by M. T Hill
Up the wet stairs and into Finsbury Park’s tiled tunnels, glossy with condensate, the sheen and colour of wet teeth. The writing man is only just ahead now, and the second man has vanished. The manuscript case jangles under Remi’s armpit. Nothing is cohering.
‘Wait!’ Remi calls after them. The crowd thins out under North London’s surly sky. The big man doesn’t turn, much less waits. The man and his holdall, his jogging trousers; his work boots leaving dirty wet prints on the tiles.
‘How?’ Remi shouts. ‘How do you know her name?’
The man is outside on the concourse, sprinting now through the bus ranks, before walking again in a longer stride, seemingly focused on a place unknown. Remi watches him pull a large woollen hat over his head. Remi follows. ‘Wait!’ he shouts. ‘Wait!’
By a pub on the corner of a main road, the writing man turns at last. Their first proper eye contact: a moment of curious recognition, incomprehension. Remi is coming in fast, yet the man remains nonchalant. He rolls away as though preparing to throw a punch, but instead takes something small from his pocket, folds it quickly, and posts it through the grate of a wall-mounted ashtray. He lights a cigarette, takes a short drag, and posts that also.
Finally, the man steps off the pavement and into a waiting cab. Remi instantly unpockets and throws his bug into the air – ‘Shoot! Shoot it! Get the reg plate of that taxi, you little bastard!’
But the bug falls to the ground, wings inert and body dull.
5
Remi wavers in the Finsbury Park drizzle, the writing man gone. Now Martha returns to him from the recesses, the flooding drains and cobbled alleys. Of all the places, they’re in the old bathroom, her legs around his waist and belly, backside on his forearm, and she’s proudly repeating her newest word – teesss for teeth – laughing at herself, the tickling sibilant, and at Remi’s over-the-top movements as he uses his finger to demonstrate brushing. It’s painful to him, an old scar raised as they sometimes do in heat, picked at. It was always so bittersweet to watch Martha develop. The dissonance of completely loving a child so bright and fearless and full of potential, and yet having to second-guess who she might become, what might await her out there; what anyone her age might go on to do in the onrushing England, the irrupting future, where the jobs would change, or slip away, and the opportunities would all be so different, the stakes so much higher. All those evenings he sat there in Martha’s room feeding her from a bottle as she gently tapped his nose for comfort, he and Joan the entirety of her world. Remi would feed her milk as he read with his spare hand about new atrocities: the horror show of western Europe convulsing in some kind of pre-collapse; another vote going this way, another heart-deadening lurch that. The recession of empathy they had to witness and endure (some, of course, in more acute or violent ways than others). The triple threat of heat and war and high water. And Remi feels again the perverse relief he enjoyed in the months following her death. The release to know that, even though she’d gone, leaving an absence that completely anaesthetised them from the world, he’d never have to see his daughter heartbroken or sobbing or suffering. For every moment of beauty nested within her, for every moment of pride she had seeded in him, Remi would never have to watch Martha suffer the ignominies of adolescence, young adulthood or the otherwise unknowable – be that robots, riots or plain human wrath.
And yet, as the smell of burning paper fills him up, it’s the missing her that matters more. Her breath as she settled in for sleep, how it deepened yet softened as she drifted away. A small green boat, he would tell her. Lower the oars, Martha, and hear the rowlocks rattle. The sound of water will carry you. Later, when he was sure she had gone, how he would open and close the door in such a way as to not disturb her; knew so well the creaks of the landing, the stairs, every patch of carpet to avoid. He misses her sleep-smell and her impossibly tiny fingernails, the fine hairs of her neck, the way she would sneeze without a care in the world, then laugh with thick snot in her mouth, let it down her chin; and how she brought him his shoes and tried to put them on the wrong feet, squealing in frustration. Right here, he would give it all gladly to have her back. To know she’d had her shot at this life after all.
Remi picks up his bug and turns to the burning cigarette bin, damp and dismal in his Lycra. There’s no longer a way to get the manuscript to the publisher – although that seems incidental, a fact from a separate, parallel reality, and readily acceptable. This, here, this is what’s actually happening. His desire to know what the writing man posted in the cigarette bin is deep-set and much heavier: Remi wants – needs – to find it. Which the writing man clearly knew, too – else why would he have pushed in a burning cigarette, if not to eliminate choice? So now Remi’s self-conscious and agitating; there’s football chanting from the pub, and he can’t go in there asking for water for the bin – not in this state. In part because someone showing off, a few sheets to the wind, might take an interest in the manuscript case, but also because there simply isn’t time.
Remi swears breathlessly and kneels and scoops two hands of rainwater from the nearest puddle. He throws this silky grey water over the smouldering ashtray. A hiss, and a bloom of thick, sour smoke. The smell of wet cigarette butts is nauseating – a clogging, rot-sweetened smell, black in his mind as the tarry mulch he’d surely dig from the bottom of the bin.
Remi pushes his sleeve over his hand to lift the dirty ashtray lid – only not carefully enough. A masonry screw, perhaps already loose, works free from one corner. The whole unit swings towards him and flaps open, releasing a flurry of still-smouldering papers, butts and ash, the latter blowing directly into Remi’s face. Remi staggers back, gasping, his face caked and sticky with it. Only the sight of paper scraps blowing away prevents him from vomiting immediately; instead, he gags and swipes at his eyes, goes quickly to his knees to splash puddle water over his cheeks and forehead, and then tries his best to snatch the largest pieces of paper away from the pavement before the wind or wet can take them.
Remi doesn’t notice the men exiting the pub beside him. Only loosely does he hear someone calling him a ‘fucking scumbag’ while another man stands laughing at the spectacle of this bloodied and ash-dirty man rooting through the filth of a cigarette bin. Only vaguely does Remi suffer this humiliation. Because now in Remi’s hands is a tightly folded wad of thin paper, unfolded to reveal a small chit, and here the ash and the stench is meaningless, because there’s another message meant for him, and him only. He tries to stand, then tries again. He rocks on his knees. The message starts MARTHA, and he swallows a hard knot, and then he continues:
LEICESTER SQUARE
SSID: 394020
PASSWORD: theyearofourlord1812
Remi pushes off his knees and stands, sodden and thrilled and shivering, nose clogged with sourness. This message, this instruction, being the most he has felt about anything for the longest time.
‘Scored, then?’ one of the watching men ventures. Stretched Arsenal shirt, modish glasses, tight jeans.
Remi laughs over his shoulder. Whatever’s happening here – whatever this is – it’s a reminder of what it is to be relevant. And her name is all around him, and she’s everything, and Remi’s gaping holes are plugged for an instant.
Martha.
6
The manuscript case’s late-alarm finally dies as Remi ducks into the Tube, cutting its signal. Another courier once told him not to worry about it: these cases use the same tech you find in the watches rich men wear when they fly their single-seaters over rainforests, in case they go down.
Driven on by the note, by intrigue of what now seems like a deliberate, carefully planned operation (did they have a team following him – a whole network – or did they simply hack and track the package?), Remi boards a westbound Piccadilly Line train for Leicester Square. He stands in the vestibule, swaying with the carriage, aware of his body heat and the ash still remnant in his hair, in the creases of his neck, the crust on his clothes. He is otherwise apart f
rom the experience, watching the scene as though detached from his body.
He checks his phone – battery holding out but well below half charge – and then his bug by habit, shocked to find it still dead. With the train approaching King’s Cross, he can feel the approach of a Rubicon: a sense of falling over, or falling in. An event horizon only a few stops down the line, a few more brake squeals and handle squeezes, the engaging of otherwise unused muscles to stay upright. Maybe it’s that he already understands this will affect his life by some measure – even if that’s only because it might be the kind of story that in its retelling sounds ridiculous.
This whole train’s on countdown, Remi tells himself – and not one of them knows it.
Finally, the train bursts from the last stretch of tunnel before Leicester Square’s platform. Tangerine light and massed bodies in flammable-looking winter coats. Remi holds up the chit of paper, floppy now owing to his clammy hands, and digs deep into his phone’s settings. He switches the Wi-Fi function to manual search.
The train doors open. Remi pauses briefly as he recognises the northern accent of a staffer on the platform, begging people to let passengers off the train before they board. The phone does its thing: the nearest Wi-Fi networks scroll into the list, but none of them look anything like the one on Remi’s chit. Frowning, he refreshes and refreshes the settings. Nothing. A few official-sounding TFL networks, a partially masked SSID, and what looks like a temporary hub for a jobbing utilities or civil engineering firm. Not the SSID from the chit.
Then the doors start to close, and Remi wants to be sick. What if this is it? A cruel prank in which he’s setting up the reveal, the punchline, as himself?
No. It’s enough to recognise that people have been tracking him. There’s intent, calculation.
As the train slides out of the station, Remi tries one final time – turning his phone’s Wi-Fi off and on again. To his horror, the movement of his thumb – the switch – coincides with a grim jolt near the front of the train. The emergency brake sends him reeling. His system dumps adrenaline. His elbow almost overextends, so he automatically releases the handle and staggers into the person next to him. The train judders to a pause, leaving the carriage most of the way out of the station, and all of its passengers in near-darkness.
A hush. A shared psychosis, the whole carriage questioning what just happened. Wondering if the jolt was caused by something worse than a bag or scarf caught in a door farther down the train.
Remi’s phone vibrates in his hand. He almost drops it. A new SSID has appeared on the screen, and he holds up the chit to compare the number.
Connect.
Password.
Remi fills out both fields with dizzying imprecision, weak at every joint. Despite himself, he gets the password in first time.
Now, an interstitial page loading slowly. Dark, with a line of pixelated white text at the top, which resolves quickly to CLICK HERE. The carriage has all but dissolved into negative space. Remi stands in a blank room, bounded by nothing.
The loading circle sputters. The next page loads in agonising increments. It’s an image. Low quality, full of blocky distortions owing to compression. A slice of background, a sliver of hair. A hint of eyebrow. A single, questioning eye.
Remi clutches his face and kneads the soft spots beneath his ears. His throat is full.
The page finishes loading. It’s a picture of her – of Martha – staged as an old school portrait. He squints. Her face has been subtly altered. Her hair isn’t blond, or at least how he remembers it. The longer he looks, the more he’s certain: the whole image has been manipulated to make Martha look older than her seven years. This isn’t the little girl they buried – it’s an impression of Martha: taller, leaner. Martha as the young woman he dreaded her becoming.
The image winks out. In its place flows a scree of figures and characters like those he watched the man plot in his squared-paper pad. Then the text edits itself down to a single line, animated to flash like an old-fashioned GIF.
ALIGHT.
ADHERE.
Next thing the screen is plastered with red crosses. Dumbfounded, with the sensation of drifting despite his standing still, Remi obediently presses the screen. It blackens instantly.
Remi pockets his phone and looks up at the roof of the carriage, blinking. They hadn’t moved, had they? He twists and repositions his feet. The train is clicking quietly, unpowered. Murmuring along the carriage. Glaring lights – passengers using their phone torches. The carriage aisle is filled with ghosts, blue-skinned and milky-eyed.
‘What’s this all about?’ someone asks Remi directly. A smartly dressed man in a trilby peers at him from behind a tablet. The kind of man you’d have seen down here a hundred years before.
Remi blinks back at him. He doesn’t know, apart from the inescapable sense that using the Wi-Fi switch also turned off the train. He lowers his eyes. Too alarming a thought. And yet the idea persists like tinnitus – a keening in his inner ear that tells him he’s in some way responsible.
‘Power went,’ Remi offers. ‘I mean, I reckon.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ a woman chimes in. ‘This country!’
Remi gives both of them a lost expression and fixates on his shoes, then at the manuscript case poking out from his armpit.
‘Here, someone’s coming,’ someone else says. ‘Out there, see?’
They’re right. Outside, elongated by torchlight, shadows stalking the tunnel walls. A work crew, perhaps, or a team of first responders. There comes a deep, rhythmic clanging, very internal and mechanical, like sounds from the bowels of an old ship, and then the carriage doors grind open.
‘Single file,’ one of their rescuers shouts. ‘Get tight into the wall – you can worry about your clothes later.’
Remi is quickly swept into the dismounting crowd. Quick – that’s about right. The whole day has been quick. Someone wearing a head torch helps Remi down from the step, where he stands on a material like shingle. The man’s torchlight illuminates the bow of the tunnel ahead. Blackened bricks and impossibly green flora. Someone asking if this was terrorists. A young child sobbing gently. The urge to run a finger along the filthy wall, leave a record of his being here. A tiny marker that might, on finding it later, prove to him all this had really happened. He looks across at the rails, three strips of wire suspended in uncertain light, and wonders what it might be like to touch the live one. Would you even know you’d touched it?
‘Single file!’ someone shouts. ‘For your safety and ours!’
Remi leans further into the black walls, watching silvery particles rolling, disturbed by the steady stream of bedraggled travellers. They pass the driver’s cabin, and inside the driver is staring dead ahead, paused in the strangeness.
As Remi falls into the rhythm of the march, he tries to think reasonably about the picture of Martha, the awareness he’s being toyed with, somehow. At some point someone’s hand has risen to guide him from behind, and now he lifts his own to guide the woman in front. Maybe he’s done something heinous, he thinks, and he’s about to be outed or punished for it. But why? That he’s been targeted is obvious. For what purpose is a bigger question. He’s gripped by it, by the excitement and the keen paranoia; aroused and alive at the thought of being exceptional enough, or so unremarkable as to be anonymous – a perfect asset to someone, or an agent, or maybe the ideal folly.
Who, then? And how do they know about his daughter? Why have they made her look older?
Remi’s head is full to bursting again. Martha, flickering, an archive of film rushes running through an old projector. He can hear his blood. His stomach feels burned out. As the sallow light of London begins to leach into the tunnel ahead, it’s all Remi can do to close his eyes and let his head hang slack; let the people around him reveal the city, return him to the natural level, and help him to normalcy, away from these last hours.
Then he remembers what he left the house for. He grips the dead bug in his pocket and then
the manuscript case. No two ways about it: an insurance write-off is pretty much the only thing that’ll keep the literary agent happy, and Remi in a job. He releases the hand of the woman in front and tears away the manuscript case’s tracker pod, its alarm chip, and throws these components sideways. They bounce into the pit below the central rail. The manuscript he’ll keep hold of. He can deliver it anonymously as lost-and-found when it suits him, or at least when he’s next up Walthamstow way.
‘I was dazed after being knocked off my bike,’ he’ll tell the client, affecting a tone of concern and regret. ‘The envelope was damaged. Someone rifled my pockets and took my things. I don’t remember what happened – it happened so quickly.’
And then he’ll show them his bug footage of the driverless car, and they’ll believe him. And London, their savage city, will churn on.
7
Remi walks home to his apartment in fine rain, a million white cuts on the bitter wind. As he goes, he is with her, his chest burning with her, and he musters more of the past: Martha being little and chatty, four or five, and them visiting Remi’s parents in France. She’s playing outside in their garden, old enough at last to be left unsupervised for longer periods of time. ‘Papa,’ she’d called to him, squatting over the rough lawn as if she needed to pee. And Remi had gone to Martha, who revealed to him a pile of dead flies, each of them wingless. ‘What are they doing like this?’ she asked him. And Remi couldn’t say, felt ill looking at them. In truth, he couldn’t be certain she hadn’t committed this herself. ‘Let me fetch you a dustpan,’ he said in loose French, and he swallowed once before he went inside. When he returned, Martha was laughing hysterically. There was a length of knotty brown string running across the patio stones, and Martha was skipping madly over it, back and forth, back and forth, totally rapt. As Remi approached she squealed, ‘Papa!’ and when Remi squatted to look closely he saw that the string was in fact a long line of ants. They were carrying the wingless flies into a wall. ‘They cooperate!’ Martha told him. ‘They work together as a team!’