by Tom Pollock
The pressure of their almost-touch on my shoulders is making it hard to think.
“No.”
“No? Your mum kept a photo of Franklin Roosevelt in the kitchen, but none of the father of her children anywhere?”
I flinch. Another scrap of knowledge, casually tossed off. I picture Mum’s rueful smile every time Bel or I asked about our father. Look No. 66, a complicated one—I don’t want to talk about it. It was a long time ago. It was no big deal. I remember the tremble in her fingers, her hands betraying the lie.
“He scared her.” I look down at her and my throat tightens. Christ, she’s just so still. “And now I know why.”
From the corner of my eye I see a look pass between them. Rita says, “He scares us too.”
I look up sharply.
“Your father’s a thug, Peter, but that’s not all he is. Louise met him at Cambridge in the mid-nineties, soon after they got their doctorates. I’m not sure I can believe it, but their classmates say he was even as brilliant as her.”
“Dad’s . . . a scientist?” I don’t know why I’m surprised, it’s not like an IQ anywhere sub-160 would have been good enough for Mum.
“A neurobiologist, like Louise.” Rita steeples her fingers. “Peter, your mother’s work for the past seventeen years, work that has . . . seismic economic and strategic implications, was work your parents began together. They argued fiercely over which direction it should take and their relationship frayed under the strain. Then, on the twenty-fourth of February 1998, exactly one month after you and your sister were born, he disappeared.”
Her gloved hands mime a puff of magician’s smoke.
“Went to his lab and didn’t come home, vanished into thin air, never to be heard from again, completely off grid and out of sight.” She looked up at Frankie and nodded fractionally. “Until last night.”
“Last night?”
Frankie clears her throat and takes up the tale.
“Well . . . three-fifty-three this morning, actually. A virus was uploaded remotely to your mother’s server at Imperial; it erased everything. We called Louise, but there was nothing she could do.”
My mind flashes back to the larder this morning, my mother wearily pulling shards of pottery from my gums. The handset lying on the table. That’s why she was awake.
“And then,” Frankie continues, “at ten-fifty-seven at the Natural History Museum—”
Blood-soaked blue silk. A knife flashing under the museum lights.
“Are you sure?” I ask quietly. “Are you sure it’s him?”
“Without footage, we can’t be certain,” she admits. “But by all accounts, he was a vicious bastard. Not just violent, but egomaniacal, and for all his intellect, petty. Erasing your mother’s work, and then gutting her right at the moment of her greatest professional triumph? It fits our profile of him.” She shakes her head in disgust and mutters, almost to herself, “No recent photos, either; four hundred thousand CCTV cameras in this city, and we might as well be blind.”
Dad. Ernest Blankman. Neither name feels like it fits. The idea of him appalls me, it always has. I’ve always been able to name my fears; I’ve made a science out of analysing them. All except one. All except him.
“He had to have heard she’d made a breakthrough.” Rita lays out the case like a deck of cards. “One that had eluded him. If, as we suspect, he’s spent the last decade and a half pursuing the same research, that would have enraged him. So, he decided to put her out of the picture, freeing him up to pursue the work himself. That’s why Frankie and I get to hunt him in office hours.”
“Office hours?” I don’t follow. Rita grimaces behind her mask.
“Loyalty and payback are all very well, Peter, but they’re personal motives, not institutional ones, and our firm usually wouldn’t indulge them. A scientist as brilliant as Louise Blankman, though?” There’s an awed note in her voice. “One with no institutional ties, no link to his country, no leverage. Nothing to stop him from selling their research to the highest bidder? That’s got the top floor shitting itself, and with good reason.”
“What research? What was Mum working on?”
Rita doesn’t answer.
Frankie gives a half-embarrassed shrug.
“Sorry, Peter. We’re spies. You have to expect us to have a few secrets.”
I don’t know where to look, so I stare at the human wreckage my father turned my mother into. Rita’s and Frankie’s faces are turned to mine, only their eyes visible behind their masks, and close enough that I can feel their breath through the fabric.
Christ, it’s so hard to think, but there’s something not quite . . .
“Erased her data,” I mutter.
“Sorry?”
I look up at Rita. “You said Mum was close to concluding whatever she was researching? And Dad was researching it too. She’d had a breakthrough. He hadn’t. So why would he wipe her data? Wouldn’t he want to steal it?”
They exchange a look, a combination of admiration and chagrin, like this is something they were hoping I wouldn’t pick up on.
“You’re right,” Frankie concedes reluctantly. “The virus erased Louise’s research, but Ernest wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t already have access to it.”
“How would he have gotten access?”
“Well, we aren’t sure, but . . .”
“Yes?”
Her eyes are all sympathy. “Anabel.”
I flinch like a prey animal. It feels like they’ve accused me.
“We don’t believe it was malicious,” Rita rushes to assure me. “It wasn’t her fault. It could just as easily have been you. A stranger runs into you on the street one day. You can’t explain why, but you have an affinity with him. It starts slowly, but over time you see more of each other. You don’t tell anyone; normally you’re such a close-knit family, but it feels good to have something no one else knows about. One night, over pizza maybe, or Chinese food, or something else greasy and fun your mum doesn’t let you have, he tells you who he is. He lets you know his side of the story. Turns out your mother might have . . . exaggerated a few things. He doesn’t need to ask you not to tell your family; you know they’d go spare if they knew you were seeing him. But he’s so much fun, so much more chilled out than your uptight mum, and he listens to your problems too, in a way that makes them seem smaller, more manageable. It’s impossible to reconcile him with the ogre you’ve been told about. So you don’t.
“It’s months before he even asks you about your mother’s work, and months more before he first asks you for something from her lab. Something small, some scrap of research that was really his anyway, that he’d left behind when he left. And you don’t want to disappoint him, and he somehow manages to ask you on a day when she’s pissed you off. And when you get right down to it, you realise you’re angry with her, because you’re starting to love this man, really love him, and you could have had this years ago if only she’d told you the truth. So you do it. You steal for him, just to stick it to her . . .” Rita shrugs. “It’s a recognised technique. He could have everything Louise ever worked on out of Anabel in less than a year.”
She falls silent. Both she and Frankie watch me, tensed, as if I might puke or punch them or put a Pete-shaped hole in the wall. And in a horrible instant, I realise why.
“That’s why you’re so worried about Bel.”
“Yes.”
“Because she’s seen him, spoken to him, knows what he looks like, maybe she’s even been to his house.”
“Yes.” Her voice is dreadfully even.
“And he’s been staying, what did you call it? ‘Off grid.’” I think of the museum hallway, how the camera footage cut out, just before the attacker showed his face.
Loyalty and payback may be personal motives, but tying up loose ends is just good business.
F
uck fuck fuck. Again, I think of the blank museum footage, the way the clock stopped at seventeen, twenty, and thirteen seconds past the minute: 17, 20, 13. I turn the numbers over in my mind, over and over. I want to help. Help Mum, help Bel; be of some goddamn use to somebody. I work out the positions of letters in the alphabet and come up with QTM. Meaningless. I want to scream with frustration.
I’m cold and I hug myself; my bandaged hand throbs under my arm. Frankie puts a consoling hand on my shoulder, and it feels quite natural to turn to face her.
“We have to find Anabel before he does. You’re her brother; no one knows her better. Is there anywhere she’d go? We’ve got people watching your house, but is there anywhere else? A place she’d go if she was scared?”
That kindness, that warmth that Frankie seems to emit; it feels like the heat from a steaming bath after hours battling against a shrieking November wind, and I can feel myself swooning into it.
My eyes fill with tears and for a second Mum’s hospital bed blurs into two: I see Bel’s prone form next to Mum’s, wheezing with the same dreadful monotony. My dusty-suited, faceless father hovers between them, his hands vivid and bruised and bloodstained.
Fuck you, I think. I will protect her from you. All I have to do is speak.
Red brick and falling leaves flash through my head. I was scared sick . . . If Bel went anywhere, she’d have gone there. I part my lips to tell them . . .
But . . .
Something Rita said niggles me, like a thorn in the soft flesh of my brain.
“You’re starting to love this man, really love him.”
But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t, and neither could Bel; it would be an unthinkable betrayal. However pissed off she was at Mum, whatever he told her, Bel would never help Dad. She’d never give him anything but a black eye if she had the opportunity. Their story doesn’t make sense.
But why would they lie?
“We’re spies. You have to expect us to have a few secrets.”
Oh god, I don’t know, I don’t know. Maybe they are telling the truth. Once again I’m stumbling around in the dark.
My mind flits back again to the blacked-out museum footage. Those pauses at 17, 20, and 13 seconds exactly past the minute. Dead on the second—the one microsecond in a thousand where the digits read 00, three times in a row.
Randomness is hard to fake, but that clock wasn’t even trying.
17-20-13.
Randomness is hard to fake.
17-20-13.
Static around the signal.
There is a pattern. There is, there is, there is.
17-20—Come on, Pete. I catch myself before I say it aloud.
“Peter.” Rita takes a half step towards me. “Are you all right?”
I try to smile, to reassure them. I look from one set of green polyester-framed eyes to another. Their masked faces suddenly look cold. They stand one on either side, comrades, eager to keep my family safe from my murderous father, when what this really is, is . . . an interrogation.
They’re interrogating me about Bel. They’ve asked me thirteen questions about her since I got here.
There will always be patterns, Peter . . . It’s our job to obscure them.
Randomness is hard to fake.
“Peter?” Frankie asks me again. “Tell us. Where would Bel go if worst came to worst?”
“If worst comes to worst.” Bel said those exact words to me earlier, at the museum. I remember her, nodding at the CCTV cameras.
The cameras. The pauses. 17, 20, 13. Could the message be from Bel? I remember sitting in the back of Mum’s Volvo, swapping Caesar shift ciphers with Bel on long, sick-making car journeys.
To break a Caesar shift, you only need to know the key word, and I always knew Bel well enough to guess. But what if it’s not a word? What if it’s a number? What number would she use?
Rita’s staring at me intently. I still haven’t spoken. Everything has a number. Everything’s connected. Mum’s respirator beeps and resets. She was attacked by Dad. Dad disappeared one month after Bel’s and my . . .
Bel’s and my birthday: 24-01-98
Desperately, I try to think. My fingers twitch for a pen, but I can’t show any sign I’m trying to work it out. I try to visualise the code in my head: 24, 1, 9 and 8, and after that every other number from 1 to 26, with the alphabet right beneath it.
17-20-13
R-U-N
My mouth runs dry. If worst comes to worst. In my mind I see my sister in the dinosaur hall, talking and laughing with Rita. Was Bel sounding her out, working out who she was?
“I . . . I . . .” I look from one green-masked face to the other and back to Mum and make a decision.
“There’s nowhere,” I lie. “Bel doesn’t get scared.”
Frankie stares at me for a second. She peers into my eyes, as though she’ll find what she wants printed on my retinas. She doesn’t believe me. I begin to turn, to obey my sister, to run. I see their surgical gloved fingers twitch towards me, and I lash out, slapping and punching. Frankie fends me off with practised ease. Her hand strays close to my mouth, and I try to bite it.
Rita says, “We’re out of time.”
Something black is pulled tight across my head, cutting out the light. I struggle and spit and gag on acid. Hands are gripping my wrists; my ankles are lifted off the floor.
“I don’t get it,” I hear Frankie say, her voice muffled by the fabric. “I really don’t.”
A searing electric pain sparks into my side. I jerk and convulse. “Iiiiii reaallllllly doooooooooooooooooon—”
The world is drowned in nothingness.
Recursion: 2 Years,
9 months Ago
Ingrid’s brow furrowed. You could almost see her rearranging the ideas in her head, like repacking a suitcase, trying to make room for what I’d just told her. I waited anxiously, shifting my weight from foot to foot.
“I don’t get it,” she said, “I really don’t.”
Which was hardly surprising. I was explaining myself badly, talking too fast because I was nervous, because the only girl I’d ever thought about like that was looking up at me, lying sideways across the bed where most of my thinking about her like that had been done, her blonde head nestled against my Nightcrawler duvet cover. I wished I’d had a chance to change the sheets; I wished I’d at least had a chance to empty the thinking like that tissues out of the bin under the desk. I really, really hoped she didn’t want to throw anything away.
Four hours earlier I’d seen her walking towards the school gate with stiff, reluctant steps, gripping the straps of her rucksack like an escape parachute. It had seemed like the most natural thing in the world to ask: “Hey, do you want to come round tonight, like . . . for dinner or something?” After all, if she didn’t have a family who understood, maybe she could share mine.
Only, that night my family wasn’t in an understanding mood.
Bel had picked up a two-week suspension for . . . something involving frogs. I didn’t know the details, because the minute she’d come through the door Mum totally lost it, dragging Bel into the kitchen and shrieking like a steam whistle about her “responsibilities.” Ingrid lined four peas up on the upper right quadrant of her plate in a prearranged distress signal, but the way her fingers twitched towards her gloves already had me on my feet. I abandoned my chicken Kiev to slowly bleed out its garlic butter on the porcelain, and I pulled Agent Blonde Calculating Machine away from the crossfire.
The only place in the house out of shouting range turned out to be my room: top floor under the eaves. I kicked yesterday’s pants under the bed while she pretended not to notice. (They got caught on my toes. It took three goes. She pretended very well.)
And so to my collection of X-Men posters (“What, no Jean Grey?” “The idea of telepathy always freaked me out.” “Oh . . . okay.”), a
nd my Legends of Maths posters (“What, no Newton?” “Newton was a dick.” “I am so glad you said that, Peter. I’m not sure we could have stayed friends otherwise.”), and then—inevitably—to the blue hardback notebooks stacked on the corner of the desk. Their very neatness screamed their significance in a room that was otherwise a bomb site (“Study in entropy, Pete? Or just a slob?” “Who can say, Ingrid? Who can say?”).
“Peter,” she’d asked, turning the pages and tucking a stray lock of that metamorphic blonde hair behind her ear, “what does ‘ARIA’ stand for?”
I stared at her, dumbstruck. Her casual question had flipped my five-year private obsession into the air like a ten pence piece.
Heads: she looks at you like you’re crazy.
Tails: she says it might actually work.
Yeah, the voice inside me bit back, like the odds are that evenly split.
I started to mumble something evasive and nonspecific, but then I thought: She’s your friend, Pete, your friend, and she’s basically a maths ninja . . . She might even be able to help.
I swallowed hard and decided to go for it.
“You have obsessive-compulsive disorder, right?” I asked her.
She knew I knew, but in the six months we’d known each other, she’d never come out and said it. She looked at me warily and nodded.
“They give you pills for that?”
The muscles in her jaw tightened. For a second I worried I’d pushed too hard, but then she said, “Ana.”
Her lip quirked ruefully as she said it. It was short for Anafranil. I’d been on Ana too for a while.
“Laura for me.” I pulled a foil-covered blister of lorazepam out of my pocket.
“And how’s Laura?” she asked, mollified. It was a familiar kind of trade. You show me your biochemical crutch and I’ll show you mine.
“Like a sandbag to the temple, but when I need her, better than the alternative. How’s Ana?”
“She messes with your head.” She smiled sourly. “But sometimes she takes the edge off. What’s your point?”