by Liz Jensen
‘Naomi,’ I say. She doesn’t react, so I move closer. She’s looking straight ahead. No smile. I miss her smile, and the two shallow brackets around it. I need to see them. I want to kiss her.
‘Can I have a minute alone with her?’
‘Sure. You can have five. She’s all yours.’
When the WPC has gone I squat next to Naomi’s chair and take her hand, but immediately I drop it. It’s cold. Far colder than it should be. Can shock do that? I must look it up. I stroke her hair instead. Beautiful hair. Smooth and strong.
‘Professor Whybray’s dead,’ I tell her. ‘Trampled. The children did it. They crushed out his life.’
She nods and blinks.
‘Did you let them escape?’ She looks around the room and then slowly nods.
‘Why?’
‘Because there’s one in here.’ She whispers, pointing to her chest.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It got in,’ she whispers. ‘I did what it wanted. I had to.’
‘What do you mean?’ I whisper back, my mouth close to her ear, her silky hair in my face.
‘Freddy was right. We belong to the Old World. Time doesn’t work the way you think. They’ve come back to stop us.’
Slowly she pushes me back, raises her hand, and makes a fist next to her eye.
‘No. Don’t do that. Please Naomi. Don’t.’ I grab her head and clutch it to my chest.
But she keeps her hand there, fingers splayed. I can’t stand this. I grab hold of her fingers and press them to my face. Her flesh feels well below thirty-seven degrees. It feels cold as stone. Suddenly, my breathing goes haywire and ugly noises start pouring out of me. My eyes fill with liquid that runs down my face. It’s like another tear-gas attack. Naomi just looks at me with a very gentle smile. Both hands are on her lap now. It’s a modest pose, the pose of the Madonna in Italian paintings. She doesn’t say anything. I grab her around the waist. I want to carry her away from this place. I bury my face in her stomach, her breasts. The terrible noises keep coming. I can’t stop them.
I’m not aware of the door opening. The young policewoman takes my elbow. She pulls me to my feet and hands me a tissue. I blow my nose, then shove it to my eyes.
She puts a hand on my shoulder.
‘You’re not a lawyer, are you,’ she says. ‘I mean, you’re not behaving like one.’
‘No.’
‘Then I think you’d better go.’
Back in the car, I try to get my breathing back to normal. But I can’t stop the hiccuping, or the snot, or the tears that keep coming. Freddy wakes. I tell him to stay under the blanket until I say he can come out. He doesn’t ask why I am crying. I sit there fighting it and losing.
We belong to the Old World. Time doesn’t work the way you think. They’ve come back to stop us. What is that supposed to mean?
I start to drive. In the absence of traffic lights, I honk the horn at each crossing. But I don’t obey the speed limit.
Fifteen minutes later, I let Freddy come out and sit on the back seat.
‘Why can’t we go to the Unit?’
‘Because it’s closed. There’s been a problem.’
‘Where are the others?’
‘They left.’
‘Where to?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well we have to find them.’
‘I’m sorry Freddy K. We can’t.’
‘Let me out!’ He reaches for the door.
I slam down the child lock and keep driving.
He starts to cry.
I don’t care. I don’t care about anything. I am a robot made of meat.
I stop at a corner shop, get out and lock Freddy in the car again. They have supplies, the man says.
‘I do boxes. With tins, if that’s what you’re after.’ He looks at me sideways. ‘But it’ll cost.’
I give him all my cash.
I don’t notice the figure on the roof of the tower block opposite right away. I’m too busy loading the boxes into the car.
But a distinctive noise makes me look up.
SCHTUKKK.
There is a connection I should be making, but I don’t.
Then the noise comes again – SCHTUKKK – and I realise. There’s a sniper. And his gun’s aimed at Freddy. The boy hasn’t noticed. He’s still on the back seat, deep in his DVD, in the world of sand and snakes. I want to stay there and rock, gathering my thoughts. But that’s not going to work. I can tell.
So I yell at Freddy to get down, hurl myself into the car and drive.
My heart is banging. I am overloaded. For once, mental origami is no help. The paper resists me, crumpling at the first touch.
Three hours and nineteen minutes later, when I stop for petrol on the M1, I manage to unclasp my fingers from the wheel. They are pale and stiff, as though they have been deep-frozen.
Half an hour later, eighteen army trucks pass us in the opposite direction.
And I know, definitively: a new phase of human history has begun.
CHAPTER 16
I used to imagine Freddy coming to live with me on Arran, in the cottage by the sea. I’d point out how the colours of the scrubland change by the minute, flashing their way through the spectrum according to the cast of the sun. He’d see how the salt sparkles on the sheer granite boulder after a storm. We’d walk beyond the cove as far as the wind turbines, and I’d explain their aerodynamics and engineering: he’d listen for a bit, then scramble up the hill by the ruined cairn, shrieking into the wind at the top of his lungs. We’d make kites, hunt for edible berries and fungi, construct driftwood boats to float in rock pools, identify bird-calls, build bonfires to grill the mackerel we’d caught, read books bursting with facts.
But nothing’s as I thought.
A month has passed since we left London: soon winter will be setting in. My decision to move to the island after splitting up with Kaitlin was fuelled by an urge to be isolated and alone. But I see now that being encircled by sea gives us an advantage over mainlanders at a time when containment is vital. Arraners have always known how to subsist on what there is. Once the fuel supplies have run out and the ferry to the mainland stops, they will have no choice but to resurrect the habits and lifestyle of their ancestors: hunting, fishing, trapping, sheep-shearing, planting and harvesting crops according to the season.
To the rear of the cottage, behind the jumble of rusted tractor parts there’s an overgrown patch of land that was once cultivated. In the summer, the purple balls of onion heads and potato flowers stood tall among the weeds; now, they’re flattened and rotting. Here’s where I’ll plant my amaranth, in honour of Jonas Svensson. Here’s where I’ll experiment with salt-resistant crops. I’m digging the soil over, a few square metres a day, before winter hardens it. Repetitive movements soothe me. While I dig, Freddy pulls out worms from the freshly turned earth, or wanders further off and rakes in the heather, returning with the bones and skulls of birds, voles, weasels, rats and mice. With his agile, filthy hands he assembles them into crude necklaces, adding twigs, berries and snail shells which he secures on nylon fishing string or horse hair he’s picked from barbed wire. Other times, he likes to burrow about in the scrubland on the far side of the bluff, collecting beetles, spiders and larvae of all kinds. Or he’ll scour the beach for crabs, shrimp, seaweed. It would be futile to try and stop him devouring what he forages. He knows what he needs, in the world he inhabits.
The morning after Freddy and I arrived, I showed him where the fish lived. Together we scooped the chickweed out of the bathtub and decanted the creature into a bucket. The rubber plug was still functional: I pulled it free, sluicing the stinking water on to the mud below so we could right the tub properly on its supporting stacks of bricks. We wiped the enamel down, replaced the plug and filled the tub with rainwater from the butt. Once the sediment had settled, we put the goldfish back. There was damage to one of its trailing fins and what looked like a tumour by its eye. But it held Freddy’s attention
– or seemed to, until I suggested we give it a name. He used to like christening things.
But he just looked at me blankly. I might have been from another planet.
Since then, communication has been minimal, as if he has moved to a realm where he simply has no need of the conversations I offer. But there are occasions when he’ll be preoccupied with something – a dried-out jellyfish, a daddy-long-legs, a maggot – and I’ll catch him unawares, and get a short flow of speech. It never lasts long.
The first time it happened was when I was digging. As I bashed flints out of clods of cold earth, I told him about the belief that if you make a thousand ozuru, your dream will come true. I recounted the story of the Japanese girl who got radiation cancer from Hiroshima.
‘She folded and folded until she had a thousand cranes and then she made her wish. Which was to be cured. But when she found out that couldn’t happen, she wished for world peace instead.’
That didn’t materialise either. But I didn’t tell him.
‘I’m going to make a thousand ozuru,’ said Freddy, pulling a worm from the soil. I wasn’t expecting him to respond: my heart crashed about. The worm coiled and uncoiled between his finger and thumb. He wiped it clean.
‘What will you wish for?’
No reply. I asked again. But he just stood there and chewed his worm.
Later, I asked myself why I hadn’t pressed him further. Why I kept digging instead, harder and harder, working up a furious rhythm, concentrating on what I’d plant in the spring and summer: root vegetables, runner beans, tomatoes, aubergines, a few varieties of pumpkin, some soy.
The answer is that I get overloaded. I am slow to take things in. I know when I am not ready.
I wasn’t ready. So I dug.
Soon I must acknowledge the thing he craves so badly. He is a child. He wants to be with others like him. According to all the books I have read by paediatricians, it is normal for them to seek the company of their peers.
But the thought of losing him again kills me. This is, of course, a figure of speech. I will remain alive. But I will not know happiness.
As for myself, I try to eliminate all but the useful memories of what life was like before. By which I mean those that can provide clues as to what has happened, and help me map out a future worthy of the name.
Routines help. So does planning.
I order supplies by phone. Seeds and tubers to plant, an array of animal traps, a gun for shooting rabbit and deer, some sacks of seed, a good stock of tins. A man who doesn’t ask questions drops a box at the gate when I need him to. By springtime, I’ll have no further need of his services. There are three feral groups on the island, he told me. All native kids. ‘And we protect our own.’ It was meant as a warning – he’d seen the gun – but it came as a relief. From the local adults at least, Freddy will be safe.
There’s no internet any more, and little in the way of media coverage since the military took over on the mainland. Inevitably, things are far worse there. This is confirmed occasionally when there’s a phone signal, and Ashok rings. His tone is angry and unsettled. He’s frustrated that there’s no role for the man who could once shine the hot light of a business idea through any prism. The fact that capitalism has become ‘a dirty word’ enrages him. He’ll find his place, I am sure of it. But it may not lie where he hopes. He’s doing ‘a shit-load of figuring out’ what he’s got ‘to put on the table’, he reports. ‘Things suck here, you did well to get away. Just keep your head down, keep Freddy safe and wait it out. The child attacks are dying off, but the sabotages, they’re rife, man. And the kiddie-camps are full. Nobody asks what goes on inside them. Or what drug combination you use against so-called evil. Or what effect it has. And you don’t even want to know what’s happening in China. Anyway, take care of yourself, bud. Did you hear that Steph’s taken over Old Man Whybray’s post? Let’s stay in touch.’
The professor’s death has not sunk in. Perhaps it never will. The thought of his bloodied, open-mouthed corpse lying on the floor of the corridor at the Unit returns to me daily, sometimes hourly. And it does so in such vivid detail that I could tell you the exact shade of every element of it.
In the drawer of my desk, on top of the sheets of origami paper I have pre-creased according to Robert J. Lang’s instructions, lies the professor’s notebook. Sometimes I need to read his words over and over again. Other times, I am not in the mood to, because his reflections are as demanding and as complex as Lang’s folds. So I work with paper instead. I can get so absorbed that I don’t notice the hours pass. This is good.
Later, I’ll lie in bed trying to make sense of what he wrote, travelling miles on my restless legs.
Human history is a juggernaut. If it’s to change direction, it must first come to a stop. If our visitors believe the destruction of the world we have built is a prerequisite of humankind’s continued existence on the planet, no wonder their occupation is so brutal. It needs to be.
His handwriting is neat and precise: the handwriting of one uncorrupted by keyboard use.
People think ghosts are from the past, Sunny Chen said in his testimony to Hesketh. Quote: ‘We think they are all dead. But they are alive. And some of them are not even born yet. They are travellers . . . They go wherever they like.’
So where is it transmitting from, this occupying force? And what is its mission?
Hesketh asks what mythology the afflicted ones are replicating. But that begs the question: why should we imagine they are replicating what has gone before? And why must we assume it is ‘mythology’ at all?
There is a lot more in this vein. Much of it is highly speculative and emotional. The idea of a ‘hypothetical world’ he posited that day in Ashok’s office is taken much further. Like me, the professor was interested in the neutrino experiments – what scientist wouldn’t be – but the conclusions he drew made me wonder whether he was ill when he wrote them. I don’t like to consider the possibility that my mentor became unstable. Especially now that he is dead and I have no way of ascertaining precisely what he meant.
The idea that the children have indeed travelled – not forward in space, but backwards across time – is as heroic as it is unthinkable. But how else to explain their creeping occupation of our world?
What if they are indeed a manifestation of man’s own possible future? And that they have come not to ‘haunt’ us (as superstitious minds might insist), but instead, to simply show us – in only part of its full horror – the legacy our era will leave them, if our despoliation of Earth continues unchecked? If so, one can see their arrival as a desperate attempt to avert that future, by stopping it in its tracks.
It seems counter-intuitive to salute the children for what they have done, given the destructiveness of their methods. But instinct has its imperatives. And so does DNA. Can we blame them for craving survival, when that survival is that of our own descendants too?
When he speculated about a new paradigm that day in Ashok’s office, I dismissed it as ‘fanciful’. It never struck me that I might be wrong to. The final entry in Professor Whybray’s notebook is very short.
We are a species in crisis: a species on the brink of collapse. If this is crisis intervention, then I am glad to have seen the start of it, however appalling its immediate consequences. Yet I fear that of all the people on the planet, my beloved Hesketh will be the very last to understand: the last to make the leap of faith that’s needed. His need for proof blinds him.
This is very painful for me to read. He always praised my cast of mind. Yet here, in black and white, he condemns it. If a ‘leap of faith’ is required, how does one go about taking one? And to where must one leap? I would like to show the contents of Professor Whybray’s notebook to Einstein, or Plato, or some of the physicists from CERN or the High Energy Research Organisation in Japan, whose job is charting and assessing the unseen. But in their absence I must make do with the only expert I have access to: a boy of seven.
‘Freddy K, go and fetch
some old newspaper from that pile over there.’ I point. He looks blank. I’m about to give up and try later when I see him give the little shudder I recognise: a sign that he is switching mode. ‘Freddy K. We’re going to make the world. Your world, not the old one.’
‘OK.’
‘Are there trees?’
‘Just dead ones.’
‘So get some twigs.’
Soon he’s at work on a hawthorn branch. While he’s busy, I fold half a dozen origami men, on the same model as the one I made for Sunny Chen. I remember there’s a sack of sand among the rusted farm machinery. I haul it to the porch and spread it out by the doorstep, and sprinkle some coarse dishwasher salt on top.
There. A sparkling white desert that looks like Heaven. Freddy is immediately excited. He doesn’t say anything, but he rushes to gather up the origami figures and the makeshift trees.
‘So what next?’ I ask.
He plants the twigs first, in clusters. ‘Scissors,’ he says.
When I hand them over he calmly begins snipping my origami figures into pieces.
‘What are you doing?’
He digs a shallow hole and throws them in. ‘They die.’
‘Who?’
‘People. They get sick. From poison and the sun. Their eyes pop. Then they die and we bury them in salt. And when they’re ready we dig them up. For eating.’ He throws a handful of sand and salt over the chopped pieces.
‘That’s a sad story, Freddy.’
‘It’s not a story.’
‘But if it was, how would it go after that?’ His face changes again. As if sleepwalking, he gets down from the table and opens the front door. ‘Freddy K?’ A blast of freezing air rushes in as he steps outside, still barefoot. He never wears shoes any more and I have stopped trying to make him. ‘Freddy!’ We were getting somewhere: I can’t let him go now. ‘So what happens next, Freddy?’ He doesn’t respond. ‘How does the story go?’
