Erased

by Nick Gifford

  There had been all kinds of reasons for putting it off.

  But he could never have expected this...

  ~

  New Chapel Road was just as it had always been. The houses set back from the street behind tidy front gardens. The cars neatly slotted into their drives, each one shining as if it had had a Saturday morning wash and polish. The doves cooing from the trees and the rooftops.

  Liam could almost find himself believing that nothing had happened.

  The three eucalyptus trees flickered silvery-white in the breeze.

  With a rising sense of dread, Liam crunched across the gravel drive. It was then that he realised why the front of the house seemed so bare. There were no curtains in the windows.

  He stopped and peered into the front room.

  It was empty. Stripped. There was no furniture. No carpets on the floor, no pictures on the wall. Not even a light-shade over the bare bulb.

  He went to the door, but his key did not fit the shiny new Yale lock.

  There were no windows at the side for him to look in, but he saw that the old trailer had gone. The back lawn was freshly cut. It had been shaggy and in need of a trim only the day before, a job his mother always put off and which Liam often ended up doing.

  He peered into the kitchen, and it had been similarly stripped out. Even the units had gone, replaced by new ones with creamy white doors and metal handles. Liam stepped back, suddenly wondering whether he had come to the right house, the right street.

  There was a tennis ball lodged in the gutter. Liam had knocked it there two weeks before, when he had been home for the bank holiday weekend. He had been playing tennis against the back wall and skied one.

  He came back to the front and there was a man there, Mr Mendes from next door. Mr Mendes had always been a bit frightening, the kind of neighbour who had a shed full of children’s balls that had ended up in his garden. Right now, he seemed a welcome and familiar figure.

  “Hey,” Mr Mendes called, as Liam emerged. “What are you doing here?”

  Liam looked at him, open-mouthed. He realised that his neighbour was staring at him like a complete stranger.

  “I ...”

  “Go on, get out of there. I’ll get the police onto you. There’s Neighbourhood Watch, you know.”

  Mr Mendes didn’t have a clue who Liam was.

  Liam looked from his neighbour to the house, and then back again. “Who ... who lives here? I thought...”

  “It’s empty, isn’t it?” said Mr Mendes. “As I expect you saw. Not for long, though. New tenants moving in tomorrow. I hope they’re better than the last lot.”

  “The last?”

  “Bloomin’ Pakis,” said Mr Mendes. “Don’t want their lot round here. Or yours. Go on, get out of there. I’ll call the police.”

  Liam walked past him, still stunned by what was happening. He felt like just sitting down in the middle of the pavement and giving up. What more could the world throw at him? How much more could he cope with?

  ~

  It was well into the afternoon now, and Liam hadn’t eaten since the breakfast Kath had cooked for him. He stopped at the market and bought a bag of chips. Around him, people talked and laughed and hurried about their business. He went and sat on some steps.

  He was beginning to think that the police station had been the wrong kind of institution for him to visit this morning. He should have gone to the hospital and told them that the things he knew no longer matched the real world. He was sane enough to know that this was completely mad.

  He was on his way back to Kath’s flat. He knew that was where he would end up. But he didn’t want to hurry. He wanted to put it off, delay everything as long as possible. He had the horrible feeling that when he got there and rang on the bell a complete stranger would come to the door and ask who he was. Piece by piece, his life was being erased.

  He took his phone out, yet again. No messages. He tried his mother, his father, and all he got was their answering services.

  He didn’t dare try Kath. He wanted her still to be there. He didn’t want to get the dead line that might hint that she too had been removed from his life.

  ~

  A man was waiting in a white Volvo outside Kath’s flat. The street was always heavily parked-up, but all the other cars were empty. Why would this man be sitting in his car unless he was waiting, or watching? He wore a dark suit and tie, and had dark glasses obscuring his eyes.

  He saw Liam and immediately picked up a mobile phone and thumbed a number.

  Liam walked on and considered just keeping going. But what about Kath? He should warn her. But he could call her on his mobile rather than going right up to the flat.

  He hesitated and then it was too late.

  The door to Kath’s flat opened, and another dark-suited man stood smiling at Liam. He was tall and thin, and deathly pale. “Hello,” he said. “You must be Liam. Come in, come in. Your sister’s upstairs. She said you’d be along shortly. Come in, what are you waiting for?”

  A car door thunked shut, and he heard footsteps approach and stop just behind him.

  “Who are you?” said Liam. “What are you doing here?”

  The man was still smiling. “I’m Mr Smith,” he said. “And my colleague behind you is another Mr Smith, although we’re not related. We’re investigating your parents’ disappearance, Liam. We’re here to help.”

  “You’re with the police?”

  The man nodded. “We’re part of the official investigation.”

  But there was no official investigation, according to DC Parker earlier. The police knew nothing about it. Liam remembered his first encounter with the “policeman” at his home. “Do you have ID?” he asked.

  The first Mr Smith nodded but made no move to show it.

  Liam looked up to the living room window. Kath was there, watching them. He raised his eyebrows and she jerked her head, telling him to come up, stop messing around.

  Liam slumped his shoulders, dropped his head, and trudged in past Mr Smith at the door. He didn’t know what was going on. He wished it would all just stop. As he started to climb the stairs the front door shut behind him, and then he heard Mr Smith following him up.

  There was another man in the room, wearing a similar dark suit to the two Smiths. His grey hair was thin on top, and he wore thick, black-framed glasses. He was sitting on the sofa, keying something into a notebook computer. He barely glanced up as Liam and the first Mr Smith entered.

  Liam looked at Kath and she smiled at him. “You okay?” she asked.

  He shrugged.

  “These men,” she continued. “They’re looking for Mum and Dad.”

  “And you, Liam,” added Mr Smith. “We were concerned when your sister said that you had gone off on your own in the city. You should be cautious at such a difficult time. At least, until we know the fate of your parents.”

  That phrase had an ominous ring: “the fate of your parents”.

  “Where are they?” said Liam. “What’s going on?”

  “Sit down, Liam,” said the man with the computer, waving a hand towards the other end of the sofa. The man had a soft voice and a Scottish accent. “We want to talk to you. We want to find out what’s happened.”

  “Who are you?”

  The man stared at Liam as he sat. “You don’t need to know who we are, lad. We’re members of Special Intelligence, an agency which reports to the Home Office. We look after people like you. Let’s leave it at that.”

  Special agencies ... what did the Government have to do with all this?

  Liam didn’t like the man’s stare, but he found that he couldn’t look away. He was like a rabbit, transfixed by a car’s headlights. He felt dizzy, felt as if the room was rushing around him. It took all his concentration to steady himself. How did the man do that?

  “I went to the house,” Liam said. He felt the need to talk, to win these men’s trust. It would be good if they were on his and Kath’s side. “Home. This morning.
Someone had cleared it. Since yesterday. Everything was gone. The curtains, the furniture, the carpets, the pictures and books and kitchen units. They’ve mowed the lawn, although they didn’t do the edges. They’ve wiped out any sign that we ever lived there. Apart from the tennis ball.” He chuckled at that. “The one I hit up into the gutter a couple of weeks ago.”

  He stopped to gather himself. Mr Smith gave him a glass of water and he took it, sipped, put it down on the coffee table. “Our next door neighbour came round and found me. Mr Mendes. ‘Mental Mendes’ – remember, Kath? He didn’t know me. He didn’t recognise me. Everything’s been wiped away... Even in Mr Mendes’ head. What’s going on?”

  The two men exchanged a glance, and then the Scot spoke. “It’s an erasure,” he said. “They’ve removed any evidence that your parents existed. It’s going to make them very hard to track down, lad.”

  Liam looked at him. He could see himself reflected in the man’s thick glasses. “Who are ‘they’?” he asked, not sure if he wanted to know the answer. “Why would they want my parents erased? Why is a Government agency investigating this?”

  “You don’t need to know, Liam.”

  Liam nodded. It seemed fair enough that these men from Special Intelligence should only tell him what he needed to know. He felt that very strongly, all of a sudden.

  “We want to know how you are, Liam. We were concerned. We thought you were in your sister’s protection, but she let you out into the city.” As he said this, he darted a look at Kath, then returned his gaze to Liam. “So how are you coping? You’re under a lot of stress, right now, aren’t you?”

  Liam shrugged. “I’m okay,” he said.

  “Come here,” the man said. “Lean closer.”

  Liam did so. The man reached up and ran a hand over Liam’s scalp. He nodded. Then he put something to Liam’s left eye, a kind of frame that sat in the eye socket, holding a lens that made everything blur. A face loomed close, black-framed eyes suddenly snapping into focus, magnified so that every tiny movement looked seismic.

  The man sat back, removing the device from Liam’s eye. He keyed something into his notebook. “Everything seems stable so far,” he said to the first Mr Smith, who was watching intently from the doorway.

  “What’s all this got to do with ... with what’s happened?” asked Liam. He felt a little detached from what was going on, as if he was watching it happen rather than taking part.

  “Everything,” said the man in the glasses. “It has everything to do with it, lad. Everything connects, even the unconnected. You’d be surprised.”

  The man snapped his computer shut. “We want you to stay here, Liam. Do you understand? And if anything happens, we’ll talk again.”

  “But... how do I let you know if anything happens?”

  The man smiled, the first time he had done so. “Oh, Liam, don’t you worry about that. If we’re needed we’ll be on hand. We always are.”

  His gaze locked into Liam’s for one last time. “I think you need to get some rest now, Liam. You’ve had a lot of excitement today. You need to re-gather yourself.”

  Liam nodded. The man was right. His words, in their soft Scottish tone, made perfect sense. Liam’s eyelids were heavy, too heavy to hold open.

  The man stood, and helped Liam swing his legs up onto the sofa. Moments later, Liam was in darkness again.

  5 Out on your own

  Liam slept. He curled up on the sofa with his knees tucked under his chin, his hands shoved into his face. Babies in the womb curl up in this way. It’s the most compact, tidy way for them to fit into such a confined space. Animals in shock curl up like this, too. It’s a defence mechanism, a way of trying to shut out the horrors of the world and retreat into a safe, sheltered, enclosed space.

  ~

  Liam woke, stiff and aching. He had been curled up tightly on the sofa, a position he didn’t like, one which made him uncomfortable.

  The flat was in gloom, the curtains drawn even though it was still light outside. Kath had the radio on in the kitchen, voices talking in tinny, scratchy tones.

  Liam took his phone from his pocket and flipped it open. Still nothing.

  He stretched, his legs poking out over the end of the sofa. He remembered Mr Mendes at the house, the look on his face... the complete lack of recognition. The empty house, talk of new tenants. How could there be new tenants when Liam’s parents owned the house? He remembered the shock as DC Parker told him that there was no record of any police investigation into what had happened at Liam’s home the day before. And the Special Intelligence men here, the two Mr Smiths and the nameless Scot who seemed to be in charge.

  At this, Liam stiffened and levered himself upright. He peered around the room, but it was empty now. No sign of this afternoon’s visitors. He settled back into the sofa.

  All these incidents... Everything that had happened over the last two days seemed like scenes from a bad dream, a fevered hallucination.

  Maybe he had just woken up from it.

  But he knew that couldn’t be true. If it was, then why wake up here and not back at home, or even back at NATS?

  Everything seemed detached. Unreal. He wondered again if he had gone mad. There was that buzzing in his head again, that sense of the world closing in.

  He got up, and went through to the kitchen where Kath sat on the high wooden stool, idly flicking through a magazine. She looked up, and smiled awkwardly.

  “I’m hungry,” said Liam. He found it hard to say much more.

  She nodded. She was looking after him. She made him some food – beans, microwave chips, an omelette – and brought it through to him in the living room. She watched as he ate it, and afterwards he felt calmer again. This was what they called comfort-eating, he supposed. Food to settle the jangly state of his thoughts. Food to straighten his head.

  ~

  He woke again, and it was morning.

  He remembered the evening, another awkward time of a few exchanged words, of two people uncomfortable together. Familiar, yet strangers.

  And the night. Dozing and waking, over and over, unsettled by the streetlamp and the noises of the city. Kath had been awake through the night, too. He could tell. He remembered the previous night, her outburst, her hatred. Nights seemed to be worst for her. She seemed more exposed at night.

  She cooked him breakfast again. They hardly exchanged a word. It was as if they had exhausted all their small talk and had run out of anything more substantial to say.

  Afterwards, calmer, he gathered his things into his weekend bag.

  Kath leaned by the window, half looking out into the street and half watching Liam. “What are you doing?” she said.

  “I’m going back to school. It’s Sunday. I have to be back by six. I might as well go this morning.”

  She looked anxious, eyes widening. “You can’t,” she told him. “You heard what they said. You have to stay here, with me, until this is all over.”

  “What is there to wait here for?” said Liam. In the night he had realised that Kath wasn’t the only thing in his life left ... un-erased. There was NATS, too. There were Anders and Hayley and all the others. Skiver, too. “If I don’t get back on time they’ll mark it against me. I can’t get kicked out of NATS.” He had been about to add that she must know how easy it was to get turned out of NATS if you don’t make the grade, but he stopped himself.

  “You can’t go back to that place,” said Kath. “NATS is the last place you want to be right now. Ever.”

  Her failure at NATS still hurt, clearly.

  “They want me,” said Liam. “I belong there.”

  That hurt her. No-one at NATS woke in the night to tell him how they couldn’t stand him to be around.

  He checked his wallet for his return ticket.

  Kath hadn’t moved from the window. “They’ll be watching,” she said. “They’ll be looking out for you.”

  “Who?” said Liam. “Who are ‘they’, Kath? What do they want with us?”
/>
  She shrugged. “They were here yesterday, weren’t they? Special Intelligence. They told you they were always around. Look out for yourself, littl’un, you hear?”

  She still stood by the window. She wasn’t going to come across the room. No goodbyes, no farewell hugs. She couldn’t stand to be near him.

  Liam nodded. “Look after yourself, too,” he said. He didn’t understand, but he knew his sister had problems of her own. The night terrors, the erratic behaviour, the pills. He slung his bag from his shoulder, and took his phone from his pocket. “I’ll call if I hear anything,” he said.

  She nodded. “Me too.”

  She stayed by the window as he went to the doorway, then he was heading down the narrow staircase to the front door.

  Outside, on his own, he was aware that she was watching from above but he didn’t look up. He paused by the door and looked along the street. It was thickly parked up as usual, but there was no sign of the white Volvo, no sign of anyone sitting in a car, watching and waiting.

  He ducked his head and went out, across the road to the far pavement. Walking along towards Unthank Road, he glanced back but Kath was no longer visible in the window.

  ~

  He waited for a long time outside the station, watching the taxis arriving and leaving, the people heading to and from their cars. The station had a grand entrance, a brick extension with stone-edged arches where taxis picked up and dropped off passengers. Up above this entrance, the clock hands edged round.

  This was the only way in. It would be easy for them – whoever they really were – to watch.

  He waited until another taxi arrived, and while its passengers climbed out and sorted out their bags, Liam ducked his head and darted through into the station. He stopped by a cluster of telephone booths and looked around anxiously. Nothing.

  He felt a bit foolish, then. Was all this cloak and dagger stuff really necessary? Why would anyone be watching for him?