The Rhythm Section--A Stephanie Patrick Thriller

by Mark Burnell

  My bones are cracking, my skin is cracking, my brain is cracking.

  * * *

  On the sixth evening, Boyd told her that between Easter and late September, he ran outward-bound courses for pale office workers whose bosses sent them north to get fitter and to bond. Mostly, it was beneficial, Boyd claimed, although there was always a certain percentage for whom the entire exercise was not only an appalling experience but also a negative one. During the long winter, the place was closed, although he continued to live in the stone house that he and his wife had renovated. She had died two years previously from cancer—a fact that might usually have elicited some sympathy from Stephanie. But not at that moment, not when she was in so much pain and he was the cause of it.

  He alluded to a military background, told her that during the closed winter months small army units were sent to him for ‘discreet’ training. There were also certain climbers for whom he was always available, regardless of season. They came to him for tailor-made preparatory regimes.

  The short days seemed endless, the nights seemed as brief as a blink. Along with every other muscle in her body, her brain alternated between bouts of extreme discomfort and total numbness. Most of the time, she existed on some form of excruciating auto-pilot, responding mindlessly and mutely to Boyd’s barked orders.

  On the seventh day, Stephanie got her period. The usual warnings were masked by the pulverizing cramps that ran right through her and by an exhaustion so complete she could easily believe she was already dead.

  She found Boyd hauling coke from a storage hut to the kitchen. ‘I need tampons.’

  He frowned at her. ‘What?’

  ‘I need tampons. I’ve got my period.’

  ‘That’s none of my business.’

  ‘It will be when your lovely mattress gets stained.’

  Boyd scowled at her. ‘You bleed on that and I’ll make you eat it.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’

  ‘What do you think? Sleep on the floor until it’s finished.’

  He was glaring at her but she was glaring back. ‘Fine.’

  During a run the following morning, they reached the edge of a small loch. Boyd stopped and began to strip. Stephanie guessed she was hallucinating and supposed it was inevitable. She was so crushed she had no idea why her body was still functioning. No amount of Valium had ever dispersed the contents of her mind quite so successfully.

  Boyd turned round, as he dropped his trousers. ‘Get your clothes off.’

  There was steam rising from his shoulders.

  Stephanie shook her head as he stepped out of his shorts and was naked. ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? Because I say so, that’s why. Now get them off!’

  Stephanie stripped clumsily. She was hot, there was perspiration all over her, but as soon as her skin came into contact with the air, she was cold.

  They stood naked on the rough grass. There was a strange, glazed expression on Boyd’s face. It was one with which she was depressingly familiar. It made her alert. Boyd seemed to be encouraging an awkward silence, perhaps to allow the worst elements of her imagination to get to work. She looked him in the eye and said, ‘So, are you going to fuck me or what?’

  Boyd bristled at what he perceived to be a challenge. ‘You think I wouldn’t?’

  They stared at each other, each as dead as the other. It wasn’t just Stephanie’s body that was going numb. ‘I’ve had nastier than you. Uglier, too. It won’t be the worst thing you can do to me.’

  She looked down and saw the blood on the inside of her thighs and the stains on her clothes. Then she looked up and saw that Boyd had noticed them too. It was impossible not to; the deep crimson—almost purple—against her white skin.

  Boyd suddenly dropped to a crouch, stretched out his trousers on the ground and then began to roll his shoes and the rest of his clothes in them. Without making eye contact, he said, ‘Put everything into a bundle like this, so you can hold it above your head when you swim.’

  Stephanie glanced at the water in the small loch. It looked black. She was glad she was already freezing. She tried to stop herself from wondering about the temperature.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Boyd, heartened by her silence. ‘We’re taking a short cut.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ she replied flatly, hoping to mask her anxiety. ‘I could do with a clean.’

  * * *

  Wind buffeted the side of the house. The windows shuddered. It was night. Stephanie sat at the kitchen table and watched Boyd dump the plates into the sink. For all the brutal drill outside his home, he never allowed Stephanie to lift a finger inside it. His aggression stopped at the door. When they were inside, she sat at the table and listened to him while he cooked and served them food, before clearing it away. She wondered if this was how it had been while his wife was alive.

  He disappeared for a moment and returned with a wooden board, a wooden box and a thick book. ‘Do you play chess?’

  ‘I know how to play. The basics…’

  He set the chequered board on the table between them and opened the box, revealing thirty-two cream and black pieces. Stephanie wondered whether this was the first sign of a thaw in his attitude towards her.

  He said, ‘The mind is a muscle. Yours has withered. Like every muscle it needs to be exercised to stay healthy. You need to learn how to absorb vast quantities of information at short notice and to retain it. You need to learn how to keep that information flexible, so that you can adapt it to any situation you find yourself in. You need to learn how to think tactically. Chess can help prepare your mind for those techniques.’

  Boyd pushed the book towards her. Stephanie picked it up. Modern Chess Openings, more than one thousand five hundred pages of annotated moves in tiny print.

  ‘Looks like a riveting read.’

  ‘You’re going to learn the defences I select for you. You’ll memorize all the variations I want to a depth of coverage that I specify. And once you’ve got those nailed, I’ll expect you to apply a little mental elasticity to a solid foundation during the middle game.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay?’ Boyd smiled coldly. ‘Every error you make will be punished. So will every lapse in memory. And whatever the punishments are, you can be sure that they’ll be unpleasant enough to be worth avoiding.’

  Stephanie bit her tongue for a second. Then: ‘And when am I supposed to learn all this stuff?’

  ‘At night. You don’t need to sleep half the hours I’m allowing you.’

  * * *

  I am awake. I slide out from beneath the blankets and place my feet on the wooden floor. I know the floor is cold although I can no longer feel it through my soles. Instead, what I feel are the blisters and the bruises. The first bleeding blisters have healed, leaving hard scabs in place of skin. The second set are still raw but they too are hardening and mending.

  This is what is happening to all of me. Every laceration and every twisted joint serves not to cripple me, but to fortify me. The incident on the shore of the loch has proved pivotal. It took me back to another time; Dean West forcing himself on me with ever-increasing vigour and ever-decreasing success. Each attempted act of brutality backfired, empowering me and unmanning him. Boyd and I are experiencing something similar, although I don’t think he realizes it.

  I won’t ever quit. Not now. I would sooner die.

  The cramps are lessening. I am remembering something that Proctor told me. He said stretching was the best exercise one could take. When Boyd and I return from a run and I am banished to the showers, I stretch in secret. It can be agony at the time but the reward is rich; my muscles are starting to stay flexible, to become more flexible.

  I pull on my clothes and start to go through a small stretching routine that I have devised for myself. I feel stiff but, as the stretches progress, I am aware of the flow of blood warming me. I become supple. I feel energetic and strong. For this, I thank Proctor, remembering him with fondness each time I perform an exercise
of his. And, in turn, each of these exercises acts as a spur, reminding me of why I am here and what I must do.

  This is the first morning since I’ve been here that I’ve been awake before Boyd’s rowdy entrance. It’s an important milestone for me. I keep stretching until I hear him outside.

  When he throws open my bedroom door, he finds me standing beneath the bulb, fully dressed, ready to run. He makes an attempt to conceal his surprise but it is too late; I have already seen it. Just as I see the anger that follows it. Our eyes lock, a battle of will ensues.

  Eventually, he whispers, ‘You’ll still quit. Believe me.’

  And I shrug rather casually and say, ‘Whatever…’

  * * *

  During the fourth week, there was a blizzard that lasted five days. Driven by a howling wind, the snow blew horizontally through the passes. The days seemed to go straight from dawn to dusk and once the temperature plunged, it failed to make zero for almost a week.

  Confined mainly to the lodge and outbuildings, Boyd managed to maintain the routine. On the first day, they ran in circles around the loch, keeping close to the water’s edge. By the second morning, the snow was knee-deep and so Boyd led Stephanie to the empty cabin beside the canteen. It was hardly any warmer than outside; there was a thick glaze of ice on all the windows. The cabin itself was a general purpose assembly room. At one end, beneath dust-sheets, there were stacked chairs. The floor was made from varnished wooden boards and it was on these that Stephanie exercised for four days. During the dark afternoons and evenings, they played chess. Boyd continued to win but Stephanie began to make it harder for him, using a selection of the Najdorf variations she had learned, as well as a selection of Sicilian defences that she had memorized without his knowledge.

  Towards the end of the fifth week, Boyd told her that a small group of soldiers was arriving for some specialist training and that she was to have no contact with them. That afternoon, when she returned to her cabin from their run, there were mattresses on a dozen of the beds in the dormitory.

  They came at night. It was raining hard. Stephanie was listening to the drops hammering the roof when she heard the grumble of engines. Momentarily, fragments of light played across her ceiling. She heard movement and muffled talk in the dormitory for half an hour, then nothing, except the rain.

  By the time Boyd came for her in the morning, the men were gone, although she had seen them running around the far side of the loch. As she and Boyd stepped outside, she noticed there were two men working in the canteen. Boyd told her that she would still be eating with him in his house.

  Over the next twelve days, Stephanie hardly saw them. It might as well have been just her and Boyd. Occasionally, she heard them leaving in the morning or returning at night, or caught a glimpse of them in the canteen. Sometimes, they left in the truck and returned by foot, sometimes it was the other way round. At one point, they were absent for three days. At least, Stephanie thought they were; it was not possible to be sure.

  On the thirteenth morning, Stephanie was detailed to run with the soldiers. Boyd had told her the previous evening and had said, ‘They were pretty underwhelmed when they learned you’d be joining them.’

  When she was introduced to them just after dawn, it appeared the feeling had not run its course. They were a stony dozen. There was nothing faked about the menace they radiated. Stephanie had known plenty of men who thought they were hard, mostly petty criminals who surfed on their inflated reputations. Even the genuinely tough ones would have been no match for any of the twelve in front of her. Only Dean West had the same brutal charisma and that wasn’t because he was hard, it was because he was psychopathic.

  One of the twelve wasn’t running. The other eleven were split into pairs with Stephanie being assigned to the man left over. His shoulders sagged a little at the prospect; the others were visibly relieved. Each pair was handed a different route.

  Stephanie ran as normal in lightweight walking boots, thick track-suit bottoms, two loose-fitting T-shirts beneath a heavy sweatshirt and a Gore-Tex vest. The men ran in combat dress with heavy boots and loaded packs on their backs. Stephanie’s partner might as well have been naked for all the difference the weight made; he sprinted over the treacherous ground. Stephanie tried her best to keep up and assumed it was military male pride that was driving him on, and that soon enough he would tire and she would catch up. But that never happened.

  Instead, she was saved by the weather. The mist came down in a matter of seconds.

  They were running along a high ridge between two peaks. There had been clouds in the pass below them but that was not unusual. Although it had been murky since first light, there had been no serious problem with visibility. Then, seemingly from nowhere, the mist descended, as thick as smoke. One moment, the soldier was ahead of her, the next she was alone in a world of grey cotton wool.

  Her universe shrank to ten feet by ten.

  He called out to her and told her to stand still and then to call out for him. She did and he tracked back to find her. A rough wind was blowing rain with the mist.

  The soldier said, ‘We’ll have to wait until this passes.’

  She agreed; Boyd had repeatedly stressed the importance of not moving in the mist. Disorientation was almost instant and automatic for the uninitiated. Even with the aid of a compass for direction, there was no way to judge distance effectively.

  The soldier led her off the ridge to escape the worst of the wind. They moved cautiously until they found partial shelter behind a collection of jagged stones at the edge of a peat hag. They crouched low and pressed their backs against the side of the hag, which was wet, but which was a preferable discomfort to the full force of the wind and rain.

  ‘Fancy a tab?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. He produced a small metal tin and took a cigarette from it. He used a match to light the cigarette. Then he extinguished the match between his thumb and forefinger and put it into a thigh-pocket on his trousers.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Stephanie asked.

  He shook his head. ‘No names.’

  ‘Make one up.’

  ‘Geordie.’ It fitted his accent.

  ‘I’m from the north, too.’

  ‘Don’t sound like it.’

  ‘I’ve been away.’

  ‘Down with them soft, southern shites, I’ll bet.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He grinned. ‘That’s a fucking tragedy, that is.’

  He was shorter than she was by a couple of inches, but he was amazingly broad and she was sure it was all muscle. She supposed he wasn’t much older than she was but his face was creased by a permanent scowl that remained in place even when he smiled. His soaked buzz-cropped blond hair allowed her a view of his scarred scalp. He kept the glowing tip of his cigarette inside his fist.

  ‘What you doing here?’ he asked her.

  ‘I don’t know. You?’

  ‘This and that.’

  ‘What part of the army are you?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who can say?’

  ‘You are army, aren’t you?’

  ‘Could be.’

  The rain was getting fiercer. Icy water was dribbling on to them from the lip of the ledge above. The mist rolled by. The wetness and the cold were starting to work their way into her; Stephanie tried to close her mind to them. She thought about herself on the top step of the al-Sharif Students Hostel, Reza Mohammed on the other side of the glass. Would she—could she—have done it?

  ‘Have you ever killed anyone? Not in self-defence.’

  Geordie glanced at her suspiciously. ‘What you asking that for?’

  ‘Because I’m curious.’

  ‘You canna know what it feels like by being told.’

  ‘I don’t want to know what it feels like. I just want to know how you actually make that leap from planning to do it to actually pulling the trigger.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that, like.’

  Geordie smoked and appeared a
lmost content sitting in the dismal weather. When he’d finished the cigarette he extinguished it on the wet sole of his boot and then placed the butt in the same thigh-pocket as the used matchstick.

  Neither of them had spoken for a couple of minutes when he said, ‘It’s a question of self-control. Everything’s a question of self-control.’

  Stephanie looked at him and he was peering into the mist.

  ‘When you’re in a tight situation, you canna be panicking. You gotta keep hold of yourself.’

  ‘How do you do that?’

  ‘By looking after your rhythm section.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When you panic, you gotta get your breathing sorted. Once you do that, you’re in control of yourself again. But if you can’t, you’ve had it, you’re dead meat on a hook.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s like in music. Drums and bass are the rhythm section, right? Your heart is the drums, your breathing is the bass. You get those two sorted, then you’re sorted. You can’t panic when your breathing’s under control and you’ve got your pulse in check. It’s not physically possible. That’s what you gotta remember. Keep the rhythm section tight and the rest of the song plays itself.’

  When Stephanie got up the next morning, she and Boyd were alone again.

  * * *

  They ran for forty minutes before reaching the face. Stephanie’s leg muscles worked in harmony with her ankles, knees and hips, rolling with the ground over which she passed. Her movement was no longer a series of spasmodic lurches; stumbles followed by clumsy overcompensation. Now there was a fluidity which allowed her confidence. She enjoyed the improvement in her own condition as much as the feeling that she was somehow forming a bond with the environment that had been so cruel to her when she first arrived.

  Stephanie looked up at the wall of rock. She had wondered whether Boyd would bring her here. They had run past the face before, and above it, having ascended the hill by the gentler slope on the far side. Climbing was a new element in the routine and one that she had taken to instinctively, surprising Boyd and stirring within herself a conflict of emotions. For the first time in her life, she felt a strong spiritual connection to her mother. And as ever, warm feelings confused her.