Folk'd

by Laurence Donaghy

  Aaron’s head jiggled crazily in response.

  “Hey Maggie. Long time.”

  Maggie adopted her usual approach to situations with the potential to develop into awkwardness, which was to adopt a veil of geniality and push through them head-on.

  “Yeah, hasn’t it? Hard to believe! Uni seems like another lifetime doesn’t it!”

  “Yes,” Ellie said with feeling and with absolute conviction. “Yes it does.”

  There was a pause.

  “I love your dress Maggie,“ Ellie said. “I used to have one like that.“

  Danny could have sworn he heard a slight sigh from Steve when she said that.

  “Thank you,” Maggie beamed. “I was amazed when it fit. Thought I’d ballooned to a 12.”

  “I wouldn’t hold him…he’s just had five ounces,” Ellie went on, neatly ignoring the size comment completely - Danny could see she’d put on a little weight since the last time he’d seen her, but she didn’t look the worse for it and he really wanted to hold her.

  Fuck. Christ. This was a huge mistake. How was he going to get through an entire night of this? For a moment he considered panicking and simply heading for the door, but try as he might he couldn’t handle the thought of moving away from Ellie. More than anything right now he wanted to simply touch her, to make sure she was real, that it was really her standing there safe and sound (safe? and sound?) in front of him.

  “I’ll just leave him in Mummy’s capable hands then,” Maggie said, not exactly seeming dismayed at the prospect. She was standing beside Danny now, and he felt her fingers snake around his forearm and clamp around it, past the point of being a couple-y type squeeze of the sort they’d had not minutes before; this one said I’m watching you.

  They sat and the conversation started between all four, splitting and splintering sometimes on the natural male/female divide when football or clothes shops would rear their heads as topics, or when parenting/social lives would be brought up.

  Danny could sense that maybe an hour ago, two at the most, some sort of argument had gone on between Steve and Ellie; certain words, phrases that cropped up in conversation, mostly to do with socialising and the lack of opportunity to engage thereof, would cause a look to be passed between them. The sand had not quite smoothed over enough for the remains of the message written on it to go unnoticed.

  Mind you, he wasn’t exactly out of the doghouse woods himself yet after the performance when Ellie and Aaron had entered the room. Maggie was being all smiles and pleasantries and teeth-baring grins, her fingers firmly intertwined with his own, but it was more a gesture of forcible restraint than of easy affection.

  Aaron eventually conked out in his mother’s grasp. Steve, Danny noticed, had yet to hold his son. Some part of him burned slightly at this; some other part wondered why.

  “Fuck,” Steve said, checking his watch, “I better go check the chicken.”

  “Not in polite company, please,” Ellie replied instantly. Danny laughed, then winced as the fingers holding his went up a tightness notch. Steve stuck his tongue out and disappeared into the kitchen. Ellie looked down at the slumbering little boy in her arms and sighed.

  “I’d better go out and help him. He did dinner a month ago for my parents and I swear, we had to get Quincy in to do the autopsy.”

  “I heard about that,“ Danny chimed in, gravely serious. “That was no suicide. That….was murder.”

  She nodded with equal intensity of expression. “Thankfully we were able to call in Columbo and just arrest the first person he wouldn’t leave the fuck alone.”

  Danny laughed. He couldn’t help it. Some part of him felt sorry for Steve going up against Ellie in a battle of wits; there was a mismatch made in heaven. Mostly though he just found himself marvelling at how many memories the nonsense banter they’d just engaged in brought back.

  She stood up, awkwardly due to holding little Aaron, and started looking around for something. “St-” she began.

  “Here, let me,” Danny offered, extricating himself from Maggie’s death grip, with only momentary resistance offered, and walking to the far end of the room. Reaching down behind the stereo, he picked up a pile of blankets stored there. Green at the bottom; it was the thickest of the blankets but also the least comfortable for direct skin contact. Then the little red one with the teddy bear in the corner, and finally the blue blanket, the one that zipped around the front, spread out on top-

  “Isn’t this where Luke’s supposed to, y’know, start crying and we look at each other and do that sigh thing in unison…?”

  “What can I say,” Ellie smiled. “I bribed him with the emergency fiver.”

  Staring down at the layers of blankets he’d just spread in the centre of the room, he realised the snatches of conversation and fragments of domestic life flashing across his mind didn’t feel like fantasies, or daydreams. They were too mundane for that, too normal.

  They felt like memories.

  He straightened up. Ellie was staring at him with frank astonishment. Maggie was alternating between he and Ellie, the baby, and the blankets, as if she were trying to add something up none of whose component parts she particularly liked.

  “Did I do it right?” he said, keeping his voice level. “Steve told me where they were.”

  Ellie raised her eyebrows. “Either you didn’t hear him right, or Steve actually remembered the order right for the first time in, um, ever. But yeah, thanks…”

  He made his excuses and headed upstairs to the bathroom, supposedly for a piss, but really just to get somewhere that wasn’t in that room. Staring into the mirror in that tiny bathroom, looking around at the detritus of Ellie and Steve’s domestic bliss, the little baby seat that he knew little Aaron lolled semi-limply within when it was bath time, the plastic duckies, he had to fight down a wave of nausea that rolled over him.

  The revulsion wasn’t coming from the objects themselves; it was being produced from the rapid-fire sensations of déjà vu that were thudding through him like some sort of memorygasm, carrying his brain away from where he stood and sending it spinning off, making the room fuzzy and changed, just as small but formatted a little differently, and the bath seat wasn’t white it was yellow, yellow with little daisies on the side, and downstairs on the blankets were little Luke slept, he’d known where to get them and how they were ordered because he’d done that same routine a hundred, two hundred times…the bottles, Christ Almighty he could make Luke’s bottles in his sleep and often enough he had-

  Luke. Yes. LUKE.

  HIS NAME IS LUKE.

  That was why he’d stopped in his tracks when the little head had turned to look at him. He’d been expecting a different baby. Sure, Aaron had a look of Luke about him, but he wasn’t the same.

  He wasn’t his.

  And now he did throw up, hunched over the toilet, bile filling his mouth as the déjà vu coalesced from formless impressions and half-baked feelings to concrete things, to faces and dates and names and events. It overwhelmed him. His eyes filled with tears, and for a long moment he thought it inevitable that he would pass out from trying to wade through the overload.

  A knock at the bathroom door. Maggie’s voice. Asking if he was alright. Maggie. He’d almost had sex with her this morning. He would have done if she’d let him do it without a condom. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. But that wasn’t the worst.

  Ellie and Steve were together.

  The very thought was so patently absurd that for an instant he didn’t know whether to throw up again or bust out laughing, but the truth was that neither option was going to help him.

  He rewound his mind back, back to the last memory he had of what could be considered ‘reality’, if that word even still existed. The last two years of memories from this place were still there; but now rather than presenting themselves as the true history, he could see in his mind that they were overlaid on the previous version of his own reality, a superimposed image, a green screen. His entire life had be
en treated like a special effect.

  Anger. Yes, Jesus yes, anger felt so good. He needed to stop with the self-pity, stop with the wallowing and the crying and the throwing up in toilets. Enough with it.

  Bee. Bee and her warning. That was the last ‘real’ memory he had. Bee whose face had appeared at his car window just over an hour ago and had asked him - do you believe me now?

  She knew. She knew everything all along, and he’d been too fucking stupid and closed-minded to believe what had been in front of his own eyes.

  All of this flashed through his mind in a second, all of this and more; back to him came the synaesthesia, which somehow they’d stolen away along with Ellie and Luke. Why? Why take a neurological disorder?

  “I’m fine,” he called, forcing himself to his feet and to the sink. A bottle of mouthwash sat beside the cold tap. He knocked back a capful, swizzed and spat to rid his mouth of the remnants of puke.

  The important thing was that Ellie was here. Ellie was back, she wasn’t missing any more. Okay, technically in this wanky place she wasn’t his Ellie, but Jesus Christ at least she was alive; that was why he had been so enthralled, so tempted to wrap her up in his embrace the moment he set his eyes on her.

  It was time. He opened the bathroom door. “Sorry love,” he told Maggie. “Stomach upset. You’re right. Stress. Holiday needed.”

  “Do you want to go?” she said, in a tone of voice that suggested if he said yes she would not treat it as the worst piece of news in the world.

  “Go?” he said, shaking his head. “You joking? I can’t wait to get stuck in.”

  The Belly of the Whale

  It was a mistake. He’d known it had been all along. Somehow they’d gotten those reports mixed up with someone else, one of the other managers. He’d known it the moment they started talking about lost the respect of the staff. That wasn’t him! The staff loved him. Okay, maybe not love – definitely not in the sense of the disabled toilet’s extra curricular use – but they respected him and besides, it didn’t do to get too close to the troops, did it? You never knew when you might be called upon to give one of them the bad news. Best to keep a professional distance.

  “I’m here to see Mr Black?”

  “Go on in, Thomas,” said Sarah, flashing him a dazzling smile. “He’s expecting you.”

  In he went. It was drawing late – getting on for after half seven – and Sarah had been most apologetic for the time when she’d rang him to request he come in and speak to Mr Black to discuss his employment situation. He had jumped at the chance; literally jumped out of his chair in his eagerness. He’d still been wearing the work clothes from this morning when that little fucker Morrigan had given him the news.

  Despite the lateness of the hour though, the Chief Executive’s office was still stunning, the vista of Belfast just beginning to show pinpricks of illumination here and there, more winking into existence with each passing moment as entire streets’ worth of streetlights came online one after the other. He could see the lights of the ferry as it lumbered up the harbour away from the Lircom building, towering over the Belfast skyline.

  “Thomas. Do come in.”

  “Yes, sir,” Thomas gabbled, trying to calm down but not really managing it with any degree of success. He’d only been in here twice before and then it had been in a group with other junior managers. Standing in here alone, he was overwhelmed by it all.

  “Sit down,” the Chief Executive said, indicating the chair opposite his own. Thomas sat.

  “Excuse the hour, Thomas. But I didn’t want to risk leaving this until tomorrow morning in case anyone had headhunted you by then.”

  “Well,” Thomas sucked in a breath, “to be honest with you, sir, even by being here I’m probably breaking a verbal contract I had with Microsoft. They wanted me to come over and run one of their support divisions at headquarters.”

  The corner of Mr Black’s mouth twitched. “Oh?” he said. “In Redmond?”

  “No, sir, at their headquarters,” Thomas said patiently.

  Mr Black covered his mouth for a second, apparently to cough. “Yes, well,” he said. “I have a role for you.”

  “Management?”

  “...more testing than management. But definitely high-level testing, Thomas.”

  High level. Thomas almost fainted with ecstasy. “That sounds like quite a challenge,” he said.

  Mr Black’s smile faded. He was deadly serious now. “It’s vital,” he intoned gravely. “Pivotal, you might even go so far as to say. And the results of your analysis will be key. Of course to reflect the additional responsibility, we’ll have to bring you in as an executive. Seat on the Board...fifty thousand a year...company car. Would that suit you?”

  “Buh.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Thomas tried again. “Yuh,” he managed.

  Mr Black clapped his hands together. “Excellent! Let the records show you entered into this of your own volition. I’ll even text Mr Gates and let him know.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind Thomas – moving swiftly on! Let’s start right now with your duties, shall we?”

  He pressed a button on a remote control and the lights dimmed in the office. The inlaid LCD TV television flickered into life, though all it showed was a blue screen. The sound system surged into life also, and a voice began to drone. It sounded like...sounded like a voice he knew vaguely, from somewhere...

  “Fascinating things, networks,” Mr Black was saying.

  ...and it was telling him a story. About a king...and a witch...and her sons...and it was all very warm and very easy to listen to...almost...almost hypnotic in a way...

  “Amazing what sort of information they can be made to carry.”

  ...and the voice kept on, and even though he couldn’t make out the individual words behind it anymore, it was lovely, and melodious, and it seemed to wash over him time and again as if he were the shore and the voice the wave, coming and going...

  The voice stopped. Thomas did too. He simply sat there, breathing, but beyond that not moving, his eyes staring into the middle distance, his head slightly cocked to the side.

  “Take my pen.”

  Thomas took it. It was a fountain pen, ornate and heavy, and black ink dripped from its nib. Mr Black leaned forward in his seat until his features were thrown into relief by the light cast from the desk lamp. He was not wearing the mini-smile now.

  “Good, Thomas. Very good. Now, stab it into your neck.”

  Thomas did so. He felt the pain like he would have felt a gust of air from someone closing a door half an office away. Warmth spread across the fingers of his right hand, and he felt it grow harder and harder to breathe properly, so his breaths started to come in raggedy gasps. The sticky warmth was seeping all down the front of his body now.

  “Sarah,” Mr Black said, pressing a button on his desk intercom. “Can you come in here please?”

  Through fading vision Thomas saw a second figure enter the room and move to stand beside the Chief Executive, and at some distant level of his cognitive functions he had the thought that it was the first time he’d seen Sarah out from behind that desk.

  But, considering she had the lower half of a spider, perhaps that wasn’t that surprising.

  “Finish that off and clean it up, will you?” Mr Black said. “I think we can consider the network test a success.”

  “Right away, Mr Black,” Sarah said.

  Thomas’ eyes kept staring straight ahead as Sarah scuttled from beside Mr Black, all eight of her long legs covered in chitinous black interwoven plates of what looked like armour, stiff black hairs jutting out, hairs which rippled as she moved.