by Tom Pollock
Recursion: 5 Days Ago
“So why not read her mind?” I asked. I was talking about Rita. We stood under the bare bulb in the maintenance cupboard that served 57 as a prison cell. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? Why not make sure?”
“I can’t read minds, Peter.” She eyed me sullenly. “I can only read yours.”
Recursion . . .
Recursion . . .
Recursion . . .
NOW
There’s a long silence.
“You gave her chicken Kiev.” It’s all I can think of to say. The gun’s hanging by my side now. I’m wrung out, and it’s all I can do to stand.
“And pasta, and apple pie and sausage and mash and stir-fry.” Mum sighs. “I always made extra when you said she was coming round. Food going cold in front of an empty chair.” Her blue eyes crinkle, and her voice aches with sympathy. “Perhaps I should have tried harder to tell you. Made you understand. But she seemed to make you so much happier. You were so lonely. So I figured, what’s the harm?”
She actually laughs then, staring down the gun, but the laughter quickly dries.
“Besides, any friend, even an imaginary one, had to be a good thing if it made you less dependent on your sister.”
I shake my head weakly. “It doesn’t make sense.”
It makes perfect sense.
“If Ingrid’s a delusion, my defence mechanism against loneliness, if I imagined her, then why would I imagine her betraying me? Why would I hurt myself like that?”
Because that’s what always happens. The medicine always gets taken to overdose.
Get counting.
. . . and counting becomes a prison.
Get eating.
. . . until your stomach’s fit to burst.
Get moving.
. . . and hurl yourself from a rooftop.
Get talking.
. . . that’s what we’ve been doing, and tell me, Pete, isn’t it just the worst?
“My sister’s a g-good person,” I stammer stubbornly.
“Your sister’s a killer. A thug. She killed a fifteen-year-old boy. A child. I had to cover it up.”
Me too, a treacherous voice in me whispers, but instead I yell at her.
“You had to cover it up because it was your fault! You made her that way!”
She looks sad then, sadder than I’ve ever seen her. Two new faces in as many minutes. Look No. 278: Heartbroken.
“Of course you’d think that. You could never bear to blame her for anything.”
I fall silent because how can I refute it? She’s my axiom, the basic founding assumption. The one you don’t need to prove. The one all your understanding is built on. The one person without whom everything comes crashing down.
“So you blamed me instead.” Mum nods slowly, like she’s putting it together. “Poor Pete; so good at connecting the dots, at finding the pattern, even when there isn’t one. Only you could dream up this insane conspiracy, so nothing would be her fault.” She looks up sharply. “When did you find out? That she’d killed that boy?”
Two years ago, I almost say, but I don’t, because maybe five days ago would be more accurate. Five days ago, when I remembered.
And now the panic’s really mounting. The strip lights are suddenly too bright and my blood’s searing in my temples and my heart’s jackhammering in my chest and the gun’s like an anvil in my hands and I can’t think can’t think can’t think.
I picture an ankle, sticking out pale and stiff from a roll of carpet in an alleyway behind my house; I picture a note, decoded and crumpled on my duvet saying: I killed someone, and I picture me, two years on, sitting in Anita Vadi’s kitchen, slumped and exhausted, not even remembering that night until I’d found out that my neuroscientist mother did secret work for the government, until I had fragments of a pattern I could clutch at, a story I could tell myself that brought Bel out clean.
Memory. ARIA. What an incredible thing.
“It’s okay, Pete,” Mum says soothingly. “It’s all going to be okay. I’ll help you, like I’ve always helped you. That’s why I stayed. It’s just us. I’m here for you; just give me the gun.”
“A . . . and Bel?”
Mum slumps a little in her bed. She looks, suddenly, very old.
“I don’t think there’s anything I can do for her. And believe me, I’ve tried.”
I stare at her. I don’t know what to believe.
“Give me the gun, Pete, please.”
Now I have a problem. Only one? sneers the part of me that counts everything. But yes, there is only one that matters right now, maybe the only one that’s ever mattered.
Ingrid isn’t real.
Mum knows me better than anyone, maybe even better than Bel. If she was going to lie to me, this is exactly the lie she would tell. To make me doubt myself, my eyes, my mind.
My treacherous brain dredges up the first time I remember seeing Ingrid: in maths class, all those years ago—not on the first day of school, not walking in midterm to stand awkwardly in front of the class while Arthurson introduced her, but just there, all of a sudden, when I was at my loneliest. Like an answer to a prayer.
Could she be a useful fiction? Like the imaginary number that scientists use to make planes fly and bridges stand? The square root of minus one . . .
. . . the number mathematicians call i.
Images flicker in my mind as once again I ransack my memory, searching for a moment when the existence of Agent Blonde Calculating Machine was acknowledged by anyone other than me.
. . . Girls clustered in the bathroom, watching Ingrid while she scraped at her knuckles. Phone screens glimmering as they filmed her, but had they been filming or just texting? Were they laughing at Ingrid or just laughing? Tanya Berkeley’s voice rose clear in my ears, “Oh my god, get out!”
. . . Me, strapped to a bed in the basement of this very building as they interrogated me. They’d tied me up, but I lashed out first, flailing, jaws snapping. Had they hooded me because they were frightened of contracting the fear on my face? Or just because I’d tried to bite?
Ingrid had asked the questions, but were there even any questions?
Was I being interrogated? Or just restrained?
But they’d burned me, electrocuted me, wires plastered to my temples, my chest . . .
My chest!
Slowly, I take my right hand from the gunstock and probe under my shirt. My questing fingers find a burn scar, but it feels old and smooth, not fresh and flaking. I remember a steaming kettle, hot water bottle overflowing, scalding water splashing on me, and I can’t tell if it’s remembered or imagined.
I never can. I never could.
I return my shaking hand to the gun. The pain throbs from the shot in my shoulder and I can barely hold its weight. Whatever I remember, or think I remember, it doesn’t matter. It’s all tainted, ruined.
Memory is who we are.
Memory is flawed.
You can’t use one memory to corroborate another if you know your memories can lie to you. But memories are all we have.
Memory can’t prove itself, but there’s nothing outside of it I can rely on to do the job.
“Encrypt.” My lips slowly shape the words. “Invert, Recoil.”
Just like maths.
I picture Gödel lying wasted in his hospital bed, croaking: There’s no way to be sure.
Mum smiles at me. “It’s okay, Pete. It’s over. Take all the time you need. We’ll get through this. We’ll beat this, together, just like always. Just give me the gun.”
True or false.
Heads or tails.
Mum or Bel.
There’s no way to know the right choice. I just have to choose.
“Give me the gun, Pete.” Her hands are outstretched.
The g
un is so ugly and awkward in my hands. Suddenly I can’t bear to touch it any longer. I try to imagine myself using it, and I just . . . can’t.
“Give me the gun.”
The pistol muzzle twitches as I start to lower it. It’s the only choice I can make.
I don’t even think I hear the shot, just feel it. It sucks the air out of the room, so close it’s like being punched. Mum’s head snaps back hard on her neck. Red slashes the wall behind her.
I gape. My finger is on the trigger, but . . . I didn’t. I couldn’t. My brain is a mess of static. No signal. No resolution. Just chaos.
There’s no smoke rising from the barrel of the gun in my hand. I press it to my palm, but I’m so feverish I can’t tell if the metal is hot or not. As it clatters to the floor I realise. The shot came from behind me.
Ears ringing, I turn.
Hands, wrapped in fingerless gloves, clutch a pistol that’s identical to mine. I blink furiously, and my vision clears, and I see a messy thatch of short blonde hair framing a face that looks far, far too much like Ada Lovelace’s.
“Imagine that,” she says softly.
Her eyes are wide, grey and empty as the winter sky. I rush to her and catch her as she falls, ease her down into the corner.
“Are you—” I begin.
“What do you think?” she whispers. She looks as lost as it is possible to be. Bereft and vacant; it’s like looking in a mirror.
Mirror. I think. Black Butterfly. She reflects emotions, desires, but her own desires are deeper. Drawn from only one person, the one she spent the most time with. The one she’s just shot in the head.
She looks up at me. She always knew what I was thinking. So the silent Why? I form with my lips is redundant.
“After three years, if you can’t trust yourself, trust me,” she says.
“But back at the house . . .” I protest. She shrugs and smiles, but it looks forced.
“Bit of a crisis of loyalty,” she says.
“I can relate.”
“I know.”
Running feet drum up the corridor towards us. Shouts of alarm.
“She said we were alone,” I say.
“She lied,” Ingrid answers faintly. “She did that a lot.”
Whatever Mum did or didn’t do, hearing that past tense is like a knife in the gut.
“Dr. Blankman!” a male voice yells. “Dr. Blankman, are you all right?”
The door shudders and rattles, but it doesn’t open. Ingrid must have relocked it after she came in.
I flinch as two shots splinter the lock. A boot thuds into wood. My stomach leaps into my throat as I hurl myself to the ground, groping for the gun, but my fingertips only push it farther away; the wound in my shoulder shrieks as I stretch for it. On some half-baked instinct, I lurch upright to get between Ingrid and the first shot.
But there is no first shot. There’s only a body, burly, male and crew-cut, lying in the corridor, and my sister stepping delicately over it like a drunk in the street.
“Jesus,” she mutters. She takes one look at the bed and pulls me into a fierce hug. The strength in her arms feels like the foundation of everything. “You okay, Pete?”
I almost laugh at the question. But it’s not quite laughter, more like a brief bout of whooping cough.
“You did the right thing,” Bel whispers.
I didn’t. I didn’t do anything. But I don’t say that. Because I’m trying too hard not to look at the angle of Mum’s head and the gore clinging to the wall behind her. Trying not to imagine the trajectory of the shot that killed her. Trying not to feel the ache in my right wrist that the recoil of a pistol might cause. Trying not to look at Ingrid in her corner, far too pale, far too much like a ghost.
Something tickles the back of my throat, then scratches, then claws. I start to cough, eyes watering. Sweat pricks my scalp and shoulders.
“I set a fire,” Bel says, eyes streaming. She lets out her own hacking cough, but smiles. Bel always liked a good fire.
“Why?”
“Cops. Once 57 had cleaned all the intel out of the place, they finally called them. They’re swarming out the front, so we need to exit round the back. The fire should slow them down a bit, but we have to move. Come on.”
She pulls me to the window, yanks it open. Cold, fresh air and the scream of sirens rush at me.
“Wait,” I gasp.
“Pete—”
I squirm out of her grip and run to Ingrid. She’s still sitting where I left her. The smoke’s thick enough now that it’s dragging nails over my larynx and I’m choking, but Ingrid isn’t coughing, just staring. I grab her arm and pull, but she’s waxy, unresponsive. For a split second I picture her in the fire, not burning but melting, pooling on the floor like a candle.
“Come on!” I yell at her.
She doesn’t move.
“I need you! 23-17-11-54!”
At that, at last, she yields. I throw her arm across my shoulders and drag her; her toes skid along the floor, then she skips, then stumbles into a regular gait.
“Pete, come on!” Bel yells. She’s sitting on the windowsill, her legs hanging over the edge. She beckons once, and then pushes herself off, dropping in a heart-stopping instant below view.
I heave Ingrid over to the window and look down. Bel’s looking up from the flat roof less than three metres down. Raked gables fall away on either side, their tiles as red as autumn leaves.
Ingrid goes first, kissing me gently on the cheek before clambering onto the sill and dropping to the glittering tarred surface. Showing me the way.
Bel never takes her eyes off my face. I swing my legs over the sill, hesitate.
“Pete, it’s okay, it’s easy, like falling off a log.”
“Or a roof,” Ingrid adds. I guess she can be pretty literal when she’s scared.
Leap of faith, Petey, sometimes that’s all you’ve got.
I jump.
The impact hammers up through my knees and I buckle sideways, but Bel’s arm, warm, strong, confident, pulls me into an embrace.
“I’ve got you,” she whispers. And she’s right.
The air is a chaos of wind and flames and sirens. Bel laughs, a sound of genuine delight. She twines her fingers with mine and I let her, even as I twine mine with Ingrid’s. The three of us stand on the roof. White Rabbit. Red Wolf. Black Butterfly. All three of Mum’s children.
Three.
Bel tries to pull me away, but I resist.
“Pete?” she says uncertainly. “What’s wrong? We don’t have time to hang around.”
I look at Ingrid, whose hand I’m still holding.
“Bel?” I say. “Can you see—”
But the question stalls in my throat, forever incomplete.
acknowledgements
It’s a strange paradox that the more personal a book is, the more I seem to need to rely on other people to help make it a real thing. And this is a very personal book. So I owe a lot of people a lot of thanks.
First up, my heroic agent, Nancy Miles, without whom this book would have been half-baked at best, and not in the delicious ice-cream way. Thank you for not only selling it, but for insisting on it being the best book we could make it beforehand. Huge thanks also to Barry Goldblatt, Caroline Hill-Trevor and Emily Hayward-Whitlock for your tireless (and continuing) efforts at getting this story to as many brains in as many places and in as many forms as superhumanly possible.
To the teams at Walker and Soho: Frances Taffinder, Gill Evans, Rosi Crawley, Maria Soler Cantón, Anna Robinette, Emma Draude, Annabelle Wright, Kirsten Cozens and John Moore; Dan Ehrenhaft, Rachel Kowal, Monica White, Abby Koski, Rudy Martinez and Paul Oliver. It’s a thrill working with such talented, passionate people, and I’m honoured to call you colleagues.
I always lean pretty heavily on my friends,
and they never complain. They’re good like that. Emma Trevayne, James Smythe, Gillian Redfearn, Laura Lam, Emily Richards and Will Hill not only gave feedback on early drafts that made this book a lot, lot better, but also provided the psychological cake that got me through my various long dark tea times of the soul.
My family have to take the credit/blame for making me who I am. So Sarah, Matt and Jasper, Mum, Dad, Sally, Livs, Chris, Aislinn, Hugo, Toby, Arianna, Barbara, Robin, Moira, James and Rachel this is for you all.
Finally, and most of all, Lizzie, the one to whom I am devoted, thank you for continuing to put up with this, and me.