Birdkill

by Alexander McNabb

  He glanced at her. ‘Like?’

  ‘As a person. What drives him?’

  ‘How would I know? He headed up a military research programme I provided security for. I was in the army. That was what my unit did. I’m sorry I can’t help you further than that, Ms?’

  ‘Shadid. We didn’t get introduced, did we?’ My name is Mariam Shadid.’

  Warren took the exit. They waited at the red light on the roundabout.

  ‘You’re Lebanese?’

  ‘Originally. My parents moved to the UK in the seventies. During the civil war.’

  ‘Lucky.

  ‘You know Lebanon?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Go there with Hamilton, did you?’

  ‘Look, Ms Shadid, I’ve told you all I know. I’m sorry it wasn’t much, but Kojak or whoever he is was wrong to give you my name. I don’t even know where he got it.’

  Warren drove back up onto the road they’d come down. Mariam reckoned she had about three minutes before they were back at Sainsbury’s. Time to get serious.

  ‘Probably from the archive.’ She dug into her bag and produced a sheet of A4 paper. ‘Who’s the third guy in the photograph?’

  Warren glanced across at the image she was holding up to him.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘That’s you and Hamilton. You look pretty buddy buddy for someone who hardly knew him. The third guy’s a Yank, nobody else would chow down on a cigar like that. Three-star general type.’ She fancied there was a flicker in those cool eyes. ‘This picture was taken in Beirut, my hometown. You can see the Grand Serail in the background.’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘From the archives we have, this image would date to between January 2012 and March 2014.’

  ‘I told you, I got out.’

  ‘I have a copy of your transfer request, you know that?’

  ‘So that proves it.’

  ‘Why did you ask to leave?’

  ‘You got the request, you tell me.’

  ‘It’s been deleted. The reason.’

  ‘Then no comment. Here we are. It’s been nice talking to you Ms Shadid, but I’m afraid our conversation ends here. If you attempt to contact me again, I shall file a complaint for harassment with the police which, I can assure you, they will take seriously.’

  ‘Very cool, Mister Warren. Did you get out when they started experimenting on prisoners from over the Syrian border? Is that when you got your cold feet?’

  His knuckles on the wheel were like alabaster, but his voice was perfectly controlled, no hint of anger or tension in there. ‘Time to go.’

  Mariam unbuckled and opened her door. She turned back to Warren. ‘One last thing. Does the name Tom Parker mean anything to you? General Tom Parker?’

  ‘He was Elvis Presley’s manager.’

  ‘No, wrong answer.’ She wagged her finger at him. ‘That was Colonel Tom Parker. General Tom Parker was a three-star general in the good ole US army, Mr Warren, and he played up the whole hard-bitten, crew-cropped cigar chomping tough guy thing like the big old ham he is.’

  Warren’s cool regard faltered for an instant. Mariam leaned towards him, the faintest flit of his eye rewarding her for the button she’d thoughtfully undone before leaving the house. ‘He left the army, just like you Mr Warren. Only he went into politics. Did you know that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s a senator. He’s busy, too. He sits on the Joint Armed Services Committee, among other things. Shame you lost touch. You seemed so relaxed together back there in good old Beirut.’

  ‘Get out.’

  EIGHT

  Of Mysterious Domes

  Robyn’s first week teaching at the Hamilton Institute had flown by, buoyed by glorious sessions in the classroom that were, she had to admit, enlivened for her by Martin Oakley’s marginalisation as he sulked and lashed out vocally in the face of the other kids’ evident enjoyment of her lessons. She had outgunned him twice in vicious verbal sparring matches that had been all the easier because she’d known she enjoyed the room’s sympathy. Beating down a kid would have given her no pleasure in the normal run of things, but Martin was clearly beyond a simple child, was a prodigious intellect with a nasty streak she found perhaps even a little daunting to even try and understand.

  Several times she had reached out to him, only to have her overtures smacked aside and upended in her face. Any possible sympathy for him was, she had to admit, now lip service. She would have been happy had he announced he was leaving her class but, far from that, his attendance was punctual to the point of compulsive.

  She sensed he had somehow been holding back, had something in reserve or check in the way that a man would put down his gun and offer to duke it out instead. That thought she preferred not to dwell on, because that was about sparrows and feeling her lips had been sewn up and was weird territory she wasn’t going to explore.

  If there had been a true low point to the week, it would have to be the dreams. Twice they had left her feeling eviscerated and torn. Last night she had woken up screaming the place down and lay in her cold, damp sweat as the doorbell to her apartment rang.

  She had taken to leaving the iPod playing downstairs in case it happened again.

  The weekly staff drink at the Sloop was actually something she looked forward to. She wondered if Archer would be there. Two classes today, as every day. Her morning session was due and she sat at her desk in the little temporary classroom and grazed through the Guardian as usual.

  They burst in, a clamorous little throng. ‘Morning miss!’

  She waved at them. Martin brought up the rear and plonked himself down at the back of the classroom, his face like thunder. There was something feral about him, stripped back and famished.

  ‘Okay, so yesterday we looked at the conflicts between Islam, the Eastern Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. Anyone managed to get started on Gibbon?’

  Jenny Wilson’s hand shot up. Claire Drummond was more hesitant, as usual. She dressed older than her sixteen years, plain jumpers and baggy jeans that disguised a figure that, Robyn suspected, was quite voluptuous. She had thick-rimmed glasses, her hazelnut hair tied back into a bun. A self-made frump with nondescript, flat shoes and yet her mind dazzled when she let it burst out of the brown restraints she tried to lay around it.

  ‘Claire. You seem unsure.’

  ‘It’s just that Gibbon’s so, well, racist. He’s the ultimate orientalist, seems all the time to be, well, patronising civilisations that clearly eclipsed the intellectual achievements of his own milieu.’

  ‘Granted. That’s the Victorians for you. And those attitudes persist today. But cut him some slack, it’s like I said back when we first met at the beginning of the week, you have the opportunity, perhaps the responsibility, to cut the quality of thought and research he represents away from the language and attitudes of our age and try to couch it in the attitudes of his own.’

  ‘But he’s clearly biased. It’s propagandistic.’

  Robyn nodded to acknowledge her point and responded to John Appleby’s raised hand. ‘John.’

  ‘Was he conscious that he was documenting the perversion of Christ’s teachings by the Catholic Church? The convocation at Nicaea, for instance, was indefensible by any standard, ancient or modern. But as you say, in his time, that criticism would surely have been inflammatory?’

  Robyn barely caught Claire’s doubling up, turning in time to see the girl sitting straight again but her skin bone white and her features taut. She glanced at Martin, the thin face focused viciously on Claire. He sensed Robyn’s regard and turned to her and she stared into the predatory little jet eyes down a tunnel. Claire slumped as if released from a strychnine-like tension.

  Martin spat at her. ‘Gibbon was a fucking arsehole. A monkey. Gibbon.’

  ‘Brilliant, Martin. Is that a post-ironic attempt to show that intellect can be turned three hundred and sixty degrees and made to seem like stupidity or just a cry for help?’


  ‘Help? From what?’

  She shrugged, blithe in the face of his spite and the clamp that seemed to be pressing against her mind, squeezing her like a bully would grip a weaker hand to make the other cry out.

  Defiance and frustration made her lash out. ‘I don’t know. From your place on the spectrum, perhaps?’

  ‘Spectrum? That a Sinclair Spectrum, Plectrum?’

  She shook her head in bemusement. The class waited it out, every single one of them eyes to the floor. ‘Why would you call me Plectrum?’

  ‘You’re pulling my strings, trying to make me resonate to your frequency, to play your tune. And it’s not happening. So you can stop picking.’

  The pressure was blinding, she felt like her mind was a lump of meat caught in a strong hand, squeezed so blood and gristle squirmed through the great fingers. Pain coursed through her and yet somehow she coasted above it, another Robyn looking down on them realising she had known infinitely greater pain than this. She formed words in her mind, flung the thoughts at him like shards.

  You want to hurt me? Really? You’ll have to grow up first, because I know what pain is and you don’t. It’s like everything else, you’re all intellect but there’s no experience there, my love. You can’t inflict pain until you’ve felt it, until you truly understand it. Not mentally. Physical pain is just brutishness. To inflict mental anguish, true pain you have to have been there. In fact, I’d be a bit worried about trying to pick on me, because I have known pain like you’d shit yourself to even comprehend. I’ve been broken like you wouldn’t even start to wrap your imagination around. And you don’t scare me one bit.

  She couldn’t stop the thoughts once they’d started, didn’t understand where the thought-words were coming from, another Robyn inside of her was speaking, stronger and more certain than she. Martin’s astonishment gave way to bewilderment.

  Robyn’s triumph coursed through her veins like liquid gold. She cleared her throat. ‘I didn’t pick you, for a start, babe. And if you don’t like it, the door’s just there. You can walk if you like, but stop picking on the others. They’re just enjoying a conversation.’

  It was if a sigh of release passed through them. Martin broke his stare, jumped to his feet and stormed out, his face black fury. The door smashed shut behind him. Robyn stood behind her desk, her hands held together in front of her and her eyes on them as she forced her pumping heart to calm. She breathed deeply, pushed all her questions and alarms to one side to try and give her kids at least a semblance of control to latch on to. She looked up and found them staring at her, waiting for her to react.

  She smiled, shakily.

  Jenny Wilson piped up. ‘Fucking hell, Miss.’

  The relief in the class was clear, a ripple of laughter releasing the tension.

  Robyn beamed at them. ‘Okay, fair enough. It’s the weekend, enough drama for now. I’ll see you Sunday. If you get the time, download Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose. It’s a good read and it’ll give you another viewpoint into the whole argument, as well as an introduction to semiotics.’

  ‘Semiotics, Miss?’ Jenny again.

  ‘Yes. Google it, smarty pants.’

  Mariam had been trying to get hold of Dr Lawrence Hamilton and failing spectacularly. His London practice were efficient, helpful and singularly evasive. The woman Heather at the Hamilton Institute, Mariam knew her name through Robyn, was charming and useless. Clive Warren hadn’t returned her calls and she hadn’t heard back from her contact in Washington about General Tom Parker.

  The archive was going cold on her and she didn’t like it one bit. She knocked her screen in exasperation.

  Kelly looked up in mild-mannered inquisitiveness. ‘What’s up, love? Jilted again, is it?’

  She’d lived with Kelly’s avuncular, sexist banter all week and – against all her instincts – liked the man despite the constant drawling references to her love life. That and calling her love or, and she swore to God if he did it again she’d fuck him up, on one occasion ‘bird’. The veteran Guardian man was a ferociously good journalist and had been signally more successful in plundering his trove of archive than she had. And somehow she felt he liked her back, was actually on her side. Quite how a sexist pig got to work for the Guardian was a question she was dying to ask him.

  ‘It’s this Hamilton guy. I can’t get a handle on him. I just can’t get through.’

  ‘This your battlefield drugs thing? Who’s Hamilton?’

  ‘The mad professor behind the drug programme. Doctor Lawrence bloody Hamilton.’

  Kelly pulled out the pencil he kept habitually stuck behind his ear, a sure sign he was interested. She didn’t even know why he had a bloody pencil, he used a laptop same as her. He tapped his teeth, which to Mariam was a little like a cat scrabbling up a blackboard.

  She shuddered and he grinned. ‘Sorry, love, forgot you don’t like that.’

  ‘The fuck you did.’

  ‘Did. Serious. Hang on a ticky. I got to use our lone Internet machine here.’

  ‘I already Googled him to death.’

  ‘Nah, not Google. The rag’s archive. Hold on there. Dr. Lawrence. Hamilton. Let’s see.’ Kelly scanned the screen, thumbing the notebook’s trackpad. His eyes danced, reflecting the blue light. Eventually he sat back, his arms crossed and grinning.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Patience is a virtue, especially in the young.’

  ‘You bastard. Spill.’

  ‘There’s a whiff of sulphur, alright. He was involved in research into genetic predisposition to high achievement. Seems he strayed a little too far into morally dubious territory for some people’s tastes. Surfaces again in a scandal about a hospital in London where pregnant single mums had been subjected to procedures without their consent. Some got sick, lost their babies. Seems to have been hushed up, got political somehow. Archive’s a bit shaky on this one.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Nineties. I’ll order up printouts for you. There’s more. He pops up again in the noughties, more research into building better humans. He’s a bit of a Nazi if you ask me. And then a military problem which seems to have gone away before it started. Oh. And we got some D notices about that one.’

  ‘D notices?’

  ‘Relatively rare. It’s where the government tells us to shut up or we’ll piss mummy off. They don’t like doing it because we don’t like them doing it and the public likes to think they don’t do it at all.’

  ‘Can I see the suppressed stories?’

  ‘You’re going to have to make daddy happy.’

  ‘I won’t slice your balls off, that do you?’

  ‘You’re talking my sort of talk already, darling.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off, Kelly.’

  His low chuckle was an invitation to violence. She flung her mouse at him. He ducked, falling off his chair in the process. His shout of ‘You fucking hellion!’ from beneath the desk cheered her no end.

  Lawrence Hamilton grimaced, his concentration on the screen in front of him broken by the knock on his panelled study door. ‘Come.’

  It was Simon Archer. Hamilton had come to rely on the young man a great deal. He was sensible and practical in all things, a judgement Hamilton was astute enough to know meant he did as he was told and made difficult things go away. But those were fine attributes that allowed Hamilton to focus undisturbed on his research. Apart from the necessary and tedious distractions of funding and reporting to powerful men who didn’t understand the importance of his work.

  ‘Come in, Simon. How can I help you? You have a worried air about you.’

  ‘It’s Robyn Shaw.’

  ‘She’s settled in marvellously, hasn’t she? The children already seem to think the world of her.’

  ‘She’s got something about her for sure. But she’s screaming in her sleep. Last night it was so bad I rang her doorbell, I was worried she was being attacked or something, but she didn’t answer. Everything seemed normal, I even checked the windows outsid
e in case someone had broken in. A colleague had mentioned something earlier in the week or I’d have hit the alarm button. It was a spine-chilling racket.’

  ‘We all dream, Simon.’

  ‘Another thing. There was an incident in class today. Young Oakley stood up to her and apparently she bludgeoned him into submission in front of the whole class, stripped him down until he stormed out. Emily found him in tears in the corridor. He said she’d bullied him and humiliated him.’

  ‘Really? That’s at odds with everything else we’ve been hearing, isn’t it? You’ve talked to her, worked with her this past week. Does that seem consistent with the person you know?’

  ‘She’s a trauma victim, could perhaps be behaving unpredictably? I know it doesn’t map to the Robyn I thought I knew, but Emily was definite the child was in a state of total hysteria.’

  Hamilton felt his years pressing on his shoulders for some reason and rubbed his eyes. ‘Martin is also a prime locus, probably the strongest we have ever seen.’

  ‘All the more worrying, then.’

  ‘Interesting. Perhaps something to do with her trauma and amnesia. I’m glad she’s here, we can offer her support and care. Leave it for now, Simon. Keep an eye on her and perhaps offer her a helping hand. I’ll have a word with the people in London who’ve been caring for her. Whatever has happened to her is not her fault, but she clearly has ghosts. Mind you, don’t we all?’

  Archer nodded, bowing his head. You’re mourning her when I can’t, dear boy, Hamilton thought. He smiled for Archer’s sake. ‘Chin up, Simon. Keep an eye on young Robyn, I think she’ll pull through.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Archer retreated, trying to conceal his relief.

  A nice young man, really. But Hamilton’s brow knitted at the idea of Robyn’s dreams tormenting her. He was perhaps a little worried she would start to remember. It would all be so much more convenient if she didn’t.

  Robyn resolved to stay up and see what happened on Thursday evenings over the wall at the Research Institute and cased the joint in a series of casual-seeming walks around the grounds. There was a black iron fire escape zig-zagging its way down the red brick back wall of the staff block and it happened to pass just underneath her spare bedroom window. She found a way to get out without attracting the attention of the corridor cameras and plotted the location of the cameras in the grounds.