by Tham Cheng-E
Thirty seconds passed in Hannah’s mental clock before she rolled him onto his back. She slapped him twice, once on each cheek, and his head lolled lifelessly at the blows like a sloven corpse. There were occasions when longevity made her think she’d seen it all; it fortified her against death and gave her a penchant for it so that she could kill without remorse. This was one of them. For the next three hours she would be endowed with such dominance and power that it made her feel like Death itself.
She watched him in the darkness, taking her time to parse the situation and avoid sophistry in her lines of reasoning. It was never easy to be completely honest with oneself. She could put a cap in his head with a suppressor and end this silently, painlessly. She would be doing him a favour, protecting him and protecting whatever that was in him from falling into the wrong hands.
But this was never her intention. She still had scruples left in her.
She got out of bed and stepped over Arthur as if he were a log. From her patchwork bag she retrieved a pocket-sized touchpad and a vial of clear fluid. She attached it to a compartment at the bottom edge of the touchpad, and its black screen glowed. From the top of the device she extracted a tab fitted with a pair of silver needles. A thin conduit led from them, and pneumatic pressure sent the fluid coursing through it. Her fingers flickered across the screen, programming the cellular cybernetic organisms in the fluid and assigning them their tasks. Then she took one of Arthur’s feet, pulled off the sock, and plunged the pair of needles deep into the web of flesh between his toes.
The pain would’ve jolted Arthur awake if it weren’t for the capsule tranquiliser. The needles pumped tens of thousands of preprogrammed cybernetic cells into Arthur’s bloodstream. Matrices of information rolled across the black screen. The touchpad performed a synchronisation and logged into a covert network.
Profiles of individuals appeared as a list, each with a mugshot. She scrolled through one face after another—mostly unsmiling ones, some with inattentive gazes, others frozen in the middle of speech, and all of them taken against backdrops of streets and homes and workplaces—faces belonging to those who didn’t know their pictures were being taken.
She chose one of them at random—a man who looked to be in his early fifties, set the grid accuracy to ten metres and tapped out a track. The device whirred and whined for a moment before telling her that the individual had been triangulated to a spot in Chiang Rai, Thailand. She then went down the list and stopped at a profile.
The name Qara Budang Tabunai glowered at her from the screen. Beside the name was an orthogonal blank where the mugshot would’ve been. She set the device to work. Thrice the system attempted to triangulate a position, and thrice it failed.
And here he is, right beside me. Hannah indulged herself in a smile. The jamming worked, and perhaps this was the best she could do for him.
/ / /
Mornings were always crisp and sunny after a wintry night’s rain. The light that streamed in through the window was warm and uplifting. Arthur leapt up from the floor with the sleeping bag draped halfway over his shoulders and shuddered with a chill when he found the bed empty. He headed for the door, grabbed the lever and felt it turn in his hand. The door swung ajar, and in popped Hannah with a towel over her head.
“Morning,” she chirped. “Sorry, I took any towel I could find.”
For a moment Arthur failed to register the greeting. “I thought you left.”
“Relieved?” Hannah swung out her damp hair and proceeded to press them dry with the towel. “Shall we leave in five minutes? It’s past ten and I could eat a horse.”
They snuggled in the warmth of a small Mediterranean café off Mornington Crescent and ate poached eggs, flaky flatbread, and mutton kibbehs that came with sides of olives and pickled mushrooms. Arthur had a Turkish coffee served from a copper cezve, and lamented about its acidity and attributed it to its roast. On the other hand, Hannah loved it and had four shots of it.
Museums were closed that day, so they checked out the hippy stores at Carnaby Street and toured Piccadilly Circus. The walk kept them warm and they were hungry again by the time they got to Kensington. From a small Spanish deli just off Portobello Road they picked out a small selection of cheeses, two tin mugs and a bottle of Chianti.
At Kensington Gardens they found no footballs, no Frisbees, no pot-smoking hippies. The lawns along the scenic vista were misty and empty all the way to the Albert Memorial. They put out the wine and cheese on a mat. Arthur immersed himself in Kafka while Hannah read Vogue, their plans for a tranquil afternoon picnic playing out to near perfection except for the biting cold. Hannah, juddering, said this place was empty because they were the only stupid tropical schmucks trying to picnic on a winter’s day. Arthur suggested that they drink to warm themselves. And they downed almost half of the Chianti before the cold became unbearable.
The London Underground dropped them off at Euston where they transited from the agreeable warmth of the station to the icy street and then into the cheerless twilight that seemed to have descended far too quickly. Windchill had them scuttling into the nearest self-serve store they could find. “Wine rack’s almost empty,” said Arthur.
Hannah replaced one of the last remaining ice wines on the rack. “A good bottle of port would be a decent compromise. The Chianti was quite a let-down.”
“We could go somewhere else.”
“Tell you what.” Hannah jabbed her finger into Arthur’s shoulder. “I saw a Vinos way back at Woburn Place. I go get us a bottle and you go get the food. Surprise me with the selection. We’ll meet back in your room.”
Arthur looked uncertain. “You sure? I could—”
Hannah pressed a finger to his lips. “I expect dinner to be waiting when I get back.”
“A kiss would’ve been better.”
Hannah considered the request for an instant and then planted one on Arthur’s right cheek. “There,” she said, “you got one.”
Arthur rolled his eyes at it.
“No crossing the line, remember?” Hannah ran her hand tenderly down the side of his face. “Why don’t you give me one? Where I like it.”
Broodingly, Arthur leaned over and kissed her tenderly between her eyes. He felt a breath slip from her lips and he could hear the faint sound of swallowing.
Hannah pulled her hands away, turned around and strode down the aisle between half-empty racks of eggs and bread. She cast a lingering, sidelong glance upon him before she left the store. The doors closed to a dulcet ring of little bells.
Now alone, Arthur picked up a meatloaf with gravy and a salad at a discount—perks you would expect at the closing hours of Christmas Eve. He got two large Christmas candles—red ones with the twisting stems, a can of sugared peaches, cream and a loaf of sourdough. Then at a small Italian eatery just off Kentish Town Road he got ribbons of freshly sliced parma ham, stuffed olives and a few slices of rock melon.
The walk back to the residence was a long but leisurely one. It afforded a good workout, and Arthur shrugged off his jacket even before he entered the room because he was perspiring underneath it. He cleared the table, made the bed and returned the chairs to their places. He laid out the ceramic dishes and a rather handsome set of cutlery he had purchased from a thrift store. He put dinner on them, doubled-up two empty beer bottles as sconces and fitted in the Christmas candles.
As he was lighting them his eyes strayed over to a square note tucked beneath the top flap of a table calendar. He looked around and found Hannah’s hippy patchwork bag missing, along with all traces of her except for a used towel—his towel, draped upon a plastic hanger that hung from a doorknob of his wardrobe.
He dropped onto the edge of his bed, the same spot where Hannah had sat him down last night. He fixed his eyes on the candles and watched the drops of wax spiralling along the threads and solidifying halfway down the stem. He resolved to wait.
Maybe the London buses got their schedules messed up. Maybe the underground’s busted and sh
e’s stuck somewhere between Mornington Crescent and Camden Town.
The clock read ten. It’d been three hours. The candles were down to less than a quarter of their original lengths, their beer bottle sconces adorned in popsicles of red petrified wax. The spread was untouched and the entire set up now resembled an altar to the kitchen god, complete with festive offerings. A couple of persimmons would complete the still-life.
Arthur shifted his weight. In the silence, the creaking of the old bed sounded like thunder. At last he retrieved the note from the calendar and flipped it over. Its message, in Hannah’s neat hand, did not surprise him.
Forgive me.
It was all for the better.
He ignited the note over a candle and dropped it into one of the tin mugs from the picnic. Then he tore off a page from his journal— last night’s entry, and accorded it the same fate. Such memories debilitate; they corrode your sanity and hold you back. In moments like this, Arthur was thankful for his amnesiac gift.
It renewed him each day, it got him moving.
It was his secret gem.
15
FIRST ENTRY
24th August 1859, Wednesday
Mother breathed her last this afternoon calling out to a father I never knew. Businesses were already closing for the day, and the undertaker thought it unseemly to prepare rites at this hour. According to custom the dead must reside in his home for the night and be laid inside a three-humped coffin. Mother never took to these customs, so I did not think it necessary to procure the coffin in anticipation of her passing.
It is now past eight by the clock. The lamplighter has finished lighting the few gas lamps in my vicinity and mother lies dead upon her bed as I write, seemingly in peaceful slumber.
I did not mourn at length. Mother came into my care since the day she became blind. I cannot but confess that the efforts in caring for her were wearing, and that my heart had been inured to anticipate her inevitable passing. She was aware of the burden which her debilitating illness had brought upon me, and had discerned my immense displeasure on account of it. Still she deigned to pitch generous smiles against my umbrage whenever I entered her room. Of these little nuances I took notice only upon her death.
Such is the blight of human nature.
I write this so that I may remember and acquit myself of the guilt of neglect, which in the distant future, I would be unable to disavow in the absence of credible memories.
I had known mother to be very devout; constantly devoting herself to penitent prayers, uttered aloud, for forgiveness over things I did not reckon one would need forgiving. She often recounted how she had embraced this faith borne upon the tidings of missionaries when we were still part of the Bengal Presidency of British India.
She said it was better to be born again of Christ than of the Gift, and that it was important to know that the Gift, however wondrous it might appear, belonged to a depraved world. The abstraction was confounding; and short of an epiphany, I am much obliged to consider them words of delirium.
Mother had always resolved to keep our family plot. She said it was the only heirloom father could offer, and that it must never, under any circumstance or price, be bartered or sold. She said we are the last of the lot; which I took to mean our plot since most of the surrounding plantations have already been sold to the colonial administration. “Keep it always to your name and honour, because father had willed it so.” So she said.
If there was sense left in her she would have taken notice of our blighted fields, where a beetle infestation had ruined our entire stock of nutmeg trees two years earlier, and retracted that burden of an instruction laid upon me.
Mother also issued explicit instructions for me to acquire a new persona when my age exceeds 30, and from it I shall once again become a young man of an appropriate age who shall, in turn, acquire another persona when his real age exceeds that which reflects his appreciable youth. And this process must be repeated for as long as I live, though she did not say for how long.
Dementia forbade her to recall that such peculiar instructions had already been given. They seemed to have precipitated from a Gift (or a Curse) that I was never meant to receive, but had to in light of the circumstances which she refused to elucidate. It is absurd for any sane man to be held to such tasks. But I have given her my word. This mystery I have yet to uncover, and probably never will.
In her final days Mother was rather garrulous about how fortunate she and father were to have met each other. I never understood her affection for a father who never was; whom I am compelled to believe had left us for better riches. Scarcely did she ever speak of him—until now, and in the years of my life I have felt nothing for him but disdain.
I hear the sounds of lumber being piled. In the darkness I see lamps dotting a trail that bobs downhill, to the east. The military has been at it all day: felling trees, clearing the undergrowth, sawing and tinkering away at frames and armatures of more sheds and longhouses. Soldiers have been stationed in the completed barracks to the west, beyond sight of my residence. It was no less a prodigious feat to have completed the barracks in three months, and I should hope that the construction of new ones would be equally expeditious.
In the wake of mother’s passing I hope only for peace and calm. I am alone and in possession of little but a spot of land and an old house. Our nutmeg business is no more, and after mother’s burial tomorrow I shall contemplate the full measure of my quandary.
Here I must end with mother’s last words: Remember all that Harriet has given us, and remember your father’s name: Qara Budang Tabunai.
16
SERUM
WHO WAS HARRIET? Landon circles the name with a pencil and dries his hair with the towel on his shoulders. He googles it and finds celebrities dead and living, sports personalities, social networking pages of common people. A website lists the name Harriet as a variant of the French Henriette, the female version of Henri. Someone close to his family? Someone he loved?
It doesn’t matter because Little Miss Harriet probably precedes any leads to Clara or Hannah by a century or more. The only memories of his past are those of the oath made on the day of mother’s passing. Keep it always to your name and honour. This, thinks Landon, is the beauty of an oath unbroken. But for how long? And to what purpose? He closes the journal and slides it back into the bookshelf. A pinned schedule shows an early shift today.
With any luck he might just run into Clara.
/ / /
It is past seven in the morning. A parked sedan, frosted in morning dew, rests quietly by the road. Through a clear spot in the misty windshield John watches Landon leave the house with his knapsack, and tracks him visually until he passes beyond sight.
John does not yet enter. He waits, and ten minutes later sunlight skims the treetops and casts long, slanting shadows across the old house. Through the second storey windows he catches the iridescent glint of bulbous lenses. It glides from one window to the next before the glare of sunlight off a pane swallows it. He dons a pair of shades. His vision goes monochrome, and he sees shafts of infrared radiation sweeping the room like beams of searchlights.
Ghosts—robotic infiltration probes the size of golf balls, borne upon a mag-gravity propulsion system not yet revealed to the known world. Unauthorised contact with them is cause for sanctioned elimination without trials or inquisitions. It isn’t worth the risk. In time the Ghosts will depart and he will commence his recon. Getting into the house is easy, staying invisible isn’t. A probe or two might still be lurking in the depths of an ancient attic. Caution bids John to prolong his wait and it pays off.
The Ghosts withdraw and in their absence a spectral shape appears. It loiters in the study, almost too recklessly without stealth, sifting through Landon’s effects with abandon. Confident of his invisibility, John leans nearer to the windshield and goes on watching the spectre going from room to room, browsing, angling for clues and signs just as John would if he’d been the one inside. Then he sees it
halt, lift its head and turn towards the window.
The faceless silhouette is now looking right at him.
John glowers. He has been careless—too careless. The mission is irrevocably compromised and the shame of it scorches him from the inside. This Tracker is a huge step ahead of him and he knows it. He calmly lowers his gaze, twists the ignition and with commendable composure, eases the sedan onto the street.
/ / /
FourBees wouldn’t see a morning crowd if not for the spouses of wealthy expats living in the posh neighbourhoods around Dempsey Hill. The café offers just the right balance of sophistication and finesse to beat the competition and have the loaded mistresses flocking to it. Raymond even designed portions for their trim tummies to have them mop up every morsel on their plates. Dishes licked clean make for good publicity.
They breeze into the café every morning with their Stokkes and Fendis, and Sam receives them at the door with a sprightly toss of her head and a practised grin. Table for four? Right this way. Pets leashed to the columns outside, please. We’ll have water served to them in clean, stainless steel dishes, free of charge.
The front door jingles and John walks in, dressed in denims and a chequered shirt that conceals a pistol. Sam gets to him like a hawk and leads him down an aisle full of whinnying toddlers and their mothers dressed in sweatshirt fleece, and offers him a freshly-vacated corner seat by the window, farthest from the bar. John sidles into it and manages to catch Landon’s attention from behind the hulk of a coffee machine. He smiles and Landon snaps a patronising one in return.