by Rob Aspinall
Becki didn’t seem fussed. “Uh-huh.”
“It’ll only take a minute.”
“Uh-huh.”
I left her leaning against the wall, glued to her iPhone, and stepped inside the church. Everything felt eerily familiar. It was cool and dark, with old chairs, a quiet carpet and that woody church smell. It was empty, too, save for an old woman dressed in traditional African clothing, sitting quietly at the back. Far enough away not to notice me.
I spotted the confession booth against the left-hand side of the hall towards the front. I made a beeline for it with soft, quick steps. Fortunately, the booth was empty.
I remembered from the dream that Philippe had sat on the right-hand side as I looked at it. I stepped inside, drew the purple curtain and plonked myself on the hardwood bench. I pulled out my phone and tapped on the flashlight, then bent over double and searched the underneath of the bench for any sign of the mystery object.
I scanned the light back and forth. There was a hardened lump of pale-green chewing gum, but nothing else. Did I really think there was some kind of secret object hidden in a church by a super-assassin? My heart sank a little. It felt like a dead end on the road to an adventure.
Maybe it fell, a part of me whispered.
I felt around on the floorboards beneath the bench, rough to the touch, worn down by sin. My fingers brushed against something light, smooth and very un-wooden. I scooped it up and held it under the flashlight.
Yes! It was the object! I did a silent fist pump and tucked it away in a small pocket inside my handbag, before standing up and flattening out my dress. I wanted to stroll out, cool as a frozen cucumber. Just one snag. I heard footsteps approaching the booth. The curtain on the other side drew shut and a shadowy figure sat down with a wheeze on the other side of the mesh divide.
Oh, terrific. It was the priest.
He rested for a moment, breathing heavy through his nose, as if waiting for me to speak. Fat chance, gramps. I was about to sneak out when he spoke in a soft Irish voice.
“Yes, my child?”
Damn.
“Um …” How did this go again? Auntie Claire had made me confess once, on the off-chance my condition was because I’d offended Big Beardy.
“But I’ve not done anything,” I’d told her.
“Have you said anything?” she’d asked me. “Taken the Lord’s name in vain?”
“No,” I’d said. “I don’t think so.”
“Then you must have thought something.”
“I really don’t think I have, Auntie Claire.”
“Well, just make something up,” she’d said, shoving me inside the booth while she did one of her fake smiles at the rest of the congregation.
I was a little fuzzy on how it went, but I took a stab. I had to look like I was here on church business, not secret spy business.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“What is your confession?” the priest asked, looking straight ahead, silver haired and smelling of wine. Yep, he was the one from the dream. I tried to think of something to own up about.
Jesus, where to start?
Keep it small, Lorn. Didn’t want to be here all day.
“Okay, I guess I swear sometimes. Shit and piss and stuff like – oh, sorry, Father.”
The priest sat impassively.
“And what else, my child?”
“What else?”
“Have you disrespected your father or your mother?”
“No.”
“Stolen from your fellow man or woman?”
I thought about the object inside my handbag.
“Not technically.”
“Have you had any impure thoughts?”
I puffed my cheeks and blew out some air. “Um …”
“Whatever it is, I’ve heard it all before, my child.”
Something about his soft persistence dragged it out of me. Before I knew it, I was confessing away.
“Well, I’ve been having dreams about killing people.”
“Go on.”
“Blowing up cars. Shooting guys in the face. I chopped a guy’s head off in the desert.”
Once I got going, there was no stopping me.
“I humiliated a science teacher. And I’ve been having … impure thoughts about my, um, best friend. I’m not a lesbian or anything, but she’s really, really hot and … I think it’s because I got transplanted with the heart of a man. An assassin. He’s dead now. He got shot by a government sniper and—”
The priest twisted in his seat and stared at me through the divider. I realised I’d said far, far too much. This was the priest who’d found Philippe, after all. I grabbed my handbag and dragged open the curtain.
“Okay, bye!”
I scampered out of the church, half blinding myself in the afternoon sun. Becki was taking a photo of a dress in a shop window.
“What took you so long?” she asked.
“Come on,” I said, dragging her away from the window without breaking stride. “Gotta go.”
I glanced over my shoulder and saw the priest standing in the doorway, scratching his head.
“Did you get it?” Becki asked. “Was it there?”
“I can’t believe it’s actually real,” Becki said, shaking the object. “What do you think it is?”
That was the squillion-dollar question. It didn’t seem to be, do or fit anything. I’d heard Sarah mention some kind of list, but other than that …
“I don’t know, it’s weird,” I said, taking it back off her. “There must be some reason the guy hid it.”
Becki bunched up the curtain against the coach window as a make-do pillow, the early-evening sun still high enough to break over the hills and cast her face in a warm, amber glow.
“Phew, what a day,” she said, yawning. “It was fun.”
She smiled and touched me on the hand. Perfectly innocent, until we caught each other’s eye and she remembered the kiss.
Awkward!
She took her hand away and closed her eyes.
I plugged a headphone in each ear and scrolled through the music on my phone. Something soft and chilled to accompany the hypnotic rumble back up the M6 motorway to Manchester. I was used to being a burden to people, doctors, relatives. But I didn’t want to be a burden to Becki. No one wanted to be the friend who fancied the friend who couldn’t have the friend. Especially when the friend knew all about it.
What made it worse was that it would remain unspoken. And there’s nothing I could say that wouldn’t turbo boost the shame I was trying so hard to conceal.
I rested my head back against the seat and tried to doze off, wanting to escape to psycho-killer dream world again, where I’d be free from my own skin. Except the dreams had stopped. Philippe was dead. I’d retrieved the object. Mission accomplished. But the object itself didn’t seem to have any practical use. I had no idea how it was connected to this so-called list or what Philippe had done with it in that beige Merc sitting in the driveway of the old man’s home. I guessed that I’d never know why it was so important or who the hell Philippe was.
Just as I was drifting off to sleep, my phone vibrated in my handbag. It was Dr J.
“Apologies for the late call, Lorna, but I need to book you in for an unscheduled appointment as soon as possible.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“There’s a problem with your latest tests,” he said. “We think one of the machines is malfunctioning, so we’ll need to do them again.”
I came off the call with an appointment booked. Right when I was starting to feel an ordinary sense of immortality again, whoop, there it was. A sticky note from the universe:
Dear Lorna,
Don’t get cocky.
Take your pills.
Watch your diet.
Don’t overdo it.
Remember, you’re still sick.
Don’t book any holidays.
Thx, your good mate, Fate.
Destiny was a bitch. I
popped a pill, closed my eyes and did my daily breathing exercises.
21
Brown-Eyed Girl
The new hospital appointment was booked for Friday morning. I spent most of Thursday in class, scrolling through the photos me and Becki had posted from the trip to London. She was so photogenic. I looked like a mentally challenged ghost who didn’t know how to smile. I needed to fake tan ASAP. I’d buy some Saturday. In the meantime, I spent the evening searching online trying to find out what the hell the object was. I must have tried a hundred Google searches. Nothing.
What would a bunch of secret-service killers want with a grey piece of small, boxy useless?
Auntie Claire called my name from downstairs. I tucked the object away in my skinnies, climbed off my bed and ventured out of my room in trepidation. The Silent War was still on. I’d managed to avoid her for days and didn’t know how to act. She stood at the bottom of the stairs and told me she’d be away for the weekend seeing Uncle Paul – her big bro, who lived with his wife and a couple of devil sprogs in Wales.
My heart leapt. A long weekend of freedom.
She pulled me into the kitchen to go through the ground rules. No mention of our recent contretemps.
“No more than one friend over,” she said, “and absolutely no boys.”
“Seriously, that won’t be a problem,” I said.
“No junk food. Eight hours of sleep. And no going out.”
I nodded along convincingly. I didn’t tell her about the malfunctioning hospital machines and the impromptu appointment. It would only make her more suffocating.
“Okay, I’m setting off now to avoid the traffic,” she said, slipping into her coat and slapping a twenty for shopping down on the kitchen table.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” she asked, in the most patronising way ever. Like I was some recovering junkie who couldn’t work the grill without setting fire to the entire street.
“I’m not a baby,” I said. “I can take care of myself.”
“Well, excuse me for caring,” she said, picking up a couple of weekend bags in the hall.
“I didn’t mean—”
Too late. She was out the door in a huff. I made myself a cup of tea (without burning the house down) and returned to my room. Little did I realise, life was about to spiral way, way out of control.
As I sat on my bed with my cuppa, I felt the object digging into my thigh. I pulled it out of my pocket, only for it to spin loose out of my hand and end up submerged in the hot tea.
I rushed out to the bathroom and poured the tea into the sink. I picked up the object, rinsed it off and wiped it down with a towel.
As I was rubbing it dry, the top half slid off a centimetre under my thumb.
So it’s some kind of case. Hmm.
The join was so thin and the case so well made that it was invisible to the naked eye. I dumped the towel and slid the top off the remainder of the way. Inside were a pair of contact lenses.
Contact lenses, really? Had I picked up the wrong mystery object?
They lay face down in individual, crater-like grooves. I took one out on the end of my finger, soft to the touch like gel. It seemed like they were the decorative, cosmetic kind with brown retinas and pupils. I looked at myself in the mirror. The thought of sharing someone else’s eye juices was a bit blurg, but I was curious.
Oh, what the hell.
I slipped the lens in my right eye. Apart from turning my blue eye brown – kinda cool – nothing happened. I slipped the other one in my left eye. The lenses went in easy, felt comfy, and I really liked brown-eyed Lorna.
I batted my lashes a couple of times in the mirror. Suddenly, the retinas lit up a fiery orange in the mirror. A holographic message in the same colour appeared, floating in front of my eyes. Augmented reality. It said:
MESSAGE ACTIVATED
SUBJECT:
Programme update.
DIRECTIVE:
Commit to memory.
Assignments to follow.
Dispose after use.
Was that it? I batted hard a couple more times. Another message came up with a spinning arrow.
CONNECTING TO GRID …
Within a second or two, a holographic list of numbers streamed down in three columns in front of my eyes. Dates in the first, GPS coordinates in the second, such as 52.51862, –13.376187, and either the initials RFP or BFP in the third. The list came with a project name: MAELSTROM. And a clearance level: DELTA. There was an ominous-sounding message at the end that read: Classified file. Dissemination strictly prohibited. Contravention will meet with immediate and extreme punitive measures.
If I looked down, the list scrolled down. If I looked up, the list scrolled up. It was a strange feeling, but super-intuitive. I batted my eyes again.
DISCONNECTING FROM GRID …
The holograph vanished and the retinas in the lenses returned to deep brown. Wow. This was some real spy shizzle right here. Tingly with excitement, I removed the lenses from my eyes and slipped them back in the case. I’d only looked the list up and down a few times, but already I had it. Every number, in order, committed to memory. Yet another weird and wonderful skill inherited from my donor.
I returned to my bedroom and jumped on my bed in front of my laptop. I wanted to see what those dates and coordinates meant. I started with the dates, rattling them into Google, one after another. Nothing stood out about any of them. The initials in the final column were double Dutch to me too, so I tried the coordinates. They turned out to be locations all over the world. The first was the Reichstag building in Berlin, then Taipei, capital of Taiwan. The Golden Gate Bridge area in San Francisco was next. Then the Indonesian coast, followed by a whole bunch of locations, some specific sites, others just cities or countries.
Mumbai International Airport, India
Itaipu Dam, Brazil
Madrid, Spain
The Champs-Élysées, Paris
The Vatican City, Rome
The Yas Marina Circuit, Abu Dhabi
Johannesburg, South Africa
Tangier, Morocco
Seoul, South Korea
Capitol Hill, Washington DC
Tehran, Iran
The Kremlin, Moscow
Tokyo, Japan
Times Square, New York
Piccadilly Circus, London
Denver International Airport, USA
What did it all mean, though? I decided to do some more digging, Googling each location along with the date. Nothing came up, so I tried searching for information about the lenses. There was a link to a website called The Weather Report all about next-gen technologies. I skimmed the list of articles. Nothing about holographic contact lenses, but plenty on other future military tech. Smart bombs, drones, robot dogs, you name it. And this stuff wasn’t fantasy. There were links to real, prototype test videos on YouTube. There were also lots of conspiracy theories from the past, predictions about the future and a load of stuff about secret societies. I read a bit more about the author. He called himself The Weatherman. He had a mailing address and an email. I wondered if I could run my recent discovery by the guy, like I did with Dr Tariq. See if he knew anything. Or perhaps I shouldn’t be telling anyone about the lenses. I decided to wash my hair and think it over.
22
Bad Hair Night
To get the best out of your hair, you should always let it dry naturally around seventy to eighty per cent of the way. Or so Becki had told me.
Then you put your dryer on the coolest setting and keep it moving at least six inches away from your head. It was a lot of fuss, but if I could get my hair like hers, it was worth the extra effort. With a scar running down my chest, the rest of me had to be bitchin’ on all fronts.
I also had my own straightening routine, where I gave my hair a thorough going-over the night I washed it. Then a quick re-straighten when I got up the next morning.
I turned on the straighteners and let them heat up on the dresser while I ran the dryer through my
hair. I liked to watch funny videos on my lappy while I did it. Tonight’s selection was dogs trying to be friends with cats. You’ve probably seen it. Dogs with their little tails wagging, sniffing and nudging cats with their noses … and boom! The cats wallop them in the face with a lightning-fast jab. I must have seen it a hundred times, but it still made my stomach hurt from laughing.
The video ended and, under the whine of the hair dryer, I thought I heard a noise like smashing glass, probably hoodies drinking and fighting on the street. I thought nothing of it, until I heard a bang. Sounded like it came from downstairs. I turned off the dryer and opened the bedroom door, which I always closed out of habit. The lights were off in the rest of the house, including the landing, another habit drilled into me by the cost-conscious, draught-conscious Auntie Claire. I listened hard. Silence. I padded around to the top of the stairs in my nightie and doggie slippers. The front door was secure and not a burglar in sight.
Must have been imagining it. Spy shit had me spooked.
I closed the door, sat down at the dresser and recommenced Project Mega-Hair.
What a nervy Nora.
Another bump and bang.
Again, I turned the dryer off. My dresser was positioned against the wall to the right of my bed, directly opposite the door to my room. I looked behind me in the mirror and pricked my ears. Then I heard a drunk shouting outside, bashing into a wheelie bin and smashing a bottle. Satisfied it wasn’t a burglar after all, I clicked on another vid and carried on.
Just over the top of the screen, something in the mirror made my heart beat out of my chest, a freezing tingle of fear creeping up my neck.
Over my right shoulder, the door handle moved slowly downwards. Who was it? What was it? As someone or something pressed the handle down on the other side of the door, I left the dryer blowing, but laid it down as softly as I could on the dresser next to the straighteners. I crept over to the wall beside the door, where I kept an old hockey stick as a memento from my sport-playing days.