by Tom Pollock
Recursion: 6 Years Ago
Rainwater dripped from the hem of my school uniform trousers where they dangled over the floor. I stared downwards and listened to the click-click-click of high heels striking polished concrete as they approached from up the corridor. Shouts and laughter carried from the playground outside.
Bel sat across from me, below a corkboard of school notices. She was folding a train ticket over and over until she had to pinch it hard to keep it shut. She looked up and winked.
“Don’t worry about it, little bro. We’ll be fine.”
“Little?” I shot back. “You’re eight minutes older than me.”
She beamed at me, beatific. “And no matter what, I always will be.”
After twelve strides, the clicking heels stopped and Mum stood between us, arms folded, her face set in a classic Look No. 7: This had better be good—I was advancing the cause of science.
She opened her mouth to speak just as the door next to Bel’s chair opened and Mrs. Fenchurch, our brand-new and by-the-end-of-the-day-likely-to-be-ex headmistress emerged. Bel stood up respectfully and took a step towards the door, but Fenchurch waved her away like a wasp.
“No, Anabel, I wish to speak to your mother in private.” She turned to Mum and stuck out a hand. “Mrs. Blankman.”
Mum took the proffered hand and followed Mrs. Fenchurch inside. Bel and I exchanged an incredulous glance. Not only had Mum let this stranger touch her, but she also hadn’t corrected her to Dr. Blankman. This really was serious.
“Mrs. Blankman,” Mrs. Fenchurch said. “Thank you for coming. As I mentioned over the phone, here at Denborough College we have a zero-tolerance policy for this sort of thing. I’m afraid we have no alternative but to . . .” The rest was lost as she closed the door behind her. My stomach sprang up into my throat. No alternative but to what? Suspend? Expel? Bring back corporal punishment?
I stared at the door, desperate to know. Bel kept her eyes on mine, a weird smile on her face.
After a moment, the door handle began to turn smoothly counterclockwise. Without a sound, the door swung open, just a quarter of an inch. Something that had been jammed into the latch socket fell out and fluttered to the floor, where it squirmed slowly like a dying insect: a train ticket.
Voices bled through the crack.
“. . . you not reconsider?” my mother was saying. “She’s been here less than a week.”
“I dread to think what she’d manage if we gave her a month, then!” Mrs. Fenchurch exclaimed. Mum sighed and I knew she’d just taken her glasses off to polish them. I also knew she was about to leave a long silence and . . . Yep, there it was, occupying the conversation without actually saying anything.
“She’s . . .” Fenchurch was struggling. “She’s highly disruptive.”
“She’s enthusiastic.”
“She’s a little demon.”
“She’s eleven. You’re aware of Peter’s condition. He relies on her. It’s crucial that they not be separated.”
“You know what she did?” Fenchurch demanded.
A pause, a flicker of paper. Mum consulting her notebook. “She pinned an older boy to the floor and inserted two live earthworms into his nostrils, one of which exited through his mouth via his lower-left sinus. As I understand, there was no permanent damage.”
“But the boy hasn’t stopped crying since!”
“I meant the worms were fine,” Mum said calmly.
“Mrs. Blankman . . .”
“Doctor Blankman.” Even I shivered as Mum issued the correction. “Mrs. Fenchurch, you are aware”—another turned page—“that immediately prior to the incident with the invertebrates, the boy in question—Benjamin Rigby—and his friends were attempting to intimidate Peter into giving up his rucksack.”
Another silence. The kind that you can only squirm in.
“Rigby says he didn’t touch Peter. Witnesses say he only said a few words, certainly not enough to justify your daughter’s conduct. Even the words didn’t amount to much.”
“With my son,” Mum observed drily, “it doesn’t take much.”
I flushed. I thought back to the playground, to the three boys, suddenly so tall and standing so close. And even though it was only my fifth day at the school, I could see, I mean properly see, my future, like a vision from a vengeful god, day after day, year after year. I could feel the bruises and hear their laughter and taste the blood running from my nose even before they’d laid a finger on me. It must have shown on my face because Rigby actually asked me, “What are you so scared of?”
He must have been delighted to have found so easy a mark.
No, it doesn’t take much.
“Anabel can be very passionate,” Mum went on. “Perhaps her reaction was excessive, but I’m sure someone with your disciplinary experience understands the value of putting down a marker.”
“A marker?” Fenchurch sounded nonplussed.
“Peter is timid, Mrs. Fenchurch. That makes him a target and, if I may be blunt, junior school is a zoo. If he is to survive here, the other children need to know he has protection.”
From her seat opposite me, Bel winked at me and mouthed “little bro” again. I flipped her a middle finger and she grinned.
“I’m sorry, Mrs.—Dr. Blankman.” Fenchurch had regained some of her composure. “But I have an obligation to the boy’s parents—”
Mum cut her off. “I’ve spoken to the Rigbys already.”
“You have?”
“Yes.”
“But . . . how did you . . . ?”
“Mr. Rigby works with a former colleague of mine, who put me in touch. They are willing to leave the disciplining of my daughter to me if I leave their son’s to them. Which only leaves one question: are you willing to do the same?”
“Well . . . well . . . I suppose if . . . if . . .” Fenchurch sounded like she was drowning, trying to find a scrap of conversational driftwood to hold on to.
“Thank you. Will that be all, Mrs. Fenchurch? Only there’s a neuron that requires my attention.”
“Neuron?” Fenchurch said, sounding wrong-footed.
“A single brain cell,” Mum clarified, her tone implying that said single cell was more interesting, and likely more intelligent, than the woman she was talking to.
Four seconds later the door swung open. Mum stood in the doorway, one black high heel placed very deliberately over Bel’s ticket.
“Uh, Mum?”
“Tell me in the car, Peter.”
No one spoke as we drove home. Any word could be the spark to light Mum’s fuse. I was staring gloomily out the window when I felt something scratchy pressed into my palm. It was the train ticket. A series of apparently random letters had been scrawled on it in blue Biro.
I smiled. Bel didn’t have my head for number codes, so we’d been messaging each other with Caesar shift ciphers. A Caesar shift is about the simplest code in the world—perfect for the Roman emperor, who was long on secrets but short on time.
To make one, you just write out the alphabet, A to Z, then pick a secret phrase, like—I dunno—O SHIT BRUTUS, and write it out underneath the first few letters of your alphabet, dropping any repeated letters. Then you follow it with the remainder of the alphabet, in order, so you get something like this:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
OSHITBRUACDEFGJKLMNPQVWXYZ
Then you write your message, substituting every letter for the one below it, and—bam—your message is safe from the prying eyes of teachers, parents, and marauding Visigoths.
Unfortunately, because you only have to guess the keyword, codes this simple are even easier to break than my nerve. I studied the letters, tried a few combinations in my head, and stifled a laugh. “Demon,” I mouthed. She smiled back. Like any secret shared, it was a hug, a way of saying I’m here.
Sudd
enly, Mum let out an exasperated breath and pulled the car over. For a heart-stopping moment, I thought she was going to tell us to get out, to never come home.
You’ll have to go live with your father—he was her worst threat, the monster under the bed—if you can find him.
Instead, she sighed. “Don’t do that again, Anabel,” she said.
“I was only . . .”
“I know what you were doing. Don’t. It’s too big a risk. This time we got lucky, but not every meat-headed brat in that school will have a father whose job I can dangle in front of him.”
“Yes, Mum.”
“And, Bel?”
“Yes, Mum?”
The edge of Mum’s mouth curled. “In case there is a next time—which I expressly forbid, you understand—don’t use earthworms. They’re lovely creatures and they don’t deserve it. Use Coca-Cola; it’ll hurt more.”
“Yes, Mum,” Bel said solemnly.
Mum nodded and pulled back out into the road.
I sat back, relieved and awed. A spitting rain flecked the window and I watched the wet, leaf-plastered streets slide past under the streetlights.
I wanted to be like my mum when I grew up.
NOW
[email protected]: I don’t understand. A saltshaker?
[email protected]: Yep.
[email protected]: The *porcelain* thing?
[email protected]: The very same.
[email protected]: . . . did you *chew*?!
[email protected]: Hang on . . . It’s kinda gory, hope you already had breakfast.
I tilt my webcam to get a shot of the eighties horror movie that is the inside of my mouth.
[email protected]: Daaaaamn Pete, that’s gotta rate a 7 on the ballsuck at the very least.
[email protected]: Nope, only a 4.
[email protected]: *4* ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!
[email protected]: Leave some interrobangs for the rest of us, Ingrid.
[email protected]: 4? BS 4. How the hell do you get to 4?
[email protected]: Proximity, Duration, Damage. Mum helped me out of it, and the whole thing was over in under 20 mins. I ran the maths, it was a measly 4.
[email protected]: *Sigh* Always the same with you, Petey. Promising looker, no follow-through.
I brighten and type:
[email protected]: You think I’m a promising looker, Ingrid?
[email protected]: Only when it comes to sucking balls, Pete.
I snort. Ingrid gets me better than anyone, except for Bel. We bonded over our shared hobbies: rewatching Star Wars, mocking reality TV contestants, and staying up late into the night, reading online medical encyclopaedias, researching the tolerances of the human body for heat, cold, thirst, and velocity in order to understand precisely what and how we could survive—it’s fetish porn for the anxiously inclined.
Ingrid’s the only other person I’ve ever met who’s (a) as into maths, and (b) as twitchy as I am, so it was inevitable that sooner or later we’d find a way to quantify our fear.
Enter the Ballsuck.
The Base-Adjustable Linear Logarithmic Scale for Unanticipated Crazy (BALLSUC) is calculated as follows:
BS (Balls Sucked) = Log10 (T) + Log10 (D) − Log10 (P)
Where T is the time the episode lasted, D is the monetary or sentimental value of anything or anyone you accidentally smashed or set fire to, and P is the proximity of people who can help.
(We have a pact that if the BALLSUC one day enters standard scientific use, we won’t let them change the acronym. My surname’s Blankman, and Ingrid’s is Immar-Groenberg, so we could have gone for BIG BALLSUC, but we figured just plain BALLSUC was the classy choice.)
When your own special brand of crazy sucker punches you, BALLSUC measures how hard it is to get back up off the canvas. We based it on the Richter scale: violent shaking, aftershocks, wreckage. I think of the devastation in the kitchen; panic attacks are your own private earthquakes.
[email protected]: How’s yours been, anyway?
There was a delay before she replied.
[email protected]: I had a 6.
[email protected]: Shit!
[email protected]: . . .
[email protected]: You okay?
[email protected]: Yeah.
[email protected]: What happened?
[email protected]: It clocked me when I left for school Friday. I suddenly couldn’t remember if I’d washed my hands, so I went back to do them.
[email protected]: Ingrid . . .
[email protected]: I know, but sometimes we can’t help it can we? I was 23 washes in when Dad dragged me out.
[email protected]: Christ . . . Want to meet up?
[email protected]: No, it’s ok. You can’t anyway, you’ve got your Mum’s thing.
[email protected]: Exactly. Everybody wins.
[email protected]: Shush. It’ll be amazing. The Natural History Museum, come on! How is that not awesome?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
[email protected]: Just so you know, when the cops come around asking who’s behind the great interrobang robbery, I’m sending them to you.
[email protected]: Funny. Go do your family thing Pete. I’ll be fine.
I hesitate before I type.
[email protected]: Okay, but text me if you change your mind. I’ll smash my way out with a diplodocus femur and come running.
[email protected]: Almost worth having another 6 to see that. You stay brave, ok?
[email protected]: I’ll do my best.
[email protected]: 23-17-11-54, Peter William Blankman. I x
[email protected]: 23-17-11-54, Ingrid Immar-
Groenberg. P x
I shut the laptop. Go do your family thing, Pete.
Your.
I’ve never met Ingrid’s folks and she’s determined to keep it that way. She says they find it tough to believe in any kind of broken you can’t see on an X-ray.
“It could be worse,” I mutter to myself. “I could have it like Ingrid.”
I’m wrestling with the knot in my tie when Bel walks in wearing a dress (black, inevitably—she thinks black-and-white movies have one too many colours) and drops onto the bed.
“Hey, dickface,” she says.
“Hey.”
“Great, I was expecting a return insult. Now I just feel bad.”
“Sorry, distracted. Trying not to strangle myself.”
She snorts and leans forward. The knot magically comes apart at her fingertips.
“Gotta have the nails for it. Feeling better?”
“Yeah.”
“You lying to me right now?”
“You can always tell.”
“It’s a twin thing. You don’t have to come; she’ll understand.”
It’s tempting. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t, but my stomach twists when I think about backing out. No, this is what you do. You’re there for your family on big days. You clap and whoop and they see you do it. This is how you start to repay seventeen years of broken sleep and eroded patience.
This is what normal people do.
“I’m going.”
“Okay,” she says, lying back on the pillow. “You can chill anyway. No one’s going to be looking at you. Hell, Uncle Peter could show up and do his Christmas party trick and no one would look at him, so stop worrying about it.”
Uncle Peter’s one of those not-actually-related uncles. His party trick involves a pink tutu, a turkey leg, and a rendition of “I Will Survive.” There are probably bananas I share more DNA with than Uncle Peter.
“Whatever happens, you won’t ruin it,” Bel says, her head pillowed against her interlaced fingers. “Trust me.”
I look down at her and the churn in my stomach
calms a little. I do trust her.
“I always do,” I say. “You’re my axiom.”
“You’re a weird little kid.”
“Weird, I’ll take. But enough with the little. You’re only eight minutes older.”
“It was a race for the exit and I won. Margin of victory is irrelevant.”
Mum’s voice floats up the stairs, calling us.
I look to the posters on the wall for support. Ten centuries of epic mathematicians stare back: Cantor, Hilbert, Turing. We’re all squarely rooting for you, Pete, they say. Maths humour, but you can’t blame them. I gaze at Évariste Galois’s pointy face. I feel for you, Pete, he says. I felt the same way before I went into that duel in ’32.
That duel killed you, Évariste, I think back. You got shot in the gut and died in screaming agony.
Good point, he says. Forget I said anything.
Bel’s hand finds mine.
“You ready?” she asks. “It’s just a couple of hours and I’ll be there the whole time. Just gotta find a way to be brave for that long.”
There’s a blue hardback notebook sitting on the corner of the desk. Its pages are curled and gummed together. I’ve not opened it in years, but there was a time . . .
Gotta find a way to be brave.
“Let’s go,” I say.
Recursion: 5 Years Ago
Retreat! RETREAT!
As he skip-stumbled down the frost-speckled pavement, Agent P. W. Blankman (special citations for cunning, courage, and calculus) was acutely aware of four things:
The paralysing iciness of the October air in his lungs,
The thud of his trainers on the pavement,
The breeze tickling the hairs on his bare legs, and—above all—
The fact that if he relaxed the pressure of the hand he had pressed to his backside, his underpants would fall off.
He swore like the ex–Royal Marine commando he was. The underpants had sustained critical injuries, severed from the waistband almost all the way down to the thigh by an enemy blade, but if he could just get them back to the house, emergency surgery might spare them the fate of his trousers, their gallant comrades-in-legs. (He felt a brief pang of anxiety, wondering how he was going to explain the loss of those to Mum.)