by Molly Flatt
‘Are you frightened?’ Finn asked, from behind her.
‘Mostly tired,’ she said, ‘thinking about that bloody tunnel. But yes. Also fucking terrified.’
‘Stories are tough. They’ll do anything to survive.’
‘Well, we’ll see, won’t we? Or rather, I will.’
‘The other one reintegrated. The one my father Edited. Taran said that my father slipped the Memory back in, and the Story simply closed.’
‘Here’s hoping.’ Alex shrugged, her shoulder blades raking his chest. ‘Honestly, I just want it over with now.’
‘Really?’
‘Fuck. God. I don’t know.’ She traced a figure-of-eight on his knee. ‘But then we know what’s going to happen, don’t we?’ she said, falsely bright. ‘What’s going to happen is that my Story will accept my Memory back in, happy as Larry. Then it’ll repress that little bastard, and my Storylines will heal without it, in lovely new patterns. The secret of the Library will be safe, as I won’t remember any of it. I will remain in blissful ignorance as to what my father tried to do. And we can all get on with our lives, just as they were two weeks ago. Happy endings all round. Well, except for your dad. And you. And your mum. And Taran. And poor bloody Sorcha.’
But at least, in that case, she would never know what it felt like to know what she knew now. From the inside.
‘Did Taran say—?’
‘No. NO. It’s simply one option. Probably the least likely of all.’ She twisted to look at Finn with a poor attempt at an insouciant smile. ‘But, hey, when it comes to Iskeull, I specialize in the impossible, right?’
He looked back at her, steadily. Seeing what she was. Seeing what she was not.
‘Or,’ Alex said, ‘or I might die, then and there, while my Story shrivels up around me, deep under the earth, all alone.’
After a moment, Finn toppled her forward. ‘Come home,’ he said. ‘Have some tea. My mother says you’re welcome to stay, if you don’t want to go back to town tonight.’
At least, Alex thought as she let him help her up, at least if she did shrivel up and die in the dark all alone, she’d have signed off her Story with some pretty kick-ass Memories.
∞
‘Alex?’
Alex looked up groggily from a blank sheet of paper to find them all staring at her.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Sorry, Mark. I didn’t quite catch that.’
‘The CoreCo contract, Alex. Timeline for a release.’
‘Of course.’ She bent over the paper and made some meaningless squiggles with her pen. ‘Sorry. Got it. All good.’
Mark bestowed upon her a smile of great fatherly patience, then offered it around the boardroom. ‘No problem, Alex, no problem,’ he said. ‘The last thing we want is for you to push yourself. Take your time. So: on to agenda point fifteen. Matt?’
Matt tapped a key on his notebook and pulled up a PowerPoint deck on the big screen. ‘Thanks, Mark. So, if we take a look at the data for last quarter—’
Alex found herself zoning out again as Matt droned on. Her squiggles morphed into figures-of-eight, each one connecting to the next in a baroque pattern that snaked down the page. She hadn’t slept well – she hadn’t slept well since the accident – and she felt painfully tired. She was hot, too, and the pink blouse Harry had bought her as a back-to-work present was pulling uncomfortably across her breasts. She pressed her phone to check the time and saw with relief that there were only nine and a half more minutes left until lunch.
She dragged her attention back to the chart on the screen and tried to concentrate. Mark had been very generous, agreeing to let her step straight back into her old job. There was a consensus that the best thing was for her to resume normal service, as quickly as possible. She would need to keep going for check-ups, according to Dr Dasgupta at the Homerton’s Regional Neurological Rehabilitation Unit. She must eat well, sleep well and take care not to get too tired. The best medicine of all right now, apparently, was routine. Dr Dasgupta, whose diagnoses and advice had up to this point consisted of a series of elaborate and jargon-couched variations on ‘I don’t know’, had seemed relieved finally to be able to offer something concrete. Yes. Routine. Familiar, comfortable, soothing routine. That was the answer. The doctor had repeated it, nodding, to Harry and Alex’s parents, several times.
Matt’s notebook, which looked like something investigative journalists took into war zones, had a flashing USB sticking out of the side. Alex brought her hand to her collarbone and touched the blue leather necklace that lay under her blouse. She had found it amongst the belongings they’d returned to her in hospital, presumably having bought it in some tourist shop in Orkney. It was awful; the dual pendants, a carved pebble and a crumpled Lego memory stick, were obviously intended to be some kind of lame arty metaphor. But for some reason she found herself sleeping in it and showering in it and tucking it under her top, every day.
She dragged her gaze back to the screen, on which there was now a long list of bullets. She nodded thoughtfully, in case anyone was watching her, which was likely. It was all they’d done, these past few days. She could only hope the novelty value would wear off soon.
TOP BRIT TECH-HOPE LOSES MARBLES IN FREAK TRAGEDY, had screamed the Daily Mail. The Guardian opted for the more sober ‘London Entrepreneur Contracts Amnesia in Island Accident’. Flair had run a special report on ‘Women Under Pressure’, illustrated with a giant hazard sign; Wired a wry op-ed called ‘Eudomonia: On the Rocks?’ They had all wanted interviews, the very idea of which made Alex want to throw up. She had spent hours staring at the press cuttings that Harry had got off some girl called Gemma, amazed that the confident woman smiling back at her from the glossy headshots, with her good hair, expert knowledge of ‘omnichannel well-being communities’ and witty pull-quotes, was her. Less surprised to recognize the hapless mess melting down on YouTube. Twice.
Gemma had been very helpful, actually, in deflecting the journalists and trying to persuade them to run positive pieces on Lenni instead. Lenni Kauppinen – whom she vaguely remembered as a friend of a friend from uni – had apparently been her business partner at Eudomonia. He was now its majority stakeholder and CEO. They’d needed a string of meetings to disentangle her from the company, and Lenni had been very understanding. He had even insisted that she hold on to some of her shares. But the truth was that, despite all the meetings, Alex still hadn’t been able to figure out exactly what Eudomonia was, what it did. She found the whole thing utterly bewildering.
A sudden rock-fall in a broch, they’d said, but she’d had to google it even to know what a broch was. A sort of mysterious ancient stone tower, apparently, native to northern Scotland and popular with tourists. She’d supposedly been in Orkney to finish off a research project with some academic institute, but when Harry spoke to GCAS, they said that they’d completed the project on her first trip and hadn’t seen her since. It was a mystery as to how she’d ended up in North Ronaldsay, let alone gadding about in brochs.
Alex did have a few memories: hauling herself out of a tunnel; jolting along in the arms of a pale young man with thick black hair; being airlifted in a rickety plane through a piercing blue sky over a still, luminous sea. But the order of events was confusing, and nobody seemed to be able to locate her rescuers. The locals on North Ronaldsay claimed to know nothing, to have seen nothing and had no idea who had called the emergency services in Kirkwall.
When she’d asked Harry why he thought she’d gone back to Orkney, something in his manner had put her off probing too far. She got the distinct impression that he thought she’d been having an affair. The idea of it, like the idea of the interviews, made her feel sick. It was hard enough to accept that her accident had effectively left him high and dry at the altar, although he had been so forgiving, so strong, so wonderfully Harry about it all. It wasn’t her fault, he had said gently, as they sat snuggled on the sofa in his flat, cradling cups of tea, after her parents had finally gone. She hadn’t been herself for
a long time. He had tried to warn her that she was overreaching, that she was in danger of burning out. It had been scary to watch, he said – although, yes, impressive in a way. There had been a moment or two when he had even thought of encouraging her, of helping her out at Eudo. But now he had accepted an offer from a new shipping firm, with a super-fast route to the Board. It was time for him to support her properly, find them a lovely new place they could hunker down in together. Be her rock. It was so good to have her back, he had said, clinking mugs. There had even been, she thought, the trace of tears in his eyes.
Someone knocked into the back of Alex’s chair and she realized the rest of the team were on their feet, wending their way out, glancing at her and muttering. As she rushed to stand, Mark paused to put a hand on her shoulder, his fingers splayed across the front of her blouse. ‘No pressure, Alex,’ he said, squeezing. ‘Steady as she goes.’ Squeezing again.
Out on the Farringdon Road, the early September afternoon was chilly and overcast, whispering of winter before autumn had officially begun. They said there’d been a heatwave that had broken a month ago, around the time she returned. But that was hidden in Alex’s mental blind spot, and she found it hard to believe as she pushed her way through the whey-faced lunchtime crowd, every other neck wrapped in a scarf. She found it all hard to believe – the six months of life that had slid right out of her brain. There were still times when it threatened to overwhelm her. It was as if she’d been given a glimpse of the struts and paint pots behind the stageset of reality, and now she found it hard just to get on with the play, knowing that at any moment it might all come crashing down. Everyone had told her it was a perfectly normal reaction. That it would pass.
Everyone except her father. He had listened properly, offered no specious reassurances and only mentioned it days later, as they stood on Fring platform. They were waiting for her train back to London, after a fortnight convalescing at home.
‘Hold onto that feeling, Kansas,’ he had murmured, as Liz retrieved a block of foil-wrapped sandwiches from her handbag and Harry hefted Alex’s wheelie bag onto the train. ‘That space, between you and everyone else. It feels like a curse, but it can be a gift.’ He had pulled her close, kissed her hard on the forehead. ‘Don’t worry,’ he had said, fiercely, into her hair. ‘You learn to live with it. It can make you a better person even. A stronger person. You’ll be fine.’
Mae was already sitting in the restaurant when Alex arrived, flanked by a buggy and a high chair. She was surrounded by a litter of plastic containers holding half-chewed bits of food, scrunched-up baby wipes and anthropomorphic toys. When she saw Alex approaching, she stopped spooning purple yoghurt in the general direction of Bo’s face and waved.
‘Al,’ she said, sliding out of the booth for a hug. ‘It’s so good to see you. We’re all sorted. Go get some grub.’
Alex kissed the top of Bo’s head, then fought her way through the scrum to the chiller cabinets lining one side of the room. Browsing the bento boxes with their neon slices of fish and translucent tangles of wakame, she realized she wasn’t hungry after all; in fact she felt ever so slightly nauseous. Snatching a box at random, she joined the back of a long queue and began pulling faces at Bo.
‘Revenge of the geeks!’
Alex swung round. The comment had come from one of two thirty-something women who were queuing in front of her, both dressed all in black, their heads bent over a single iPad. The phrase snagged the corner of her consciousness, as if it should have some particular significance, although she couldn’t imagine what that might be. Some relic of her lost six months, she thought, as one of the servers beckoned her forward and she slotted her card in the machine. She remembered how, in the press cuttings and blogs, she’d banged on about all the time she’d spent on the family computer, when she was a teen. How she’d made herself sound like a geek, a gamer, a tech-savvy maverick, when really she’d only ever been filling time. Staying close to him. Standing guard.
She carried her tray over to the booth and settled herself on the other side of Bo, who was trying to fit an Octonaut into his yoghurt pot.
‘How are you?’
‘How are you?’
They spoke at the same time. Mae raised an eyebrow. ‘You know how I am, Al. Every day the same. An endless round of suburban maternal joy. The important thing is: how the hell are you?’
‘Oh, I’m okay.’ Alex unpicked the tape from the plastic lid, then focused on smearing wasabi that she didn’t want onto sushi she didn’t want, and carefully arranging thumbnail-sized slivers of ginger she didn’t want on top. ‘I’m good. I’m fine.’
Mae stuffed two pieces of sashimi into her mouth at once, closing her eyes and moaning with pleasure. ‘Oh my God. London food.’ She used Bo’s fork to trowel in some salad, then waggled it at Alex’s chest. ‘Your tits look massive in that blouse.’
‘I know.’ Alex plucked at it, readjusting. ‘Mark noticed, too.’
‘Ah.’ Mae snorted. ‘No change there, then. Honestly, Al. What is it like, being back there?’
‘Oh, you know, a bit weird. But it’s bound to be, isn’t it? The whole situation’s weird.’
‘And you’re seriously feeling okay, health-wise? No blackouts? No headaches?’
‘No. I’m getting fat, and I’ve got a serious dose of overdue PMT, but other than that, I’m fine.’ Alex snapped her chopsticks in two and pincered a California roll. ‘Seriously, Mae, I’m bored of talking about myself. It’s all anyone wants to do.’ She leaned across and growled at Bo, pretended to nibble his cheek, made him laugh. ‘Tell me about you. Tell me about suburban maternal joy. Tell me the latest on the Octonauts.’
But Mae just gave her a silent, sceptical look, so Alex turned back to her food, ploughing through two salmon nigiri and an avocado maki before a surge of queasiness forced her to put her chopsticks down.
‘Have you seen Chloe?’ Mae asked. She was chewing slowly now, studying Alex’s face.
‘Chloe? Oh. The therapist. No.’
‘You were mad about her. Before.’ Mae hesitated. ‘Have you thought whether she might . . . help bridge the gap?’
Alex’s first session with Chloe was one of her last vivid memories. All it had done, she seemed to remember, was rake up that old stuff about her dad, which she couldn’t do anything about, and make her feel worse. She shook her head. ‘It’s the last thing I need at the moment, if I’m honest. More talk. I just want to get on with things now.’
‘Fair enough.’ Mae put her small hand on top of Alex’s. ‘But it’s weird thinking of you, back there. At Minos. When I know how much you hated it. When you’d only just broken free.’
‘Yes. Well.’ Alex slid her hand away. ‘That was SuperAlex. We never met.’
Mae sighed. ‘And I’m not saying you should. If I’m being honest, Al, SuperAlex could be a bit of a dick. But she did have a few things going for her. She was open about her feelings. She was, I have to admit, pretty damn brave. She was a bit self-obsessed, sure, a bit shallow, but she also knew how extraordinary she really was.’
Alex fiddled with her tiny plastic bottle of soy sauce. Something about that word stung. ‘Sorry that I’m such a disappointment,’ she mumbled.
‘No!’ Mae gripped her hand. ‘No. Al! Please! That’s not what I mean. My whole point is that you’ve still got that in you, deep down. I’m so glad you’re back – you-you, I mean: non-dick Alex. But I hope you’re not letting people make you feel like you’ve become some kind of invalid now.’
Bo started making indecipherable complaints, which quickly dissolved into angry tears. Mae tried suggesting a fresh nappy, a book and a banana, before rummaging in her bag, pulling out a muffin, ripping off the cellophane and shoving it on the high chair’s tray.
‘Harry said he could see it coming,’ Alex said, as Mae settled back down, Bo now intently stuffing gummy wodges of high-fructose corn syrup and gluten into his mouth. ‘Accident or no accident. He said it was clear I was heading for some sort of burn
out. A meltdown.’
‘I bet he did,’ Mae muttered, then said, ‘And sure, he’s probably right. You went about your whole grand reinvention in a seriously full-on way. But that doesn’t take away from what you accomplished in those six months, Al. You should be really proud of everything you achieved.’
Alex unscrewed the soy and balanced a dab of sauce on her fingertip.
Mae sighed again. ‘How is Harry?’
‘He thinks we should finally move in together.’
‘Okaaay. And you?’
Alex touched her tongue to her finger and tasted the salt. It had been a long time, she thought, since she’d seen the sea. Too long. She should plan a trip. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know how I feel. Not yet, I don’t think. I feel like I need to get myself a bit more sorted first.’
‘And what about the wedding?’
‘Oh, he’s been really wonderful about it all. He says we can talk about it when I’m back in the . . . um, the flow of things. Plan it all out properly, book a slot in St Albans cathedral, do it right this time. But only once I’m back to full strength.’
Mae raised both eyebrows, then tugged a baby wipe from the packet near her elbow and began to attack Bo’s face.
‘Is something wrong?’ Alex said.
‘God, I’m such a cow. But Harry—’ Mae scrunched up the wipe and threw it on the table. ‘Look, I’m so relieved you’re okay, Al, of course I am, but I also don’t want to see you lose all the ground you gained before the accident. You may have been a bit of a dick for a while back then, but you also seemed so energized, so alive. I can’t bear to see you slide back from one extreme to the other. I know I sound like a bitch, but it’s only because I love you. Because I believe you can be so much better than okay.’