by Molly Flatt
Not so random, then, after all.
A freezing, briny breaker of grief and anger and sorrow smashed over Alex’s head. Finn must have felt it, because she felt his abs tense and his shoulders shift. She relaced her fingers, already numb despite the gloves, and pressed closer into his back – squeezing the sobs out of her ribs, holding her skeleton together with his own.
Could he really have been so fucking selfish? So fucking weak? That mild, wry, self-effacing man who had always defended his awkward little Kansas from the conformist tyranny of the world?
Another unbearable thought: his loyalty fuelled by guilt, bestowed as part of the trade. You watched my back, Kansas, I’ll watch yours.
Feeling her throat clench in a paroxysm of horror, Alex scythed the idea down in a single furious swipe. Her father had been her champion from the moment she was born. She couldn’t let this one awful incident rewrite everything about their relationship. It was hard, though, so hard, trying to understand what fit where, what caused what, what was connected and what wasn’t. She longed to know, to feel, and not just figure out the truth. Yet with that crucial Memory missing and all the others disconnected from her emotions, her only bullshit detector was her brain. And she knew from long experience that trying to detect bullshit with a bullshit-generating organ was a sure-fire way to drown.
It all came down to the same question Finn had asked her back in the archives. Why? Back then, she’d been trying to make sense of her own cast-change from heroine to murderer, not of her father’s from comic bit-part to tragic wannabe suicide. But the same problem with motivation applied. Why? What would have driven him to do such a thing? Which Storyline could he have knotted, over the years, into such an irresistible noose?
And why then? What was so special about 16 July? About 1995?
And then, as the bike tipped sideways in a turn so low that Alex felt clods of mud hit the back of her hood, she suddenly made the link with the exact same date ten years later. The date of the garden party.
The second crisis in her Story hadn’t been prompted by Dom’s offer of a job in New York. Or at least, not entirely. The crucial link she had been missing was the one fact she hadn’t thought to question: the reason her mother had thrown that party in the first place.
16 July 2005 had marked the release of Novus’s third Young Novelists to Watch list. Novus’s editors had decided to make a fuss: profiles of the original 1985 authors in a special Guardian supplement, newly issued editions of the books that had made their names, a glamorous press-packed supper in Bloomsbury. Her father had unequivocally declined both the interviews and the supper. Nevertheless, Liz, who remained both fiercely proud of The Switch and fiercely dismissive of the suggestion that her husband was a one-hit wonder, had insisted on organizing a surprise party for him at home.
With a surge of sickness, Alex recalled how fervently she had tried to persuade her mother that it was a bad idea. The Memory remained bleached of all emotion, but how full of dread she must have been, knowing that the day marked not one, but two anniversaries. How keenly her father must have known it, too. How hard he must have worked to show her that he was fine, posing for the camera in his jaunty shirt with his glass of champagne and his sardonic smile.
Because a decade before, that very same day would have marked the release of the second Novus list. The first follow-on from the now-infamous inaugural line-up. The absence of any relevant Memories suggested that Alex’s happy eleven-year-old self, consumed with pop songs and liquorice allsorts, had been oblivious to the inevitable anticipation and gossip. But Tom R. Moore would not have been oblivious at all.
Ten years on from his moment of glory, her father would no longer have been able to pretend that his much-debated follow-up was magically going to materialize. In the morning’s TLS, the critics must have picked over his early promise and mourned, or even mocked, its demise. Alex imagined her father’s frustration at proving Gramps right, that Mid-western bully who made pointed jokes about arty fags over Thanksgiving dinner. She imagined her father’s shame at failing his wife, who had always staunchly insisted that the sequel would find its own way out. She even imagined him feeling that he’d become a man whom his adoring daughter, born into the sunburst of his fame, would no longer recognize.
The chronology of her neuroses finally made twisted sense. On 16 July 1985, Tom R. Moore had sprinted to the balmy peak of his career with his very first book. Twenty years later, on 16 July 2005, he had mocked its stone-cold corpse with poached salmon and cheap fizz. But on 16 July 1995 – a time when the taunts of squandered potential and unfulfilled hope still stung – Tom himself must have privately, despairingly condemned his career as terminal.
Or perhaps it was all too easy, Alex thought, shivering in the wind. So much neat pop psychology. Surely her mother had been right about people not being jigsaw puzzles. Alex was only just beginning to comprehend how complex and contradictory Storylines were. She knew that her father would have thousands of Memories she wasn’t aware of and couldn’t begin to understand. He may not even have had a coherent why. An instantaneous bundle of overwhelming instincts, a handy bottle of booze and a dash of wonky brain chemistry may well have been enough.
What she was increasingly clear on was the nature of her own dominant Storyline. She’d nurtured a fear of failure to protect herself from the horror of what she had seen in her father. But in a way that she was beginning to see as characteristic of Storylines, it had only led her to replicate that horror every day since, in many mundane little epilogues. Throughout her teenage years, in a thousand small ways, she’d forced her head to stay below the parapet in case she exposed herself, in the way her father had so dangerously done. Squashed her natural talents. Refused to let her work become too good. And she was the one who had been her father’s protector, not the other way round; clinging to his side, scurrying home from school as soon as she could.
So the Storyline that began with that hideous root Memory in July 1995 must have been chafing like hell ten years later, when Dom offered her a chance to blow it apart. At that point she had been brave enough to surface her Story and offer up the crippling Storyline to be Read – but not quite brave enough to let Greum MacTormod help her prise it apart. And so she returned to the same old pattern throughout her twenties, continually trying and failing to throw off the shackles of her self-imposed mediocrity. Sticking to the same undemanding job. Still not able to face a single glass of alcohol. Still not able to face the sight of a single copy of her father’s famous novel on her shelves.
After yet another decade of the same old loop, Mark’s offer of a promotion must have felt like a crossroads. Like Dom’s job offer, it was a chance to finally reject all those years of aborted ambitions and change the game. So, provoked by Chloe’s blunt therapeutic mash-up, Alex had summoned the courage to surface her Story a second time. And then Taran MacGill had, as he’d boasted, torn her free. Free from her twenty-year-old certainty that if you flew too close to the sun, you’d eventually crash and burn.
Fear of failure. They’d been right all along, except for the underlying why. It was so obvious, so pedestrian, so pathetic. But then, as Taran had pointed out, the oldest Storylines were the most powerful of all.
She was starting to become overwhelmed by dizziness, to sense the void where her Memory had once been opening up. She didn’t have long now, she knew, whatever Taran had said about natural reintegration. The rot, some biological instinct informed her, had burrowed mitochondria-deep.
Jerk. Splash. Splutter. Dragging her thoughts back to the present, she realized that the bike was slowing, turning, stopping. The engine cut out. Alex lifted her head.
They were parked on top of a cliff, surrounded by wheeling birds. All around them, scales of sandstone broke through the furzy turf, cradling pools of rainwater. Below them, the sea spewed and sucked over a dice-roll of rocks. Behind them, perhaps a mile inland, she could see the outskirts of some sort of fishing hamlet, a doll’s-house cluster of low ho
uses fringed with dark squares of cultivated earth.
Finn kicked down the stand while Alex wrenched her fingers apart and inched her leg over the seat. He threw back his hood, pulled off his woolly hat and fiddled with the bandage, which had slipped down from his forehead over his eye. Alex felt a belated pang of guilt.
‘Are you okay?’ she said. ‘I should have thought . . . I was in a mess when I came back from Taran. I shouldn’t have asked . . .’
‘Cape,’ he said, spreading his own over the seat.
‘It’s still raining.’
He held out his hand. ‘Take it off.’
She unbuckled it and passed it to him. He tossed it on top of his own, then readjusted the holdall, strapped across his chest, and took her hand. ‘This way.’
Alex’s brief to Finn had been to transport her somewhere a very long way from the peninsula, somewhere she could forget the Library, Taran and her father. And they were a long way from the peninsula, if the journey was anything to go by – right down at the southern tip of Iskeull. And it was a very nice cliff, what with the rocks and the birds and the sea. She shouldn’t feel ungrateful, Alex thought, as she clambered after Finn through the pools, cold water splashing through the eyelets of her trainers. Only a landlocked Outsider would think that if you’d seen one rainy cliff, you’d seen them all. The rain was slackening. There was a flat slab not too far ahead that she could sit on. She could only hope that the view would be enough to sweep her mind temporarily clean.
Then Finn jerked her to a stop and she saw, inches from her feet, the ground drop away into a steep teardrop-shaped gully.
‘Come on,’ he said, lowering himself in backwards before she could say: I’m too ill, I’m too tired, I’m too weak.
Alex had climbed once, strapped into a harness, on a St J’s activity holiday in Normandy. Thanks to her screwed-up Memories, she had no sense of how it had felt, but she was pretty sure it had felt nothing remotely like this: primal terror, toddlerish helplessness, wild self-pity. Her toes found holes then flipped straight out, her fingers scrabbled on wet rubble, her hips banged, her knees buckled and scraped. After a timeless stretch of mayhem, she suddenly found herself anchored on a miraculously safe perch, at which point her body refused, for long panicked seconds, to give it up. Then Finn tugged at her ankle and she found herself fumbling down again. The dressing on her cheek slid off. Her jumper snagged and tore. Her trainers were too clumpy, their treads non-existent. How was it that there were Reading boots all over the fucking place until you actually needed a pair?
When Finn finally gripped her waist and lifted her down onto a narrow platform, she looked straight back up and was amazed to see how sheer the precipice had been, how far above the steely jewel of sky. Down in the gully it was sheltered and warmer than on the surface, with only a few drops of rain making it past the overhangs to spit in her eyes. Panting, flushed with triumph, Alex twisted in Finn’s hands to face him.
‘See?’ he said. ‘I told you you were strong.’ Then he stepped aside so that she could see the pool.
Her grasp on coastal geography had always been weak, so she found it impossible to fathom how the sea could wriggle up and under to erode a perfectly still, glassy basin in the middle of the cliff. She was about to ask Finn when she realized that he was dragging his orange jumper, bundled up with his shirt, over his head.
‘What are you doing?’
She might have forgotten the most significant event of her life, but she remembered every inch of his naked torso: youthfully lean but deep-scored with muscle, the ridges and furrows distorting the twisting blue leylines of his tattoo.
‘Swimming,’ Finn said, dragging the bike-key-USB-pebble-necklace over his head. He pulled off his boots, then unbuttoned his trousers and yanked them down in one smooth move. ‘Hurry up,’ he said, with a hint of a smile, ‘it’s cold.’ Then he turned and executed a perfect swan-dive into the middle of the pool.
Seconds later his head popped up, arcing back in a spray of water as he let out a roar. His bandage, sopping, was hanging over one ear. He barked something in Iskeullian, which Alex interpreted as ‘It’s really, really, really cold’ and then began to scull, vigorously. ‘I am going to get out,’ he said, the words forced between lips the same colour as his tattoo, ‘in thirty seconds. Get in.’
Alex hesitated, her skin already shrinking, then thought: Fuck it. I’ll probably be dead tomorrow, after all. She fumbled with her laces, tugged off her trainers and jeans, wriggled out of her jumper and T-shirt. Determinedly not turning her back on Finn, she unclipped her greying bra and pulled down her cherry-print multipack pants. Then, before she had a chance to think, she took two not-quite-running steps and leapt.
Cold. Cold. Heart-attack cold. Her scalp contracted to the size of a pin. Bubbles streamed through her aching teeth as she surged back up, imagining slimy creatures and gripping weeds. She broke the surface with a gasp. ‘FUCK FUCK FUCK.’
A proper, joyful grin split Finn’s juddering face. ‘Keep. Move. Ing,’ he ordered, in staccato bursts. Alex sliced her arms and legs through the water, trying to kick the cold down. She gulped a mouthful of brine, felt it shrivel her gums. The scratch on her cheek was stinging. Her eyes were stinging. Her belly was turning inside out.
He was laughing. The bulge over his eye had split open, streaking one side of his face with watery blood. The bandage was slipping further, barely clinging onto a thick white pad that was now exposed at the back of his head.
‘Get out,’ Alex shrieked, laughing now, too. ‘Get the fuck out!’
Striking out for the ledge, she discovered, mercifully, that the pool sloped upwards around the sides. By virtue of flailing her feet in all directions, she just about managed to get purchase on the submerged rock. Hauling her elbows onto the platform, she found herself shooting up, as Finn boosted her from behind. By the time she had got to her feet he was already behind her on the outcrop, cradling his holdall, rummaging inside. The towel he tossed her had the thyme smell that she associated with Cait’s house. She caught it, then punched it into his solar plexus, still laughing, still coughing. ‘You fucking idiot,’ she gasped, her teeth chattering. ‘You’ll give me pneumonia.’
He was holding both of her elbows. He raised an eyebrow. ‘You jumped,’ he said.
They looked at each other for a moment. Then Alex stepped back and pulled the towel around her chest. ‘Idiot,’ she muttered again. She turned her back, scrubbed herself dry, dressed clumsily.
‘Here.’ She turned. Finn was back in his clothes. He’d wiped the blood from his face and improvised a replacement bandage with a strip cut from his towel. He looked both ridiculous, like a boy playing doctors, and beautiful, his bones algae-green in the light of the cave. He held out a flask. ‘Drink.’
Alex took the flask and swigged, relishing the whisky’s burn. The spectre of Taran made a brief appearance, standing in front of her with his broken bottle. It was swiftly followed by an image of her father, draining vodka before climbing onto his chair. Alex blinked them both away and drank, defiantly, again.
‘You first,’ Finn said, shoving the towels and flask back in the holdall. ‘Quickly. The climb will make you warm.’
Going up was, against all her expectations, easier than climbing down. High on some epic adrenaline rush, her brain still on hold, she pushed and pulled from crag to crag with strong, instinctive grace. Seconds after she had flopped over the edge, Finn came up behind her, swinging effortlessly sideways onto his feet. The rain was back in earnest, the sky a bleary veneer of pearl, the evening sun beginning its long, slow journey towards its short northern rest.
‘Thank you.’ Still panting, Alex turned to Finn. ‘Thank you. It was perfect.’
Finn nodded, then reached out and lightly placed his palm in the space between her shoulder and her neck. ‘You’re getting cold,’ he said. ‘We should go.’
Back at the bike, they shook out their capes and buckled them on. Finn settled himself on the seat with the bag in h
is lap and started the engine, while Alex clambered on behind. She wrapped her arms around him, amazed that he could still be radiating so much heat. The bike roared, jerked, roared, lurched forward and settled back into a juddering thrum.
Cait’s barn seemed far smaller than it had been when they’d come to pick up the Honda a handful of hours before. Finn drove straight in, leaning out of the seat to open one of the doors, then puttering the bike through and down to the end of the aisle. The door banged shut in the wind behind them. The silence, when he finally turned the key, was loud.
Alex dismounted, threw off her cape and leaned against the hay bales, breathing in the sweet dust. When she opened her eyes, Finn was standing by the bike, watching her from beneath his ridiculous towel-bandage. ‘Your cheek,’ he said. He took off his cape and lifted the satchel over his head, then rummaged inside and held out his mangled towel.
Alex accepted the towel, then held it to one side and let it drop to the floor. She took hold of his outstretched wrist, turned it over and pressed her thumb into the Story symbol inked there. Then she rolled up his sleeve and slowly, millimetre by millimetre, traced her fingers along the blue rope that coiled up his outstretched arm. When she reached his neck, she buried her hand in his thick, wet hair.
Finn grabbed her arms and flipped her round, face-first into the bales. He tugged impatiently at the back of her jeans. As soon as she’d popped the button and dragged down her pants, he pushed straight up into her from behind. Alex reached round to grip the hard, round swell of his arse. He groped under her jumper and crammed one of her breasts into his hand. Then she braced against the hay and groaned while he thrust, breathing fast, his mouth in her hair.
When it was over, Alex did up her jeans and collapsed weak-legged onto the nearest bale. Finn stood looking down at her, flushed beneath the towel bandage, his hair mussed into peaks and his jumper rucked up to show a flash of blue-mapped skin. He grinned. Then he dropped onto the bale behind her and scooped her backwards, so that she was leaning against his chest. As his long, delicate Reader’s fingers reached round to stroke her collarbone, she thought, briefly, of Harry. But Harry seemed to have become a character in a book she had once read, long ago.