by Tom Pollock
“HELP!”
What? I spin around in the darkness. I want to run back, but I don’t know which way is back.
“HELP ME!” She sounds as scared as I am. She needs—I shake my head disbelievingly—Mum needs my help?
“PETER!”
Pain. She sounds like she’s in pain.
Three: get counting.
Count your steps. Turn around. Go to her. Go.
“One. One. One.” I don’t seem to know any other numbers.
“PETER!”
“One.” I stammer it over and over, my legs still folded, useless under me. “One. One. One. One. One.”
“Please!”
“One.”
“PLEASE DON’T!”
“One.”
“HELP ME!”
Four: get eating.
I jam my knuckles between my jaws and bite. Warm liquid spills into my mouth, and I spit it out reflexively. The fossils crowd around me, silently urging me on as I gnaw and chew, digging for my own irreducible, indestructible part. Pain shoots up through my wrist and into my chest and jolts my legs back to life. I’m running again, or at least shambling, spitting blood.
“Mum,” I croak. “Mum!”
No answer. I can see the corridor around me again now. Dinosaur bones once more quiescent behind their copper nameplates.
“Mum?” I’m turning corners at random. I have no idea which way I came. I see light glinting off glass cases. Butterflies. I remember butterflies! I must almost be back at the hall.
“Mum?”
No answer. I calm a little, enough to feel the throb in my hand, and I cradle it. Maybe she didn’t really come after me. Maybe I imagined her voice. Maybe she’s still back in the hall. I check my watch. 10:58. I almost laugh. I’ve only been gone for a handful of minutes. The seething in my stomach settles and I wrap my hand up in my jacket; I know my way from here. If I hurry, I can make it back in time for the presentation. I’ll clap and cheer and be the proud, normal son the way I ought—
Twenty strides ahead of me there’s something on the floor.
It’s black, blue, and red, some kind of fabric, billowed on the tiles. I can’t quite make sense of the shape, although it fills me with the oddest sense of recognition. I slow, approaching cautiously. Nineteen strides. Eighteen. It’s black in the middle, surrounded by blue patches edged with a thin rim of red. Seventeen, sixteen. At fifteen strides I see that no—it’s not black. It’s the blue of the fabric that surrounds it, dyed dark and glossy where something’s soaked in. Fourteen steps, thirteen. The red is the dye, seeping beyond the rucked cloth. I know that shade. I look down and see it on my own hand where I bit into it.
Hand. I see a hand curled around a sodden mop of hair. And then the world snaps into focus and I recognise her.
Mum.
. . .
. . .
. . .
I come to on my knees beside her. I don’t even remember crossing the last few steps. My head’s empty. I throw my head back and I bay: “Bel! Bel! Help!”
I look down. My hands are immersed in bloody cloth.
Sometimes, when things get really bad, I see things that aren’t there. Any second now, I’ll snap out of it. I’ll feel a hand on my shoulder and Mum will pull me into a hug.
There’s so much blood. I’m surrounded by the smell of it. It’s so thick it’s almost a gel. I grope for her pulse and I can feel a flicker, like a butterfly pinned under her skin. I look down at her, helpless. She’s bleeding and I don’t know how to help. I don’t know how to not make it worse. I claw the folds of her dress away from her mouth so she can breathe more easily. The human body needs two hundred millilitres of air a minute; I have to make sure she gets it. Her nose is red-black and crusted, split along both nostrils.
“Bel!” I yell, my throat almost tearing, but no one comes.
Blood. Have to stop the blood. You can lose a maximum of two litres of blood and survive it. I grapple with her dress. It’s wet-heavy, hot, and clammy. “Be less than two,” I urge the blood puddled around me. “Please be less than two.” I hear footsteps. Shouting. I find the wettest part of the dress. Under my fingers I can feel the liquid pulsing out, thick as honey. The shouts get louder. I scrunch the fabric into a wad and press it against the wound. I pull my phone from my pocket, but there’s no signal.
“Get away from her!” a gruff male voice shouts.
“She’s my . . . she’s my . . .” I gasp, but the words won’t come. Blood is leaking around my fingers. Mum’s eyelids are flickering and the butterfly flutter in her wrist is ebbing. Arms close around my waist, dragging me away, and I flail and screech like a baby.
“Mum! Mum! She’s still bleeding! Let me go!”
Startled, the arms let go and I pitch forwards. I grope amongst the fabric, desperately trying to find the source of the blood again. Out the corner of my eye I glimpse the brown uniforms of security guards.
Any second now I’ll wake up. Any second.
Please.
I hear the clack of high-heeled shoes. Bel?
“Let me through, you idiots. I’m a doctor!” a voice snaps. Dry, dark-skinned hands quest next to mine, find what they’re looking for, seize my hand and place it. I feel the seep, seep, seep of the blood again. I look at her. It’s the woman from the party, in the green dress and the high-piled braided black hair. Her face is tight with concentration.
“Press here,” she tells me, “and whatever you do don’t let up.”
“She’s my . . . mum,” I gasp.
“I’ve called an ambulance,” the woman says. “And this happened next to a room full of doctors. We’ll keep her alive.”
A room full of doctors. Of course. A lighter flame of relief flickers in my chest. They all work with Mum. Colleagues and old friends, that’s what Mum said. They’ll know what to do. The woman in green is already gently moving her. She slides an arm under Mum’s hips and raises them gently off the floor. The wound I’m pressing with the heel of my hand is just below her belly button.
“Gravity’s going to work for us,” the doctor in green says.
“Bel.” I cast about for my sister. “Have you seen her?”
“Bel?” she asks. “Anabel? Your sister? Where is she?” The doctor looks at me intently. “Wasn’t she with you?”
“No. You’re . . . you’re a friend of Mum’s?”
“That’s right. My name is Rita.”
“I . . . I ran.” It’s a confession.
“I saw,” Rita says. “You’re Peter, aren’t you?” I nod. “You sprinted out of that room like you’d seen a ghost. A girl in a black dress followed you. Was that Anabel?”
I nod helplessly; I can’t speak. Bel followed me? I hadn’t seen her.
“Louise”—she winces as she uses Mum’s first name—“was right behind the two of you. I would have been too if you were my kids.”
I feel suddenly very sick, as if I’ve been punched low in the gut. She followed me. Whoever was waiting for her, I brought her to them. My fingers slip over each other as I try to maintain the pressure on the wound, and I patter frantically around to recover the spot.
A thud of boots. Green high-vis uniforms. Paramedics, four of them, with a stretcher. One of them crouches beside me. With a pair of oversize scissors, he begins to cut away Mum’s dress around my hand while another places a clear plastic mask attached to a red bottle over her face. I hear a rip behind me as a third paramedic opens a field dressing. The one with the scissors tries gently to lift my hand away, but I find myself resisting. What if the instant I take it away, the rest of her blood comes flooding out? He emits a small breath and just yanks my hand clear. The flap of soaking silk comes with it; underneath, the wound is the shape of an eye, as if someone had stuck in a knife and twisted it.
“You did good,” he mutters to me as he
presses a square of sticky bandage over the gash. Another of them smiles at me as he rubs disinfectant gel into my gnawed hand and winds a bandage around it. He looks vaguely familiar. My brain’s flailing in confusion, trying to make connections where there shouldn’t be any to make.
“Can we move her?” another voice asks from behind me.
“We’re going to have to.” Rita is authoritative. “Get the stretcher.”
They lay the stretcher beside her and oh-so-gingerly inch her onto it. It seems to take years. Every tick of the second hand on my watch feels like a month.
“Anabel.”
I look around sharply at the mention of my sister’s name, expecting to see her finally here, but she isn’t. Instead, it’s Rita looking sternly at me.
“Peter, this is important. Where is Anabel?”
Clumsily, I fumble for my phone, but there’s still no signal. My thumbs smear bloody prints over the glass.
“I don’t know,” I manage at last. “I don’t know.”
They’ve finally got Mum onto the stretcher. They count, “One, two, three, lift.”
They settle her onto a fold-out trolley.
“You’re sure?” Rita is tense, her face set into lines I can’t read. “Think. Where might she go? You’re her twin. No one knows her better than you. When did you last take your medication? Just recently? Good. Now, think.”
I shake my head, dumb as a dog. I don’t know. She should be here, with me, with Mum. Another awful possibility kicks me in the stomach. I think of the hallways I ran through. Is Bel lying in another one, bleeding out with no one to help her?
“What if she’s hurt too?” I gasp.
“She’s not,” Rita assures me. “We’ve looked. She’s not here.”
“I don’t . . . I don’t . . .” But something’s not right, something I can’t place. When did you last take your medication?
How did she know?
Because she’s Mum’s colleague, you idiot. She’s her friend. She called her by her first name. Of course she knows about your pills. She knows all about you.
But then, and the suspicion burrows like a worm into my head, why don’t I know her? If she’s close enough to Mum to discuss my pharmaceutical requirements, why has Mum never mentioned a Rita to me before?
Stupid, paranoid fucking brain. Concentrate, you useless shit. She’s trying to help. She’s telling you Bel’s missing and all you can do is nitpick.
Mum and the paramedics are three-quarters of the way out of the door. One of them holds it open with his boot. It’s a heavy boot, black leather. There’s a long scratch over the toe, revealing the steel toe cap beneath. My stomach flips over.
“Wait . . .” I lurch forward just as Mum, her face half hidden beneath strings of sticky hair, vanishes through the door and it swings shut. “Wait . . .”
“Peter?” Rita’s looking at me, concerned. “You can follow them, Peter. It’s all right.”
“Who are you?” I rasp, my throat thick with phlegm and tears.
“I told you,” she says. “I’m a doctor; a friend. My name is—”
“I don’t believe you.” I cut her off. “If you’re Mum’s friend, why has she never mentioned you to me?” My mind’s racing now and my words tumble over each other. “That guy had a scratch on his boot, same as the guy who put up our table. There were eight technicians, two teams of four. There are four paramedics when normally they only send two. And you talked to them like you know them. ‘We’re going to have to move her,’ you said. We. Who are you? Who are all of you?”
I tail off, breathless. Shut up, Peter. Listen to yourself; you’re wired up and paranoid. I stare at her, willing her to deny it so I can let go and trust her. I can’t do this by myself. She’ll explain, she will. She’ll set me right. She’ll help me.
Rita looks at me. Then she looks at her watch. She seems to make a decision.
“You can either believe we’re your friends,” she says, and her tone hasn’t changed at all. “Or you can believe we’re your enemies. In which case we have your mother, bleeding and helpless in our control, so either way, I think you should do what we say.”
Everything inside me freezes. I stare at her. Her expression is blank, patient, waiting for me to make up my mind.
I spin back on my heel. Through the frosted glass, I can still just see them wheeling Mum away down the long adjoining hall. I want to fight them; the desire wells up in me so fierce it feels it will tear its way out of my chest and drag me after it, but there are too many of them and they’re too big, and even if, in some hysterically unlikely universe I beat four fully grown men, then what? Too much time’s been wasted already. Mum could die before another ambulance, a real ambulance, arrives. Her only hope is her captors.
Oh god, Bel, where are you?
I swallow down acid and say, “Tell me what to do.”
Through the glass I see a blurry man-shape running towards us. It falters as it passes Mum’s stretcher, then speeds up again and crashes through the door. I recognise the grey-suited man from the party, his tie now loose, his face flushed. When he sees me, something like relief flickers across his face, quickly replaced by puzzlement. He turns to Rita.
“Where’s the girl?” he demands. He has an Irish-tinged, London accent.
Rita stays silent.
“You don’t know?” he asks, incredulous. “How the fu—”
“Control yourself,” Rita cuts him off coldly. His eyes flicker to me and then back to her. The girl, I think frantically. Does he mean Bel?
“She’s gone? Did he take her?” he hisses. “How did this happen? How did he even get in?”
He, I think, my thoughts a welter. Who is he?
“I don’t know,” Rita admits.
“Covering the access points was your team’s job,” he says.
“And surveillance was yours, Seamus. You want to start throwing rocks?” Rita’s voice is dangerously taut. Absurdly, I think, scuba gear time, sunshine.
“I’m not taking the rap for this.”
“You are if I decide you are,” Rita says, in a tone that brooks no argument. “Now, get back to your screens and give us a clear route out of here.” She turns back to me and I watch him running back through the double glass doors.
“Walk in front of me,” Rita orders me like she’s got a gun to my head. But she doesn’t need a gun; she’s got my mum on a stretcher. “Stay no more than twenty inches ahead. Look at me.” I meet her gaze. “You know how far twenty inches is?” I nod. “Good, then walk.” She pauses, then adds, “Seems you’ve got decent instincts, so if you spot anything out of place, don’t be shy about shouting.”
She spins me around by the shoulder and shoves me at the door. My hands leave rust-coloured prints on the cold glass. Mum’s blood’s already drying, stiffening in the cracks and folds of my palms.
Behind me, I hear the tone of a mobile phone, Rita making a call. It only rings once.
“Home.” It’s faint, but I’m close enough that I can just hear the voice on the other end of the line.
“I have the rabbit,” Rita says.
“And the wolf?”
I start violently.
Wolf.
The wolf who took my sister?
She hesitates and then, in a tone of voice I haven’t heard from her until now, a tone I recognise better than any other: fear.
“In the wind.”
Recursion: 5 Years Ago
My toes curled over the edge of the wall with wet moss, cold and slippery as seaweed sliding between them. My school shoes—socks balled neatly up inside—were a pair of lonely quotation marks against the carpet of fallen leaves below me. The drop was less than three metres; it felt like the edge of a cliff.
Bel leaned against the wall eating an apple. She was always eating apples, not just the flesh, but the core, stal
k, even the pips. I know what you’re thinking: apple pips = cyanide = a quick and painful death, but I’d checked and she’d need more than three thousand of the things to get the median lethal dose. The trees that shielded us from sight of the school were on fire with autumn, and shreds of red-brown leaf were stuck to her hair and her school tights. This little clearing had always been ours, our place, our secret. No one else came here. Ahead of me the woods stretched up the hill into the distance. When we were younger, we’d played hide-and-seek in those woods. I thought longingly of all those hiding places now.
“C’mon,” she said. “It’s as easy as falling off a log.”
“Falling off a wall,” I insisted. I can be stubbornly literal, especially when I’m scared (which is a bit like a haddock saying “Especially when I’m wet,” but still . . .)
Teach me—that’s what I’d asked her, and this was her classroom. Fearlessness 101: basic principles of non-self-defecation. She’d already jumped six times to demonstrate, landing lightly and then rolling, throwing up a storm of leaves, laughing all the while, with no more protection than her school jumper. I had a bike helmet strapped to my skull and a pair of cushions nicked from the common room gaffer-taped to my belly and spine. I still couldn’t make my feet leave the brick.
Bel sucked in a breath and expelled it in an overdramatic sigh.
“Come on, Pete.”
“Seriously, you are the most impatient girl I know.”
“A lot of girls you know have to teach their little brother to jump off walls, do they?”
“No, I think that’s usually more of a dad job.”
We were both silent for a second. I felt the queasy clench in my stomach I always got when I thought about Dad—like when you eat a prawn and suddenly remember a past savage bout of food poisoning.
“Do you . . .” I spoke hesitantly, probing the wound. “Do you ever wonder what that would be like?”
“What ‘what’ would be like?”
“If Mum started dating again?”
“Is . . . that what you want?”
“God no,” I said hurriedly.
“You think it’s likely?”
Another long silence.