by Molly Flatt
MacBrian looked up. ‘Erupt?’
‘I can’t take full credit, of course. I owe a lot to Chloe.’
‘Chloe?’ MacBrian leaned forward, pen poised. ‘Who is Chloe?’
‘Chloe Apostolou. My holistic self-transformation mentor. Now’ – Alex leaned forward and stabbed a finger at MacBrian’s notebook – ‘the woman from Flair cut all mention of this, but it could be a really fruitful avenue to explore in your research. Personally, I have no doubt that Chloe’s method was instrumental in what happened that night.’
‘Her method?’
Alex stifled a sigh. She reminded herself that if she lived on a remote island, instead of the middle of the city, her horizons would be much less open, too. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I know that the Western scientific establishment can be sceptical about alternative approaches, but Chloe has so much integrity. She’s approach-agnostic. She combines whichever tools she thinks will be best for each individual client, everything from Shiatsu to Jivamukti to NLP.’
MacBrian seemed to be struggling to know what to write.
‘Anyway,’ Alex said, ‘the point is, that evening I had my first session with Chloe. I’d never seen a therapist before. I hated any sort of self-examination back then. However, my friend Mae had bought me a voucher for Christmas, and Harry plays squash on Tuesdays, so I forced myself to give it a go.’ She sighed. ‘It didn’t start well. I resisted opening up.’
‘Opening up?’
‘Mentally. Emotionally. But Chloe was so great. She put on some binaural beats, took me through a Kabat-Zinn body scan, made me do some Pranayama breathing, and eventually I . . . well, I suppose I simply released. I started crying and I couldn’t stop. I sat there for the whole hour with tears streaming down my face.’
Another glance at Taran. ‘Why? What were the tears about?’
Alex sighed again. ‘I have no idea. The old doomed-to-failure narrative, I suppose. I still didn’t have the language I needed, at that point, to put my issues into words. But it was obviously the first step in blasting through some major blockages.’
‘Blasting?’
‘Personally, I’m certain that my brain must have processed my old emotions during REM, or perhaps consolidated Chloe’s positivity during a period of deep wave. As Chloe pointed out, I was thirty at the time, right at the end of my Saturn Return. It’s a natural time for transition. All I needed was the right nudge.’
MacBrian was frowning. ‘You have contact details for this Chloe? We need to talk to her as soon as possible.’
‘Of course!’ Alex groped at her hip. ‘Oh. Well, I’ll send them over as soon as my phone’s back in service. Chloe would love it out here.’ She paused. MacBrian was still writing. Taran was still watching her with his hungry stare.
‘Is this helpful?’ Alex asked him. ‘I’m not sure exactly what you guys are looking for.’
‘Nor are we,’ Taran said, with his crooked smile. ‘But this is all very interesting.’
‘Good. I’d love to see some of your previous research.’
‘I’d love to—’
‘And after that,’ MacBrian cut in, ‘you went straight home?’
Alex gave Taran a sympathetic glance. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Harry goes back to his place after squash, so it was a night alone.’
‘What did you do?’
‘The usual.’ Alex grimaced. ‘Back then, anyway. Box set and bed.’
‘Any drugs? Stimulants?’
Alex laughed. ‘No. God, no. I didn’t even drink in those days. Just a ready meal and a chamomile tea. I went to bed early and dropped off right away.’
‘But you woke shortly after?’
‘That’s right. It was amazing. The moment I woke, I felt like an entirely different person. So powerful, so clear, so calm. There was no way I was going back to sleep. So I grabbed my iPad and started brainstorming. By the time my alarm went off, I had a full business plan. Oh, I’d dabbled with ideas for start-ups before, but this time I knew it would work. Something major had shifted inside.’
MacBrian underlined a word several times. At least, Alex thought it was a word, until she craned over and saw the rows of meticulous symbols that crowded MacBrian’s page. ‘Wow!’ She whistled. ‘Is that, like, ancient Iskeullian?’ She paused. ‘You are publishing the research in English, right?’
MacBrian abruptly closed the cover. Somewhere in the distance, a bell boomed, twice. It sounded more like Big Ben than a class alarm.
Alex reached for her absent phone. ‘It can’t be only two o’clock.’
‘It isn’t,’ Taran said. ‘The bells mark shifts on the . . . um, on the reserve. It’s four o’clock. Would you like a break?’
MacBrian gave him a look. ‘We should really carry on,’ she said.
‘Oh no, sure.’ Alex shrugged. ‘This is fun. By all means, crack on.’
MacBrian reopened her notebook just wide enough to let in the tip of her pen. ‘That morning. What was it that made you wake?’
‘Nothing.’ Alex took a sip of water. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘No dreams?’
‘Oh, yes, those were pretty psychedelic. A sense that I was falling, a feeling of panic, millions of lights flashing around me then winking out. My fault for choosing paella. Latenight carbs are never a good call.’
MacBrian looked at Taran. ‘And was there something specific that made you wake up? A thought? A sound?’
Alex combed her fringe with her fingers. ‘No, no, I just . . . I just woke up.’
‘Physical sensations? Changes in temperature? Feelings of release?’
Alex shifted in her chair. ‘You know, I think maybe I wouldn’t mind that break after all.’
‘Any pain?’
Alex stared at her hands.
‘You’re telling us that nothing happened other than dreams, Miss Moore?’ MacBrian pressed. ‘Nothing at all?’
Alex continued to study her flaking red manicure, feeling her face grow hot under their double gaze. Finally, she let out a groan and held up her palms in mock-surrender. ‘Okay, okay. You got me.’
MacBrian looked at Taran. She said, slowly, ‘What do you mean?’
Alex gave a rueful grin. ‘Oh God, Lenni will kill me. But I suppose if I have a veto over what gets publicly shared . . . ?’ She thought of Harry, and was suddenly overcome by a heady sense of self-sacrifice. ‘You know what? Screw it. God knows how this is relevant, but you guys are scientists. I can’t feed you the same spin we give the press. The truth is that Eudo was born in a spray of puke.’
Alex paused as the dizziness rushed in.
‘There’s no nicer way to put it, I’m afraid. The fact is, I woke up because I threw up. All over my duvet.’ She swallowed. She hadn’t allowed herself to remember, really remember, this part of the story ever since Lenni had declared it out of bounds. ‘It was just awful,’ she murmured. ‘I mean, that paella was past it’s sell-by date, I should’ve . . .’ Her stomach lurched. The vertigo arrived. The room began to pixellate. ‘There was this terrible pain, deep inside my chest, and I honestly thought I was going to—’ Her guts spasmed once, twice, the void cracked open, and then suddenly she was falling. She was falling and falling and falling and the void was rushing up to meet her as she tumbled towards the bottomless nothingness and she knew she must not in any circumstances let herself slide slide slide . . .
Alex closed her eyes, breathing hard. Through the ringing in her ears she heard MacBrian and Taran exchange a few sharp, urgent sentences of gibberish. She focused on her breath. In, out, in, out. Here and now, here and now. Iskeull. MacBrian. Taran. White walls. Hard chair. Scarred wooden tabletop. Gradually, gradually, as she felt her way back into the room, the tightness in her chest loosened and the sickness began to recede.
‘Alex.’ She opened her eyes. Taran was crouching beside her chair, studying her with a kind of scientific fascination. MacBrian was standing beside the open door, whispering with Iain, who had reappeared from nowhere.
&nbs
p; ‘God,’ she croaked. Her head was banging. ‘How embarrassing.’ She sat up carefully.
‘Captain MacHoras has sent for Dr MacDiarmid,’ MacBrian said, watching Alex from the doorway as if afraid she might explode.
‘No.’ Alex shook her head, then regretted it. ‘Please. I’m fine. It happens, when . . . when I get overtired.’
MacBrian and Iain conferred briefly again and he left, shutting the door behind him. MacBrian returned slowly to her chair.
‘Really,’ Alex said, summoning a wan smile. ‘I’d rather we all pretended that didn’t happen, okay?’ She forced herself to straighten up. ‘Look, we’re just getting to the good bit of the story. When the energy and the ideas and the confidence began to flow.’
She smiled harder at MacBrian and Taran, who were still watching her with a sort of enraptured horror.
‘Look, I know it’s gross. It doesn’t make for the greatest story. That’s why Lenni and I decided to keep it out of my public script. We don’t exactly want to advocate bulimia as an effective strategy for entrepreneurship. But Chloe – and I know this might sound a bit woo-woo, to you guys – Chloe doesn’t think it was the paella. Chloe thinks that my mind-body was expressing its metamorphosis by physically ejecting the past. Out with the old, in with the new. And I think that’s kind of beautiful, don’t you?’
There was a brief silence, during which Alex kept trying to project a breezy positivity. But underneath her game face she had to admit that she really didn’t feel well after all. That had been the worst episode yet. Her chest still felt hollow, her limbs were pricking with pins and needles, and the headache was threatening to evolve into a migraine.
Brain realignment, she reminded herself. Caterpillar. Butterfly.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to—’ Taran began.
‘There’s just one more thing I’d like to cover before we break,’ MacBrian said. ‘If you’re capable?’
‘Of course.’ Alex rallied herself. ‘Fire away.’
‘This idea that you came up with.’ MacBrian scanned her notes. ‘This business. Eudomonia.’ She pronounced it carefully, elaborately, like it was a spell. ‘Could you explain exactly how it works?’
Alex let out a breath and smiled properly, this time. ‘Now that,’ she said, ‘I could do in my sleep.’
But MacBrian was obviously about as far away from Eudo’s target audience as it was possible to be, and she seemed to have trouble grasping even its simplest aspects. She spent a long time grilling Alex on the technology behind the platform, apparently under the impression that Eudo operated via some sort of digitally supercharged witchcraft. She also seemed to have extraordinarily high expectations of the impact Eudo might have on members’ lives. Alex had an arsenal of stats proving that Eudo was a facilitator of genuine transformation, rather than a well-designed collection of woolly truisms and expensive yogawear. But now she found herself in the unusual position of downplaying its influence.
‘Look, I do believe we’ve built something truly powerful,’ she concluded after at least another hour of questions. She was feeling ever more ill and wishing that she had taken Taran’s earlier opening to escape the smoky room. ‘But I admit that I don’t feel comfortable making too many claims about its lasting effects, especially to scientists like you. Eudo’s still in its very early days, Director. The only person I can be one hundred per cent sure it has changed, and changed forever, is me.’
She sat back, utterly wrung out. MacBrian was still writing. Taran cleared his throat. ‘Sorcha,’ he said. ‘It’s getting late.’
MacBrian looked up, frowned, then shut the notebook. ‘Yes. Of course.’ She turned to Alex. ‘I’m afraid we have rather a lot to deal with at the moment, so we won’t be able to join you for dinner. I will arrange to have some food brought to your room.’
‘Of course,’ Alex smiled. ‘I just hope I’ve given you something useful.’
MacBrian stood up. ‘So do I, Miss Moore. So do I.’
Whether the culprit was a mind over-stimulated by the interview, the bowl of fish stew she’d wolfed down or the Nordic white night disrupting her body clock, Alex found herself stubbornly awake as the night wore on. Switching sides on the lumpy mattress, she reached for her phone for the hundredth time, then tossed the useless slab of plastic down onto her bag. She lay back under the heavy coverlet, staring at the damp on the ceiling and listening to the rain patter down outside.
The afternoon’s interview had left her feeling distinctly on edge. It seemed obvious that she’d somehow let the professors down. Perhaps they had expected a more intellectual, less intuitive framework for her success. It seemed Lenni had been right all along about keeping quiet about the throwing up part, too. It had obviously rattled them. Still, there was another full day to go, which should be plenty of time for MacBrian to get what she wanted, despite all her pushiness. And Alex had a soft spot for the geeky Taran, who seemed to find her fascinating – to the point, she was beginning to suspect, of a crush. They probably didn’t get many young women taking up positions in GCAS Europe, let alone young women with haircuts that made them look like Uma Thurman crossed with a sexy schoolgirl.
Sighing, Alex flopped over again and started to compose work emails in her head. She was halfway through a mental press release about the GCAS project when the distant bell boomed out again, three times. As the resonant chimes faded away, she heard her mother’s voice, exasperated and affectionate. You think too much, you and your father. Honestly, sometimes it’s like living with two brains in a jar. If you’re feeling strange, just get some air in your lungs, Alex. Get up and get out.
Her mother was right. It would do her no good to lie here thinking until morning. Alex pushed the blankets aside and slid her feet down onto the cold floor. She dressed by moonlight, then crossed to the door and lifted the latch.
The oil lamps in the corridor had been lowered to the merest glow. The only sounds were a mouse-like scurrying, a nest-like rustle, and the odd coo or hoot from a bird. When she reached the lobby, Alex noticed with a shock that Iain was sitting behind the reception desk, although slumped in his chair and obviously asleep. She crept across the flagstones and tried the main door, only to find it locked. Unwilling to wake him, she started back in the direction of her room. But then the thought of lying in that hard bed without distractions for seven more hours made her swing round again.
She tiptoed across the lobby to the opposite corridor. Groping her way along the flagstones, she was relieved to find that this wing seemed identical to the one she had just left. There was a single long corridor with the same row of doors, and the same atmosphere of abandonment. She inched open one of the doors and saw an empty shell of a room, its walls patched with peeling plaster and its corners furzed with mould. MacBrian’s urgency started to make sense. Obviously the Iskeullians badly needed to prove their worth to whoever allocated funding from GCAS’s money pot. A high-profile, zeitgeisty research paper was probably their best shot. Perhaps, Alex mused, she could offer to build them a digital strategy, on top of the interviews. It wouldn’t be hard; a microsite, a teaser campaign, a sexy infographic about the DNA of success.
Above and beyond, Harry, she thought. Above and beyond.
She continued to the end of the corridor and passed through an arch into a cold, damp anteroom. There was what looked like another outer door here, a thick old slab of wood. It was secured with a padlock, but the hoop was flaky with rust. Telling herself it was about to fall off anyway, Alex found it only took a tiny bit of jimmying to pull it apart. Then, feeling like some shlocky Hitchcock heroine, she pressed her shoulder against the door and stepped out into the night.
8
She was standing at the end of the building’s east wing, with her back to the airfield and the farmland beyond. Before her, the town that she’d glimpsed from her window unrolled like an oily black fleece. Delighted by the prospect of exploring without a pre-planned route or pressing end-goal for the first time in weeks, Alex wandered slowly
into the streets. The cobblestones were slippery under the soles of her trainers, and as her hair began to clump and drip, she wondered where Iain had stowed her anorak. But in the wake of the squall the droplets were light, and now that she was out in the soft salty air she didn’t want to go back. In any case, getting wet felt good. Appropriately Wuthering Heights.
The sun had finally dropped beneath the horizon but the darkness remained translucent as she wove her way further in. Here and there, the flickering flame of a gas lamp danced in a puddle that was caught in a patch of broken cobbles or the foot-worn hammock of a step. She passed low stone houses with elaborately carved lintels and roofs scaled with rectangular slates. She peered into the dark maws of shop fronts and workshops, catching the glint of a jewelled necklace, a shrine-like pyramid of tinned pineapple chunks, a loom beside a heap of folded cloth.
Now and then she heard a shout or a laugh. Once she saw a bowed couple hurry round a corner; shortly afterwards she heard the tail-end of an argument traded in a harsh Gaelic-sounding dialect as a distant door opened, then banged shut. After a while, as she circled through street after street, Alex realized that the town was arranged in one loose, interconnecting spiral, with residential houses on the outer loop and commercial buildings closer in. Just as she was wondering whether she ought to turn back, she found herself emerging onto a circular sweep of sand-compacted earth.
She could only presume this was the town centre, the snail in the centre of the spiral shell. Obviously used as some sort of arena, it was bounded by rings of stone seats, with a few open-fronted stalls between them and a low stage set off to one side. In the middle of the sandy ring was a huge column of rock, mounted on a plinth. Alex had dismissed it as an abstract sculpture until, rounding the perimeter, she looked back and saw the face, picked out by the moonlight.
She cut across the arena to get a better look. So far, only the head and shoulders had been hewn out of the rock, but they were masterfully done, eerily lifelike. As she brushed the rough surface where the feet would be, Alex was struck with the absolute certainty that she had seen this man before. He was beautiful, with his hawkish brow, high cheekbones and full lips. His muscled shoulders were as round as basketballs, his thick hair was raked back from his face and his blank stone eyes were fixed longingly north – over the roofs to whatever was on the other side of the town. It was him, she knew it. It was the dead Director. And, with that thought, the vertigo surged forth and the void ripped open and swallowed her whole.