TWICE

by Susanna Kleeman

  ‘You fuckers,’ I said to the walls.

  I was lying down, I got up, tried to find things to prise doors open with, could find nothing that wasn’t blunt or screwed to the floor or walls. The Ickthwaite drawers full of crap were gone, the Chinese map, welly box, Alphabet and Little Key with them. I went into the bathroom, looked at the lying mirror, my eyes, a big yellow bruise on my forehead. My hair seemed longer. The same clothes. Had I slept? Had time passed? How long?

  Could I trust the mirror? I prowled for other reflective surfaces, pulled my sweatpants down and saw the ‘V’ cut into my upper thigh by Sean in the lake. Healed now, part of my body, a clock of sorts though with skin grafts, they could fake it, what couldn’t they fake? I opened drawers, found the soil and mess. Withered plants, stinky sushi, pink fish hard and curled at the edges. I closed the drawer and opened it again: green plants, fresh flesh. A shrimp tail curled.

  The room lurched, soil and sushi fell all over me, I went to the bathroom to wash it off. The me in the mirror sneered.

  I checked pipes for ways out, checked the new toilet, crawled the soft carpet, opened every drawer and cupboard, found a life jacket and evacuation instructions under the bed. I opened the fridge, found no messages I could see, just the ‘Coke’ cans. I read every last label, every last e number, cracked the cans open, poured the juice down the loo.

  I sat on the bed. The room lights began to dim, I yawned, felt sleepy. I fought against this, pinched myself, fought against everything I felt, microtroops on parade.

  I screamed and screamed. I got up, tried to turn the lights up, found there were now no light switches. I ran full tilt at the cabin door, hurt my shoulder, nothing budged. I did the same against the new door as the lights dimmed right down, ran at it again and again with head and fists, made everything bleed, ran at that door till it opened.

  28

  Black in there and the light in my windowless cabin almost gone. A lurch, a chemical new smell, of paint perhaps.

  I stood in the doorway, called out ‘hello’, waited for porters.

  A thudded reverb to my voice: I was calling into something padded.

  I felt my way back to my bed.

  I got the phone and, using it as a torch and sensing them with me, went back to the doorway, knew they’d planned this, let it happen, were watching, could feel them watching, their reality TV.

  I shone the phone into the new room.

  The feeble beam lit a cabin like mine but not like mine. A stuffed cabin that was—what?

  I froze.

  A cabin that was the front room from Vengeance Street, as if entering from the kitchen: burgundy velvet, sofa, mantelpiece, objects, bookshelves, flocked wallpaper, chintz, doilies, pictures, crochet coverlet. I stepped back, not trusting what I saw, not trusting my brain. But there it was: the original from Vengeance Street, that Alan had fashioned his bus into a copy of, that Alan had taught me to visualise inside my head as my mind bus, my memory palace where I learnt to store Scritch and law and other info, the room I knew by heart.

  Except this wasn’t quite the original. They hadn’t cut out the actual front room from Barrow and hoisted it onboard. Things looked the same but were…smaller, kind of three-quarter-sized and made of…all one thing. I stepped inside, felt the walls, the objects lit by my beam. Everything looked kind of right but was… fake and melded together: the Chinese map on the wall, the books on the shelves, the Toby jug, the scimitar on the mantelpiece that I tried to pick up, the three wise old Chinese babies, the swan, the snowmen, the conch shell. Even the peacock feathers weren’t soft, were joined to their vase and that joined in turn to the side table. The whole room and its objects had been—what?—carved and painted from one muchness, 3D-printed, layer by layer? Made from plastic, resin, foam that set. Discount magic, one big organism.

  My chore for tomorrow, begun early: decode this room for them.

  Or was I performing on schedule: supposed to think I’d broken in illegally and had one over on them so they could track my eyeballs, see where I looked when I thought they weren’t watching so they could crack my secrets.

  I looked down, at the blue carpet swirls.

  How far did it go? I had to know, before I performed the magic I was planning. I bolstered myself and went in further, towards the stairs: had they built an upstairs, could I go up there? The white net curtains, the windows—but they weren’t real windows, were screens behind glass displaying streetlights of Walney Island in the rain.

  The stairs led up to a blank wall. But the low under-stair cupboard was there, where Sean had tried to hide, where Sean had cut his eyes out, so weird to me then, so understandable now. I tried the low door but it was fake and didn’t open.

  Why not print that too? How did they know Alan’s secrets weren’t buried in there or up the stairs?

  And what were Alan’s secrets and were they buried in here or in me?

  Cloak it. Micro-spies taking notes up in my brain room. Don’t be in here thinking any of that. Block off your thoughts.

  I went back to my own cabin, put down the phone and picked up the laptop, the only thing of any heft that wasn’t screwed down. I opened it up so it gave light, then took that back through the door to fake Vengeance Street, swung that laptop round.

  The hardened foam or whatever the place was cobbled together from wasn’t too firm: the laptop did damage, let me wreak havoc: mash the place, reveal the white polystyrene innards, mince fake Toby jugs, mantelpieces, bookshelves.

  Lights on back in my cabin: Ramona and co.

  ‘Tsk tsk,’ she said when I was back strapped on my bed, funnel in mouth, absorbing the green juice.

  ‘It’s important,’ she said, standing next to me in the doorway, soft lamps now lit in Vengeance Street before us. Hard to say how much time had passed. Time enough for them to mend the smashed room, heal it, regrow it, print it again. Which might take no time: the press of a button, rotate the walls, Vengeance Street on-demand.

  ‘Some things mean a lot,’ Ramona said. ‘It’s more than you and me. It matters. For the world. The numbers Alan stole.’

  I was juiced up to the eyeballs, she was my friend. ‘I’m really trying,’ I said. I cried. I shook my head. I could tell her statutes, stories, Scritches I associated with the objects but not what she wanted, not numbers, I couldn’t remember any specific number stories though swans were twos and hooks were fives and the snowmen were eights.

  ‘You need your right mind. Sleep will help, remember your dreams, in sleep we solve things, let’s try again tomorrow,’ leading me back to cabin and bed.

  When I woke the juice had passed. The lights were on in my room and Vengeance Street, the connecting door open. My hair seemed the same length. My bruises and scars looked the same. The door onto the corridor was still locked.

  They’d left me a new laptop to replace the smashed one. I took it into Vengeance Street and smashed it up again. I smashed up my cabin too. I smashed the mirror and the TV and the drawers, I smashed everything, turned on the taps.

  ‘Seven years bad luck,’ Ramona said while the porters dragged me out into the corridor and downstairs to distant floors. Far down into the empty humming bowels of the ship—if it was a ship, if we weren’t lurching on vast hydraulics, a massive set.

  A tiny cell, no lights, no furniture, nothing.

  ‘Think about it,’ as they slammed the door.

  29

  Echoing reverb, locked in black solitary inside cold metal, bobbing on sea or hydraulics, me and the hum.

  At least it was honest: no weird doors to plastic rooms.

  I lay freaking out in the black cell for a long time.

  But losing it was too easy. I had to show a little bit of fight: how they’d played me, what they’d done to my friends.

  And it was something to do: try to focus my mind.

  And now I remembered that in Zita the dad sat in a black cell for twenty years and trained his mind to make its own movies and project them on the wall. And w
hen Zita was captured she was put in another black cell and the dad communicated with her, through his mind movies. ‘Rainbow Theatre,’ Alan called it.

  Zita, buried in the ninth layer of the underground maze—the layers had names: Ice Cold Hell, Slash and Murder Hell, the Hell of Acquired Goods, others I’d forgotten.

  ‘Fear is only a distraction,’ Alan said. ‘A possibility you can give into, but only a possibility. There’s always other possibilities. That’s what makes everything bearable.’

  Alan was in the corner in white holy man robes with a staff, looking a bit older, talking a little stiffly. His hair was pure white and plaited into two pigtails. He had a neat centre parting. He held out a bronze begging bowl.

  ‘I’ll tell you anything,’ I screamed to the reverb. ‘I don’t know what you want. I’ll calm down, I won’t smash things.’

  Them enjoying this: hacked night-vision microbes watching me lose it, micro-paparazzi waiting for peak meltdown. Roll up, roll up, watch the lady shit herself.

  ‘Come on,’ Alan said. He was either there with me or my rainbow theatre. Or their actor or projection. Now he was dressed in a bright orange prison jumpsuit.

  He made me get up and start pacing the cell with him. Physical action to get me out of my mind and start making a system, like Zita did. Drinking her urine, licking pipes and walls for condensation, pacing the cell and counting, doing exercises and meditation to see if she couldn’t exit her own body and float free through steel walls as pure spirit, find her dad that way.

  I got up, licked walls, started pacing, making my system, perking up and feeling better.

  The meditation was called Zoo Wang, Alan returned to remind me. Now he was tatty trampy Scritchwood Alan. You sat cross-legged and let the world melt away. A place you could always access, once you’d learnt how to access it. A good place to go to when you found yourself in terror in hollow trees. If you could do it.

  You felt a warm bubbling in your back and saw a semi-transparent white mist.

  I’d never done it.

  Supposedly kids couldn’t do it, it would come later.

  But later I’d put all that away.

  I sat cross-legged in the black cell and tried to remember how you were supposed to do it.

  Zita hadn’t managed it either, then. Instead she’d gone practical: felt round and found on the wall one pipe that was big enough to climb.

  I felt round and found a pipe. It had rings which gave you a foothold. I put a foot up on the first one, hoisted myself up. It was pretty easy, inching myself up that pipe till I reached the ceiling, it wasn’t far. And then I found—just like in Zita’s cell—that if I stretched my arm I could feel in the middle of the ceiling a small hole that was a bulb-less light socket I could put my hand through to lift up and shunt aside the surrounding circular panel and make a hole in the ceiling big enough to hoist myself up into.

  In Zita, what was up there was the Cwyd, a large ticking thousand-eyed worm burrowing labyrinths of passages through the bronze walls of Zoll by means of her soft puckered mouth and twenty-thousand steel teeth. Passages you could get lost in or find your way through—if you knew the way, if you could avoid or murder the Cwyd before she gobbled you.

  Giddy with my escape plan, for a moment.

  Except Zita wasn’t caked in snitching disco flakes.

  I slid back down to the floor.

  They wanted me to go up there, that was pretty certain. They knew Zoll and Zita. And Cwyds.

  Nevertheless.

  I got up, climbed the pipe, craned over to feel for and find the hole in the ceiling, lifted up and shunted the panel aside and hoisted myself up into the lair of the Cwyd.

  30

  I lay squeezed inside a dark warm plastic-smelling flat-bottomed tube packed with pipes, cables and insulation foam above. A utility space, it pretended. There was room enough only for me to crawl forwards on my belly one way—I was at the end of the tunnel. Even then there was only just room for me.

  No hum. No tick of the Cwyd.

  In Zita she crawled round the maze till her mind received rainbow instructions beamed from her father, and she made her way to him and they burrowed out together, narrowly escaping the Cwyd.

  I replaced the panel and slithered in the pitch black, hoisting myself along on my elbows, roiling with waves or fake waves as they hit, a nanocam myself crawling down the veins of some vast beast. The metal beneath me felt warm and smooth apart from the ridges of doughnut-shaped panels I encountered every so often, doughnut-shaped panels like the one set into the ceiling of my own cell. These panels, like my own, had small holes at their centres—where lightbulbs should have been? The Skidblad, if I were still aboard, was a container ship: I guessed each room or cell or cabin was a whole or partial container with these panels set into their ceilings. The holes were big enough to stick my arm through, into blackness below.

  Where lay what? Other prisoners? The cast of nurses and grannies? Alan himself? A projection?

  I heard no sound. I thought about whispering down but couldn’t risk drawing attention to myself from any sensor.

  Except all sensors had already clocked me in this live video game for my remote controllers. Ship or set, it didn’t matter: trapped inside their arena, waiting for the thumbs down. How many of us, I wondered: crawling round this machine for our various reasons, blueprinted by Alans or similar, waiting to bump into each other or Cwyds round the next corner?

  Whatever the Cwyd was.

  I wouldn’t think about the Cwyd.

  I found, with a bit of fiddling, that I could shunt these panels aside too, and therefore enter, if I wanted, the black containers or whatever nasty twist lurked underneath. But I didn’t want to enter anything, even if the containers were empty, even if their doors might open—into what? Some corridor? For now I’d crawl my tunnel, find where it led, where they wanted to lead me. Later I might enter the containers, to dodge Cwyds, maybe. It was good to have options.

  In Zita, the other cells in the Fortress of Zoll were occupied by the Empire’s most savage villains and freaks.

  After a long while of crawling perhaps the entire length of the ship I banged up against a dead end. I felt for the pipes and cables above me, found they coiled up into empty space above my head just big enough for me to stand and follow. I forced myself up the now vertical cables, used their regular ties as footholds, moved under as they coiled round again to run overhead in a new tight tunnel—laid out above the ceiling of the ship’s next-up layer of containers, I assumed—or they wanted me to think.

  This new tunnel was different: dotted with pinpricks of brightness, a runway of dim lights stretching out before me, the light they gave enough for me to see—for the first time in ages—the outlines of things: cables, my own hands. The light came from lit containers below me, I discovered, rooms I could peer into via the pinpricks, which were tiny magnifying peepholes set between the doughnut panels which continued on this floor. But here the panels were different: the outer doughnut surrounding a filled-in circle of metal at each centre—from which hung light fittings in the rooms below? And with their centres filled, these panels were unbudgeable: no way to get your hand in and lift up the panel, no escape into the rooms below.

  In Zita, she knew when the Cwyd was approaching when the hands on her dad’s quartz watch, which she wore on her wrist always, started moving round too fast. But I had no watch.

  The rooms, as seen through the domed peepholes, were large comfortably-furnished cabins like my old cabin—not cells—some with pianos and art. All empty, bed sheet corners folded back identically, no sense of current occupation. A deserted five-star hotel.

  Then I came to a room that was different: done-up Renaissance with draped purple velvet, gilt and mahogany, silver mirrors, old-looking tools and instruments on the walls. A five-pointed star on the black-and-white chequered floor. A wooden desk with a wooden globe and next to it a metal object I wanted to say was an astrolabe. A wall stacked with shelves of glass cont
ainers. A table with an hourglass, a huge egg in a wooden holder, a silver bowl full of water, a candelabra of lit candles, metal scales, pens and ink, a pile of old books, a pair of white gloves.

  Ramping up the heebie jeebies. Flattered, my good sirs. No expense spared.

  Except it was all probably cheap as chips, 3D plastic printed from the internet, cut-price devilry done on the fly.

  The next room was the printed Vengeance Street front room, course it was. Or a printed Vengeance Street front room: undamaged, pristine, ready for me to enter and solve or mince if I felt like it which I didn’t. If there was a way to open the closed doughnut panel and drop in, which there didn’t seem to be.

  Was that why they’d lured me up here?

  I lay there for a while, one eye at the magnifying peephole, looking down at the Vengeance Street, taking care to look at no one spot in particular in case of eyeball tracking. Not that I knew where I ought to be looking, but nevertheless. Had people lain up here watching from peepholes when I’d been down there smashing the place up? If this was the one I’d smashed up. I remembered them dragging me down many more than one floor when bundling me down to dark solitary.

  The next two peepholes showed my old suite: cabin and freaky bathroom with the freaky mirror, or what looked like my old cabin and bathroom, except fixed and tidied: uncracked mirror, new TV, new laptop. And one obvious new thing: a red envelope on the bed.

  The red envelope, clearly, that Ramona had shown me the tip of in her pocket, supposedly containing a letter from Sean, fake Chris. My reward, if I blabbed correctly. Was this why they’d led me up here? Was I supposed to be so dumb that the sight of this red envelope would lure me into the room? How? To do what? To read it, some made-up thing? To believe it really was from Sean, lying there unattended?