginning to get cooler. It was still fairly warm most of the time, but as the nights closed in and the winds blew down from the mountains, the temperature began to drop.

  ‘Let me just put a jumper on,’ I told Eddi.

  When I came back, she was sitting on the settee with a glass of wine in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other. A joint was smouldering in an ashtray on the arm of the settee. I went over and sat down next to her.

  ‘I got an email from Bean,’ she said, passing me the paper.

  I looked at her for a moment, then turned to the printout.

  they come rnd ur plce yday, I read. 3 sutes 1 ldy 2 bill. gry merc & blk trnst nos blkd out. smashed n & serched 4 hrs. fprints all knds. took ur pcs & stuff. crimtaped ur flt

  I had to read it twice before I understood it. I read it again, just to make sure, then I passed it back to Eddi.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked her.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘The flat’s clean. The computers are wiped. The hard drives are gone. They won’t find anything about this place.’

  ‘But they know who you are now.’

  ‘Yeah… they know who I am.’

  ‘And they’ll know you’re with me.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘So what does it all mean?’

  She drank some wine and took a deep drag on the joint. ‘It means,’ she said, blowing out smoke, ‘that I can’t go back to my flat. And, unless we get something sorted out, I can’t go back to England either. They’ll be looking for me now. Even if they don’t know about Morris, they’ll have found out enough about me to put me away for something – fraud, deception… whatever.’

  ‘If Ryan knows you’re with me,’ I said, ‘he’s not going to let anyone put you away.’

  She looked at me. ‘No… you’re probably right. If what I’ve found out about him is true…’

  ‘What? What have you found out?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing? But you just said –’

  ‘That’s it, that’s the whole point – there’s nothing to find out. Nothing about Ryan or Hayes or Morris, nothing about Casing, nothing about Kamal… there’s no trace of them anywhere. Even if Ryan’s people are using false names, I should have found something… but I didn’t. I couldn’t even find anything on Bridget and Pete. There’s no trace of anything anywhere. I’ve gone through everything – hospital records, your records, fostering records. School records. Police records. Births, deaths, marriages. I’ve searched newspaper archives. I’ve hacked into national security systems, biomechanical companies, computer companies, government offices.’ She picked up her glass, took a long drink and relit the joint. ‘There’s nothing there, Robert. No facts, no information, no hints, no rumours… no nothing. And that’s frightening, because there’s always something. No one can hide everything. But, somehow, that’s what they’ve done. The only other explanation is that none of it ever happened. There is no Ryan, no Casing, no Robert Smith. There never was a man called Morris…’ She paused again to stub out the joint and then she just sat there for a while, staring silently into the ashtray, her eyes unblinking. I waited for her to go on, but when she still hadn’t said anything after a minute or so, I couldn’t wait any longer.

  ‘It did happen,’ I said quietly. ‘Ryan does exist. So do I.’

  ‘I know,’ she muttered, still staring at the ashtray. ‘That’s the trouble… I know it all happened, I know it’s all real… it’s just…’ She shook her head. ‘This is bigger than I thought, Robert. Much bigger. These people – Ryan and the rest of them, whoever they are – they can wipe people out. Erase them. They can make things disappear.’ She looked at me. ‘Do you realize how impossible that is these days? You’d need access to everything – the media, the law, the state. You’d need limitless power, money and resources… legal and illegal. Shit, you’d need to be some kind of god.’ She shook her head again. ‘We can’t go up against Ryan. We can’t do anything with him. It’s probably best if we don’t even mention his name.’

  She lit a cigarette and poured herself another glass of wine, and we both just sat there for a while, not saying anything.

  The flat was quite cold now. The window was open and I could feel the night air tingling on my skin. I watched clouds of cigarette smoke drifting across the room and out through the window, and I wondered why I didn’t feel too bad. If Eddi was right – and there was no reason to think she wasn’t – then I should have been worried. If Ryan and his people were that powerful, we didn’t stand a chance. We couldn’t fight them, we couldn’t deal with them, we couldn’t face up to them. This wasn’t a Hollywood film, this was the real world. And in the real world, the little guys don’t beat the big guys. It just doesn’t happen. So why wasn’t I worried? If we didn’t do anything about Ryan, I’d never find out what I was, or why I was here, or where I came from… I’d never find out anything. Which should have worried the hell out of me. But, for some weird reason, it didn’t.

  ‘What do you think we should do?’ I asked Eddi.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘I really thought I could get somewhere with this. Find out what it means, find out who’s be
hind it, then work out what to do…’ She stared at the floor, slowly shaking her head. ‘I thought I could do it,’ she mumbled to herself, ‘I honestly thought I could do it.’

  ‘It’s all right –’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ she said sullenly. ‘It’s not all right.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because…’

  ‘We’re safe enough here, aren’t we?’

  She shrugged.

  I said, ‘Do you think Ryan will find us here?’

  ‘I don’t know… maybe, maybe not. But that’s not the point. The point is…’ She sighed heavily. ‘We can’t stay here forever.’

  ‘Why not? I mean, if we start running again, that’s just going to make it easier for them to find us, isn’t it? We’ll be seen more, we’ll have to get a car, stay in hotels… we’ll be leaving a trail. But if we stay where we are, there’s no trail to follow. And we’re more likely to notice if anyone starts snooping around.’

  ‘What about money?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘We can’t live without money, Robert.’

  ‘We’ve got some money… well, you’ve got some.’

  ‘It won’t last forever.’

  I looked at her. ‘I thought you said you had some more?’

  ‘I have… but I can’t get to it from here. I mean, I could get to it, but that’d mean going into a Spanish bank and filling out lots of forms, and then the Spanish bank would have to contact various banks in England, and they’d want to see proof of ID, which would mean lots of different IDs, and they’d need an address…’ She shook her head. ‘I could probably work out a way to do it, but it’s just too much of a risk. There’s too much information involved. Too many uncertainties.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ I said, ‘it’s only money.’

  She laughed coldly. ‘Only money?’

  ‘We’ll manage.’

  ‘Yeah? And how are we going to do that?’

  ‘I don’t know… we could always find some work –’

  ‘Work?’ she said, horrified. ‘I’m not working. Christ… I know things are bad, but they’re not that bad.’

  ‘We’ll have to do something when your money runs out.’

  ‘Yeah, well, if you want to get a job, that’s fine. But don’t expect me to. There are better ways to make money than working.’

  I looked at her. ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, avoiding my eyes. ‘I’ll think of something…’

  ‘You’re not going to try selling me out again, are you?’

  Her head snapped round. ‘What?’

  ‘Joke,’ I said, smiling.

  She glared at me. ‘There’s nothing funny about this, Robert. We’re in the shit. There’s nothing to smile about.’

  I shrugged. ‘We’re still alive, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yeah, for now…’

  ‘We’ve got food, shelter, a nice place to live. The weather’s good… Christmas is coming.’ I grinned at her. ‘It could be a lot worse.’

  ‘It could be a lot better too.’ Her face was still grim, but her voice had lightened a little. She didn’t sound quite so forlorn.

  ‘What are you missing?’ I asked her.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘From before… I mean, what did you have before that you haven’t got now?’

  ‘Money,’ she said.

  ‘Apart from that.’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know… I had my cars, my flat, my work. I had a life.’

  ‘What about friends?’

  ‘I had friends,’ she said defensively. ‘I knew lots of people…’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Well, all right… they weren’t exactly friends. But it was hard… doing what I did. I couldn’t let anyone get too close. And I didn’t want to anyway… not after Curtis.’ She drank some more wine, puffed on her cigarette, then leaned down and put it out in the ashtray. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ she sighed. ‘It wasn’t really much of a life.’ She looked at me. ‘But neither is this.’

  ‘It’s better than being dead.’

  She stared at me for a moment, her face empty and still, then her mouth started twitching, her eyes lit up and she began to laugh. It was a good laugh – giggly and uncontrollable, like the carefree laughter of a child – and it made me feel good to hear it.

  As I lay in bed that night, thinking about all the stuff we’d been talking about, I still couldn’t understand why I didn’t feel too bad about things. Eddi was right – there wasn’t anything to smile about. I was on the run, I was an outlaw, I wasn’t human. That wasn’t good. I didn’t know what I was, and I might never find out. That wasn’t good either. And Eddi? Yes, I liked her, and I liked being with her, and that was good. But I still didn’t trust her. I might have been smiling when I’d asked her if she was going to sell me out, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have my doubts.

  Because I did.

  They were there all the time:

  Why was she with me?

  What did I mean to her?

  Did she think I was worth something?

  Maybe she was going to sell me out to Ryan, or blackmail him.

  Or maybe she was going to sell my story to the newspapers – GOVERNMENT EXPOSED IN ROBO-KID EXPERIMENT HORROR. Or, THE MACHINE WHO LOVED ME: MY NIGHTS OF PASSION WITH A TEENAGE ANDROID.

  Or maybe… maybe she worked for Ryan. She’d been with him from the start. She was part of the whole damn thing. And now she was just studying me, observing me, analysing me. Testing me – my behaviour, my reactions. She wasn’t searching for information about Ryan every night, she was reporting back to him. Telling him what I’d done and what I’d said… how much I’d eaten, how often I’d smiled. And one day the observation period would end and I’d go to sleep at night and wake up the next morning with a gun in my face…

  It was possible, wasn’t it?

  Everything was possible.

  It was even just possible that she simply liked being with me.

  22

  On the Thursday before Christmas Day, I woke up around ten o’clock, put on a dressing gown and shuffled out to the bathroom. When I came back, Eddi was waiting for me in the front room. She was fully dressed, which at ten o’clock in the morning was unusual for her, and she seemed a bit anxious.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘You’re up early.’

  ‘Yeah…’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ She put her hands in her pockets. ‘Listen, Robert… you know we were talking about making some money…?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been thinking about it. And I know how I can make some.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I know some people… well, I don’t actually know them, but I know where they are. I’m going to see them today.’

  ‘What people? What do they do?’

  ‘They’re dealers.’

  ‘Drug dealers?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re kind of middlemen. They don’t sell in small quantities, but they’re not quite wholesalers either. They’re sort of somewhere in between. They’ll give me a decent price and I should be able to make a good profit.’

  ‘Hold on a minute minute –’

  ‘If I don’t do it now, Robert, we won’t have enough cash left to make it worthwhile.’

  I stared at her. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this before?’

  ‘Because I knew you wouldn’t like it and you’d probably try to stop me.’

  ‘I don’t like it. It’s a stupid idea. What if you get caught?’

  ‘I won’t. I’ve done it before. I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘Yeah, but what about –’

  ‘I’m not going to listen to you, Robert. If you say another word, I’m just going to walk out the door. I’m doing this – OK? I’ve made up my mind and that’s all there is to it. Now, do you want to know where I’m going and when I’ll be back, or do you want me to just walk out the door?’

 
; I looked at her, not knowing quite what I was feeling. I suppose I was angry with her for not telling me. And maybe I was a bit upset that she hadn’t asked me if I wanted to go with her. But mostly, I think, I was just scared that she wouldn’t come back.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked her quietly.

  ‘Granada. It’s about forty miles north of here.’

  I nodded. ‘Are you going on the bike?’

  ‘Yeah, it shouldn’t take too long. I just need to find the right people, then make the deal. With a bit of luck, I might even get back tonight. If not, it’ll probably be some time tomorrow.’

  ‘What should I do if you’re not back by tomorrow?’

  ‘Nothing. If it looks like it’s going to take more than a few days, I’ll get a message to the Garcias.’ She smiled at me. ‘I’ll be back before Christmas, I promise – all right?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘If anything happens while I’m away… I mean, if anyone comes nosing around or anything, there’s a gun in the bottom drawer of my bedside cabinet.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A pistol. It’s fully loaded, the safety catch is on. All you have to do is turn the safety to “off” and it’s ready to fire.’

  I stared at her. ‘You’ve got a pistol in your bedside cabinet?’

  ‘I got it when I first came out here,’ she explained. ‘I was on my own. I thought it’d be a good idea…’

  ‘You could have told me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because…’

  ‘Because what?’

  I shook my head. ‘You just should have told me, that’s all.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m telling you now. It’s there if you need it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said sarcastically.

  She stood there for a moment, looking at me as if I was a spoilt child, then she picked up her coat from the settee and started to leave. I watched her go, suddenly feeling stupid. I was stupid, she was stupid. This was stupid.

  ‘Eddi?’ I called out.

  She stopped at the door and turned round.

  I smiled at her. ‘Be careful.’

  She smiled back. ‘You too.’

  ‘Hasta luego.’