TWICE

by Susanna Kleeman

  After that I was in a much better mood.

  No more need for porters or restraints. I relaxed on my bed, blabbed anything she fancied. What a splurge of relief to chat it all out. My ridiculous life. Stupid old Alan, crank camp, Ann Wynn and grim Clarice, her girlfriend, though I didn’t realise that at the time. Bringing me up coldly, for money, Scritch games: fancy all that connected to secret world rulers! Fancy me now tucked up aboard their Skidblad with Ramona! How we laughed. Now with her help I could sift it finally, make some fucking sense of my weird history. I told her all: strange childhood, shambolic schooling, unregistered, no doctors, ex-airforce people, the crusties, the drug addicts, the dullness, Chris and Alan the golden beacons out of it, Chris and his machines. What it was like to fall for Chris, my escape from the nothing, how I’d always loved him, his dark recklessness and black moods, how attractive all that was when you’re young and dumb and estranged from yourself and feel love can cure all and you can give solace with your heart and body and that will make you mean something. Nice old me, tending to Alan, peace-making between him and Chris, listening to those Zita stories. Grim Ann Wynn. Odd Clarice. My parents dying young, in a car crash, supposedly. Hanging out with Flora and her family, how they were my real family, crying when I talked about Flora.

  ‘Poor old you,’ Ramona said.

  She drew on thin clear latex gloves, made me do the same, took me over to the Ickthwaite drawers. She yanked each open in turn, tweezered every last object, each nail and bit of fluff, quizzed me for any meaning, talked our results out to the walls. The walls were modern and recording us, she explained.

  ‘Anything missing?’

  Flora’s note. The Hello Kitty beaded purse with Alan’s half-horseshoe inside, what had seemed to be Alan’s half-horseshoe. Somewhere at the bottom of the lake.

  Back on the bed she got out the Alphabet. Did I really know it all off by heart? She opened it, tested me:

  A is the APE, who is dressed very well

  Though he is none too wise, as most people can tell

  B is the BULL, very stubborn is he,

  Although he’s enjoying himself as you see

  C is the CAT, looking round very sly

  At a journeyman Dog, who is passing hard by

  So I didn’t need the Alphabet physically? I could remember every word?

  I remembered every word, I told her, but words weren’t everything, it depended how messages were coded. Sometimes you needed the pictures too: messages could refer to tiny details in the illustrations rather than the text itself. I knew the text but didn’t have a photographic memory of the images so the physical book was still necessary. It had been Flora who could remember details of the pictures, Flora who was good at pictures and making things, from Jassy her mum who was good at all that.

  Ramona passed me hankies, let me cry. ‘Scritchwood,’ she said after a decent while.

  I told her again. The rain, the cranks, the mud, the mobile homes, the static homes, the caravans, the hippies, the druids, the nodding skag-heads, the grey rainy sky. Alan and Chris outside the fencing at the start of the Fall in their green bus. Tal and the gang. Me with Ann Wynn. The deserted airfield across the road.

  ‘Is Alan my dad?’

  ‘We’re not sure.’

  Alan, basically a tramp, of seeming Indian heritage, who said he was Chris’s father though Chris came to dispute that. Alan was dark and Chris was white.

  ‘Some story,’ she said. ‘Didn’t it feel weird, like something was up?’

  What did I know? I said: we were born into it, knew no better or different. It was definitely weird. Check out my therapy transcripts, I told her.

  She nodded at the flatscreen TV so it came on. Something weird on the screen: strange blocky fragments in crude colours, jumpy angles, high and low, close and far, snatches of Scritchwood Covert Motorhome Park in the rain: the gate, the path, the green, the new modern static houses at the bottom by the fence where we’d grown up, Merriweather replaced by some flash new bungalow, no trace of Alan’s bus, BMWs now in the drives.

  Crude empty silent images, no people, unfinished from a computer, sometimes the whole screen, sometimes a patch of screen, a meld of close and far angles patchworked from one zillion tiny cameras.

  ‘Nanocams?’ I said. ‘From when I went back after New York?’ That cold day in the half-snow, prowling the Covert for any trace of anything, going down by the water: had they been with me then?

  ‘Live,’ she said as the footage went high: bird’s eye views of the Covert, the empty airfield, a new set of modern office buildings, the creeping suburbs, the railway line, the water, the big new road. Then swooping down by the water, juddering shots of the broken house worse smashed, diggers and big building works nearby. Inside: graffiti, needles, cans, rubbish patched together from all angles. Our mattress and cleared space long-gone, someone else’s paradise now.

  She gestured with her hands and the image froze and zoomed onto the new graffiti: people’s names, crude words. She wanted to know if it meant things to me, which it didn’t. She switched the telly off with a flick of her hand.

  ‘So. How did Alan say he ended up there?’

  He didn’t say much. A past selling trinkets on the hippy trail from Greece and Israel to Goa and elsewhere, depending on the season. Meeting Chris’s mum on that circuit. Her running off and him ending up in a disused bus parked outside the fence of the Covert just at the top of the Fall.

  ‘Nice story,’ she said.

  Nothing special, I explained. Things were different now like they were everywhere, BMWs in the drives. But those days were the very tail ends of a separate way of living: old people from the old airfield, when it had been an RAF base during the war, who’d enjoyed the chaos of the war and didn’t want regular life. Joined by younger people, different drop-outs. No digital tech then, you could be really cut off.

  ‘Or think you were. So how come he paid Ann Wynn to take you in? That’s what you found out? From her niece, right? So who are you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, suddenly sad.

  She passed me hankies. ‘These trinkets,’ she said, when I was ready, ‘of Alan’s? From the hippy trail. That he sold, collected. Things like this?’ flicking her hand so that an image of the bead came up on the flatscreen, 3D but nicely rendered this time, full-screen, moving round.

  A Jewel of Thram. One of two nearly identical beads we used as treasures in Scritch, that Alan buried in places for us to find according to his clues. White and brown smooth hollow oval stone beads speckled with red that Alan kept on a red cord and told us were lucky charms. Beads we used as toys that turned out to have high value.

  ‘Which Young Pete told you.’

  Which Young Pete told us after Alan vanished and we were going through his things, before Young Pete torched the bus.

  ‘And Young Pete was..?’

  Our Covert ne’er-do-well, odd-job man, scrap dealer, sometimes drug dealer, Chris’s pal and bad influence.

  ‘Who knew the bead was valuable how?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ The whole cast of them. ‘They were all part of it?’

  ‘Maybe. This bead…’

  ‘The dzi,’ I said helpfully, because that’s what the beads were called, I’d looked them up later. ‘Dzi’, pronounced ‘zee’. Very old stone beads from Tibet, different coloured stone melded together through unknown processes. Some sold for millions.

  ‘How much did you sell them for?’

  Seven thousand pounds and two passports for the first one, from an old Chinese man in a smoky room at the back of the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, which got us to New York. Five thousand dollars and one passport for the second one, from a young woman at the back of a Vietnamese restaurant in Queens. Which got me back to London with a new name.

  ‘You were robbed.’

  ‘Is that what this is?’ Trying to get your hands on lost beads of great value?

  She laughed. ‘Let’s see. What did Alan tell you ab
out terma?’ flicking her hands to change the flatscreen so it became a browser, a Wikipedia page about terma, pictures of Tibetan boxes and writing and statues. ‘Terma is real,’ she said, reading from the screen: “Hidden treasure from the past”.’ A so-called Tibetan tradition, she said, of hiding precious information from the deep past in caskets in trees or rocks or in the ground or in lakes or the sky or in people’s minds, so it could be found on purpose or by accident centuries later, direct ancient knowledge to blow away current perceptions, or to store secret information. The informations were sometimes written in a magical script that disappeared as you read it, she said, as the onscreen text began to fade. People who found terma were called “tertöns” she showed me, pointing out the umlaut on the ‘o’, the last thing to remain before the screen went blank.

  ‘We think you might be a tertön,’ she said. ‘Or a terma. With knowledge hidden inside you, by Alan. Maybe I’m the tertön, discovering you. How exciting,’ picking up something from the green welly box.

  The iron ring. A huge dark heavy ring, for a big man’s finger, the kind of thing a Viking chieftain might wear, the setting shaped like a miniature castle, with hinges you could open to reveal a dark cube with two hollow cylinders entwined with etched floral swirls.

  ‘The Ring of Seeds,’ I explained. In Scritch: a sign that the wearer was evil.

  ‘Really. What did Alan keep in there?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What did he say it was for?’

  ‘Playing with.’ So much junk.

  ‘And this?’ Unfolding from a plastic bag the crochet coverlet, the one—it seemed—from Vengeance Street, not made by Jassy. Maybe one hundred multicoloured squares of bright acrylic stitched together in apparent random pattern.

  ‘The same colours? As your one in the bus? What did Alan say about colours? Did he link them to numbers? What did Alan say about numbers, the personality of numbers? Did Alan make you remember any numbers, did he code them into the blanket?’

  Not that I recalled. The swans, though, the snowmen, I told her.

  ‘Any specific stories? We’ll work on that,’ she said, ‘later. Mix you up some new juice, see if that jogs things along. And we’ll pinch,’ pointing to the hand chart, ‘you’ll show me how, we’ll have fun with it, OK?’ pulling the gloves back on, making me put on mine which I couldn’t remember taking off. ‘This,’ she said, leafing through A Little Key to Drawing, handing it to me. ‘A pacey read.’

  I wouldn’t know, I said. I’d never read it. The Vengeance Street version I was apparently flicking through—gossamer pages, old words, black ink, splotched symbols—wasn’t our one from Scritchwood. Our one had been a dummy: a wooden box when you opened it up.

  Page fifty-six, I thought it had been. Darling Nim.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘The note, from Alan. It’s gone. He tore it up, Sean. He chewed it. I only read the first bit.’

  ‘The Braille? What did it say?’

  ‘That he wasn’t Chris. That I should beware. Was it from Alan? Is Alan alive? Is he sending me messages?’

  The green juice wearing off. Me crying again.

  ‘It’s getting late,’ Ramona said. A good session, we’d do more tomorrow, discuss Alan, go through the rest of those things in that welly box, do some pinching, some Braille, go deep into Scritch. All the stories, I should get ready, the Zita stuff too, plus we’d talk Tal and more terma. And if I did as well tomorrow as I’d done today she’d tell me a bit more about Sean, AKA fake Chris. Just one last thing and she’d leave me.

  Another nod and flick at the TV. More 3D fragments, mini camera surround footage, of Vengeance Street this time, with sound. Wobbly me, crazed fake Chris getting dragged out of his under-stair cupboard from different angles by covered people in yellow plastic hazard suits. His eyes gouged out, swallowing pulp, blood pouring down his eyeless face, them trying to restrain him, stop his hacking. Dreadful: me screaming, him screaming, shrieking nonsense at me from the weird screen:

  The boat. Sad nothing weed.

  ‘Yes that.’ Ramona froze it, played it back slo-mo a few times, stretching the words. ‘Scritch? Done with the Alphabet? What does it mean?’

  Not the foggiest, I said. Not Scritch as far as I could remember, and in any case Sean didn’t know Scritch, was fake, right? Except he had known so much Scritch, how had he known it? A warning, to me, about this boat, the Skidblad, maybe?

  ‘Perhaps it’ll come to you,’ tomorrow, whenever. If it did I should speak it to the walls. Or call her on the phone if something strong came on—she showed me the phone: standard apps, her the only contact, US prefix. And now she’d be off and I should eat, wash, sleep, fortify myself for another very strong session tomorrow, OK? I’d done well.

  ‘And if you do as well tomorrow I’ll let you have this,’ pulling the tip of a red envelope out of her jacket pocket. ‘To you. From Sean.’

  She left, old nurses in new uniforms wheeled in sushi.

  I wasn’t hungry.

  I sat alone on the bed feeling the juice wear off, watching the sushi, watching it wriggle. Real Chris: so cold that he’d agree to this harvesting of me, for what info? Me being fooled by Sean, fake Chris, who was so different from ice-cold real Chris, how could I have fallen for it for one instant? Me selling out Sean, pointing the way to him in his under-stair cupboard, what he’d tried to tell me, what I hadn’t believed.

  They’d have found him anyway.

  All that blabbing to Ramona, what had I told her?

  Help me Alan.

  The hacked-out eye.

  I tried both doors—the main door to the corridor and the new side door, leading where? Both locked, no handles, only black panels, for pass keys, fingerprints, retinas I didn’t have.

  I screamed and screamed, banged my head against doors and walls till there was blood. I opened the laptop, felt its light warm me, felt them watch me from the other side. Anonymous make, standard operating system, a picture of the Skidblad as the desktop, 8.16pm on January 16, apparently. The browser had my bookmarks. For laughs I looked up the Skidblad, now seemingly registered in Norway to a company registered to a company owned by a company owned by a company owned by a company called Thabbet Investments, the browser said. No mere container ship but the ultimate in discrete luxury, an exclusive set of zillionaire condos-at-sea.

  A place to stash ultrarich but forgetful grannies while you got your hands on their assets, a message-board comment said. Lock up your black sheep: heroin teens and inconvenient wives. A floating gold outhouse for the embarrassing and incontinent. Max security ahoy.

  An occult ship, another message said. Filipina prostitutes found cut in its wake.

  I looked up Flora, who was now alive and on-grid, had set up a website for her new yarn business. Rhodri had a new site too: caravans glamping in Wales, images of their tarted-up caravan collection, him and Flora and the kids with big smiles among sheep welcoming holiday-makers with slices of sponge cake and steaming mugs of tea, their returned cottage in the artful blurred background, the baby now alive and a toddler, golden curls, links to their new social media. Flora and I were now social media friends: I clicked on my feed: joyous new photos of me on a Scottish New Year’s walking holiday, with friends in London over Christmas, outside a new flat I was moving into with some hunky new unknown man I had my arms round, the tip of my index finger missing.

  I accessed the same page via the browser on my new phone: sadly my social media had become a shrine. I’d died in November, friends and colleagues left emotional posts of fond memories, would hold me in their hearts forever. I looked myself up: Troubled Lawyer Found Dead. After disappearing from my flat in London, after many years of anguish and a disturbed cult childhood, I’d overdosed in the hotel of a motorway service station outside Slough. On the phone I looked up Flora too: very sadly she was also dead and her whole family, after a dreadful fire tragedy when a Forestry Commission lorry laden with chemicals skidded on wet bendy roads and smashed i
nto their remote home.

  I accessed the same page on the new improved TV browser after trying and failing to switch TV on by flicking my hand like Ramona, having to resort to the old remote. The TV was now different: no more bog-standard Barrow General Freeview, dull UK channels, North West Tonight local news. Now it was passing itself off as the Skidblad’s personalised onboard menu:

  Welcome Nim Burdock!

  Information | Entertainment | Journey Planner

  According to the browser, I’d actually hanged myself in Barrow General Hospital after a mini crime spree, had left various notes.

  I clicked the TV’s Journey Planner, found it was 10.09 am on February 4 and we were in the South Pacific, heading from Australia to Fiji. I checked the phone: it was 4.34pm on April 31 and we were rounding the tip of South Africa, according to the location app. Antarctic Mobile listed as the carrier, but all calling was disabled, I tried to call Flora on her new mobile listed on her new website available on the laptop. I tried to call Ramona, the only contact in my phone address book. I tried to call the police. I tried to call my own number, my dead phone.

  Cheap laughs. I sat on the bed, felt everything watch me, comb me for Alan’s ancient secrets. What were you up to, old man? Using me too the whole time? The room heaved. I got up, puked green juice down the loo’s new steel innards. I sat back on the bed, watched the things hum.

  The plants were the worst: ferns and Easter lilies bending in to report my hormones. I got up, yanked them out of their pots, pushed some into the bathroom bin while mirror-me watched, squashed the rest into my drawers of posh clothes: soil, roots, leaves, cashmere: a bad mess. I mixed the sushi in there too, hoped I was entertaining the walls. New moods burrowed into me, my lungs full of Don-made digi-spores, swallowed cams trawling my veins. Porous me, infected by surfaces. Why bother with green juice when they patrolled me, could alter my moods with much less drama? But they’d have some reason, hypermaths plotting my personality versus their wanted outcomes.