TWICE

by Susanna Kleeman

  What people are saying about

  Twice

  Dark and dazzling, with mesmeric twists and much to say about where we are today.

  Anna Minton, Ground Control, Big Capital

  Drawn breathlessly into a nightmare world in which the usual conventions do not apply, there is no reprieve until one insecurely draws near to the conclusion. Written with skilful pace and polished art, we are presented with a first-rate fantasy and something that is more than mere fantasy. Here is a dextrously woven tale with deftly drawn characters that will cause as much intellectual stimulus as it does readership enjoyment. One is left gasping.

  Peter Tremayne, Sister Fidelma mysteries

  Twice

  A Novel

  Twice

  A Novel

  Susanna Kleeman

  Winchester, UK

  Washington, USA

  First published by Zero Books, 2021

  Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., No. 3 East St., Alresford, Hampshire SO24 9EE, UK

  office@jhpbooks.com

  www.johnhuntpublishing.com

  www.zero-books.net

  For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.

  Text copyright: Susanna Kleeman 2020

  ISBN: 978 1 78904 621 2

  978 1 78904 622 9 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936363

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

  The rights of Susanna Kleeman as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Design: Stuart Davies

  UK: Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  Printed in North America by CPI GPS partners

  We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.

  For Eddie and Hazie

  1

  My phone went dead the night he came back twice. It did this weird beep and then powered off. I pressed, bashed, charged it: nothing—and now they don’t let you get at the batteries. 11pm, a wet Sunday in late November, all help desks closed. I was researching this crisis on my laptop, watching some pap on my tablet, when my doorbell rang: five rings, a pause, six more.

  The five and the six, the shed code. Souvenir of our childhood in crank camp. I didn’t think it was Chris. I never thought it was Chris. I thought it was Tal, because it was always poor mad Tal out on a jolly, come to tell me more about the spiders who ruled the world. I’d get this twice a year maybe: eleven rings in the middle of the night, eleven more if I didn’t move fast enough, to the fury of downstairs. So I was quick: paused things, braced for a couple of hours of sweet tea and nonsense, tiptoed down, opened the front door.

  Nothing, then a curl of cold breath and into the frame moved Christopher Kipp doing a lopsided grin like it had been two hours instead of eleven years. The same, older, jeans, hooded sweatshirt, hands stuffed into jacket pockets. His flecked eyes giving me the stare.

  My old mucker himself, large and in charge. Blow me down.

  ‘Hey sorry, wrong doorbell. Wow it’s you, who’d have thunk it? No seriously, hello, can I come in?’ he said, smiling past me over the threshold into the hallway. ‘Nim. How lovely. Looking just the same. Do you know?’

  ‘Do I know what?’ I said, to say something.

  ‘How fantastic you look,’ already bounding upstairs. ‘Second floor? Not disturbing anything? Boyfriend? Husband?’

  ‘Chris?’

  ‘Nim,’ swinging his head down round the banisters, locking eyes with me.

  Get stuffed, I didn’t say. Because I was up for it and had new muscles, I thought. Because I was curious. Why not.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ I said. ‘Tiptoe,’ I told him. ‘This better be good,’ following him up the stairs.

  2

  ‘Nice pad you got here, Nimmywim,’ he said, scanning the dinge of my North London flat, opening my bedroom door, peeping into the cramped bathroom, checking out the tiny airing cupboard. A few months back on a tech gossip website I’d seen leaked plans of the latest proposed campus for a company he funded: a desert eco ranch with three square miles of underground robot labs.

  You’re bound to feel a pang, seeing someone like that again, a body you once knew so well, its little forgotten ways.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘Tal. I’m starving. Got anything to eat?’ heading for my fridge, stopping by my desk to admire my laptop. ‘Nice, light,’ hefting it, closing it, an American lilt now. ‘But battery issues I hear? And if you don’t mind,’ snapping the tablet cover down over the paused image: ‘I’m only up to Season Three, don’t want to spoil things.’

  The brass balls on this clown. Still thinking his sham worked, here for what? Careful Chris, I might bite. I settled in to enjoy this.

  ‘How’s Tal?’ I hadn’t seen Tal for ages, was due a visit.

  ‘Fine. Nuts. The usual. Lots of product development ideas. Got any cheese?’

  I leant against the window sill and let him find cheese in my fridge. Then he was darting about opening cupboards, locating plates, crackers, condiments, ferreting out chutney. Then he was holding his platter and scanning my bookshelves, admiring my textbooks, marvelling that I’d gone so conventional, and did I enjoy it, and how he could just see me in gown and wig, telling judge and jury what for.

  A slight paunch but still fleet and spry. Casual but luxurious clothes reeking of discrete software zillions. The white face, the bitten nails. The single tear trickling down his face on our last day: ‘Is that what you wanted?’

  Time to take charge.

  ‘So Chris. What’s up?’

  ‘Well,’ flopping into my sofa with his mini feast. ‘Nim. Nimmywimmy. Minnymoo. Nim Wynn. Or Nim Burdock, as it seems to be these days. Been a while now. Been thinking of you. Got a few things to say. But first,’ balancing plate on sofa arm, running his right index finger down the length of his nose. This gesture meant: focus. I’d adopted it myself after we split, part of my widow’s weeds.

  ‘Nim,’ hands spread out in his lap now, staring down, talking in this high holy voice: ‘I don’t know why it’s taken so long for me to come here and say this. I want you to know how much I love, esteem and cherish you and our long strange history together, and will forever. How much I feel your absence and wish you were still part of my story, somehow. Above all, how sorry I am about…how things were left and how I behaved…at the end.’

  He paused, to scan my face and reach for his plate. Over the years a possible apology scene had played out many different ways in my head, but never this… smirking version. In town and curious if his twist still worked?

  Go for it, sweet cheeks. You gad away.

  ‘Not a day goes past,’ he went on, munching a cracker, ‘that I don’t think back on our time together, our special cherished history, all the strangeness we went through that we should be so proud of, and so proud of surviving, and know how much I owe it all to you, and would be nothing and not here without you, and how very bitterly I regret my fear and immaturity in treating you as I did. Call it a testament to your very great power over me. Leaving you is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do and I knew the break had to be total, so very powerful were my feelings for you. But so deep was my immaturity that the only way I knew how to accomplish this was to behave badly and make you hate me and make you end it, instead of talking it through, honouring you and our time together. And I have suffered for my c
owardice ever since.’

  This template of a speech, possibly downloaded from the internet or purchased from a therapist, was such a calculated insult that perhaps he was in self-loathing mode and wanted a rise, a slap across the face. I saw him when he was twelve on top of the bus, throwing rocks at rocks, shouting singsong apologies for deeds he felt no guilt for.

  Should have known then. Alan always told you.

  Cut yourself the slack. We all learn in the end.

  ‘Thanks Chris,’ I said, noting new eye crinkles, clipped nasal hair. He looked very washed, probably did deep whatever high-tech skin treatments. His sweatshirt wasn’t quite grey, it was dark charcoal, an unusual colour that brought out the green-brown of his eyes, probably swatched by experts, a database of outfits. I remembered something I hadn’t in ages: a New York meltdown just after his first big pay cheque. Coming home from buying him pricey fashion gear in shops we never went to: he tried the new clothes on again and hated them, and hated me for letting him buy them. And hated me for my high-waisted jeans, not the fashion then: ‘Don’t you have a fucking clue?’

  You let him, my dear.

  ‘That’s the problem with young love,’ flicking a large crumb from his lap to my floor, launching into a small sermon about the problem with young love, specially ours: mad pash in the middle of total craziness, the first time those hormones flood through you, us really and truly against the world, feeling it would last forever, all those promises, when in the end we were children, and very sheltered children at that, who didn’t know anything and hadn’t met anyone.

  ‘I’m sure you feel the same.’

  I told him I did. Then I moved off the sill, to start escorting him off the premises, but he got in there first: ‘I’ve brought you something,’ before I could stop him, putting his plate back on the sofa arm, standing up, patting some inner jacket pocket, pulling out an envelope, walking the few paces it took to cross the room and hand it over, brushing my hand, returning to his cheeses on the sofa, watching my face.

  The envelope was light and thin. One of his top secret machines, maybe, that the internet told me one of his companies was making out of utterly new materials, foldable things as weightless as feathers. Inside though were Polaroids, of me, from Scritchwood and everywhere, as a teen in the hollow, at ten up a tree. New York in the first days, one from the redwoods. But mainly Scritchwood Covert Motorhome Park and the woods and mud of South Bucks where we grew up and all the things I never thought about: me outside Merriweather, the static home I lived in with Ann Wynn and Clarice, me outside the bus Chris lived in with Alan, the broken house, the shed, the washing, me by the gilt quartz carriage clock on the bus mantelpiece. Me on a fallen beech dangling my legs over the water with my hair swept over me, smiling at him behind the lens.

  ‘Was tidying up, found them, didn’t know what to do with them. Thought you might want them.’

  In the first years of him gone an image would come to me sometimes when I thought of him: he was a white hot metal bar I grabbed for and dropped, taking with it seared pieces of hand.

  The squatter. Taint and blight. Using me all those years, stringing me along as a mirror for his preen. Till I saw clear and shone his dirt back instead and was no longer convenient and got bundled out the back door.

  ‘How kind,’ I said, putting the photos back into the envelope, putting that down on the side to chuck out later, ‘for you to find these and think of me and go to all the trouble of tracking me down to deliver them in person and say…all this. And now, if you’ve finished your refreshments, I think it’s time to go.’

  ‘OK,’ snack done, crumbs gone, plate to floor, running his finger down his nose. ‘You’re too good and I’ve imposed too long. It’s been great to be here with you and have the chance to say…things to you. But I’d better get down to it. I’m actually here for something. Apart from all the rest of it.’

  ‘Oh really?’ I said, very suspicious. ‘What?’

  ‘Well. The book.’

  It seemed weird at the time, so random. ‘The book?’

  He nodded. ‘All those fun games. The slovenly elephant, the sly magpie.’

  ‘The sly jackdaw.’ I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘Right. Always needed your help. Anyway. The book. Turns out I need it. That’s why I’m here. Dreadful I know.’

  He waited, for me to ask why he wanted the book I guessed. ‘It’s a long story,’ he went on when I wouldn’t play. ‘As you know it belonged to my mum and it’s the one thing I have from her and I’m getting married and it would mean a lot.’

  Watching me, slipping it in.

  Poor woman, if she even existed. But I couldn’t help myself:

  ‘Congratulations. You’re getting married and you want to… share the book with your fiancée? It’s inscribed to me with your eternal love, you might remember.’

  ‘I do. But ink can be removed. Names can be changed.’

  I had to laugh. ‘Romantic.’

  But he didn’t seem to share the joke: ‘I think you can let me worry about all that. I don’t know that it’s any of your business. After all, morally, the book is mine.’

  ‘I see.’ I apologised, for thinking it was a gift, for not understanding it as a licensing agreement. Something in my tone must have irked. He got up, started pacing the room.

  ‘Considering who you are, or who you were, or who I thought you were, plus what we both went through and what you know about my mum, I thought you might be a bit more understanding. Plus does it really have that much emotional value to you these days? Apart from the Alan stuff, of course. But you have lots of Alan stuff. Or you did.’

  He actually seemed angry. He paused, sat back down, watched me, spoke again, soft and clear:

  ‘It’s a very rare edition, though, I know. A certain market value I’d be happy to reimburse you for if I didn’t think you’d be insulted.’

  This wheeler-dealer. He really did seem desperate for it. ‘How much were you thinking?’

  ‘Whatever you want. Three thousand, let’s say?’

  ‘Three thousand bitcoins?’

  ‘Very current. I was thinking dollars. Or pounds. Or bitcoins, though I hear there are issues. Whatever you want. Though considering the circumstances I was hoping for a mate’s rate. For old times’ sake.’

  ‘Didn’t one of yours just float for three point eight billion?’ Some digital games company bewitching commuters with matching lines of gems.

  ‘Flattered you’ve been following. Three point nine but who’s counting. If you need help, I’m here, any time, it’s yours.’

  This suave jousting. How well he’d adapted to the world. How well I had in the end. Perhaps I was being awful to him. Perhaps he actually wanted the book for real. And I suddenly felt sorry for him, this cavalcade of ticks wonking into town.

  ‘I don’t want money. You can have it,’ I said.

  ‘Nim. I knew…’

  His face changed, he looked genuinely grateful.

  ‘But it’s not here,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to get it. Give me an address, I’ll post it. Now go.’

  ‘So many thanks, you can’t know, but things are actually super-urgent. Tell me where and I’ll go get it myself, or we can go together.’

  ‘It’s midnight. I’ve got work tomorrow. Don’t push it.’

  ‘I really have to insist. It’s…an event I’m planning. Tomorrow. The book…figures. Everything’s…booked. People are…flying in.’

  This entitled loon, what kind of ‘event’? Some new Scritch game for his engagement party? Clues in the woods from the book like the old days? What a freak but I already knew that.

  ‘“People” might have to wait. You should’ve factored-in a bit more leeway.’ The nerve: turning up in the middle of the night for the book on the off-chance. ‘I might have been out. I might have sold it, burnt it, ripped it to shreds.’

  ‘As usual: correct. But since I’ve planned no leeway and have always relied on you to get me out of everything, I’m be
gging. I’m down on my knees.

  ‘Except you’re not.’

  ‘If that’s what it takes.’

  He got off the sofa, came over and knelt in front of me. Meaningless but strangely satisfying. He really did want that book for some reason.

  ‘Get up,’ I said after a while. ‘Whatever you’re up to I can’t get it right now. Maybe tomorrow. It’s with Flora. It’s hard to contact her.’

  ‘Flora. How’s she doing? You didn’t burn it, did you? Why’s it with Flora?’

  Lots of our stuff was with Flora. I couldn’t quite bring myself to burn it.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Wales. I’ll get her to send it. I can’t promise by tomorrow but I’ll do my best. And after that Chris? Never contact me again. Never think of me. Any other skeezy begs, get them in now, cos if you come here again I won’t know you, I won’t answer the door to you.’

  ‘You’re wonderful but can’t you just call her right now, see if I can come over? Wake her up, explain it’s an emergency? Or just give me her address?’

  No I couldn’t. It was midnight and even if I’d wanted to I couldn’t contact her. She didn’t have a computer or a phone.

  ‘Oh doesn’t she?’ he said, and started pacing the room again, walking up and down in front of my bookshelves, scanning for the book, I now supposed. ‘She has a landline though.’

  ‘She doesn’t.’ Flora didn’t have electricity or running water. ‘She lives off-grid in the Brechfa Forest.’

  ‘I bet she does. So how d’you contact her?’

  You wrote, or called the farm shop in the village two miles away and left a message asking her to call back from the phone box.

  ‘What’s the village called?’

  I said I couldn’t remember, would dig it out in the morning, get her to call back, tell her it was an emergency, money no object, he might send a private jet to Swansea if that was OK. The private jet was a joke but he nodded perfectly seriously.