The Duck Pond Incident

by Charlie Humphries

  Strictly, I shouldn’t be here - security concerns, industrial espionage and all that. As if I would do that. And besides management said it was okay - had my entry pass upgraded and everything.

  Which I swipe down the lock now, submit my thumb print and breathe out at the THUNK of the lock. The door clicks shut behind me, I lean against it just for a moment and catch my breath. I hadn’t noticed I’d been holding it.

  “Good morning, Joe. How was your weekend?” A blue table in the centre of the room, with three pairs of people, three sets of twins, settled amongst coffee and toast. I smile at my mirror image.

  “Quiet, thank you. I finished my book.” I pull up a chair, pour a cup of coffee from the pot. I am adrift in an ocean of twins and it is still unnerving six months on from the procedure.

  I come down to this white-washed cool-room every single morning, share a cup of coffee and chit-chat with the residents. I’m still not entirely sure why though. After this morning ritual, we head on upstairs to our desks together - because we are a team after all. A duplicated, quiet team of identical machines. Spot the difference.

  The morning of my procedure was cold and blustery, and I couldn’t seem to wrap up in enough layers, couldn’t tame the raging anxiety flooding my system. There’s only so much blurb you can read regarding such an operation - less operation and more going for a long luxurious nap - but knowing what would be happening around you, to you, while you were pretending to be dead was still terrifying.

  I stood at the window of the high-rise hotel, watching the dawn traffic scuttle around below. No expense spared, a massage before lunch, a hearty five-course dinner served by crisply pressed waiters with white gloves. Now it’s crunch time. A polite knock at my door, a polite smile, a polite, “Good morning, Joe. Did you sleep well?”

  “I guess,” is my perhaps too-blunt, too-honest reply. Management would have picked me up on that. That’s not very Company Tone, is it? Not too positive or concrete. What could you have said instead?

  But management weren’t there - I was alone and chaperoned by strangers who had probably never heard of us in the first place. For all the bigging up for this honour, this privilege, management only went so far.

  The clinic was a squat building set back from the road, sitting amongst prime, neat grounds. A frosted glass panel out the front claimed this was Lab Inc - Boosting Productivity since 2015! Only the glitz and glamour were really mute and dull in the dawn rain. Their reception was supposed to be a cool, neutral blue but it came off as cold and distant. The place was populated by a single, sleepy receptionist covering her yawn with a clawed hand. Her scarlet nail polish was like a flare in the gloom.

  “Good morning. Could I take your name please?” She shuffled the mouse, tapped something on her keyboard.

  “Joe,” I said.

  “I’ll let Dr Patel know you’re here. Can I get you a glass of water?”

  “Er - no, thanks.” I retreated, sat down and took out my book. I had only twenty pages remaining and was forced to read really slowly if I wanted something to do on the train home.

  Thankfully, Dr. Patel was prompt. She was bright and cheerful. She took me through to a little room, all pastels and box folders.

  And then everything goes a little quicker, my memory of getting into a gown, climbing into a very crisp, very clean bed. A nurse setting up a drip - what was the drip for?! - and all smiles and manners and, “A little scratch. There, now if you’ll just count backwards from ten.”

  Ten, nine, eight –

  Mondays are always busy in the energy industry for back room personnel. All of the queries that were unanswerable over the weekend have piled up and the phone is off the hook, and you find yourself repeating a lot of the same things and - I already spoke to you about this account.

  However, when you’re pegged as an asset, you get moved into the older pots of work - the accounts where other agents have no clue what needs to happen to get it updated and a statement produced.

  New week, new pot of work. I smile at Blake because he’s on the phone this morning and we all know his feelings about that. His patience is saint-like with the call centre operatives. He gives a little dip of his head, arranging his glass of water and mug of coffee within arm’s reach.

  My twins still unnerve him, I see. A tight smile, hunched shoulders. It’s not to everyone’s taste - we had one team member go AWOL when they discovered I was going in for the procedure.

  “It’s unnatural!” she had screamed and then walked out. She left her computer on and never came back.

  “Joe, which pot of work do you want to tackle first?”

  “I’ll have the NAP pot, please.”

  “Very well, I’ll take the main pot and B will work the System pot.” A gives me a wide grin, typing without looking at their screen. Their teeth are shiny, straight and white - a little upgrade when they were being grown. I have teeth stained yellow from too much coffee. It does make me wonder what else they’ve changed about them. Are they still attracted to men? Or did they take out desire, the ability to love?

  Looking at my twins (no, not mine even though they came from me), it feels like I am being slowly replaced: they don’t get sick. Ever. If I should leave the company, they’ll stay on. They will work here until they die. Can they die? The only death of a twin ever broadcast in the news that I could find was a suicide but aside from that, we have never been shown a natural death of a twin. There are some pages buried deep in the internet stating that twins will be just recreated if they die - that my DNA will be kept on file forever and ever, amen.

  Imagine a tiny part of you going on and on for who knows how long doing the same work day in, day out. No holidays, maybe no retirement even - will they just die from exhaustion?

  And sometimes when I’m half awake at 3am, blinking at my alarm clock, listening to my neighbours argue for the millionth time that week, I wonder. Wonder what’ll happen if I always perform 100% - will people start mistaking me for a copy. Mistake me for a man-made machine.

  A Brother’s Love

  Andrew loved his baby brother dearly, like his heart would explode, but right now he could throttle him.

  He’d been sat with his slowly coagulating Cappuccino for an hour now and the damn thing had cost nearly £2.50. He turned the page of the newspaper that he’d half read three times now, executing the shuffle shuffle-flick maneuver with newly-found ease. And just as he was considering phoning his baby brother, Mark came loping around the corner, a little sweaty, a little crumpled. Mark collapsed into the wicker chair opposite his half-brother, only a little out of breath.

  “Sorry, sorry, I-” he began to pant for breath, Andrew raising a cool eyebrow.

  “And what time do you call this?” he tapped his watch, a bootleg from the flea market.

  “I ran into Sam on the way over and we just got talking.” Mark blushed and it spread to the tips of his ears until he was a spitting image of a midsummer sunset. Andrew quirked a grin and chugged the last of his cold, greasy Cappuccino, getting up with the silky grace inherited from his mother.

  “When do I get to meet her then?” He clapped his brother around the shoulders, “have you kissed her yet?” He began to steer Mark around the corner, where the food market spread out before them in a cacophony of fragrant steam, smoky barbeque and bright, gem-like cakes. The stalls were arranged in a ring around the outskirts of the square and, although the lunchtime buzz had died down, there were still a few queues snaking through the space.

  Mark stopped short, bit his lip.

  “Andy, listen, I-”

  “Look, you’re not still doubting this, doubting me? Come on, bro, we’ve been through this already.”

  “No, it’s not this, it’s-” Mark took a breath and hissed it out his nose, “Sam’s a bloke. I’m bisexual, Andy.”

  Andrew blinked at his baby brother, mind blank. Mark looked
at his feet, face now well and truly looking like he’d been roasted by the sun, his freckles near-gone.

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Forget it, let’s get this over with.” Mark didn’t so much stomp away, but was a brewing storm, hands in his pockets, head bowed into the aromatic steam swirling over the market. He approached the Italian street food vendor, a bright pitch of red, white and green serving fresh pasta with tomato sauce, pesto or roasted vegetables, meatballs. The server was a large white woman wearing a white apron flicked with dried tomato sauce, her curly, bouncy hair tamed under a handkerchief.

  Andrew caught up with his brother, slapped an arm around his shoulders and so the game began.

  “This is the place I was telling you about, bro. And I already checked with Sarah here and you’re okay! No celery here! Have whatever takes your fancy, I’ll treat you.”

  The pair picked the pasta and meatballs in tomato sauce (with a kick of chili). Andrew was salivating like a dog at the smell and forgot for a beat what he was really here for.

  It all came back with his baby brother taking the first bite of his meal, and his dairy allergy kicked in. Mark had perfected the fall to his knees as his stomach rebelled and his body began to reject his meal. Andrew played his part of concerned big brother perfectly, fumbling his phone from his pocket, shaking, shouting for a paramedic - anybody - to help.

  And it was supposed to go like this:

  Ambulance was called.

  Mark is bundled into the back.

  Andrew takes details of the food vendor to follow up later.

  Mark recovers in A&E, to laugh about it all later.

  They write to the vendor to sue for damages.

  Money comes pouring in, nice dinners all round.Only, something had gone wrong. Mark was curled into himself, whimpering like a kicked dog, sweating, pale. He’d never gone down so heavy before, been reduced to such a state. His eyes sought Andrew, who knelt beside his brother.

  “Andy, this wasn’t part of the plan,” Mark whispered.

  “I know, Mark. Just hold on and we’ll get you to the hospital.”

  The ambulance took forty minutes to arrive, in which time Mark had fallen unconscious and a small crowd had gathered around them. Somebody had put Mark into the recovery position, but Andrew had forgotten to thank them, to even acknowledge them. The paramedics had bundled Mark onto a gurney and Andrew had left with them, forgetting to take the name of the Italian food vendor to follow up. All the way to the hospital Andrew squeezed Mark’s hand and whispered to him.

  Andrew’s last sight of his baby brother was his unconscious form being wheeled into the bowels of the hospital, flanked by an army of blue-scrubbed staff. He collapsed into a flat seat in the waiting room, surrounded by injured humanity, staring at his shoes. This wasn’t part of the plan. He still didn’t know what to do with his hands so to stop them moving he tucked them into his armpits, only then his legs starting twitching. It didn’t matter in the end. A nurse in blue scrubs approached Andrew, sat down beside him and confirmed what he already knew in his soul: Mark was gone.

  Andrew somehow managed to get home, running on autopilot when locking the front door, putting his keys in the dish, coat on hook. He sat on their tiny, sagging sofa and stared at the carpet. It hadn’t quite sunk in yet, but the numb in his heart was spreading. He had to tell people, tell their mum, tell that bloke, Sam. Andrew didn’t know Sam. It’d sounded like Mark was pretty into him, but wasn’t gay?

  The thin twilight was smothered by the night, their small matchbox of a living room illuminated by the sodium orange streetlight. Andrew was jolted out of his circling darkness by the ring of the landline. He stared at the pale blue of the screen with a mobile number he didn’t recognise, let it ring three times before picking it up.

  “Hello?” he choked.

  “Hello? Mark? It’s Sam.”

  “Oh, Mark isn’t here. He-”

  “You must be Andy! Mark’s told me so much about you.”

  “Really? He mentioned you today, before he- I-” Andrew’s core broke and the sobs bubbled up out of him.

  “Has something happened? Are you okay?”

  “No,” Andrew whispered.

  “I’m coming over. Just hold tight, Andy.”

  Sam arrived in his dented, tiny Vauxhall Opel Corsa and managed to find a gap on the street. The porchlight highlighted Sam’s high cheekbones, his long, pale lashes and the galaxy of freckles across his nose. He was absolutely gorgeous.

  “I bought tea and milk,” Sam said as way of an introduction, holding up a plastic Budgens carrier bag.

  “Please come in.” Andrew invited Sam into the tiny nook of a kitchen, with its colour scheme out of the Sixties. He found some clean, chipped mugs and managed to fill the kettle, even with his shaking, numb hands.

  “Let me, Andy. Sugar?” Sam gave him a small smile, settled into the ritual of making tea. They settled on the sofa, the room a little chilly, lit by a single fourty-watt bulb. They blew on their tea, small curls of vapour twisting up to kiss their noses.

  Just who was this helpful stranger? Coming round to make tea and listen to somebody else’s woes? Andrew peeked out the corner of his eyes, taking in Sam’s profile, his petit nose and brush of freckles.

  “Mark’s dead.” The words were a quiet hiss of admission, the grief starting to bleed through and crush his chest.

  “I spoke to him, saw him this afternoon.” Sam cradled his mug, staring at Andrew from under his long lashes.

  “We met up afterwards and tried the food market and he… he died alone in the hospital. I wasn’t in the room with him.” Andrew bit into his fist, turning away as the sobs shook his body. Mark had died alone because of him, because of his stupid get-rich-quick scheme. Could he tell Sam about that? Should he?

  Andrew placed his mug on the low table, covering his face with his hands as his grief and guilt poured out. Sam was crying too, but in a quiet, snuffling-type of way. He curled his arm about Andrew’s shoulder and it was like an electric shock. Andrew was on his feet, pedaling to the other side of the room.

  “Don’t touch me! I don’t want whatever it is you’ve caught!”

  “Sorry, Andy, what have I caught?”

  “You’re gay, aren’t you? Don’t you all have AIDs?” Sam took a breath, wiped his eyes with his fingers.

  “Yes, I am gay. No, I don’t have AIDs, tested negative for HIV as it happens. Look, Andy, I didn’t come over here to put up with homophobic bullshit. I came because you sounded distraught on the phone and I know Mark cared for you a great deal.”

  “I didn’t know Mark was gay. He never told me.”

  “He wasn’t gay. Mark was bisexual. He was attracted to men and women.”

  “But he was seeing you?”

  Sam let out a small sigh and took a gulp of tea. He hadn’t expected to be giving a lesson in sexuality to his dead to-be partner’s older half-brother.

  “Mark was bisexual, even though he was in a same-sex relationship. You don’t just stop being bisexual when you’re dating someone of the same sex.”

  Andrew took a moment to chew over this explanation.

  “So, Mark was dating a man and a woman?”

  “I don’t think Mark was polyamorous, so no. Listen, Andy, if there’s anything you need, give me a ring.” He took pen and paper from his coat pocket, wrote down his number and placed it on the table, stood up and brushed his trousers down. “Please let me know when the funeral is. I’d like to say goodbye.” Sam cleared his throat and left, closing the front door behind him. Andrew listened to the growl of the car fade into the distance, looking at the small rectangle of paper on the table. It was only when he was clearing away the half-drunk tea that he noticed Sam had left the milk behind.

  Settlement 16

  There were good perks in being the only policeman in Settlement 16, like having a non-shared house, with space and quiet lulls in the day. But it did
mean business hours didn’t apply. Or, even worse, in Thomas’ opinion, it meant that people would just drop by at all hours, and only to shoot the breeze.

  Thomas had removed his side arm holster, hung it on its hook by the door and was beginning to wind down. This involved the day’s highlight: removing his binder. It began with unbuttoning his work shirt and hanging it up to serve tomorrow’s stint at the station, as there wasn’t enough water to have a clean shirt every weekday. And then the absolute pleasure of removing his binder and breathing into his lungs, expanding his chest cavity completely.

  Only tonight, a Wednesday (not that it really mattered because this job was seven days a week), Thomas was already heating beans on the camping stove, in his tatty dressing gown, when the knock came. It was not a desperate hammering or a timid patter, but a cheery pattern that Thomas knew all too well: somebody wanted a chat. He sighed, lowered the heat under his beans and pulled his dressing gown close, tied it tight and prepared to have a chat.

  “Good evening, Mr Baker. What seems to be the trouble?” Kevin Baker was on the settlement council and breezed through his days ignoring the citizens with ideas that he didn’t agree with, and stealing other people’s work. With his short, blonde hair and button-down, pressed shirt, he made Thomas’ teeth itch. He was sure Baker was siphoning water, but Thomas had no evidence.

  “Tom! Just the, er, man I need. Can I come in a spell?” Thomas opened the door wider and invited the councilman into his sanctuary. He needed to set up an audience room, just a small space to keep business calls and his down-time separate.

  Kevin claimed the only chair in Thomas’ house, perched on the very edge and smiled up at Thomas.

  “I see you’re about to have dinner so I’ll keep it short. Tom, people are nervous, and the impression is that the police department aren’t taking them seriously.”

  “Sorry councilman, but you’ve lost me.” Thomas leant against the kitchen counter, resigned to a late dinner.