by Tom Pollock
Now I’ve said it, the pattern seems small and absurd. I expect Frankie to dismiss it, but to my surprise, she looks thoughtful.
“I’ll compare it to footage of the lab break-in,” she says to Rita.
“What lab break-in?”
Frankie’s already pulled the screen back around and is hammering at the keys as she answers.
“At four o’clock this morning, your mother’s lab at Imperial was broken into. The cameras went down there as well. A virus was uploaded that wiped every file on the drives.”
“You think the two are connected?” I say. The fog in my head is starting to clear.
“Hell of a coincidence if they aren’t.”
“S-s-so . . . this is about Mum’s work?” I ask shakily.
Rita raised her eyebrows. “She’s a strategic research scientist; it’s not going to be about her cooking.”
“But . . . but then . . .”
I remember her saying they’d tried to contact Bel multiple times. I remember what she said in her status report when she picked up her phone. I have the Rabbit. And I know the Rabbit is me. Her first question as she walked through the door was, Have we found the girl? She could only mean Bel.
I’m risking not only my glittering career but my elegant neck, Rita had said, because I owe it to her to keep you safe.
Even now, the question’s hard to formulate, I guess because it involves looking past my hardwired assumption that everything must naturally be about me, and that assumption has hitherto obscured the fact that everything I’ve seen and heard today has been unusually, suspiciously, about me . . .
. . . me and my still-missing sister.
“If this is all about Mum’s work,” I ask quietly, “then why the obsessive focus on her kids?”
For a second Frankie looks startled, then recovers. Get counting. I look over my shoulder, past Rita. Fifteen steps from the door. A door nine inches thick. Eight hundred and fifty paces back to the exit to the street through a lock I can’t operate. I check my watch: ninety-three minutes since my life as I knew it ended. I don’t want to ask my next question, but there’s nowhere to escape from it.
“Whoever’s behind this, they don’t want just Mum, her work, her colleagues; they want Bel, and they want me. Why?”
“Because of who he is.”
He, I think, remembering Seamus’s shaken face at the museum. She’s gone. Did he take her? How did he get in?
“You already know who did this.”
“We have our suspicions. But we didn’t want to prejudice your memory of the crime.”
I wait. There’s no point asking the question, the question that’s hanging in the air around us like gas vented from a drain.
Frankie glances to Rita, as if for permission. Rita nods. Frankie exhales and says:
“Dr. Ernest Blankman.”
There’s a cold knot at the base of my skull. Kidnapping. Kidnapping. How did I not see this coming? Come on, Pete, patterns are the one thing you’re good at. It takes me three tries to open my mouth, because my tongue’s fused to the roof of it.
“Dad?”
Recursion: 3 Years Ago
It was the bad kind of laughter, and it was coming from just outside the girls’ bathroom.
Ordinarily, I would have put as much distance between me and it as possible, turned on my heel, and headed back down the hall. Today I set a collision course right for the clutch of uniformed bodies at its source. I couldn’t have told you why. Maybe because it was just one of those days, the golden days, the brave days, the oh-too-rare days when anything seemed possible.
My trainers squeaked on the lino. I kept my gaze on them and my hands on the straps of my rucksack. I tallied the day’s accomplishments.
Talk to new girl: check.
Arrange lunch date with new girl: check.
Don’t chicken out and actually go to lunch hall for date with new girl: incredibly, astonishingly, check.
Wait, and wait, and wait some more, back pressed against the lunch hall wall, enduring the stares of the kids in line for fish and chips and aerated cardboard sponge, until the bell for the end of lunch goes and she still hasn’t shown: Check, check, bloody check.
I veered left a little as I passed the laughing huddle, and even though they were whispering, I could hear them.
“I know, right, she’s a total freak!”
“Should we tell a teacher or something?” One of them sounded worried.
“Please, this is just too entertaining.”
“Ugh—what is he looking at?”
“He” was me. A tilt of the girl’s head and a lilt in her voice accused me like the finger of a Witchfinder General. Additional laughter. My throat caught and my face heated up, but I was past them, and in seven or eight more seconds I’d be out of earshot. Then I heard a new voice carry through the open door of the bathroom. It was familiar; I’d heard it for the first time earlier that day asking me if I wanted to get lunch. But it wasn’t speaking now.
It was crying.
I stopped dead, one foot out in front of me like a toy soldier whose clockwork’s run down.
I tried to turn around but couldn’t. A nasty little voice in the back of my head whispered: Girls’ bathroom, and then attention, and finally target.
On any other day I would have fled. Fear sat in my heart like a clot. I was already counting the steps to the exit (22) and calculating the time before I could raid my locker for my emergency Hobnob stash and cram them into my face in a blizzard of gnashing teeth and flying oats (210 seconds—I’m not athletic). But like I said, today wasn’t an ordinary day. Today was a brave day.
My shoulders went up and I turned on my heel. I recognised three of them: Bianca Edwards, Stephanie Grover, and Tamsin Chow, looking at me like I was a giant, walking, white-headed zit, ready to burst. Behind them was the door to the girls’ bathroom, and beyond that . . .
Sometimes being brave is just working out which thing you’re more afraid of.
Eyes fixed firmly on my feet, I marched past them. Toy soldier; simple mechanics, left-right-left; the frantic ticking of my heart like clockwork. You can do this.
“Oy!” Bianca shouted. “Where do you think you’re . . . ?”
She never finished. I crossed the threshold. I was in the girls’ bathroom.
Oh Christ.
To my left, a row of stalls. In front of me, a row of sinks and mirrors, and between me and them, a little semicircle of girls’ black polyester-jacketed backs. One of them muttered something and there was more laughter. Another had a phone in her hand. Was she filming? The key in my clockwork heart gave another twist.
“Uh . . .” Had that syllable seriously come out of my mouth? “Excuse me?”
Exactly one of the girls turned around at my meek intervention, the girl with the phone. It was Tanya Berkeley, her neat black fringe like a lacquer photo frame around her face.
“Oh my god, get out!” she shrieked.
Suddenly I felt manic, high and getting rapidly higher like an untethered balloon. My mouth was out of control, my jaw chattering, up and down in a nutcracker jabber, but I couldn’t find any words. Tanya was looking me right in the eyes. I watched as her expression changed from outraged to . . . frightened?
“YOU GET OUT!” I finally found my voice.
And then—unbelievably—the sea was parting. They were getting out.
They were fleeing from me.
As they pressed themselves against the walls to pass me, I saw my own fear reflected in them, multiplied a hundredfold. Their eyes fixed on my face as if they couldn’t tear them away. I felt the heat rise in my cheeks and forehead. No mistake; they were terrified.
As the crowd cleared, I saw a thatch of blonde hair, shoulders hunched over the sink. The sound of fleeing footsteps gave way to the rush of running water and the h
issing rasp of a scrubbing brush. She was moving her arms very fast and hard. Water was flicking out past both sides of her; some of it was red.
“Uh . . . excuse me,” I said, suddenly realising that I had no plan.
No answer.
“Ingrid?” I hazarded.
“Get out.” She didn’t turn around.
“Are you sure? You don’t seem . . .” I groped for a word, but all I could come up with in the moment was, “. . . comfortable.”
“Well, shit.” She sounded like she was gritting her teeth. “Arthurson was right—you really are a genius.”
I stepped up to her shoulder. In the mirror, her face was puffy with crying, and little beads of bloody water flecked her forehead. Her fingerless gloves were balled up next to the taps. Under the foaming waterfall in the sink, the back of her left hand was a mess of red raw skin, and still she sanded it with the scrubbing brush.
“Fuck,” she muttered under her breath. “Look, I’m sorry I stood you up, okay? I’m having a bit of a moment. Could you just leave me the fuck alone?”
“Is there anything I can do?” I had no idea where to start. “Anything I can get?”
“Out. You can get out.”
“Sure . . .” On fire with shame and humiliation, I turned to go. Whatever she needed I didn’t have it. “Only . . .” I hesitated, teetering on the back of one heel. Oh screw it.
“Twenty-three, seventeen, eleven, fifty-four.”
She didn’t stop scrubbing, but she did switch hands.
“What?”
“‘Don’t let me down,’ you said.” My hands were balled into fists. My cheeks were burning. “And I . . . I kinda feel like I would be . . . if I left.”
She looked back over her shoulder at me. Her hands continued on autopilot. I saw the twitch in her cheek every time the bristles scraped over the raw skin.
“We met less than an hour and a half ago,” she said.
“So?”
“So why do you care?”
“I . . . I just . . .”
I just do, I was about to say. But I was suddenly starkly aware of how vulnerable she was, standing in front of that sink, with the back of her hand hanging off, and if I wanted to stand with her, the least I owed her was to be honest, no matter how loserly I sounded.
“You called me your friend,” I said. The rush of the taps sounded very loud in the pause that followed. “And I know that I’m not, not yet. But . . . I’d like to be.”
She didn’t reply, but her shoulders relaxed slightly, which I took to be a good sign, and then started to heave as she began to sob, which I took as a bad one. I stepped back to her side.
“What is it?” I asked quietly. “What are you afraid of?”
She threw me a startled look, her eyes distended by tears.
“What’s going through your head?” I pressed. “Right now?”
Get talking, I thought.
She was breathing in sharp, shallow little gasps.
“Right now? I’m thinking I heard four kids sneezing on the way in here. And there were two absent from my class when they took the register. There’s a bug going around, one bad enough to keep you at home, and if I don’t wash my hands really, really thoroughly, then I’ll miss a bit. And if I miss a bit, I could get sick and it’ll be my fault. And if I get sick, I can’t come to school, and I have to come to school. I really, really can’t be at home during the day. So I really, really have to make sure I clean under my fucking nails.”
The last word was a barely audible snot-choked growl. Her hands were speeding up again. Instinctively, I reached out to them, but there was nowhere to touch that wasn’t bloody.
My fault, she’d said. Something inside me clenched.
“Four point five seconds,” I said.
“What?”
“You’re completely covering your hand every four and a half seconds.”
“What?”
“Four and a half seconds, times two hands is nine seconds.” My voice was getting louder, speeding up. “You’ve been in here for forty minutes; that’s two thousand four hundred seconds: enough time for two hundred and sixty-six complete washes. Your hands are clean . . .”
Her face was tense with misery. I knew that look. She was looking at the bars of a cage closing on her.
“Trust me,” I urged her. “If you can’t trust yourself, just now, just for this moment, trust me.”
Nothing. Just the rush and splash of her hands in the sink. Then they started to slow, and slowed further, until at last the scrubbing brush plinked off the porcelain as she dropped it. I reached across, my heart hammering wildly in my chest, and turned off the tap.
She dipped into her pocket, pulled out a tiny bottle of iodine and a cotton wool pad, and dabbed at the grazes on her hands. Small, efficient, practiced motions. She didn’t even wince, but she was trembling, a high-frequency vibration running through her; her own personal earthquake.
She grabbed her gloves, swabbed the sink clean of her blood with a paper towel, and without a word, turned and walked quickly out of the bathroom.
The sun was painfully bright when I pushed through the fire-escape door. I knew all the ways in and out of that school, which ones were alarmed and which weren’t; my little rabbit runs. The bell had gone seven minutes earlier, but I needed to talk to Bel and I knew where she’d be. I put my head down against the October wind, and made for the school wall.
“Where the hell were you?” Bel demanded when I reached our secret spot under the oaks. “I was scared sick something had happened to you.” A furrow of crushed red-brown leaves was squelched into the mud where she’d been pacing. The knuckles of her right hand were puffy, and she’d even managed to crack some of the bark off the nearest tree.
It’s Bel’s one fear: something happening to me.
“Something did,” I said. I was still out of breath from it.
“What?”
“I made a friend.”
It was another week before a paper aeroplane came sailing through the classroom window at registration. Written on it was a page number and a sequence of word references; it was signed off:
23-17-11-54
I x
I met her on the back steps of the changing rooms as she’d asked. It was one of a hundred out-of-sight places in a school as old as ours. It was cold and grey, but the rain was as light as sea spray. Her gloves were back on, and she was staring fixedly out across the city.
“My dad,” she said. They were the first words out of her mouth, no hello, no nothing, just picking our last conversation up where it had left off. “I’m afraid of my dad.”
“Yeah,” I said, sitting down next to her. “I know how that feels.”
NOW
“How much do you actually know about your father?”
The ventilator hisses and beeps, carrying the woman attached to it from breath to breath, from heartbeat to heartbeat, stepping-stones over a pit I don’t want to think about.
My gaze follows the plastic tube to the mask fitted over Mum’s face, her eyelashes still thick with that morning’s mascara where they press to her cheek; the lank skeins of her hair spread over the pillow; the wires and pipes that sprout from her, carrying air and water and plasma in, urine and data out. It’s hard to see where she ends and the machines begin. With every breath, there’s a hitch as the ventilator resets: a split second when it feels like the machine has stopped, like all time has stopped—
A CCTV clock freezes for two full heartbeats—10:58:17:00—and then it beeps and hisses again, returning her to the same suspended animation. Nothing’s decided, everything’s still poised: a poker hand waiting for the final card to turn, an equation with an unbound variable.
“Peter?” Frankie says. Her tone suggests she’s been saying my name for a while.
“Sorry?”
&
nbsp; “I asked, how much do you actually know about your father?”
“Know?” I have no memories; only impressions, glimpses from dreams and imaginings; a faceless man in a dusty black suit with meaty, thick-palmed hands.
“Almost nothing.”
“Louise didn’t tell you anything about him?”
I barely hear her. Frankie had gotten a call to say Mum was stable but unconscious. She told me they didn’t know when she’d wake up. Her fractional hesitation before saying “when” made me feel like I was teetering on the edge of a cliff.
We rode in a lift up to this small room, an office repurposed to a surgery. I can see the grooves in the lino where the desk was dragged out. They’d anointed my hands with alcohol gel and wrapped me in green sterile cloth as if this were some kind of sacrificial ceremony. We put on green surgical masks and then they’d brought me here to face my work.
“You sprinted out of that room like you’d seen a ghost. Louise was right behind you.”
I led her to this. I’m the reason. I’m the bait. I’m the rabbit, the rabbit who ran, and she followed; the boy who cried . . . Jesus, Peter, get a grip, just shut up, shut up, shut—
“Up,” I say aloud.
“Up?” Rita says. She’s standing next to me, her plastic-gloved hands folded in front of her. Frankie’s on my other side. And suddenly Rita seems so neutral, all her acidity drained. It would be easy to talk to her, as easy as talking to myself.
“It was something Mum used to say about her marriage, she said most relationships have ups and downs, but hers and Dad’s had only ups. They met up, hooked up, got her knocked up, then split up. It was one massive fuck-up.”
Rita’s eyes crinkle above her surgical mask.
“Yes,” she says. “She said that to me too.”
“Did you ever think it was strange, Peter,” Frankie asks from my left, “that there were no photos of him in your house?”