by Tony Salter
‘Can you tell me about her? It must have been less than a year after I was born.’
‘Ah,’ said Daz. ‘She was amazing – a goddess, come down to Earth – I’m sure Rupert will agree. Fabi was the love of my life from the moment I met her.’ He grinned at the memory and scratched his beard. ‘Describing what she was like though. That’s not so easy.’
‘Please try,’ said Nicki.
‘She genuinely had no idea how special she was. Any room would go quiet the moment she walked in, but she never noticed.’ Daz looked more ill at ease than I’d ever seen him. He kept shifting around in his chair and wouldn’t stop picking at his fingernails. ‘I don’t know, Nicki,’ he continued. ‘How can words, or even pictures explain who a person was, once they’re gone? Fabiola was kind, happy and natural – watching her change and fade in those years before her death was unimaginably painful.’
‘Thanks, Daz. I know it can’t be easy,’ said Nicki. ‘… And you knew Julie?’
‘Yeah. I knew Julie,’ said Daz. ‘She was Jax when I knew her, though. I was there when she and Fabiola first got together. We were at a march in Germany.’
‘And you were all friends, back then?’
‘In the same group, but never friends. If it hadn’t have been for Fabi, I don’t think Jax would have given me the time of day … and I’d have been a lot happier that way.’
‘OK. Julie Martin certainly doesn’t have any friends in this room,’ said Nicki. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t talk about her.’ She smiled and touched Daz on the arm. ‘One thing I did want to know. Did my mother ever mention my father?’
‘Only one time,’ said Daz. ‘Someone at uni came from Bedford and recognised her, so Fabi gave us her version of the scandal. I guess she thought she needed to justify herself.’
‘But nothing about me?’
‘God, no. No-one had any idea that she’d ended up having the teacher’s baby.’
‘And how about you, Nicki?’ I said. ‘Did you know about the affair?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘These things always come out. One of the girls at school found out about it when I was thirteen. For a while I had lots of new friends because all the girls wanted to meet my dad.’
‘That must have been awkward,’ I said. ‘And you never asked him about the timing?’
Nicki laughed. ‘Not the sort of conversation you have with your dad when you’re thirteen, is it? I just assumed he found someone else soon after. He was a good-looking man when he was younger.’
My father reached over and poured Nicki another glass of wine. ‘But you didn’t meet your father until you were eleven?’ he asked. ‘You were adopted. Sorry to be nosey, but how did he find you, and what happened to your adopted parents?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Nicki. ‘It’s OK to be nosey, but I actually don’t remember much about that time. Just before and after I went to live with Dad, I went off the rails a bit. I was definitely a more obnoxious teenager than average.’
‘But you remember your adopted parents,’ I said.
‘Of course I do,’ said Nicki. ‘I remember being very happy with them and then my world exploded. My dad was suddenly arrested for some awful stuff, my mum went to pieces and I was taken into care. I met some bad influences, and I suspect I was well on my way to becoming a bad influence myself.
‘After a year or so of living with my real dad, I started to improve. The school made me see a counsellor which really helped. One of her strategies was to teach me techniques to help me to stop thinking about what might have been, and to focus on looking forward. She called it “Piafism” which I always found funny. Anyway, I tried it and it worked.’ She shrugged. ‘I’ve tried to live that way ever since.’
‘Piafism?’ said my dad. ‘Never heard of that.’
‘Keep up,’ I said, laughing. ‘Edith Piaf? Je ne regrette rien?’
‘Oh,’ he said, slapping his forehead like a circus clown. ‘Just being a thicko.’ The sheepish look on his face was hysterical and I watched Nicki press her lips together as she tried not to laugh.
It was an ideal moment for the food to arrive. Nicki might have been happy enough to answer personal questions, but the atmosphere around the table had intensified as she talked about her childhood. We needed to take a break from the questions and answers.
I heard Dad muttering to Nicki as he poured the wine:
‘Sorry. I’m not usually that dense,’ he said. ‘Your mother was the sharp one, though. Always a step ahead.’
Nicki smiled and raised her glass. ‘Let’s hope I got some of that, then.’
A phone vibrated on the table. It was Daz’s.
‘Give us a sec,’ he said, standing up. ‘It’s Liz.’
I saw his shoulders tensing as he strode outside, leaving the door to slam behind him. A sudden chill sent shivers down my back. Had something happened to Liz?
Uncle Daz had been single ever since I’d known him – having eventually found a perfect soulmate, it would truly be Sod’s Law if she was sick.
No-one spoke as we watched him pace up and down outside the window like a cornered animal. I’d never seen him look so angry. By the time he eventually walked back into the restaurant, his eyes were bulging and his fists were clenched into balls; something was very wrong.
‘You’re not gonna believe this,’ he said, hands pressed over his mouth in an apparent attempt to push the truth back inside. ‘It can’t be happening.’
‘What?’ we shouted as one.
‘Julie Martin’s bloody escaped,’ he said, slamming his hand on the table. ‘She’s disappeared.’
We all picked up our phones to check the news feeds, no-one ready to respond until they’d seen it for themselves. As I skimmed the reports, I glanced up at Nicki. She was scrolling down her screen open-mouthed like the rest of us. Whatever Daz might suspect, this was as big a surprise to her as it was to us all.
As the truth took shape, bit by bit, word by word, I felt the walls closing in and crushing me. I couldn’t breathe. My throat was pinched tight and cloth bands were wrapping themselves tightly around my chest threatening to mummify me alive.
I heard the sound of my chair clattering onto the hard floor as I jumped up and ran outside. I needed air. Fresh air. Outside. Space.
As I stood on the pavement, doubled over, gasping and coughing, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
‘Slow, deep breaths,’ said my dad, the soft richness of his voice evoking memories of a lifetime’s comfort and support; unbroken links in a chain which stretched back into my misty beginnings. ‘It’s OK. You’re OK. Just breathe.’
‘It’s happening again, Dad,’ I said. ‘I know it is. She’ll come after me. She’ll come after all of us.’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’ll catch her straight away. The news reports said that the police didn’t expect her to get far.’
I tried to laugh and doubled up again in a fit of uncontrollable coughing.
‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’ I said, once I’d recovered. ‘Next, you’ll be telling me she might decide to leave us alone. I know your glass of water is always half full, but there are limits.’
‘What do you want me to say?’ he said. ‘I’m doing my best.’
‘I know you are, Dad,’ I said, turning and hugging him. ‘I’m sorry.’
I was facing the plate-glass window of the restaurant and could see, through the reflections, Nicki staring out at us, white-faced and tense. She was probably wondering what sort of crazy family she’d inherited.
Who could blame her?
A Rocky Road
None of us wanted to talk about Julie’s escape. What was there to say?
Daz and my dad left early to meet Liz – apparently she was trying to squeeze some details out of her former colleagues – and I offered to walk Nicki home. Over the course of dinner I’d decided to delay telling her about the investigation. When we heard the shocking news about Julie, I changed my mind – I had no choice.
‘Nicki. You need to understand who Julie Martin really is,’ I said, as we walked slowly along Halton Road. ‘If she knows you’re my sister, you could be in danger.’
‘What?’ she said. ‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘No … It’s not,’ I said. ‘Julie isn’t who, or what, you think she is.’
‘But still …’
‘… Anyway. Before we talk about her, I’ve got a confession to make.’
‘Go on …’
‘I’m not proud of this, but, before we met, after Dad got the letter from your father, I hired a private investigator to check up on you.’
‘Nice!’ she said, looking down at the pavement, her hair falling forward and hiding her expression. ‘And you didn’t think to mention this last time we met?’
‘We didn’t have the report then,’ I said. ‘I probably should have done though.’ We stopped at a traffic light and I put my hand on her shoulder. ‘The thing is … the thing is … we agreed to keep it very basic – a simple identity check – but Daz is completely paranoid about Julie and he asked the investigator to dig deeper without telling me.’
She shrugged my hand away, still hiding her face, ‘It doesn’t make a difference,’ she said. ‘The principle’s the same.’ She stopped talking as we crossed the road. ‘What did they find? I really don’t think I’ve got anything to hide.’
‘No-one’s saying you have, but there are things in there, things which don’t fit together, questions which don’t have answers. I think you’ll probably feel the same way.’
‘Like what exactly?’ Nicki snapped, stopping and turning to look at me, eyes on fire.
I handed her my copy of the report. ‘You’ll have to see for yourself,’ I said. ‘But haven’t you ever wondered where your father got the money to live like he did?’ I waited as a smartly dressed couple walked past us. About my age, they were like something out of a TV advert – beautiful, tanned, laughing together – a caricature of a perfect, normal life and about as far from mine as I could imagine.
I wasn’t sure if Nicki was actually taking anything in – all I could see was anger and resentment – but I carried on anyway. ‘Now you know who your birth mother was, don’t you find it an amazing coincidence that you chose the career you did, and then went to work for your mother’s former lover?’
‘No. I haven’t thought about it,’ she said. ‘The world’s full of coincidences. Maybe I’m not as devious as you lot all seem to be?’
I couldn’t hide my frustration at the way she was brushing me aside without listening. ‘I wasn’t like that until my mother’s former lover seduced me … and then tried to kill me after I discovered her nasty secrets,’ I said. ‘She forced me into her safe room at gunpoint and disabled the air systems, for Christs’s sake.’
‘But Julie told the police where to find you before the air ran out, didn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But only because Daz caught her and threatened to break her arm.’
‘Or so he claims,’ said Nicki.
I couldn’t speak. If I’d opened my mouth, all that would have come out would have been an anguished scream of frustration. I knew I was right, but it seemed that nothing I could do or say would convince Nicki.
After a few deep breaths, I calmed down enough to reply. ‘You don’t have to believe me or Daz,’ I said. ‘Just look at the facts. It’s not hard to conclude that I’m telling the truth and to see that Julie’s been manipulating me all my life.’
‘Now you’re being ridiculous,’ said Nicki.
‘I’m really not,’ I said as we stood on the pavement glaring at each other. ‘I know you’ve only just met me, but I’m not making this up or being a drama queen. Julie Martin is obsessed with anything to do with Mum. I don’t really understand it, but she is. I can’t believe she employed me by accident. Nothing Julie ever does is by accident. If Fabiola told her about you why would that be any different? It would certainly explain a lot about your career choices and the Pulsar Scholarship, wouldn’t it?’
‘Stop! Enough!’ said Nicki, holding the report tight to her chest like a shield. ‘I think you’re a good person, Sam. I really do. And I believe you mean well. But I hardly know you and I’m not going to listen to any more of this. Julie Martin was a good boss to me, and Pulsar gave me an incredible start. I won’t stand here and let you turn her into some sort of crazy, obsessed psychopath.’
‘But that’s exactly what she is?’ I said. ‘She drove your mother to kill herself. Isn’t that enough proof?’
‘According to you,’ she said. Was that a shadow of doubt in the back of her eyes? ‘Look. I said I didn’t want to carry on discussing this and I meant it. You don’t need to come any further. I’m just up the road.’ She waved the file at me. ‘I’ll read this and then I’ll call you.’
‘OK,’ I said, realising I wasn’t being given a choice. ‘Sorry again.’
She half-lifted one hand in half-recognition of my apology, turned and walked away. No thought of a hug, not even a handshake.
As I made my own way back to the Tube, I allowed myself to wallow in self-pity and misery, imagining her anger and disgust and realising that she’d probably never call.
As happened every night, Highbury and Islington station had transformed over the few hours while we’d been having dinner. There were no more bright-eyed workers hurrying home to their clean, safe houses. Every doorway, every shady corner, every bench had been claimed by the Fausts – their blank, uncaring looks a chilling reminder of the desolation inside them.
We’d all played around with synths when I was in my teens – all-nighters wouldn’t have been the same without a tab or two. But it changed when Solar 99 came along – for a year of so, it was all anyone could talk about, the way everything burned brighter and longer and the sense of power and immortality which lingered long after the effects of the drug had worn off.
I only tried it once, and that was enough to smell the danger. The sensations were great, fabulous even, and I felt – no, knew – that I could do anything I wanted. The entire world had belonged to me for a few short hours.
Luckily for me, and most of my friends, it was expensive, we were poor schoolkids, and we’d been brought up with just enough street smarts to know that the road to heaven was never going to be that easy to find. Many of those with more money than sense weren’t so lucky, and S99 had been on the streets for over a year before the first reports started to come in.
Conservative estimates put the number of victims in the UK alone at over a hundred thousand. Anyone who’d taken the drug more than five or ten times was affected eventually, sometimes years afterwards. Their bodies would wake up one morning and it was as though their souls had been torn out of them during the night. They were left as shells, physically normal, but empty of all thoughts and feelings.
Even the richer countries still hadn’t figured out how to cope. At least the UK hadn’t gone down the route of establishing isolation camps, but there were still no systems in place to manage the volume of vulnerable victims, and many thousands had found themselves on the streets.
Apparently, Fausts were almost never violent, but that didn’t stop them from being frightening as shuffled slowly around. In search of what? I hurried past the vacant faces and into the station.
When I heard the alarm, I stopped and turned. There was no-one else in sight. The alarm didn’t stop. Its insistent beep was urgent and demanding. The barrier in front of me was closed and a big red help button was flashing. I didn’t have time for this. If I missed the last train, it was a long way back to Chelsea. I punched the button.
The disembodied voice which answered from the metal grill was predictably harsh and distorted.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There’s something wrong with the barrier. The alarm’s going off and I can’t get through.’
‘Which station are you at?’
‘Highbury and Islington.’
‘One moment.’
After a few seconds of waiting, the alarm stopped. It was as though a weight had suddenly been lifted off my chest and I could breathe again.
‘Hello?’ The voice was back.
‘Yes. I’m still here.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Blackwell, but you don’t have any credit on your account.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a monthly pass.’
‘Which was cancelled earlier today,’ said the voice.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ I said. ‘Why would I do that?’
‘I don’t know, sir. All I know is what’s on the screen in front of me.’
‘Well, that’s no bloody use to me, is it?’ I shouted.
‘I would appreciate it if you didn’t take that tone with me, Mr Blackwell. We have a very strict abuse policy and all calls are recorded.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I just don’t understand what’s going on and I need to catch the last train. Is there any way you could open the barrier …?’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m not authorised to …’
I turned and half-ran back up the steps. I was getting nowhere. I’d need to get an Uber which might take an age in North London.
I walked the gauntlet of blank stares, and as soon as I was far enough away from the Fausts, took out my phone to request a car. No data signal. I walked another hundred metres. Still no signal. This was becoming ridiculous.
It was only eleven o’clock. I could call my Dad and get him to come and pick me up. It would be just like old times.
The phone rang once. Another metallic robot voice:
‘It has not been possible to connect you. Your phone is only authorised to make emergency calls. Please dial 100 to speak to an operator. Operators are available between 09:00 and 17:30 Monday to Friday.’
What was going on? It was like all the systems were down. Surely Julie couldn’t be behind it? She’d only been out of prison for a few hours. Daz’s warnings started to fill my mind as stood alone on the dark street and I switched my phone into full lockdown mode just in case.