by Jane Killick
“Excuse me,” said Michael to the woman in uniform behind the desk. “My friend came in about ten minutes ago. Youngish, blonde, muscular guy. I’m just checking he hasn’t left yet.”
“Not out this way,” she said.
“Good,” said Michael. “I’ll wait.”
“He could be in there for hours,” she said.
“I’ll wait.”
Michael sat on one of the hard plastic seats in the public area and leant back against the wall behind. Above the main desk, a television screen played a series of silent adverts on a loop that warned people to beware of pickpockets and not to leave valuables out on display in their cars. He pulled out his phone and opened up a game he hadn’t played for ages.
After a while, the nervous woman got out of her seat. Michael felt an unstoppable wave of relief from her as a young man emerged from the other side of the security door. He was tall and lanky and barely old enough to be an adult, legally speaking. He muttered something about being released on police bail and she hugged him, much to his discomfort. Then they left, taking their confused emotions of relief, anxiety and love with them.
Fifteen minutes later, the battery on Michael’s phone died and he went back to staring at the screen with its helpful hints on how to avoid getting his pocket picked.
He was beginning to wonder if the desk sergeant had been right about Otis being in the police station for several hours. Michael had assumed Otis was there, like he had been, to give a statement in less than half an hour. But if Otis had been arrested, then the police had twenty-four hours to question him before he had to be charged or released. Michael was happy to wait, but not that long.
At last, about an hour and a half after Otis had passed Michael in the reception area, he emerged again. One of the plain clothes policemen said goodbye to him at the security door and left him to it.
Michael stood up. “Hello, Otis.”
Otis looked his way. Instinctively, he increased his filters in the presence of another perceiver, but not enough to block out that he was unfazed by his encounter with the police, if a little tired. “No one’s called me Otis for a long time,” he said.
“What do I call you?” said Michael. “Oliver?”
“Sounds odd when you say it. I like Otis fine.”
“Why are you here?”
“The Sian Jones case. You?”
“Same.”
“They think a perceiver did it,” said Otis. “They thought I might know who. I told them perceivers don’t go around shooting people. They didn’t believe me, but they know I wasn’t the one who did it, so they couldn’t keep me.”
“I saw you on the TV the other day, Otis.”
“With that bloody Angelheart woman!” If I was going to commit murder, she’d be the first in line.
Michael laughed.
The desk sergeant looked up at them. It was like she was mentally projecting her disapproval in their direction.
“Come on, let’s go,” said Otis. “I need to get home and my wife’ll kill me if I miss the night bus.”
They stepped out into the cold. The temperature had dropped several degrees since Michael had gone into the police station and he wasn’t dressed for it. Above him, despite the light pollution of the London sky, a few stars could be seen twinkling in clear patches between the clouds and it felt like it wouldn’t be long before frost started to form.
“You’re married?” said Michael as Otis walked to the bus stop.
“Not really,” said Otis. “Strictly speaking she’s my partner, but I call her my wife because we had a baby together. It was a bit of a surprise, to be honest, but now Matilda’s here, I wouldn’t have it any other way. So we’re saving up to get married. Trying to. Nappies are expensive.”
As he thought of his family, Michael perceived he was happy. It wasn’t something he had ever expected from Otis, but then a person could change a lot in five years. When Michael thought back to everything that had happened to him since he and Otis had last seen each other, he realised how much.
“Your baby will grow up to be perceiver, then,” said Michael.
“I expect she will.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. Talking of which, I better let my wife know I’m on my way.” Otis pulled his mobile phone from his pocket and turned it on.
The tiny machine responded with a series of pings and alerts that came so rapidly one after another it was like it was playing a little tune. An ominous tune.
Otis touched the screen on his phone and Michael perceived his dread. “This has to be some kind of hoax,” said Otis. “We’ve been down this path. We fixed this five years ago.”
“Fixed what?”
Otis touched the screen again and the familiar sound of Pankhurst’s voice emerged. He held it out so Michael could see the video playing on it.
“… The experiment has failed,” Pankhurst said from a podium placed outside of Ten Downing Street. “We were willing to allow perceivers to live among us. We even experimented with allowing perceivers to act as useful members of society by looking into the minds of criminals. But, still, they did not respect the privacy of honest, hard-working people. It has been made clear to me, in recent days, that we cannot allow this perversion to continue to exist on our streets. Therefore, regrettably, I shall be ordering the full-scale curing of all perceivers from midnight tonight.”
Michael felt sick. He felt betrayed. The man who had made him give up the chance of a normal life at university to bring him to London had turned his back on him. He had turned his back on all people like him.
Otis was right, it was déjà vu.
Pankhurst had thought curing perceivers was the answer before. Michael had persuaded him otherwise. It had taken a riot, five dead people and a deftly worded argument to bring about the introduction of a law to allow norms and perceivers to live alongside each other.
Suddenly, in one speech, Pankhurst had thrown it all away.
Otis was just as horrified. He barely had the strength to hold the phone up. He stopped the video and the Prime Minister’s words were cut dead. He ran out in the road, waving his arms like a madman.
“Taxi!” shouted Otis.
A black cab screeched to a halt and barely managed to avoid running Otis over.
Michael perceived his panic, but he didn’t understand it. “What are you doing?”
“I can’t afford to wait for a bus,” said Otis. He rushed up to the driver’s open window. “Can you take me to Stepney, mate?”
The taxi driver indicated that was okay and Otis went to get in. Michael was already standing by the back door. “Was is it, Otis? Can I help?”
“The police know I have a list of perceivers,” said Otis. “After Jennifer was cured, teenagers kept contacting her wanting to know if they should take the cure too or live under Perceivers’ Law. She didn’t want anything to do with all that stuff anymore and I sort of took over running the network. All the data is secure, but … I’ve got to get home and warn everyone and then … I don’t know … destroy all the data? Start a new protest movement? I should have seen this coming. When the journalist died and people blamed perceivers … I should have seen this coming.”
Michael stepped out of the way and allowed Otis to climb into the back of the taxi. “Bye, Michael. It was good to bump into you again. A shame it wasn’t under better circumstances.”
Otis closed the door and the taxi drove off, leaving Michael standing on the pavement and wondering what the hell he was going to do.
Twenty-Two
Pauline opened the cupboard nearest the fridge in Michael’s flat to find two shelves containing only a half-used packet of pasta and an unopened packet of rice. She slammed the door shut again and opened the cupboard next to it.
Michael watched from just outside the kitchenette. He had intended to go in and unload the dishwasher, but Pauline had been rushing from one end to the other for the past five minutes and he decided he was better off keeping o
ut of the way.
The second cupboard contained coffee mugs and china bowls.
“What are we going to do?” she said.
“I don’t know, Pauline.” He was tired. It was late when he got back, then he spent another night hardly sleeping.
“Doesn’t he know that you can’t just go around curing perceivers with an injection? That injection thing is a myth, a lie to keep parents happy. They’ll need other perceivers to go into our heads and cut off our power. How the hell does he think he’s going to get enough perceivers to do that to all of us in the country?” She opened a third cupboard and found where he kept the teabags and the coffee. “Christ, do you not have any breakfast stuff in this flat?!”
Michael stepped forward and went to the cupboard under the counter where he kept an emergency box of cornflakes. He’d had to put it there because the box was too tall for the other cupboards. He handed it to Pauline. “Pankhurst knows all that. I can only assume the report drawn up by the woman from the cure programme addressed all those things.”
“I suppose they’ve got all the records from the schools where they screened everyone. Even the ones they cured will be on record and the register of births will say if they’ve had children or not.”
“It doesn’t matter how they’re going to do it, Pauline, the fact is they’ve announced that they are. We’re officially public enemy number one.”
Pauline went back to the cupboard with the china bowls and pulled one off the top of the stack. “You need to speak to Pankhurst,” she said, shaking the box of cornflakes harshly like it was the box’s fault. The bowl was more than half full by the time she stopped.
“That’s going to be difficult since he sacked me and had my security pass taken away.”
She went to the fridge, opened the door and stared at the inside. “Michael, have you got no milk?”
He sighed. It was one of the things he had meant to do on the way back from the police station. “Sorry, I forgot to get some.”
“For Christ’s sake!” She slammed the fridge door shut so hard that the whole thing rocked on its base. “Can you not manage to do the simplest thing?”
Pauline spun round with her arms out in front of her. They collided with the bowl and it leapt into the air, sending cornflakes flying everywhere. The bowl hit the hard kitchen floor with the sound of smashing china. Shards shot out in all directions as cornflakes rained down on them like confetti.
She cried out with rage.
Michael felt it too. The helplessness, the anger, and the fear over what was going to happen next. When he perceived the same things from her, it only made his emotions more intense. He took a step towards her, to comfort her. “Pauline, I …”
She walked straight past him, pushing him out of the way as she did so.
He watched as she sat on the sofa and reached for the TV remote.
“Don’t watch that, it’ll only make you angry,” said Michael.
“If they’re going to come for me in the middle of the night, I want to know about it,” she said.
With the mood she was in, there would be no consoling her. Not that he had anything to say. He could tell her that everything was going to be all right, but that would be a fairy story.
Michael found his wallet from the trousers he was wearing the day before and headed for the door. “I’m going out,” he told her.
She didn’t reply. She just continued to sit in front of the television, watching the news and torturing herself.
Out on the street, the cold of the day soothed Michael’s hot cheeks. Drizzle fell on his head and on his arms and cooled him still further.
He went to the shop at the end of the road and picked up a bottle of milk. He got bread and butter in case Pauline fancied toast, some cheese which would work for a sandwich later in the day and a packet of chocolate biscuits because he fancied them.
When he got back to the flat, the television was playing to itself and there was no sign of Pauline. He was about to open his perception to find her when he heard the shower running. He turned off the TV and crunched over the fallen cornflakes to put the provisions away.
After picking up the pieces of broken china, while Pauline was still in the bathroom, he got out the vacuum cleaner.
Only half the floor was cornflake free by the time Pauline came out of the bathroom. She had her body wrapped in a towel with her wet hair dripping down her back. “Didn’t you hear the door?” she yelled over the sound of the vacuum.
“The what?” Michael stamped on the ‘off’ button on the base of the machine and the motor wound down to reveal the sound of insistent knocking.
“It really is Katya this time,” said Pauline.
She opened the door to see that her perception had been right. Standing in the corridor, with a belly so large it looked like she might topple over, was Katya.
Katya’s face broke into a smile and she came in to give Pauline a big hug. “Pauline, I’m so sorry I was so long.”
But Pauline’s need for it to be Katya at the door had fooled her perception and, as the pair stepped back from their embrace, she became aware that Agent Cooper had followed Katya through the door.
Michael watched it all from the centre of the living area where he had stopped vacuuming. It wasn’t the fact that Agent Cooper was at his flat that interested him, it was the feelings he perceived coming off him. He was defeated, frustrated and even a little scared.
“Agent Cooper!” said Pauline. She pulled the towel tighter across her breasts.
He nodded. “You’re both here. That’s good.”
“I’m going to go put some clothes on,” said Pauline and scampered off towards the bedroom.
“I need to go too,” said Katya in her heavily accented English. “Baby make me go pee all the time.”
It left Michael and Agent Cooper facing each other.
It reminded Michael of how they had faced each other on the stairs of the fire escape at his father’s office some five years before. Michael was a scared kid then, with no memories of who he was or what he was doing there. But he still had had an instinct not to trust Cooper. It was an instinct that had never gone away, even when he had worked for him. Back then, Michael had been armed with a knife. Five years later, he stood holding the handle of a vacuum cleaner. On the face of it, Michael had lost ground. But, in the intervening years, what Michael had learnt had given him more ammunition than a weapon ever could. He could perceive that Cooper thought he was there to help Michael, Pauline and Katya. But the truth was, he was there to help himself. He was always acting to help himself.
“I had some intelligence operatives interview Katya,” said Cooper.
“And?” said Michael.
“She’s a scared young woman who thought she was having a baby for a childless couple, but found out she was really part of a military experiment.”
“So not a spy, then.”
“She was able to give us some more information which ties in with what we’ve been able to glean from our operatives in Russia. It seems, to all intents and purposes, that the Russian perceiver programme has collapsed. All that is left is some perceiver serum that someone in the Russian military got their hands on and has been using in a reckless attempt to gather information to impress their superiors. There have been a few incidents, nothing quite as newsworthy as a soldier blowing his brains out all over the President of the United States, but incidents nevertheless.”
“That’s good,” said Michael. “It means the Russian perceiver programme is no longer a threat.”
“It means Pankhurst can go ahead and destroy all the perceivers in Britain in the false belief that they are not needed to protect the country against the Russians – or any other foreign power – using perceiver spies. Just because the bear has gone back to his cave to sleep, it doesn’t mean that he won’t wake up again in the morning, even more hungry than before.”
Pauline emerged from the bedroom in the jeans and T-shirt that Michael had bought her. Her hai
r was still damp, but no longer dripping.
“Agent Cooper, we weren’t expecting you,” she said.
“I had an urgent meeting with the Prime Minister,” said Cooper. “He called me in after last night’s announcement.”
The frustration that he had brought into the room with him became louder in his mind.
“What did he say?” said Pauline.
“He’s ordered the break up of the Perceiver Corps,” said Cooper. “He said that all members are to be cured in order to prove to the public that he’s serious about tackling the problem.”
“Cured?” said Pauline. Of all three people in that room, she was the one who was the most shocked. Cooper had clearly been processing the information on the way over and Michael had half expected it.
The sound of the toilet flushing broke through their conversation and Katya emerged from the bathroom. She leant back against the doorframe. “What’s going on? You all look like someone’s died.”
“It’s nothing for you to be worried about, Katya,” said Pauline.
“I think you lie.” Katya rested her hand on her pregnancy like she was protecting the baby inside. “My son helps me know things. He helps me know that you are all worried, which makes me worried.”
Cooper bowed his head, not making eye contact with any of them. Michael could perceive his regret as he spoke. “I’ll try to protect as many of you as I can, but that’s going to be a handful at best.
“But that’s …” stuttered Pauline. “That’s … ridiculous! We work for the government. We’ve done everything you’ve asked. We’ve done more than you asked.”
She was thinking about Alex again and of the moment that he drew his last breath. Michael struggled to push the image out of his mind.
“I told Pankhurst I have spent my life building up the Perceivers Corps. I told him the Ministry of Defence has spent millions training an elite force. I reminded him that there were natural borns before the vitamin scandal, I told him that if natural borns exist in Britain then chances are they exist in other countries. He heard none of it. All he’s thinking about now is the next election and his political legacy. He doesn’t want to go down as the prime minister who allowed perceivers to walk free to read the minds of innocent members of the public. He wants to be remembered as the prime minister who saw the error of his ways and worked to eradicate perceivers once and for all.”