The Complex

by Michael Walters

  Art leant forward. ‘Is your phone working now, Leo?’

  ‘It was never about the phone.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘It was the car. We’d never get home.’

  Art picked up his glass and swirled the red wine around with a practised motion. ‘Where was the power circuit box—’ he waved his glass around as he looked for the right word ‘— switch thing.’

  ‘Downstairs,’ Leo said. He couldn’t remember where, exactly. He thought harder.

  ‘Where downstairs?’

  Leo thought. He remembered looking from the basement, through the water of the swimming pool, at a figure on the patio. The stink of himself, the dust.

  ‘You can’t remember?’ Gabrielle said.

  ‘Let me think a minute.’

  ‘Perhaps you do need a doctor,’ Art said.

  ‘I just need some air,’ Leo said, standing abruptly.

  ‘You okay, Dad?’ Stefan said.

  ‘I won’t be a minute,’ Leo said. ‘Carry on.’

  ‘Toilet break,’ Art said. ‘He’s fine.’

  As Leo went past the top of the basement steps, he heard Art say something and Gabrielle laugh in reply. He went out to the poolside. It was dark now, cooler, and the moon was full over the mountains. Wind blew through the trees on the hill behind the house, so it sounded like they were whispering. The breeze had a pleasant bite. The fence of the tennis court was a high shadow, the clubhouse almost invisible. It was clear, each star in the sky distinct. The five crystals were catching the moonlight. They seemed to be making a sound of their own, like wind chimes, but only just discernible against the sound of the trees. It was like they were talking to each other. Perhaps they were talking to him.

  ‘Leo.’ Gabrielle was in the doorway behind him. ‘For fuck’s sake.’

  ‘What?’ He turned to face her.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Just getting fresh air.’ His hands were really cold. ‘Actually, I’m freezing.’

  ‘You’ve been twenty minutes. Out here the whole time? You’re crazy. We’re clearing away.’

  He followed her into the house.

  ‘You look great,’ he said to her back, as she stalked back to the table.

  ‘The kids have gone back downstairs,’ Art said. ‘They say they’re working.’

  ‘Where do they go?’ Polly said.

  ‘The library,’ Gabrielle said, refilling her wine glass without sitting down. She walked to the sofa and looked out of the window, her back to them all. Leo could see her blackened reflection.

  ‘Leo?’ Art wobbled the bottle at him, smirking. ‘Go on, you’re on holiday.’

  Leo was upset but trying not to show it. He’d lost more time. Another gap in his memory. Something was wrong. And Gabrielle was angry. With him. A recurring motif.

  ‘Gabrielle?’ Art called. ‘How is work?’

  She didn’t turn around straight away. Leo couldn’t tell if she was weighing them all up in the glass or simply thinking about the question. When she did turn, her wine glass was empty. She came back to the table and filled it again.

  ‘How is work?’ she repeated, holding Art’s gaze.

  ‘It’s only a question,’ Art said. ‘I’m interested. I can ask another question.’

  ‘Work is fine.’ Gabrielle took a gulp of wine, swilling it as Art had done, but sending a swish of liquid onto the table top. Leo covered it with a napkin and watched the red stain spread and stop.

  ‘Actually,’ Gabrielle said, ‘work is shit. It’s fucking awful. I hate Toby. I hate having to get dressed up and make an effort for some prick who can’t decide if he wants to fuck me or fire me. I hate the people, I hate the technology – I hate all of it!’

  ‘Feeding humanity?’ Art said. ‘Terrible.’

  For a moment, Leo thought Gabrielle would throw the rest of the wine in Art’s face. He hoped she would. But instead she drank the rest of it in three long swallows.

  ‘Gabrielle?’ Leo said.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ she said. She stood up, blinked once, slowly, then said, ‘Leo?’ There were flecks of red wine on the front of her white dress.

  ‘I’ll take you,’ Leo said, standing too. She walked towards the bedroom without waiting for him.

  ‘Faster, Leo,’ Art said.

  Leo’s shoulders were up as he went after Gabrielle. He was getting sick of being the follower, sick of Art’s constant drip of unpleasant words. He caught up with her and took her arm. He was surprised when she put her head on his shoulder. He didn’t recognise her perfume. It was musky, a heavy mist around them. He put an arm around her waist. Her hip jutted onto his hand.

  ‘I’m so tired,’ she said.

  He pushed open the bedroom door and they went in.

  ‘That fall—’ he said.

  ‘It’s not that.’ She sat on the edge of the bed and took her shoes off.

  ‘What, then?’

  Gabrielle looked exhausted, lost. He sat next to her.

  ‘I’ve got to tell you something.’ Her eyelids flickered. She was fighting to stay awake. ‘I’ve done something bad.’

  ‘We’re all finding it hard. It’s okay.’ Whatever she was going to say, he didn’t want to hear it now.

  ‘Leo.’ She turned and put her head on the pillow, lying on her side, stretching her body out.

  ‘Tell me tomorrow,’ he said. He got a thin blanket from the wardrobe and put it over her still-dressed form.

  ‘Art,’ she said.

  He kissed her cheek. ‘Goodnight,’ he whispered.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, quietly, a child’s voice. Her breathing steadied. A switch had been flipped somewhere in her head. She slept.

  He went into the bathroom and rubbed cold water on his face. He had forgotten he was wearing Art’s suit. In the mirror, over his shoulder, he could see his wife’s inert body, the blanket pulled up to her neck.

  Was that it? She was fucking Art? He couldn’t believe it. Why would she sleep with that piece of shit? She was smarter than that. Had Art bought her those clothes? That perfume? Of course he had. He ran his fingers through his hair, then brought them forwards, digging his fingers into his scalp. His head pounded. Fresh air. Cold air.

  In the kitchen, Polly was clearing the table.

  ‘Where is he?’ Leo said, his voice louder than he wanted.

  ‘He’s gone to bed.’

  ‘He’s gone to bed,’ Leo echoed. He stood still, looking towards the sofa Gabrielle had sat on, read her book on, perhaps fucked Art on. Perhaps she had been here before. Art was at ease here, was it his place? Did he own it? Call in a favour from a billionaire buddy?

  Polly looked at him curiously. She was holding two used wine glasses in each hand, the counter tops filled with dirty plates. She seemed small in the cavernous open space. He went to the table and brought the last of the dirty cutlery.

  ‘It’s all going in the machine,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ he said. Polly went back to the table and took the tablecloth off, pulling the corners in so the crumbs didn’t fall on the floor. He loaded the dishwasher.

  After everything was cleared and put away, Polly got the last two clean wine glasses from a shelf and poured the last of the wine between them.

  ‘It’s not much,’ she said. She raised her glass. He took the other and softly tapped her glass with his. A quiet note rang out.

  He closed his eyes and let his shoulders drop. His body was thrumming. Adrenaline. He rolled his shoulders around.

  ‘You’re so tense,’ Polly said.

  ‘Thank you for today,’ he said. He saw Gabrielle’s dusty face, collapsed in the garden. Then, Gabrielle’s open mouth, moaning as Art fucked her.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For what?�
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  ‘Listening.’ She took a sip of wine. ‘Is Gabrielle okay?’

  ‘She’s not herself,’ he said.

  Polly gave him an assessing look. She seemed to make a decision. ‘Is it any surprise?’

  ‘What do you know about it?’ Art felt a surge of adrenaline again. His voice had a harder tone than he intended.

  She took his hand. He pulled it away.

  ‘She hasn’t told you,’ she said. ‘Okay. That’s why you were so interested in my pills.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ He put his wine glass down and backed away from her, sitting on the back of a dining chair, arms folded. Polly stayed by the sink.

  ‘Art’s been helping her with her anxiety,’ she said.

  ‘What the fuck does that mean?’

  ‘Medication,’ Polly said. ‘She had some sort of panic attack. In work. Art told me on the way here. Said he had contracts with the company Gabrielle works for. They were at a meeting and she was behaving strangely. As they were leaving, she started struggling to breathe and fell.’

  ‘She didn’t tell me.’

  ‘That’s all I know.’

  ‘Are they sleeping together?’ he said. Polly put her glass to her mouth but didn’t drink. The words hung awkwardly in the air.

  Eventually she said, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Open relationship, is it?’

  ‘In its own way. Leo—’ she put emphasis on the following words, ‘—it’s not my fault.’

  No, but he still blamed her. Wasn’t she tied to Art too?

  ‘You’re a good man, Leo.’ Polly brought him his glass. He took it.

  ‘Let’s go downstairs. See what the kids are up to. We can watch a film or something.’

  She swirled her glass, the wine close to the rim.

  ‘Don’t get any on your dress,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not really my dress.’

  She deliberately dribbled a line of wine down the front of it. Leo watched it skip over the material, down her chest, over her belly and onto the floor. The liquid spread on her front, widening so she looked as if she was cracking open.

  Leo gave a shocked laugh. ‘You must hate him,’ he said.

  ‘You have no idea,’ she said.

  Before he knew what she was doing, she poured the rest of her wine onto Leo’s chest. He tried to get out of the way, but the chair behind stopped him. The suit’s thin material absorbed some of the wine, pushing the rest down his sleeve and onto Art’s white shirt. He flapped his arms, then took the suit jacket off, trying to lessen the damage.

  ‘Oops,’ she said, beaming. ‘His best suit. He will be annoyed.’

  ‘Polly!’

  ‘You’re the sportsman. Where are your reflexes?’

  She went to the basement steps and looked back. He followed, holding the jacket between two fingers. Walking down, he could see Polly’s cleavage in the ceiling mirror, her stained dress, the top of her clipped hair. His white shirt was also now marked red. They were bleeding together. He would go wherever she led.

  WEDNESDAY

  Stefan: Gatehouse

  Stefan ate his cereal sitting on the arm of the sofa. He was looking at the woods on the mountains, remembering the long trip. The week was already half over, and they would have to drive back soon. That was an unpleasant thought. He didn’t think Fleur would fit into his life at home. This place had the magical ability to equalise them. He had tried to think about Jess this morning, but it was always Fleur his mind came back to. That meant trouble.

  Fleur called the thing that had happened in the headset a glitch, but it was more like a reality-altering headfuck to him. His father was the obvious person to talk to, but his father was also acting really strangely. On his way to bed last night, he had run into his father on the basement steps. Polly had been holding his father’s hand, but she released it the moment she spotted Stefan. His father had looked shocked, and his clothes, Art’s clothes, had been stained purple with wine.

  Dinner had been an uncomfortable experience, with their parents dressed up like they were going to a fancy hotel, and then an undercurrent of something he couldn’t put his finger on. Games were being played and he was glad to escape to the library. Fleur was desperate to get back to her headset and work out what had gone wrong. He had tried to study, but his notes kept degenerating into doodles of tanks, corridors and misshapen heads. The woman in the glitch particularly creeped him out. She was the only character, if that’s what she was, who had spoken to him.

  ‘Fleur?’

  ‘Yup.’ She was wearing the larger headset and was looking towards the far wall.

  ‘What if it was me? What if it wasn’t the headset at all?’

  She turned towards him, looking disturbingly insectoid. ‘I watched you disappear from the map.’

  ‘No, I mean, what if my brain caused the problem somehow? I’ve tried VR before, but it wasn’t like that. That felt real. Like you flipped a switch and, boom, I was gone.’

  ‘It’s intense, right?’ She twisted her body a little more and cocked her head. ‘I’d love to know how it works, but it’s their intellectual property, I guess.’

  The headset was ugly. ‘You look like a B-movie nuclear­waste-contaminated cricket.’

  ‘I prefer to think of myself as a praying mantis. Which part of you shall I eat first?’ She made clicking sounds with her tongue and wiggled her fingers at him.

  ‘That’s creepy.’

  ‘People like to be eaten,’ she said. ‘They think they don’t, but they do.’

  Being consumed by Fleur didn’t seem that bad a way to go, but he was tired. ‘Will you take that thing off?’

  She put the headset on the desk. Her hair was ruffled, and her forehead was damp with sweat. ‘There’s nothing in the logs,’ she said. ‘Nothing in the code. And my interview is next week.’

  ‘Could it be a hardware problem? Interference from something?’

  ‘Your father was messing with the power yesterday,’ she said, looking up at the ceiling and stretching her arms. He admired the muscles tightening under her skin. Then she relaxed and blew air out of her nose, like a surfacing whale. ‘That could have done something. And what’s with him wearing Daddy’s clothes?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘He looked like a new man.’

  ‘He’s good as he is.’

  ‘I didn’t mean he wasn’t.’ Fleur gave a crooked smile. ‘We all defend our daddies.’

  Stefan stood up. ‘I can’t concentrate on anything. Do you want to hear a dream I had last night?’

  ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘It’s kind of weird. I was in these woods and there was a stag. No surprises there, right? It was nibbling at grass in a clearing. A sparrow landed on one of its antlers and started chirping away at him, like it had some important news. Then they both looked at me, at the same time, and I had this incredible feeling. I don’t know how to describe it. Joy, maybe. It was like I belonged in the woods with them. We all just stood there. Then the sparrow flew off and the stag started hitting its antlers on a tree trunk. I was scared, but I also knew it was perfectly natural. One antler fell off. Now it looked half male and half female. I went to pick the antler up, but it wasn’t an antler any more, it was your dad’s rifle.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘That was it. The end.’

  ‘Cool dream.’

  ‘I don’t know why it came back to me now.’

  Fleur had put the helmet back on, evidently not as fascinated by Stefan’s dream as he was. That was when he had decided to call it a night.

  Stefan snapped himself out of his memory. He had been holding his empty cereal bowl for some time. He went to the kitchen sink and swilled it out before putting it on the draining board. There were patches of yellow and red leaves on the trees behind the house that felt sad an
d autumnal. The sculptures his father seemed to like so much didn’t work for Stefan. They seemed awkward, positioned wrong, with no symmetry or pattern. Five stony faces on five skinny bodies, caught in conversation and all turned at once to look at him.

  Cursing himself for the spooky thought, he went down to the library to find Fleur. Her desk was a patchwork of papers and books, but she wasn’t around. He went out to the pool. The sun sliced the patio and the stone was already hot under his bare feet. The silence was intimidating. There was no one on the tennis court. The trees were still. When he looked at the sculptures, they seemed closer to the pool than he remembered, and he thought of a children’s game, the one where you closed your eyes and counted to three and opened them to try to catch someone moving. Someone coming to get you.

  ‘Bad thought,’ he said under his breath.

  He tried the bedrooms next. He was about to knock on his parents’ door when he saw Fleur’s was ajar. Relieved, he went to it, watching himself approach in the corridor dresser mirror. He didn’t like seeing the empty corridor reflected behind him, it was too easy to imagine something moving, just out of sight. Christ, he was even managing to make furniture creepy.

  ‘You in there?’

  He could see her en suite was open. He waited a moment before taking a single step in, not wanting to catch her unawares. The floor and bed were clear of clothes, but the colourful dress was still on the wall. As he turned to leave, he imagined one of the sculptures in the corridor, perched on one thin leg, waiting.

  Of course, the corridor was empty. ‘Where is everyone?’

  He went into his own room to put on some trainers. Then he tried his parents’ room. The bed was rumpled and empty. His mother’s unworn clothes were neatly stacked on a desk while his father’s clothes were still in his suitcase, open on the floor.

  ‘Mum?’

  He went to the bathroom door. His mother’s hair products were on the floor of the shower. Both towels were used.

  He went back to the kitchen and along the glass expanse to the front door. The scale of the house and grounds was no longer thrilling. He felt disconnected. There might be nobody for miles around. Unless there really was someone in the gatehouse. Again, he imagined the sculptures, this time moving silently around, perhaps clustered in the basement now, or waiting for him by the front door. He refused to look at them in the garden, in case they were gone.