Being

by Kevin Brooks

  ‘Nothing at all?’ Eddi asked.

  I shook my head. ‘I was just a baby. I can’t remember anything – no faces, no voices, no sense of place. I don’t even know how long I was with them. I can remember most of my other carers… not in any detail or anything, but I sort of remember bits of them. You know, bits of houses, bits of faces, bits of times…’

  ‘But nothing about the Smiths?’

  ‘No.’

  It was strange, trying to think about it. I knew that I had been a child. I could remember growing up, getting older, getting bigger. I remembered getting feelings that I’d never felt before.

  I had grown up.

  ‘What did Ryan say?’ Eddi asked me.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘On the phone… what did Ryan have to say?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Anything…’ She glanced at me. ‘Why did you ask him what he thought you were?’

  ‘Did I?’

  She nodded. ‘You said to him, “What do you think I am?” You asked him that twice.’

  ‘Oh, yeah…’ I shook my head, as if it was nothing. ‘I was just letting him know that I’m not an idiot. You know, like, what do you think I am – stupid?’

  ‘Right… so this was when he was trying to make you believe his lies?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

  ‘And what about anything else? Did he tell you anything at all?’

  ‘Not really…’

  ‘What about when you asked him where he was?’

  ‘He said he was in London – Queen Anne’s Gate, SWI. I think he was probably lying.’

  ‘Queen Anne’s Gate?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I looked at her. ‘Do you know it?’

  ‘The Home Office is in Queen Anne’s Gate.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘It could mean anything. He could have been lying, in which case it means nothing. Or he could have been telling the truth, which could mean he works for the Government.’

  ‘Why would he tell me the truth?’

  ‘To make you go looking for him. He tells you where he is, you go looking for him, he’s waiting for you. He’ll have cameras, guards, people on the street watching out for you. You wouldn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘Not even if you were with me?’

  She smiled. ‘What do you think I am – stupid?’

  We finally got to Leeds around ten o’clock. The rain had started falling again and the city streets looked cold and hard in the night. I was tired and hungry. I wanted to know when we were going to stop, and where, but I couldn’t be bothered to ask. I’d had enough of talking. I was sick of the sound of my own voice. So I just sat there and watched the streets pass by.

  We drove on, following the signs to the airport. After a while, I began to see the flashing lights of low-flying aeroplanes in the distance up ahead. As the airport got closer, I could hear the drone of planes flying over us, and I started to feel the reality of what we were doing, and where we were going. We were leaving the country. I was leaving the country… with a girl I hardly knew. I was going somewhere else, with someone else, and I didn’t know how I felt about it.

  Then Eddi started slowing the car, and I looked out and saw that we were turning into the courtyard of a hotel…

  And I started feeling another reality.

  ∗

  There was only one room available – an executive double.

  ‘It’s quite expensive, I’m afraid,’ the woman at the reception desk said. ‘But it’s all we have left at this time of night. If you’d booked earlier –’

  ‘We’ll take it,’ Eddi said, passing her a credit card.

  While the receptionist pressed buttons on her keyboard and Eddi filled out a form, I picked up a Daily Mirror from the desk and started flipping through it. I couldn’t find anything about me – no photographs, no stories, no lies.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Rogers,’ the receptionist said to Eddi. ‘You’re on the second floor. Through the doors, down the corridor, the lift’s on your right.’

  I folded the newspaper under my arm and we took our bags up to the room.

  ‘You don’t look like a Mrs Rogers,’ I told Eddi as she opened the door.

  ‘Don’t I?’

  I shook my head. ‘I knew one once. She was a cleaner at one of my Homes. A dumpy little woman with a big hairy mole on her face. Everyone called her Kenny.’

  ‘Why?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  We went inside and Eddi locked the door behind us. It was a big room – double bed, loads of cupboards, plasma TV, fridge, armchair, desk, settee. The bathroom gleamed with chrome and glass, and there were two white bathrobes laid out on the bed. I watched Eddi as she went over to the window and pulled back the edge of the curtain. We were at the front of the hotel. I could see headlights streaming on the road outside. I glanced at the bed, wondering what I was wondering, then I turned on the TV and started clicking through the channels.

  ‘Is there anything in the newspaper about you?’ Eddi asked.

  ‘I couldn’t find anything.’

  ‘Check the news channels,’ she said, nodding at the TV. ‘See if there’s anything about Morris.’

  While I searched through the channels, looking for Sky News or BBC 24, Eddi went over and picked up her holdall, then took it into the bathroom and closed the door. I heard taps running, zips unzipping, things rattling…

  I turned my attention back to the TV. There was lots of news, lots of rolling headlines – murders, bombings, wars, disasters – but nothing about a dead man in a barn. I muted the TV and sat down on the bed. It was soft and comfortable. I gazed around the room… remembering another hotel room… another night. I put my hand inside my shirt and felt the scar on my belly. I looked down at the bite mark on the back of my hand. I rubbed my right arm where the bullet had grazed me. The wounds tingled slightly, but there wasn’t any pain.

  I glanced over at Eddi’s rucksack, imagining the carrier bag full of cash inside. £10,000. It was a lot of money. I could live on that for a while.

  I thought about it.

  I could see myself getting up off the bed, picking up the rucksack, then quietly leaving the room. I could see myself doing it… walking down the hallway, down to reception, out into the cold rainy night. Getting in the back of a taxi, telling the driver to take me to…

  Take you to where?

  I closed my eyes.

  I couldn’t see anything.

  When Eddi came out of the bathroom she was wearing a long woolly jumper, a pair of long woolly socks and not much else. Her skin smelled soapy and freshly washed, and she was drying her hair with a towel.

  ‘Did you find anything about Morris?’ she asked me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t think you would.’

  ‘Maybe they haven’t found him yet.’

  ‘Maybe not… but even if they have, they’ll probably try to cover it up. I doubt if we’ll see anything about Morris in the news.’

  She went over to the fridge, opened it up and looked inside. I was too tired to stop myself staring at her.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ she said.

  ‘Starving.’

  She pulled out a tray from the fridge, placed it on the floor, then emptied the contents of the fridge on to the tray and brought it over to the bed. There were crisps, peanuts, chocolate bars, cans of beer and Coke, little bottles of wine.

  ‘Help yourself,’ Eddi said, cracking open a bottle of wine. She took a long drink, opened up a packet of crisps and settled down on the bed beside me. I looked at her for a moment, watching her stuff a handful of crisps into her mouth, then I ripped open a Mars bar and got stuck in.

  We ate in noisy silence – chomping and chewing, slurping and burping – until there was nothing left but wine and beer and a muesli bar. Eddi opened another bottle of wine.

  ‘You want some?’ she asked me.

  I shook my head.

 
She drank half the little bottle in one go, then leaned back against the wall, crossed her legs and lit a cigarette. As she blew out the smoke, I could smell the sweet taste of wine on her breath, and for a moment it reminded me of when she’d drugged me – the whiteness, the fog, the helplessness. I tried to keep the memory from my eyes, but Eddi had already seen it.

  ‘I know you can’t forget what I did to you,’ she said, ‘but we both have to get over it. I’m not saying we have to trust each other –’

  ‘I know,’ I told her. ‘It’s all right… it just came back to me for a moment, that’s all. It’s not a problem.’

  She nodded. ‘I still don’t understand how you managed to wake up.’

  ‘I know… it happened at the hospital too.’ I looked at her. ‘Maybe it’s got something to do with what they were doing to me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know… that thing inside me. I mean, whatever it was, it had to do something. It had to have a purpose. And it was inside my body. So maybe it had some kind of physical effect on me… and somehow that made me less susceptible to the anaesthetic.’

  ‘Yeah, but you didn’t have anything inside you when I drugged your wine, did you? You’d already got rid of it by then.’

  ‘Maybe the effects carried on after I’d got rid of it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged. ‘I’m just thinking out loud. I don’t even know if that kind of thing’s possible.’

  ‘What about the scar on your stomach?’

  ‘What about it?’

  She looked at me. ‘You only cut yourself open on Monday night.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, it’s a bit quick for a scar to form, isn’t it? I mean, I know I’ve only seen it once and I don’t know what’s normal anyway –’

  ‘What do you mean – normal?’ I said. ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘I’m not trying to say anything –’

  ‘I’ve always healed quickly,’ I told her. ‘Look.’ I showed her the bite mark on the back of my hand. ‘See? That’s healing too. And you know when that happened.’

  ‘I’m not doubting you, Robert,’ she said. ‘I’m just trying to work out what this thing inside you could be… what it could have done to you…’ She shook her head. ‘You started it anyway.’

  ‘Started what?’

  ‘The idea that it might have some kind of physical effect on you. It was your idea, not mine.’

  ‘Yeah, well…’

  ‘I’m just trying to find some answers, that’s all. I’m just…’

  ‘Just what?’

  She smiled at me. ‘I’m just thinking out loud.’

  We looked at each other for a moment, and I wondered what she was thinking. Did she believe me? Did I believe her? Did we both think we were fooling each other?

  She smiled again, then leaned over and reached for an ashtray on the bedside cabinet. As she lay there, stretched across the bed, stubbing out her cigarette, her jumper rode up, revealing the still-moist skin of her half-naked body. I couldn’t help staring at it for a moment, but then I forced myself to look away, not wanting to think about what it was doing to me… certain things, uncertain things. Skin and bone, flesh and blood… carbon, metal, plastic.

  It was all too complicated.

  Eddi sat up straight again and drained the bottle of wine. ‘It sort of makes sense,’ she said.

  ‘What does?’

  ‘This thing that was inside you… I mean, it could be some kind of experimental technology, some kind of microchip that works inside a human body. It could do all kinds of weird stuff. It’s not impossible. And if Ryan and his people are experimenting with it, it’d make sense for them to use someone like you as a guinea pig.’ She looked at me. ‘You’ve got no family, no one to look out for you. They can move you around, put you in different situations. They can have people watching you all the time. And if there’s ever a problem with anything, they can make sure you’re alone when they fix it.’

  I stared at the bed, thinking hard, trying to untangle the truth from the lies. Eddi could be right. What she was suggesting did make sense – to both of us. To her, it was a possible solution to what she thought was the truth. And to me, it was a possible solution to what I knew was the truth. And somewhere between the two possibilities – or maybe somewhere within them – there was another possibility: the possibility of me finding out my truth without Eddi finding out that hers was a lie.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked me.

  I looked at her, too tired to think any more. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘it’s possible.’

  Some time around midnight, Eddi started getting ready for bed. She called down to reception for a four-thirty alarm call, set the alarm on the TV and went into the bathroom to clean her teeth. I didn’t know what to do. I just sat there, looking at the walls, not daring to think. I knew what I wanted to do, but I knew that I couldn’t. I wasn’t normal, was I? I wasn’t human, for God’s sake. How could I even think about that? Of course, I hadn’t been human the night before either. But I’d still ended up in Eddi’s bed. That was different, though. I was drunk then. I was drugged. I didn’t know what I was doing…

  ‘Did you say something?’

  I looked up suddenly at the sound of Eddi’s voice. She’d come out of the bathroom and was jamming a chair up against the door. She glanced over her shoulder at me. ‘I thought I heard you say something.’

  ‘No… I was just… I was just thinking…’

  ‘Yeah, well, we’d better get some sleep. We need to get going at five tomorrow morning. Five thirty at the latest.’ She came over to the bed and stood in front of me. ‘Are you going to sit there all night?’

  I smiled, trying to hide my embarrassment, and got to my feet. While Eddi started clearing away all the crisp packets and empty bottles from the bed, I went over to a shelf by the door and lifted off a spare duvet and some pillows. I carried them across the room and dropped them on the settee.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Eddi said.

  I turned and looked at her. ‘I was just making up a bed…’

  ‘What for? There’s a bed right here.’

  ‘Well, I just thought… you know…’

  ‘Oh, don’t be stupid.’ She shook her head. ‘What’s the matter – don’t you trust yourself? Or is it me you don’t trust?’

  ‘No, it’s not that… it’s just…’

  ‘Look, if it’s me you’re worried about, you can forget it. Even if I wanted to do anything, I’m too tired. And if you don’t think you can control yourself… well, you can leave that to me.’ She stared at me, waiting for me to say something, but all I could do was stare back at her. ‘I haven’t got time for this,’ she said, turning to the bed and throwing back the duvet. ‘It’s up to you, Robert. Sleep where you want.’ She got into bed and pulled up the duvet.

  I stood there for a few moments, wondering what it was that was beating so hard inside me, then I went to the bathroom. I washed, peed, cleaned my teeth. I sat on the edge of the bath and took off my shoes and socks. I stood up and took off my shirt and trousers. Then I turned round and looked at myself in a full-length mirror on the back of the door. My eyes looked tired. My hair was blond and unfamiliar. My skin was scarred. Stomach, arm, hand, arm. Scalpel, scalpel, teeth, bullet. The scars were ghost scars – thin and white, barely visible. Like threads of see-through plastic.

  My reflection shimmered…

  I didn’t want to look at it any more. I opened the door, turned out the light and quietly went over to the bed. I climbed in, careful not to make any noise, switched off the light and lay down with my back to Eddi. The pillows were soft and cool, the sheets crisp and clean – it felt like heaven. I stretched out my legs and tried to relax.

  ‘See?’ Eddi said quietly. ‘It’s not so bad, is it?’

  ‘Very nice,’ I muttered.

  We lay there in silence for a while. I could hear Eddi breathing, a whispered rhyt
hm of sighing breaths, and I could feel her body moving as she breathed in and out… her chest rising and falling, her hair stirring faintly on the pillow…

  I could feel the heat of her presence.

  It was hard to ignore.

  But I had to. So I just lay there in the darkness, keeping perfectly still, trying not to think of anything.

  Empty your head, I told myself.

  You need to rest.

  Go to sleep.

  Just close your eyes, forget about Eddi, forget about everything, and go to sleep.

  I closed my eyes.

  And I started thinking about things…

  I opened my eyes again.

  ‘Are you asleep?’ I whispered to Eddi.

  ‘Yeah…’ she mumbled.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s about Curtis… John’s brother. Your ex-boyfriend -’

  ‘I know who Curtis is. What about him?’

  ‘Was he taken into care at the same time as John?’

  She didn’t answer immediately. She just lay there, not moving, not saying anything. I waited, listening to her breathing. Her breaths weren’t so steady any more. Eventually she said, ‘Curtis was thirteen when they took him and his brother away. I suppose John would have been about nine or ten at the time. They kept them together at first – a few months in a Home at Southend, then a year or so with a foster family in Basildon. I’m not sure where they went after that…’

  I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. ‘John told me what happened,’ I said. ‘You know, with his dad and everything.’

  ‘Curtis never talked about it.’

  ‘Their dad used to abuse them… you know, mess about with them. Really nasty stuff. And he was always beating the shit out of them too. John showed me his scars once.’

  ‘Yeah, Curtis had them all over his back. Cigarette burns.’

  ‘John told me that his mum knew all about it, but she never did anything.’

  ‘Yeah, well…’ Eddi said quietly. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to do the right thing. Even when you know something’s wrong, it’s not always easy to stop it.’