by Tom Pollock
“No,” I said, finally. “Not after the last time.”
“Yeah.” We shared our relief. Better as we were, just the three of us. Safer.
“I’d like to see the man that could keep up with her,” I put in. “He’d need like six PhDs to come close.”
“Yeah.” Bel grinned. “But you know what you don’t need a PhD for? Jumping off a wall. Enough procrastinating, little bro. Get to it.”
I looked down. My head swam. My stomach pitched. My arms windmilled. In fact, the only bits of me that didn’t move were my feet. They stayed rooted to the brick. Bel sighed again.
“On the other hand . . .” Gripping the apple securely in her mouth, she jumped, caught the top of the wall and scrambled up. Straightening, she bit a chunk from the fruit and let it fall back into her palm. A white wound glistened in the acid-green skin.
“How about we do this your way?” she suggested, chewing thoughtfully. She held the apple out over the edge. “What happens if I let this go?”
“It falls.”
“Thank you for that startling insight, Professor Einstein. How fast will it fall?”
I sighed. “It’ll accelerate by nine point eight metres a second squared, then brake back to zero when it hits the ground. And by the way, it’s pretty ironic you picking Einstein to demonstrate Newtonian mechanics when—”
“And how fast would you fall?” She cuts me off.
“Same,” I said. “Gravity doesn’t care how big you are; it drags you down all the same.”
“How hard would you hit?”
I squinted down at the leaf-drifts.
“Fifteen kilonewtons,” I mumbled reluctantly, “ish . . .”
“Which is . . . ?” she prompted, gesturing with the half-eaten apple. I didn’t answer.
“Totally survivable,” she said, finishing her own sentence. “Right? I mean, you know it is.”
“I don’t know if I know it, exactly.”
“Come on, Petey, you know exactly how high a fall you can walk away from. You know all this kind of stuff.” Another bite of the apple. “I bet you even looked up how many of these I could eat before I poisoned myself.”
“I did not!”
“Uh-huh. Look, even if you hadn’t just seen me do it a million times, think of the maths. Your precious numbers are giving you the green light, so what are you so scared of?”
What are you so scared of? For an instant I saw Ben Rigby’s lips mouthing the words.
“Come on, Petey,” I muttered. I tried to steel myself. I looked at her uncertainly, and she gave me a supernova of a smile and a thumbs-up. I inched around until I was facing the drop again. The trunks of the trees seemed to elongate away from me; the leaf-mould cushion seemed treacherously thin. I could hear the distant shouts and laughter of kids on the playground. Everything swirled and I felt like the world was tipping backwards around me. I screwed my eyes up and tried to bend my legs.
Three excruciating minutes later, I said, “I can’t.”
Bel sighed. “Why not?”
“Look, intellectually, I know I’d be fine. My brain trusts the numbers. It’s just . . .”
“Yes?”
“I’m having a hard time convincing the muscles in my legs that need to do the actual jumping.”
There was a soft flump below me. Bel’s apple nestled in the leaves, the imprint of her teeth etched in the brilliant white flesh. She held out her hand towards me.
“These sceptical legs of yours,” she said. “Do they trust me?”
I hesitated but then nodded. Of course they did. They’d shared a womb with her; she’d been there from the beginning. That’s the deepest trust there is. Bel was my axiom.
“Then let them lead. If you can’t trust yourself, trust me.” She smirked. “After all, I’m kind of an expert. If there was a PhD in falling, I’d have it.”
An alarm buzzed in her pocket.
“Shit,” she said. “I’ve got to get back for science. You?”
“I’ve got a free.”
“Then keep practising.” She knocked gently on the helmet, hopped off the wall, landed perfectly just to rub it in, and sprinted off towards the school.
“Three, two, one, zero,” I muttered. My feet stayed on the bricks.
“Three, two, one, zero . . .”
“Three, two, one—”
“Afternoon, Wankman.”
I started and lurched forward, teetering. When I raised my head, there he was. Ben Rigby, flanked by Kamal Jackson and Brad Watkins, standing at the edge of the tree line. I went cold. There was no chance this was a coincidence; no one came here. They’d followed us, waited for Bel to leave.
And he was holding his knife.
His parents had given him one of those Swiss Army things with sixteen zillion functions that look like the contents of a cutlery drawer fused together in a nuclear blast. Right now, though, only the main blade was extended.
I’d thought a lot about that blade. I’d meditated extensively on every gleaming steel edge, because ever since he got it, Ben had been telling me he was going to cut my balls off.
Come on. All I had to do was take one step backwards and there’d be three metres of solid brick between them and me, but my muscles were like stone.
They started forwards, feet crunching the leaves. “Y’know something sad, Kamal?” Ben spoke like I wasn’t even there. “Something really tragic. I think we might be the closest thing to friends Wankman’s got.”
Ben was a gifted bully. He had great instincts for it.
“Either that or all those donuts he had last week,” Kamal replied. “I heard he stuffs his face when he’s lonely.”
I froze. I looked at the knife and felt a spasm of guilt. I had to get out of here. Fifteen kilonewtons, I told my legs. Move! Nothing.
“Is that true, Wankman? Were those donuts your mateless medicine?”
“I have friends.” I’d meant it to sound defiant, but it came out as a whine. They weren’t buying it. They’d seen me try to make friends. Too shy at first, then too eager, pressing in too hard, scaring people off.
“Really? Who?”
“Bel.”
“Your sister?” Ben laughed delightedly. “I thought you couldn’t get any more pathetic, but you’re just the gift that keeps on giving, aren’t you? You can name exactly one friend and she’s related to you. But here’s the thing, Wankman.” He dipped his free hand into his pocket and pulled out his phone. “That’s not what you said last week.”
He thumbed the phone.
“My sister’s a bitch. I hate her, she’ll get what’s coming to her.”
It was tinny, distorted by the speaker, but it was still, unmistakably, my voice.
And then suddenly, I was back, lying prone in the alley behind the baker’s at six in the morning last Sunday, the paving slabs freezing and grazing my arms, where Kamal and Brad held them down.
“Just say it.” Ben was crouching beside me, holding his phone out. “Once for the record and we’ll let you go. Otherwise . . .”
I remembered the tear-rip noise between my legs, the sudden feeling of cold air and colder metal pressing against the inside of my thigh. I remembered fighting not to wet myself.
My legs were trembling. If I didn’t jump, I was going to fall. Bel was probably still in earshot. If I called out . . . But my eyes fell on the phone and the thought shrivelled up.
They were almost at the wall now. I looked down behind me. The other side was sheer. There was no way to climb down. It was jump or nothing.
If you can’t trust yourself, trust me.
“THREE!” I yelled, so loud that they stopped, startled.
“What—?” Ben began, but I cut him off, continuing the shouted count.
“TWO . . .”
My legs bent under me, my weight tippi
ng back.
“ONE . . .”
NOW
“Zero,” Seamus’s voice crackles out of Rita’s phone, which sits on the dashboard. Over the last five minutes, his tone’s gone from taut to outright panicky.
The ambulance is jinking through traffic ahead of us and we’re in its slipstream, sliding through the briefly empty patches of road cleared by its sirens.
“I’ve checked the cameras over and over again, and there are zero entry vectors. There was no way to mount this attack, no way for anyone to get in or out without being seen.”
“There’s a bleeding woman in an ambulance ahead of me who disagrees with that assessment, Seamus,” Rita says.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Rita . . .”
“Then what is the point of you?” She reaches over the steering wheel and thumbs the device off.
There’s a bleeding woman. I imagine Mum breathing, her chest rising and falling in time to it. Keep breathing, I tell myself as much as her, just keep bloody breathing. Think back . . .
Rita frog-marched me out of the museum through a series of back ways and staff exits, leaving her high heels abandoned next to the pool of blood on the floor. At one junction Mum’s stretcher went right and I tried to follow, but Rita snapped, “Left.”
“But . . .” I began, but tailed off when I saw her face, imagining one of her fake paramedics dragging a scalpel across the skin of Mum’s throat. I turned left.
“It’s just a shortcut,” Rita said. “There are stairs they can’t take the trolley up.”
A pair of turns later, we were climbing a set of concrete steps, then descending another to a black door with a green fire exit sign. I reached for the metal release bar, but Rita said, “Wait.”
She lifted her phone to her ear.
“Seamus, do you have eyes on the road? East exit.”
Seamus’s voice crackled over the line. “It’s clear.”
“That’s what you said last time.”
“Then either believe me or don’t,” Seamus said testily. “But then why bother asking?”
Rita swore at him and hung up.
“Okay,” she said, pulling me round to face her. “Peter, through this door and exactly two hundred feet to the left is a black Ford Focus. It is unlocked. When I say go, you will run to it as fast as you can and get in. Pay attention, because this part is important. Your mother isn’t leaving here without you. If you run anywhere other than my car, I will keep her lying bleeding in the ambulance until you come back, and she doesn’t have a lot of time for you to waste. Do you understand?”
I swallowed back impotent fury. “Yes.”
“Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Then go.”
I spun, threw myself at the door, and felt it give way. A blast of chilly air hit me and I sprinted left down the pavement. The city was a tunnel of blurred colours and noises, pavement grey, bus red, the drone of traffic. A black hatchback was parked by the curb over double red lines. Eighty-five strides, I thought, two hundred feet. I lurched at the passenger door and grappled with the handle, and it popped open. I scrambled inside.
A fraction of a second later, the driver’s door opened and Rita slid in beside me. She must have been right on my shoulder, but I’d been so focused I hadn’t even noticed. I glanced at her for signs of satisfaction at my obedience but saw none. She looked hunted; sweat was tracing chaotic pathways down her cheeks, and her shoulders were hunched up as if she were trying to protect her neck. Her eyes darted back and forth, peering through the windscreen. I followed suit, but all I could see were the buses, cars, and idling pedestrians of an ordinary Kensington morning.
“Okay,” she said. She turned the ignition and the car rumbled to life. She put it in gear, then paused, absolutely still.
“What is it? What are we waiting—?” I started to say.
A siren droned up and down the scale, and a green-and-yellow-checked ambulance shot past, lights flaring.
Rita stamped on the accelerator and threw us in pursuit.
“What do I need to do?” I ask Rita. My brain’s a welter. Impressions, images, car horns, brake lights, blood, blood, blood. I try to calm my breathing. I check my pulse and find to my astonishment it’s actually slowing: eighty-eight beats a minute and falling. For a moment I can’t make sense of it, then I catch a glimpse of the time glowing on the dashboard: 11:26 a.m.
Ah.
It’s been forty minutes since I swallowed the tab of lorazepam. Right now, dear old Laura’s busy rushing around my brain, shoving socks into the mouths of all the frantically chattering neurons, dampening the noise of the rioting crowd in my head. Even if she wasn’t, you can only run at full, five-alarm panic for so long before your entire cerebro-synaptic complex collapses like an overweight asthmatic running a marathon. I’m hitting my upper limit. My eyeballs ache and my temples throb. I fight through the fog for the only question that matters.
“What do I have to do so you’ll get Mum to a hospital?”
Rita barely glances at me.
“Shut up, sit tight, do as you’re told, when you’re told to do it.”
“I’ve been doing that.”
“And you’ll notice in return that your mother is tearing through the streets of London in a big yellow van with flashing blue lights attached to the top of it. What does that normally signify?”
Normal? My mum was supposed to get an award today and got stabbed in the gut instead. I’ve been kidnapped by a doctor with the bedside manner of a serial killer, and I have no idea where my sister is, so no, I’m sorry. Normal didn’t show up for work today. His replacement, Completely Batshit Insane, is here—can he take your order? He’d like to recommend the fucking veal!
Fighting to keep my voice neutral, I say, “We’re heading northeast and the three closest hospitals to the Natural History Museum are all to the south and west. So I’m asking again: what do I need to do so that you’ll get Mum help?”
Rita gives me a look, half amused, half impressed.
“You know that stuff, huh?”
“I’m a world-champion paranoiac. You think I go anywhere without knowing where the nearest operating theatre is?”
She smiles. Out the window, the columned sandstone bulk of Apsley House appears and vanishes in an instant as we plunge around Hyde Park Corner and into Green Park.
“We’re taking her to a company facility.” She hesitates before adding, “Employee benefits.”
I stare at her.
“Are you telling me Mum’s a . . .” I grope hopelessly for the right word. I feel a brief, needle-sharp pang: Bel, where are you? “A . . . whatever you are?” I manage finally.
“I told you Louise and I are colleagues,” she says. “I never said doing what.”
“But you threatened her. You said you’d let her bleed.”
“I had to get you in the car.” A hint of a shrug. “That was the fastest way to do it.” She fumbles in the glove compartment and pulls out a box of tissues, a rattling can of travel sweets, and eventually a photograph. She hands it to me. It’s old and dog-eared; something black and gummy’s streaked over the surface, but it still clearly shows three women standing in a field, smiling. Rita’s on the right, a blonde woman I don’t recognise stands on the left, and in the middle, a few years younger but pale, freckled, and unmistakeable: my mother.
I pinch the photo uncertainly between my finger and thumb. Rita glances at me out the corner of her eye.
“And being the world-champion paranoiac you are, you naturally think that’s faked.” She sighs, throws the car into a zigzag so violent I think my seat belt will cut me in half, then wrestles it back straight.
“What are you good at?” Rita asks. I don’t answer. “Maths, right? You’re supposed to be quite the human calculator. So, here’s a question. What’s one plus two?”
I stare at her blankly. I can feel cold creeping through me, numbing my lips and my fingertips. Locking my jaw is all that keeps my teeth from chattering.
She purses her lips thoughtfully. “Okay,” she says, “let’s try this: want to see what I’m good at?”
She winds down her window and digs under her seat. When her hand comes up, a ten pence piece glimmers in her palm.
“Heads or tails?” she asks, and then, perhaps guessing I’m not about to turn this conversation into a two-player game, answers for me. “Let’s say heads.”
She puts her hand out the window and flicks the coin up. My eyes track it through the sunroof as it glints and flickers, turning and turning and turning and . . .
BANG.
A shattering sound fills my ears. I smell hot metal and something like a freshly extinguished candle. The coin zips off its trajectory and out of sight. For a sickening second I think we’ve crashed, and I screw my eyes shut. My vertebrae bunch, bracing for flying shards of windscreen to slice my face off the front of my skull.
One second passes, two. My face still feels attached. The motion of the car still pitches my stomach. I open my eyes, look down, and see the neat black pistol in Rita’s grip. The stink of hot metal and chemicals fills my nostrils.
“Heads,” she says, not bothering to look back. “You believe me?”
I do.
Outside on the pavement, heads have whipped around in the direction of the noise. But the car’s already moved on and the gun’s back inside it, pointed ever so casually, at me.
“What are you thinking?” she asks, perfectly calm, gaze flicking from the road towards me every now and then. “Describe what’s going through your head right now.”
The end of the pistol’s like a black hole, sucking all the light out of the world.
Light . . . light . . . My mind races, trying to find some hope, some sum that will let it grip onto this moment and not leave me a slobbering catatonic wreck.
“Speak,” she says. But I don’t know what she wants me to say.
Light.
“L-l-light,” I stammer. I swallow and try again, trying to keep my teeth from chattering.
