Tanglewreck

by Jeanette Winterson

  She hesitated. Then she dodged away and into the darkness behind the kitchens. As the train came round she jumped into a carriage, and hid herself under a sack of flour.

  The train ran silently into the hospital and stopped smoothly. Silver waited, but no one came to unload the trucks. Cautiously, she raised her head and looked round. No one was there, but she could hear two pairs of footsteps. She jumped out and ran up a flight of stone stairs that she hoped might lead somewhere. The door at the top was locked with a fingerprint scanner.

  She waited and listened. ‘Get those bananas in the lift, OK? They’re wanted in the kitchens for breakfast.’

  She peered down. Yes, she could see the lift. If she could get in, she could go higher, maybe take the lift further.

  Two Scrappers started unloading the first few sacks into the open door of the lift. After three sacks, one of them stopped and offered his mate a swig at a bottle.

  ‘Don’t kill yorsel fur this lot,’ he said, and his mate nodded, and they turned away.

  Silver took her chance and ran across behind the little train, and hid in the lift, crouched small as small behind the three sacks of bananas. After a while the Scrappers resumed their work, and at last, at long last, one of them pushed the buttons on the lift, and travelled, humming a tune, up towards the kitchens, with the bananas as required, and Silver as not required.

  She felt the heat as soon as the doors opened on the stainless-steel-polished kitchen. Men in hats and aprons were making jokes she didn’t understand about bananas, but while they were busy with their banter, Silver reached out and pushed the button that said OPERATING FLOOR. The lift closed and glided upwards, and before anyone could start investigating, Silver was out and away.

  She had done it. She was in Bethlehem Hospital.

  Swing doors. Polish. Electrical hum. Low lights. Corridors. Trolleys. Door opens. White coat. Door closes. Conversation. Can’t hear. Beeping. A blue line on a white screen. Beeping. Antiseptic smell. Clatter of tin on tin. Tray of swabs. Someone’s coming. Hide. Beeping. CCTV. Fear. Someone’s coming.

  Silver hid behind bags of used sheets. Orderlies were changing the bedding. The ward was empty. On the door it said BOYS 8–12, but there was no one there.

  Why would you have a hospital with no one in it?

  At home she had heard on the news that hospitals were always in crisis because there were too many sick people and not enough beds. Here a whole ward of – she counted, twenty-two beds – was empty. Did that mean that all the boys aged between eight and twelve on Philippi were healthy and well?

  At the end of the ward was another door. This one said GIRLS 8–12, and it was empty too. The whole floor was deserted. This was the operating floor, but there was no one here to be operated on.

  Then Silver remembered the lines of twins she had seen at Checkpoint Zero that day. She had seen the girls going into the red hut, and when she looked in the hut, the boys were there too. Were they from the hospital? Were they going to be Atomised because they were so sick? They hadn’t looked sick.

  She wandered on in the quality of a dream. A deserted hospital, endless silent corridors, herself alone, and no sound except …

  Then she heard it, unmistakable, like on a loudspeaker; a heart beating.

  Lub dup, lub dup, lub dup, lub dup.

  Silver followed the beating heart.

  She came to a pair of double doors with mesh safety glass in the small observation windows. The noise of the heart was loud enough now to hurt her ears.

  She pushed lightly against one of the doors. It opened. She was in a spotless room where two big horizontal cylinders – like giant cigar tubes – were placed side by side connected by wires. Monitor screens that she didn’t understand lined the room, each showing a different moving coloured line. She guessed from the peaks and troughs of one of the screens that it was a heart monitor, but she didn’t know what the others were showing.

  On top of each of the cylinders was a big clock. It was the clocks she could hear ticking like heartbeats, and she remembered that day in Abel Darkwater’s study.

  Everything in the study was ticking, even the two of them, their hearts beating like human clocks.

  She was very frightened but she tiptoed up to one of the cylinders and looked through the glass panel. There was one of the twins! Silver didn’t know which one because they were identical.

  Kelly, or Sally, was lying peacefully inside. Silver watched her, and saw something very strange start to happen; the girl began to age.

  Faint lines appeared on her face. Her skin grew redder and coarser. The lines deepened, her hair thinned and turned grey. Her skin wrinkled. She was old.

  Hardly able to stop herself crying out, Silver went round to the other cylinder and looked inside.

  The woman lying there was beautiful but not young, or rather she was getting younger every second. Her skin began to smooth out. Her cheeks plumped. The crow’s feet under her eyes disappeared and the lines on each side of her mouth vanished. Her hair was thick and blonde and her face was radiant.

  She was in the prime of life and she was Regalia Mason.

  Spooky Action at a Distance

  Toby and Gabriel had got free of the Scrappers, but the two of them had been separated. Toby had smashed a crate over the bully twisting Gabriel’s dislocated shoulder, and then, seeing more Scrappers arriving, he had run for it, shouting at Gabriel to do the same. Gabriel scrambled up and limped off. He had only one thought in his mind; to find Silver.

  ‘Help me, Micah,’ he whispered. ‘This be Bedlam and I am fearful.’

  In the Chamber Micah heard him. ‘Bedlam …’ he said to himself. ‘Not gone, still with us.’ In his mind he pictured the way that Gabriel must find. How well he knew it!

  Gabriel breathed deeply to try and ease the pain in his shoulder. He had never been comfortable above ground, but since his time in the Black Hole, fresh air and light seemed sweet to him.

  He stood in front of the hospital, but he did not see a place to heal the sick, he saw the place he remembered: massive, brutal, barred.

  The way in … He closed his eyes and Micah’s picture cleared in his mind. If he walked to the side of the fashionable main drive where the ladies came to marvel at the madmen, he would find the grille opened by Micah on the night of his escape in 1774. He would find the tunnel dug with wooden spoons and bleeding fingers, and he would squirm through its crumbling depths until he forced his body up into a narrow cell for the Confinement of Raving Lunaticks.

  His heart was beating fast. What if they were waiting for him at the other end? The White Lead Man with his poisonous stare and filthy ointments? Abel Darkwater himself, leather truncheon and straightjacket?

  Micah had not hesitated. He must not hesitate.

  He lifted the grille and plunged down into the mire.

  Silver knew that she had to move away from the cylinder before Regalia Mason opened her eyes. She had to move now, this passing moment, this ticking second, this final click of the clock.

  Why then did she stand staring into that face?

  Down went Gabriel, bending with difficulty in the tunnel. It must have collapsed. He had to crawl. He had to wriggle. The air was foul. Pestilence and rot. He found a food tin with the inmate’s name scratched on it – Beulah. He used it to catch some green water trickling down the side of the tunnel. He was thirsty. They were always thirsty. The water was only piped into the hospital for two hours a day and the wells outside were kept locked.

  He was coming to some rough-made steps. Not far now. Silver couldn’t make her body move. She felt as though her body belonged to someone else. She tried to lift her arm. She tried to move her foot. She willed them to move and nothing happened. She could not even turn her head away from that face. She could not even close her eyes …

  Gabriel was through. Yes, here was the way into the room. He swung up. The room was lit by a single flare, and in the corner shadows he could just make out a hunched and desperate shape,
its arms and legs shackled.

  ‘Who art thou?’ he whispered.

  ‘King of England,’ said the man.

  Gabriel looked down at the poor fellow, lost and wretched. He took out a tool from his pocket and undid the shackles. The King of England rubbed his ankles and wrists. He smiled. Gabriel gave him two chocolate bars, and he tore at them with his long teeth, a bar in each hand.

  ‘Go down there,’ said Gabriel, ‘and leave this place.’

  Gabriel went to the heavy door and opened it with a quick turn of one of his delicate metal jemmies that Micah had made for him. He locked it behind him again to avoid any suspicion, and crept on through the gloomy halls of Bedlam.

  Regalia Mason opened her eyes and smiled at Silver.

  She pressed certain buttons in the cylinder, and the heartbeat noise began to die away. Then the monitor screens went blank and the cylinder lid slid open. Shaking her head, Regalia Mason sat up and swung sideways, her long legs and bare feet lightly hitting the floor, and then she walked and stretched, and glanced briefly into the second cylinder.

  ‘You’re a murderer!’ said Silver.

  ‘You have a vivid imagination,’ said Regalia Mason, ‘and a very clear idea of right and wrong. So did I at your age, many many years ago, but things change. Besides, the girl isn’t dead.’

  ‘What have you done to her?’ said Silver, who still couldn’t move.

  ‘You could say I am living on borrowed time.’

  ‘Let me go! I can’t move!’

  Regalia Mason went over to a switch and pulled it. ‘I am not Abel Darkwater,’ she said, ‘and I haven’t put a spell on you.’ Silver moved again.

  ‘You were standing on a magnet,’ said Regalia Mason. ‘This is science, not magic, just like the twins. Now come with me.’

  The two of them walked out of the Zone and into what looked like an ordinary kitchen in an ordinary world. There was a big table and white plates, and a fat loaf of bread next to a round creamy cheese. Regalia Mason cut some cheese, stuffed it in her mouth, and started making scrambled eggs.

  ‘Protein is essential after a Time Transfusion,’ she said, talking with her mouth full. Silver had the wild thought that no one would ever believe that this beautiful barefooted blonde woman, eating bread and cheese and cooking eggs, was the most powerful being in the Universe. No one was ever going to believe her. Regalia Mason would never be caught.

  ‘Caught by whom?’ she said, reading Silver’s mind. ‘Just who do you think is going to make a better job of it? Abel Darkwater and his friend the Pope? Would you like them to be in charge of a whole Universe?’

  ‘No,’ said Silver.

  ‘Or your friend Mrs Rokabye?’

  This was such a ridiculous idea that Silver laughed, even though this was no laughing moment. Imagine Mrs Rokabye and Bigamist ruling the Universe! Regalia Mason laughed too, and tossed Silver a piece of bread and butter. For a second – not even that, a nano-second – Regalia Mason felt something like sadness and something like happiness, and then she was herself again.

  ‘Let me tell you now, Silver, that where you live, on Earth, in the twenty-first century, Time Transfusions will be successful, thanks to billions of dollars of Quanta research. Wasted Time will be a thing of the past. Parents will have more Time to spend with their children, children will live longer happier lives. There will be no need to rush and race. There will be enough Time.’

  ‘But you make people die.’

  ‘Quanta has been instrumental in reducing the world’s surplus population.’

  Silver tried to keep her mind clear. Whenever she was with Regalia Mason, she found it hard to think clearly. She concentrated.

  ‘And you tried to kill Gabriel. You broke your promise to me.’

  ‘I promised you I would not have him Deported. I promised you I would not kill him. Is he dead?’

  ‘No! I saved him.’

  ‘Exactly, and that was remarkable. Science says that nothing can escape a Black Hole – but one of the pleasures of being a scientist is to prove science wrong.’

  ‘And you left me to die on the Star Road.’

  ‘I left you to find your own way – it was a little test.’

  That sounded like school to Silver, and in the days before Mrs Rokabye, when she still went to school, she had never been any good at tests. She had to concentrate. She felt Micah’s medallion in her pocket.

  Gabriel was approaching the great room at Bedlam. That room, where the gallery ran around the upper part for observation, and where the Warders walked, truncheons in hand, one from the North Wing, one from the South Wing, meeting midway, bowing briefly and walking on.

  Two fireplaces lit the room but never warmed it. Men and women, half-stripped, shivering, huddled as near to the fire as they could, and clutched each other for warmth and comfort. Twice a day many of the inmates were taken to a freezing cold tank of water, thrown in, and dragged out with a pole, like drowning dogs, and left to drip dry as best they could before being crammed into icy unchanged beds.

  The room had a few pieces of furniture – benches and rickety chairs and tiny milking stools. Straw was scattered across the floor. Some preferred to sleep here than to mix with the bodies and the lice of the dormitories.

  All manner of madness was loose in Bedlam. There were more kings here than there had ever been countries to rule over, and more Popes than sinners. The deluded, the counterfeit, the broken-hearted, the broken-winged, the savage, the pitiful, the chatterers, the silent, the violent and the cowed were all here in this mighty madhouse, this warning to the wise never to surrender their wits to the ways of fools.

  And there were others too – ones like Gabriel and his clan and his kind, whose minds were free and whose bodies were shackled. These were the ones chained around the edges of the room, some trying to read scraps of books by the dismal light of dripping tallow candles.

  Some of these men and women had been cruelly decorated with painted wooden wings that flapped uselessly on their shoulders.

  Gabriel was angry, and wherever he could, he used his tools to unlock the cuffs and manacles, and to gently lift off the wings. These he broke up and threw on to the fires, so that at least for tonight the room would be warm.

  He passed on, not knowing where he was going.

  ‘Twins can be doubly useful in Time Transfusions,’ said Regalia Mason, ‘but they are particularly useful for teleporting – you know what that is?’

  ‘Like Star Trek?’ said Silver. ‘You disappear in one place and arrive somewhere else?’

  ‘Right,’ said Regalia Mason, ‘but at present it is very difficult unless you have a pair of twins to help you.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Silver.

  ‘It’s called Entanglement,’ said Regalia Mason, now eating fried eggs. ‘Take a pair of particles – you know, bits of atoms – put them miles away, even light years apart, and they still share information. Entangled particles act as though they are a single object; what happens to one of the pair automatically affects the other. Remember Silver, that you, me, everything in the Universe came from a single explosion, so the atoms in our bodies are linked with every atom in Space and Time. The Universe is not local and isolated, it is a cosmic web. Have you heard of a scientist called Einstein?’

  ‘Einstein said that e = MC2,’ said Silver.

  ‘Very good, that’s right, but although Einstein discovered what we call Relativity – and most important of all, that Time itself is relative – Einstein hated the idea of a cosmic web. He called these links, these connections, this Entanglement, “spooky action at a distance” because he was never comfortable with the implications of quantum mechanics.’

  ‘Umm, what are the implications?’ said Silver.

  ‘One of them is teleporting human beings.’

  ‘I don’t want to be teleported,’ said Silver.

  ‘What I tried to show you on the Star Road is that while you think of yourself as a particular person living in a particular
time and inside a particular body, that is only a part of the story. What you are is information, Silver. Coded information. DNA is coded information. Every cell of your body is coded information and that information can move and change.’

  ‘I know I’ll grow up,’ said Silver.

  ‘Yes, and nobody has to teach your cells to grow – they know they have to do that, it is in their code – but some of the cells that were you yesterday are already dead, and some are brand new. The You that is You is not constant, it is always changing.’

  Silver’s head was spinning. She rubbed the medallion and concentrated.

  ‘But why do you need twins?’ she said doggedly.

  Regalia Mason sighed. ‘It has been known since the twentieth century that if you separate a pair of twins at birth, they will often grow up and do the same things at the same time, even though they have never met. The coding they share makes this happen.

  ‘Teleportation needs three things – me, the person who wants to be teleported, and a pair of twins who are entangled. Bring me Sally and I scan all of my information into her, and she will instantly relay it to Kelly on the other side of the Universe. Kelly becomes an exact copy of me.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Of course, you need a quantum computer, but I have one. I had the first one ever developed – top secret. We made it for the Pentagon.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Here’s what we do with the twins. We separate them and we station them where people – that is, certain people – might need to travel. There are depots of twins all over the galaxy. When I was in London and I wanted to come here, I used one of our London twins paired with his Philippi twin. Instantly, I was here – information, you see, is the one thing that can travel faster than the speed of light.’

  ‘And love,’ said Silver.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Love can travel faster than the speed of light.’