by Nick Gifford
“Do you have any other means of contacting the world? E-mail? IRC?”
Liam nodded. “E-mail,” he said.
“Come with me.”
Liam followed his host through the house to the dining room again. Alastair’s notebook PC was plugged into the wall. Alastair stooped to do something, and a few seconds later Liam heard the tone-dialling and then whine and crackle of a modem shaking hands with the world.
“There,” said Alastair. “All yours.”
Liam sat at the table and looked at the desktop icons. He found Internet Explorer and started it up, then typed the URL of his webmail service.
“Welcome Guest,” it told him. “New user? Register now. Existing user: type username _____ password _____. Lost your password?”
He typed his username, liamconnor34, and his password, c4n4r1es.
“INVALID ENTRY,” it told him. “USER NOT KNOWN. New user? Register now.”
He tried again, with the same result.
Alastair had been watching over his shoulder. He put a hand gently on Liam’s back. “Well,” he said. “It looks like you’ve been erased too, lad.”
~
Liam stood at the window, watching the rain.
“This could be their biggest mistake,” said Alastair, from the table. He had been tapping away on his notebook computer, but now he snapped it shut, and sat back with his hands interlocked behind his head. “I’ve just checked a few directories and databases I can get into. There’s no trace of you, Liam. No trace of you or your parents. You’re a non-person. No background, no ties. You’re nobody. You’re nameless. Your only current existence is here, in number three, The Coastguards, Wolsey, Suffolk. You could be anyone you want to now. We could create a new identity for you. We’re good at that. I’ve been two other people, myself.”
Liam said nothing.
They were offering him freedom. A blank page.
But it would mean accepting all the losses. Saying goodbye forever to any chance of seeing his parents again, to Kath and to his friends stuck at NATS. It would mean drawing a line under them all.
This man was offering him normality and Liam realised that he did not want that any more. He could not accept it, after glimpsing the depths that lay behind what was, for most people, the normal, everyday world.
And there was the small matter of the little white pills. These people would always have a hold over him.
Normality ... freedom ... they were all an illusion. A gift offered, only to be snatched away when the puppetmaster decreed. He would never be free if he accepted gifts like this. The only real freedom was that which he could create for himself.
He turned to face Alastair.
“No,” he said. “I want to do things on my own terms now. I’m fed up with being pushed around. Can I borrow your phone? I want to talk to my sister.”
“That’s a very bold decision, lad,” said Alastair. “Most people, having seen what you have, would run a mile.” He reached into his trouser pocket and produced a mobile. He opened it and slid it across the table towards Liam. “You’ll find her number under ‘K’ for Katherine.”
~
In the front room again, Liam studied Alastair’s mobile. He found the phonebook, then found Katherine’s number. Call? it asked him. He pressed the “okay” button and listened to the tones as it dialled.
What to say?
He understood. That would be enough.
He understood and he wanted to come up to Norwich and talk.
Whatever. They had to learn to talk to each other some time, and that time might as well be now.
The phone was picked up on the third ring. A man’s voice answered. “Hello?” it said. “Who’s that?”
For an instant, Liam thought Alastair must have the wrong number for Kath stored in his phone. “Erm, it’s me,” he said. “Liam. I was–”
“Liam! Are you okay? Where are you? Listen, Liam, are you okay?”
It was his father.
Liam realised he had taken the phone away from his ear and was just staring at it in amazement.
“Liam. Are you still there?”
“Dad... What happened? Where’s Mum? Are you with Kath?”
“I’m okay, Liam. We’re all okay. Listen, can you get here? Where are you? I can’t talk now. Come to Kath’s place, okay? Will you do that, Liam?”
“I’ll get there, Dad.”
“Good, good. Hang on in there, Liam. Things aren’t always what they appear, but we’ll get through all this together, okay? Can you make it this afternoon?”
“I’ll be there.”
~
“You want to go to Norwich?”
Liam nodded. “I know you’ve helped me a lot already, and I don’t have any right to ask for more. But I don’t have enough money for the train. And ... I need the medication.”
Alastair studied him closely. “What if Katherine doesn’t want to talk to you?”
“I’ll handle that if I have to,” said Liam. He had said nothing about the conversation with his father. They didn’t need to know.
“You’re a one for bold decisions, aren’t you?”
Alastair opened his attache case and took out a plastic pot. He thumbed the lid open and tipped it, with a finger over the opening to control the flow of tablets. He tipped out seven pills onto the table top. “A week’s worth,” he said. He took a small brown envelope and a pen from a pocket in the lid of the case and wrote down a phone number. “One a day,” he said. “They deaden your sensitivities. NATS only want any talents to emerge in a closely controlled environment. Don’t be tempted to take more if things get tough. And don’t try to get yourself off them – you’re well and truly hooked. That’s one of the ways they control us. That’s my phone number. I want you to phone me before you run out. I want to know where you get to and I want to be able to extract you if you get into trouble. Do you understand?”
Liam nodded. He had a week.
Alastair took out a wallet, licked a finger and peeled off five twenties. “Enough?” he said. “That should cover your train and anything else you run into. If not, call. Okay?”
Liam nodded. “Thanks,” he said. He meant it. Whatever Alastair was up to, here in this cottage on the beach, he had just bought Liam’s passage back to his family.
“A word of advice, lad. There are no bystanders in this game. None. Everyone is either a player or a victim.”
Liam nodded. “I think I’d just about realised that,” he said.
~
He was back in Norwich by mid-afternoon. All the time on the train he had studied his fellow passengers. Were any of them players, or were they all victims, trapped in an illusion of normality?
He was excited, he realised.
He was astounded to think how many upheavals and awful shocks he had been through in the last few days.
And here he was, riding the train home. On his way to see Dad and, he hoped, Mum. And his big sister, with whom he now had some kind of deep connection. He felt like a little boy again.
He looked a mess, he knew. He’d had a wash at 3, The Coastguards, but he still looked like someone who had been sleeping rough.
The taxi driver gave him a funny look, but he didn’t grumble when Liam waved a twenty-pound note and gave him Kath’s address. They stopped and started through the city traffic, and Liam grew impatient. He wanted to be there.
He paid the driver and went over to Kath’s front door, peering up at the first-floor window in case they were there, looking down.
A folded-over note was pinned to the wood:
Liam.
Working till 5 @ KidActive round the corner. See you there?
Liam had noticed the nursery before. He remembered wondering why they always had to have such dumb names.
He knocked on the door. Kath might be out, but it wasn’t his sister he’d come to see.
No reply.
He checked the note again, then turned on his heel and strode back down the road.
~
It was an ordinary detached house, set back from the street, with a long front garden. Some children were playing a ball game on the lawn while a young woman watched. She looked at Liam, quizzically.
“I’m Kath’s brother,” he said. “She told me to come and find her here. Is that okay?”
Absently, the woman nodded towards the house. “They’re all inside,” she said.
Just then, the ball rolled past Liam’s feet. Instinctively, he trapped it, flipped it up with his toe and side-footed it back to a small blonde girl. She laughed and kicked at it, missing completely.
Liam smiled at her, and walked up the long, straight path to the front door. He felt good. Relaxed.
The door was partly open, and he knocked, then pushed at it.
He entered a gloomy corridor. Two rows of coat-hooks lined one wall, with tiny coats crowding for space. Excited, high-pitched laughter came through the open door of the room on his right.
Liam stood in the doorway and looked in.
Kath was there, squatting next to a small boy, helping him with his shoe. The boy had a hand in her hair, stroking it like a comfort blanket.
Liam had never seen such a look on his sister’s face. This was her element. She was a natural here. Maybe those sensitivities they had never quite managed to kill off gave her a special understanding with these children.
That reminded him of what else Alastair had claimed: that Kath had been sterilised. Stop her breeding. Stop her from extending her bad blood-line. It sounded like some kind of Nazi project from the last century: controlling the breeding of those seen as inferior.
“Okay then,” said Kath, straightening. “Who wants to sing another song?”
There was a chorus of enthusiastic children’s voices.
She glanced across, just then, and saw Liam. She nodded, then looked away, thrown off her stride. Liam told himself that he shouldn’t feel disappointed. It was unreasonable to expect everything to be fine between them the moment he turned up.
“Okay then,” said Kath, to her class. “London’s Burning? Okay then. Here we go. Remember your three groups, Lions, Tigers and Leopards? Just the Lions first of all.”
She started them singing.
“London’s burning, London’s burning...”
As the first group moved on to “Fire fire! Fire fire!” Kath pointed at a second group and they started with the first line. Liam remembered singing this when he was little. He’d loved this song, loved the battling voices, the clash of words, the way the tunes of the different lines interlocked.
“Pour on water, pour on water.” The third group joined in with the first line, as the second sang the second line and the first the third line.
“And again...”
The cacophony of high-pitched voices scattered around the right tune, singing three different stages of the same song simultaneously was quite astounding. It was an exciting sound. An exhilarating one.
Liam had to hold onto the door-frame, the sensations made him so dizzy, the sounds swirling around his head, holding him, transfixing him.
“Liam! You made it.”
“Dad.” He didn’t even have to turn to know that it was his father who had come to stand at his shoulder. “It’s...”
“Liam, son. I’m sorry. But this is for your own good. You’re better off in our protection than charging around like a mad thing.”
He turned, and saw that his father was not alone. Standing with him was the fake policeman from the house, the one with the thin face, the ever-present fuzz of stubble, the always-moving, twitching eyes. And with him, the other policeman, the one from the station. DC Parker.
Parker smiled, said, “We get everywhere, don’t we? Our kind.”
Everyone is either a player or a victim.
“And again...”
The noise filled his head. But something else was there, too. A presence. A pressure.
He wanted to run, but that presence would not allow him to move.
He wanted to lash out. He wanted to beat his father with his fists, demand to know why he had betrayed him like this. But the presence smothered him, stopped him from doing anything.
It started to slow down his thoughts, too. Snuff them out, one by one, until he was still seeing but everything was just shapes, patterns of light and dark. The shapes weren’t even people because his mind was blank, incapable of doing anything with the information his eyes sent to his brain.
And then: blackness.
11 Under the knife
Fear can be a powerful thing. If something scares you, it will stick in your memory for a long time. If something really scares you, scares you in a life-threatening, serious trauma kind of way, then its lesson will be imprinted on your mind in a far more fundamental way: a subconscious thing, a lesson learnt in ways that affect your gut reactions, not mere memories of events.
If something scares you even more than that, then it can start the job of rewiring the person that you are.
~
Darkness.
Darkness and movement. A shaking, forward motion. Lying on his back, but moving headfirst. Shaking, rattling.
Sound too, then. Rattling and an occasional, muffled drone of a voice like a slowed-down tape.
Liam was lying on his back, on some kind of trolley, being wheeled somewhere.
Thoughts struggled through his mind. Slow thoughts, as if each was weighed down, or pushing through mud.
Mud in his head.
The creek. Jake’s head, drifting slowly from side to side in the current. Slow, like Liam’s thoughts. Smiling. What was there to smile about?
A distant chorus of young voices. Singing London’s Burning. Kath’s look. Guilt. Betrayal.
Dad...
He opened his eyes.
A circular light on the ceiling, above him, moving down towards his feet, then gone. Glimpses of wall to his left, with noticeboards, pieces of paper stuck there with drawing pins and staples. Wood panelling to his right, dark wood with a deep, deep polish. A door, of the same dark wood, then it, too, was gone.
It looked like one of the corridors in the main NATS building. Why would they have brought him here?
There was a thud and a dragging sound, and the trolley slowed sharply. Swing doors. They clattered against the sides of Liam’s trolley, then a hand reached forward from somewhere near Liam’s feet to push one door away again.
This room was darker, and there were what looked like surgical gowns hanging from hooks on one wall. It smelt like ... that hospital smell...
They went through some more swing doors and stopped. The light was brighter again, here. Too bright, when you were lying on your back looking up at a bank of harsh lamps above you.
There were more people in this place, several different voices. A hum of machinery.
A man moved into view just then. He was wearing a mint green gown with a cloth mask over the lower part of his face and a white surgical hood tied at the back, covering his greying hair. He glanced at Liam, then turned away, intent on whatever it was that he was doing.
Liam bucked his body, trying to sit up, to get to his feet, to run.
He couldn’t.
He was strapped down.
He arched his neck so that he could look down his own body. Two black straps stretched across his chest, with more pinning down his arms and legs.
He was naked. And he was strapped down in an operating theatre. He didn’t dare think about what was to come next.
~
For a long time, none of them seemed particularly interested in him, and he lay there, body rigid, straining at the straps.
A hand came into view from the right, pushing his head back down. Then another strap was passed across his forehead and pulled tight. Someone pushed two cold, hard blocks against his face from either side, so that finally his head was locked in position. The only parts of his body he could move were his eyes, mouth, fingers and toes.
A head loomed over, a hand holding a hypode
rmic syringe with a long, fine needle.
Through its surgical mask, the face said. “Hello, Liam. My name’s Brian and I’ll be your anaesthetist today. Let’s deaden things a bit, shall we? I think you’ll appreciate that.”
The needle came down, and for an awful moment Liam thought it was going to be stuck in his eye. Instead, it moved past and there was a tiny prickle of pain on his forehead, just about the centre of the hairline. Another to the right, and then to the left. Then more across his scalp. There didn’t seem to be any hair in the way of these injections – no sensation of it being pushed aside to make way for the needle – and he realised he had been shaved.
Naked, hairless, unable to move. It felt like everything had been stripped away from him.
“It’ll take a few minutes,” said Brian the anaesthetist, looming back into view. “We should have some music on really, shouldn’t we? Something to occupy your mind. You’d probably like that, wouldn’t you?” He moved away, and Liam could only stare at the lights. Even with his eyes shut, they glared through his eyelids.
They were going to do something ... to his head.
He could feel the numbness spreading. Before, he had felt the gentle movement of air across his scalp as people moved about, but now there was just a fuzzy warmth, a nothingness.
His head. His brain.
They had operated on Kath. They had killed off the sensitive part of her brain in order to remove her talent. Or they had tried to, at least – Alastair had said it hadn’t been a complete success, which was why she was still sensitive.
Were they going to do that to Liam now? Kill off a part of his brain? Erase an aspect of himself that he had never even known existed?
Was this to be the end of all that had been happening? Had they rounded him up just to do this and then dump him back into a so-called normal life, like they had with Kath?
Perhaps that was for the best. He could almost see himself adjusting to things, just as Kath had. Living within whatever limits they imposed on him.
“Feel that?” A face drifted into view. Brian again. “No, I don’t think you did.” He must have done something to test the sensitivity of Liam’s scalp. Liam had felt nothing. “Okay, he’s all yours, Sir Peter.”