Hindsight

by AA Bell

  ‘Bastard!’ Lockman shouted. ‘Do you get your jollies from hurting innocent girls now, too?’

  ‘Shut it,’ Patterson warned, ‘or I’ll be forced to shut it for you … Get him stowed, Uno, and encourage him to sit quietly.’

  ‘Lieutenant?’ Mira called. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Well enough,’ he replied with a grunt as someone shoved him up the ramp to the cabin. Engines engaged, and within seconds they were accelerating out of the lagoon into the estuary and headed for the bay.

  ‘Woah!’ Pobody exclaimed from across the room. ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘He did,’ Lockman said. ‘That’s the standard of new company you’re keeping.’

  Mira sensed the energy of the air change inside the cabin as many bodies swarmed in and loomed around her. She smelled blood, and sweat and other stale smells she didn’t recognise. Then the row of chairs behind her thumped as if a body had been dropped onto it, back-to-back with her, and she heard Lockman groan very close to her ear. Within seconds, she heard two more groans from opposite corners of the room, as if two other bodies had been dumped less ceremonially on the floor — one female, and the other far more frighteningly familiar.

  ‘Ben?’ she called frantically. ‘Ben, are you there?’

  ‘He’s there,’ Lockman said. ‘Unconscious for now and better it stays that way.’

  ‘Lieutenant?’ she cried. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I’ll answer that.’ Gregan crouched beside her and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. ‘You’re going to answer a few questions for me, dear.’ He stroked Mira’s hair, causing her to flinch and lean away from him.

  ‘Keep your hands off her!’ Lockman warned, but Mira heard him answered by a thud that knocked the wind and another grunt from him.

  ‘Stop it!’ she screamed. ‘Stop hurting people! Just ask me the question.’

  ‘That’s the spirit.’ Gregan stroked her hair again, and this time she suffered his touch with a shudder. ‘Show me your eyes, please, Miss Chambers.’

  ‘I’m blind.’ She clenched her eyes shut and turned aside. ‘What’s to see?’

  ‘I’m curious.’ Plucking off her glasses, he gripped her chin and peeled back her eyelids forcibly. First one, then the other. ‘Madre mia!’ He slapped her face. ‘Both at once, open!’

  She did, and squinting through the painful blue shades of yester-century, Mira saw a whaling ship bearing down on her with its harpoon pointed her way. A whale in the estuary! Nowhere to go! The ship fired, just as the hump breached the surface beneath Mira. The ghostly barb speared towards her and she screamed, clenching her eyes shut and struggling to pull away from her invisible captors.

  ‘It hurts!’ she pleaded. ‘Please don’t make me? I need my shades.’

  ‘Do the glasses help?’ Gregan asked. ‘… with these controls on the side?’

  Mira worried about how to answer that, since lying to him meant also lying to herself, and without her vigilance in clinging to the truth all these years, she felt sure she’d have lost her grip on reality and gone insane.

  ‘They’re broken. Any shades will do, really, but purple is best. My skin is very sensitive. I can tell the lights are on in here, so I need a dark shade or I’m no use to anybody.’

  ‘You see with your skin?’

  ‘Basically, doesn’t everyone to a certain extent? The eye is just a different type of skin cell.’

  After an awkward moment of silence, she felt the glasses return to her face, also returning a small measure of relief.

  ‘Now tell me how you do what you do? How you see truth?’

  She shook her head. ‘I told you. I look and I sense.’

  ‘Then to business. A test question: tell me what I had for breakfast today, yesterday and last Sunday.’

  ‘I can’t answer that here. I’d need to go there — to each place if there was more than one. You’d need to take me.’

  ‘But you can tell me the truth from the places you’ve been today?’

  ‘Only some of it — the parts I recall or lived through myself. I don’t study every yesterday of every place I ever go. I’d never get anywhere.’

  ‘Very well, then. This gels with the sales pitch from Colonel Kitching. So let’s jump straight to the big question for today. Did my son ask you to spy on me?’

  Mira chewed on her lip, worrying about his reaction if she told the truth. ‘What does that matter now?’

  ‘Because I’m not as dead as you think!’ The voice sent a chill down her spine, as if she’d finally met a real ghost.

  ‘Get him away from me! If I tell the truth, he’ll kill me!’

  ‘Lying bitch!’ Greggie screamed, grabbing her by the throat. ‘I have nothing to fear. I’ll choke the truth out of you!’

  ‘Get off her!’ Lockman shouted, going wild at the same time. ‘Let her go!’ But the result was the opposite, with many hands grappling to grab her or drag her free, while also trying to drag Lockman and Greggie apart. She felt Gabby’s body slide away from her lap too, and Gregan himself leap away to safety, leaving Mira to strain against the rope that tied down her hand to the chair, with the chair itself rocking against its bolts to the deck.

  Patterson and Cinq finally dragged Greggie off her, while she heard Uno and a few others struggling to keep a hold of Lockman a short distance away. Mira gasped and coughed, catching her breath.

  ‘That dog is trouble,’ Gregan warned. ‘If you can’t put him down yet, at least chain him.’

  ‘I was just about to suggest the same for your son,’ Patterson replied. ‘So I will, if you will.’ An awkward silence endured briefly, broken by shuffling and complaints, mostly from Greggie, and then Mira felt a slice of rough rope pulling Lockman’s wrists against hers, binding them together through the seat, and from there to the deck.

  Gregan resumed his seat beside her, ordering one of his men to ensure that Pobody navigated the cat north after leaving the estuary. Then he stroked her hair again. ‘I apologise for the interruption, my dear. Please answer the question.’

  She chewed on her lip, wondering if he really did want the truth or like most staff at psychiatric hospitals, just something that would keep him happy and feeling safe in himself.

  ‘If you can’t trust family, who can you trust?’ she asked, recalling Greggie had said the same thing, as if driven to madness by it.

  ‘Indeed. Can I trust my own flesh and blood, Miss Chambers?’

  ‘Tell him the truth,’ Lockman said. ‘If he’s weak, it will break him.’

  Mira heard another fist slug into Lockman and felt it herself through the chair.

  ‘Will you please stop volunteering as their punching bag?’ she pleaded. ‘I can handle this.’

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ Gregan said patiently. ‘I’ve paid millions as a security deposit to ensure that I don’t. Clearly, Colonel Kitching wants you back in one piece at the end of my week. But I don’t owe anything on any of them. I’m paying for the truth, so it’s the truth I’ll get, or I’ll take it out on them. Or perhaps return you to the colonel for correctional treatment. Are we clear?’

  ‘As glass,’ she replied. ‘But if you don’t like what you hear, you can’t blame me or my friends. You must promise not to vent your reactions on us.’

  ‘I promise nothing. I place blame where blame’s due, and if that’s you, then your friends may need to suffer the consequences in your place. As I said, I’m not permitted to harm you.’

  Mira gulped, fearing harm to her friends far more than to herself. ‘You framed Ben for murder and robbery,’ she reminded him, ‘and he’d been loyal to your family store as a friend as well as an employee.’

  ‘That was my son’s idea. By the time I heard about the frame-job, there was no going back on it.’

  ‘For you, Pops!’ Greggie shouted. ‘I did it for you and for us, for the family!’

  Mira shook her head, suspecting another web of lies was being spun over there in the shadows, but the details o
f the aftermath no longer mattered now that she knew the facts of the robbery itself and could ensure that the long process of clearing Ben’s name could begin and succeed — if only they could get away.

  ‘Tell me!’ Gregan insisted.

  Mira sighed. ‘Greggie will betray you first chance he gets.’

  ‘No speculating,’ Gregan warned. ‘Just the facts. After the fire, my son called to brag that he’d found you. I recall you were shouting abuse at him at the time in the background. However, it soon became clear that he didn’t bring you to me by a direct route, and during the detour, you escaped. Or so he says. It’s possible he let you go in exchange for your cooperation.’

  Mira laughed. ‘Trust me, that never occurred to him! It might have worked, actually.’

  ‘Then tell me exactly what happened, everything he said, while you were in his company.’

  ‘You mean aside from his crude attempt to breed with me?’ She felt Lockman’s wrist tense against the ropes, and clasped his hand, hoping to reassure him that she was okay and keep him from getting hurt again.

  ‘Crude but shrewd,’ Gregan replied, defensively. ‘You’re too expensive to rent regularly except for special projects — like digging up dirt on a few bank managers and currency exchange agents. If your talent is genetic, a child or two could prove quite profitable in the long term.’

  ‘Bastards!’ Lockman swore, earning himself another slug to the gut.

  ‘Hey, I can feel that!’ Mira complained. ‘If you want to punish him, just slap me, okay?’

  ‘What else?’ Gregan said, undaunted.

  Mira chewed on her lip. Waves began to slap the hull as she sensed the ship gliding from sheltered waters into choppy waves. A ghostly fishing trawler sailed through her, and she glimpsed a dozen soldiers inside, working at surveillance screens where she’d expected to see storage crates.

  ‘He wanted me to discover your passwords, and the code to your safe and all the contact details he’d need so he could move up in your organisation. He told me he wanted to take over from you; that he’d been upset with you for years, feeling unappreciated — even held back by you deliberately — but it’s not just what he said. It’s how he said it. If I was allowed to speculate, I’d say he was planning to kill you if you didn’t finally promote him.’

  ‘Kill me?’ Gregan wailed. ‘My own flesh and blood? That’s what they said!’

  ‘A moment of madness!’ Greggie sobbed. ‘I had no choice, Pops! You gave me no choice! I’m a laughing stock among your men. It’s so humiliating! You say you trust family first, but then you make me work harder for everything! I’m the one who saved the scam after Uncle Theo died, and yet I get no cut or benefits. You don’t even let me step up when you go away a few days on business.’

  ‘Oh, my son!’ Gregan cried, leaving Mira for him. ‘I’ve never seen it that way. I thought you wanted to work your way up. We must fix this. We must fix it together at once — with this trip!’

  ‘Oh, great,’ Lockman muttered. ‘Now they’re united.’

  Freddie clung to the passenger seat of his angel’s Volkswagen, feeling the pitch and yaw of the trawler’s deck amidships being distorted through her car’s suspension. His music stick hung around his neck, humming and trembling like a gagged hostage, and feeding the silent scream of music into the basilar membranes of his inner ear. Sound waves splashed against sound waves, negating each other, leaving him with only a fraction of the cacophony to process; the most frightening the echoes from the future that were most likely to happen.

  He could hear the trouble coming — hear his angel’s screams brought to him across the waters in ripples of time as they sailed nearer. Yet there she sat behind the wheel with such a Mona Lisa smile on her face, worried for Ben and Mira, while drawing small pleasures from simple moments, staring at the streaming rain on her windscreen and occasionally switching on the wipers to peer across the stormy waters of the bay.

  ‘How cool is this?’ he heard her say, and within moments, her lips moved to pronounce the words like a warped movie with the soundtrack behind sync; an actress kissing silence to a tune already played. ‘We’re sailing through our conversation — literally. Does it make it any easier for you, Freddie? Less confusing not to hear everything that’s coming all at once? I mean, it must be quieter at sea, surely?’

  He shrugged. ‘This water is busy.’ Growing busier too. He felt less and less hopeful of being man enough to save her when the time came — his muscles spritely enough to climb trees and crawl into drains and other secret spaces at Serenity, but his body aging now by the minute, and his confidence withering. He hadn’t expected this — a journey across water. In all his life, he’d always known what was coming; so many futures — an endless torment. Now, not knowing seemed far more terrifying!

  Outside, he saw six large, menacing crewmen, and heard too many competing sounds and arguments to know exactly how their futures would unravel. He could hear the furors aboard other craft too; absent now but he knew they’d pass this way soon. Without being at the final destination itself, he could only hear those screams which were loud enough to travel over distance as well as backwards in time — among them a man’s voice saying, ‘Don’t scream. You’ll die faster.’

  His sweet angel turned to him then, sharing her smile and drawing one from him in that magical way that she had, no matter how miserable he felt. He closed his old eyes and heard her voice whispering to him in gentle echoes as each word broke the soft end of the sound barrier; each ripple flattening and setting like stone as they passed from the future into history.

  ‘You know what this feels like?’ she asked.

  Again that same male echo warned, ‘Don’t scream, you’ll die faster.’

  Reopening his eyes, he enjoyed the bliss of reading her lips and hearing her voice one more time from memory.

  ‘Like riding a drunk duck,’ he said, timing it to ensure they said it together.

  She laughed, and he tried to laugh too, but her future screams echoed softer, drawing nearer in time as well as in distance.

  Don’t scream or you’ll die faster — clearer now but softer and still all the future echoes of all those other sounds soon to come. He couldn’t judge how far into the future he could hear any more. Sound seemed to travel so differently over water. They were still sailing into it, and as always, the distant futures screamed so loud he could only feel them out there beyond the upper field of his hearing.

  ‘Are we there yet?’ she asked, playfully triggering the wipers to life again — and he nodded, already hearing the wane of the engines and the pounding of a fist against her window.

  Give me your phone! he said urgently with his hands in case they could lip-read from a distance. They’re going to search you! Wrenching his headphones from his ears, he pushed the music stick and headphones into her lap. I’m a deaf old fool! he reminded her. You must hurry! They won’t search me properly!

  ‘Honey, there’s nobody …’ Then she saw them — five fishermen and the captain approaching with purpose, and although the vessel slowed to bob far between shores, two of those men broke away to open the gates in the guardrail behind her car.

  Galvanised into action, she switched her phone to hostage mode too and passed it to him, touching hands one last time — the echoes suggesting forever, but for her sake, he couldn’t let himself be distracted. He stashed her phone down his tracksuit pants and into the front fork of his underwear, blushing as he noticed it was still warm from her own body.

  A fist pounded against her window.

  Step out of the car please: his lips cracked and weathered, but still easy to read; the captain of their destiny.

  Why? she called as the doors were wrenched open, and from behind their backs the captain and his five men all drew menacing T-shaped machine guns.

  Don’t scream or you’ll die faster.

  I’ve been instructed to say nothing, but I’m permitted to show you. This way please.

  Freddie refrained from get
ting out until the captain’s words had finished leaving his mouth, already hearing his angel’s pleas for them to leave him alone, and that same warning, still echoing over again. Don’t scream or you’ll die faster.

  He began to rock, driven mad by it, straining to hear the softer echoes at the same time, and make sense of them. He heard himself struggle and then speak — heard his angel struggling too against one of the five men — and then as he was hauled bodily from the car and thrust backwards over the hood, he grappled to stay with the silent fisherman and clutch hold of his beard, while on the far side of the car, the matron was hauled bodily out too, putting an end to those of her echoes.

  ‘Such pretty hair,’ Freddie said, opening his mouth to gulp out the words he’d already heard, as if rehearsed. ‘I wish I had your pretty hair! Do you need to oil it, like I oil my head?’ He tried to stroke the man’s beard, already knowing the standard reaction — same as always from anyone when he played this game of hiding his intentions — but this time restraining himself from defending himself as his hand was slapped away.

  What’s wrong with him? asked the captain. He sounds like he’s not the full shipment.

  He’s deaf. He can’t hear anything, and he’s a little senile so he frightens easily. If you need to talk to him, please … please talk through me.

  The captain nodded, but not to her. On his signal, two men wrenched Freddie and his angel to stand aside near a rack of cylinders, while three others attended to the car, rolling the windows down first, shifting gears into neutral and releasing the handbrake. One of them searched all the storage spaces too, and found Fredarick’s Braille manuscript under the seat, where Freddie had stashed it.

  Watching them flip through the pages, Freddie could see the dangerous look cross their faces; the colourless dots in the paper were to them a secret code.

  Freddie panicked, struggling and screaming, but unable to control himself when the turn of fate had occurred so unheralded. He’d needed those pages to make it into Mira’s hands — to solicit her help in staying away from Serenity and in so doing, to keep all such trouble as this away from his beloved matron.