by Tom Pollock
“Go on.”
“A-add up the time it takes for the light to go from me to your retina, the electricity to shoot up your optic nerve and p-p-pinball around your brain and then head all the way b-b-back down your arm to your trigger finger, you get about a quarter of a second. You, me, and that gun have been alone t-t-together in this car for eight and a half minutes.”
My nerve fails me.
“So?”
“So, you’ve had two thousand and forty separate chances to kill me, and you haven’t taken any of them yet.”
For a long second she just looks at me. Two dark pupils and the dark barrel of her gun. Then she mutters, “Jesus Christ, you really are a piece of work. How do you even know all that?”
How do I know how long it takes for a human being to make an irrevocable decision? I stare at her.
She tucks the gun away beside her seat. “You like counting, so let’s count.” She curls fingers out from the steering wheel, ticking off items:
“One: I could be an assassin. This could all be part of a convoluted plan to kill your mother. Only, as I just demonstrated, if I wanted either of you dead, you would be.
“Two: this is a kidnapping. I want Louise alive, except, why would I endanger my objective by giving her a gushing abdominal wound?
“Three: everything I told you is true. That photograph is real. Louise is not only my colleague but my very, very close friend, and I’m risking not only my glittering career but my elegant neck because I owe it to her to keep you safe. Now, what’s one plus two?”
“Three,” I reply, my mouth parched.
She nods. “Sometimes the obvious answer’s the right one.”
Her phone buzzes and jiggles over the dash, spitting out the trumpets from “Mambo No. 5.” She thumbs Answer, cutting Lou Bega off in midflow.
“This is Rita,” she says. “I’m on speakerphone.”
“Understood, Rita. This is Henry Black. Report.”
“I have both Louise and the Rabbit. We’re six minutes out.”
There is a brief, startled pause.
“You’re bringing the Rabbit into 57?”
“Affirmative.”
57? I think. What’s 57? Why am I the “Rabbit”?
“Rita.” The man on the other end of the line sounds appalled. “You can’t . . .”
“I can and I am.”
“Rita . . .”
“He’s Louise’s son, Henry. If this was your daughter, would you want me to leave her out in the cold?”
There’s a shocked silence coming from the phone. I get the feeling Rita’s crossed a line. She hangs up. We’re on the Embankment now and the traffic’s thinned. She yanks us up onto the north side of Blackfriars Bridge with, frankly, unnecessary force.
“Who was that?” I ask at last.
“My boss,” she says tightly, “for as long as I continue to be employed.”
For the rest of the journey neither of us speaks. All I can think about is what’s going on in the back of that sealed steel box rolling ahead of us. Have Rita’s fake-real paramedics stabilised her? Or are they even now scrambling around with paddles and syringes, trying to save her life?
Don’t be dead, Mum. Just don’t be dead.
Eventually, we turn onto a residential street in Hackney, brick terraces on both sides, the one on the left bandaged up in scaffolding. The ambulance pulls in and cuts its sirens, and we park up behind it. I don’t want the door to open; it feels as if whatever has happened inside won’t be real until I see it. Rita seems to read my mind.
“They’d have called if they lost her,” she assures me. “She’s still with us.”
I try to grip onto that reassurance, but it’s slippery. A terrible loneliness surges through me: a premonition of loss. The handles on the back of the ambulance turn, and my pulse quickens. Where are you, Bel? We need each other right now. We need to face this together. I grasp empty air with my right hand as if I could feel hers.
The door to Schrödinger’s ambulance swings open and a ramp unfolds. They’re pushing Mum out onto the pavement on her gurney. Fussed over by her green-coated minders, she vanishes under the scaffolding. In between the struts, I see tired-looking brick and dirty windows with pea-green paint peeling from their frames. The nearest door has a pair of splotchy brass numerals screwed to the bricks beside it, wonky in a way that makes my teeth ache: 57.
As we approach the door, Rita arrests me with a hand on the shoulder.
“I am out on a limb for you, you understand?” she says.
“How can I?” I ask hoarsely. “You haven’t told me anything.” She snorts, but I see a flicker of a smile on her lips.
“Yeah, you should get used to that. World-champion paranoiac, huh?”
I nod, wide-eyed.
“Good. Don’t let me down.”
Recursion: 3 Years Ago
“Sir?”
Dr. Arthurson’s head swung towards the sound of my voice. Eyes like soaped-over windows screwed up to peer at me.
“Peter?” He was all but blind, but he had a killer memory for voices.
“Yes, sir.” The space between my shoulder blades itched. Dr. A might not have been able to see, but at least half the class were staring a hole in my back. I gulped air. “I’m struggling with this bit of the problem, and I was wondering if you could give me a clue.”
“Oh, well, of course.” He patted the desk in front of him and I slid the sheet of paper I’d been working on under his waiting fingers. For the main part of his lessons, he typed onto a laptop that got projected onto the board while a text-recogniser spoke into his earbud. But for marking, he held it right up in front of his nose.
I pointed to a random line on the page and said, “It’s this bit here,” before I leaned into his ear and muttered,
“I’m pretty sure this is right, but the last time I was the first to find the answer in this class, we had chemistry next lesson and someone “accidentally” spilled a blister agent down the back of my trousers. Guess what our next lesson is now—double chemistry! So please play along. Act like I’ve made some really basic mistake and give me something else to work on, please? I’d stare out the window, but the view of the sixth-form block air vents isn’t going to move me to poetry, you know?”
In the reflection of the glass clock face, I could see Ben Rigby. He saw me see him and mimed a wank with his right hand. Kamal snorted.
“Ho ho ho!” Dr. Arthurson burst out, like a corduroy-clad Santa Claus. “Oh my, you have made an elementary error, haven’t you?” Dr. A had what I guessed was a fifty-four-inch chest, and his fake laugh shook the light fittings. He tabbed off the projector so only I could see his screen and typed:
I was quite the actor in my university days you know!!
“Uh-huh,” I said.
I played Falstaff!!!
“That . . . makes sense?” I hazarded.
Try the problem at the top of page 297. Your secret is safe with me!!!!!
I had a horrible feeling that if he’d had a working eye, he’d have winked.
“Um, thanks, sir. I’ll give that a try. Sorry.”
Behind me, Rigby fake-coughed, “Dumbass.” A couple of people laughed and I sat back down, feeling like a spy after a close shave at a dead-drop. The sweat cooled on the back of my neck as I flicked to page 297.
Find the maximum, always holding . . . Huh, calculus.
I made a couple of false starts, then realised that this one was going to need a Lagrange multiplier. I snapped the cap off my pen and was just getting down to it when I noticed something odd.
The rest of the class were working on a problem on page 86, but the occupant of the desk immediately to my right had her textbook open much further in than that. It was the fat bank of white pages pinned under her left hand that had fish-hooked my attention.
&n
bsp; I leaned back into a fake yawn and stretch so I could see her properly. It was the new girl—Imogen? Ingrid? I knew it started with an I. She’d joined the class at . . . some point. She hadn’t been here at the start of the year; I knew that. She had an erratic thatch of blonde hair and wore fingerless gloves even though the classroom radiators were set one notch below “active volcano crater.” I looked at the thickness of the paper under her hand, then back at my book to make sure.
She was. She was on page 297 too.
The silence in the room was suddenly more intense. I felt myself flush hot. I tried to go back to the Lagrange but kept stealing glances at the girl. She was all business, scribbling away, pinning her fringe out of her eyes with one gloved hand.
Could I talk to her after class? I wondered. What could I say? “Hey, you know before, when I sounded like an idiot? I was pretending! Wanna get together after class so we can swap notes on differential calculus?”
Not the single worst chat-up line of all time, but definitely in the top five. I had a half hour left to work on it.
I went back to the sums, but I couldn’t concentrate. I was full of curiosity, fizzing with it, like sherbet in the blood.
I looked to my right again. She’d stopped writing and was running her pencil over her work, checking it over and over. She was frowning. She tucked her hair back behind her right ear, but it was too short and came loose again. She tucked it back, again and again like a tic.
Did she need a hint? Did she even know about Lagrange multipliers? She looked anxious, desperate even, and suddenly the most important thing in my world was whether this girl knew how to solve constrained optimisation problems. She was a fellow agent, embedded deep behind enemy lines. She needed help, and I had to get it to her. But how, without giving us both away? I spied out the others in the class, hunched over their desks, quiet and dangerous like mines drifting in dark water.
I checked the index of my textbook and found the page for Lagrange multipliers: 441. I spun my pen around in my hand, hesitated, and then tapped it against my desk: four taps, then a pause, then another four taps, then another pause, then a final solitary strike that to my nervous ears filled the classroom like a thunderclap.
I looked across at her. Nothing. Of course nothing—because neither of us really were spies, so neither of us attended a secret training school in a big English country house where we learned the dark arts of clandestine pencil-tapping. I mean, think about it, Pete. She’d have had to be telepathic to . . .
She was looking right at me.
She had that same frown on her face. Not an unhappy frown, now I saw it full on. She looked interested, in a “this isn’t as straightforward as I thought” kind of way.
Not taking her eyes off me, she flicked towards the back of her textbook. Now I was holding my breath. She stopped at what looked from here like page 441 and studied the page for a second. An “Oh duuuuh” expression swept over her face, followed immediately by a look of intense irritation. Then she started scribbling on her notepad fast—I mean really fast, like I wouldn’t have been surprised to see smoke rising from the paper. She tapped three numbers into her calculator and held it up so I could see the display:
322.
She raised her eyebrows and slightly opened her hands: Well?
I started, flailed, and almost impaled my thumb on my own compass. I wasn’t even halfway through the sum yet. I churned through the calculation as fast as I could. After what felt like a hundred years, flustered and embarrassed and unutterably relieved, I held up my calculator: 322.
Her lip quirked at the corner.
I felt my face heat up and I smiled back at her. I had a feeling we were on the same wavelength and it was fantastic. I luxuriated in it.
She tapped on her calculator keys for a second and then held it up again.
579,005,009
What the fuck?
She leaned back in her chair, arms folded: Go on, then, work it out.
I sat there and racked my brain: 579,005,009. What was that? Was it prime? It wasn’t a Fibonacci. It wasn’t—I thought with a brief flash of sadness—her phone number. I started to sweat. She was still watching me, still smiling expectantly. I mean, seriously, what? Its square root was something in the twenty-four thousands. Its natural log would be . . . twenty . . . something? But none of that meant anything that . . .
My eye fell back onto the textbook. I flicked to page 579: it was the last page in the book, the acknowledgments. The fifth word was thanks; the ninth, friend.
I glowed. I flicked back to the calculus problem, typed into my calculator, and held it up.
297,018,002
She checked the page, found the words—No problem—and smiled. It felt good to see her smile, so I sent her another, only one word this time.
345,009—New?
104,006—Correct.
181,007,005—Working out?
Her smile turned a little shy, and she nodded in my direction.
276,008,009—Positive signs.
I stifled a delighted laugh. HQ, this is Agent Blankman—contact established with Agent Blonde Calculating Machine.
We talked like that, secretly and silently, for the rest of the lesson, and I had sherbet blood the whole time. The brief delay while she deciphered each snippet filled me with eager anticipation. It was the first time in my life waiting had been fun rather than frightening.
Even another fit of coughing from Rigby—“Mateless freak”—didn’t ruin it, because it wasn’t true anymore.
She rolled her eyes, glanced back at him, and tapped out:
112,003,190
I looked: page 112 had a couple of test papers with those “Pretend you’re a zookeeper/café owner/football coach . . .” problems on it. 003,190 made “monkey sausage.” I glanced back at Rigby and smirked. I knew what she meant.
The bell went and I felt a sharp kick of disappointment. I’d totally lost track of the time, and I never lose track of time. I fell in beside her desk, trying to be nonchalant.
Now or never. I remembered the pressure of cushions gaffer-taped to my chest, my feet leaving brick. My brain went utterly blank and I reached for the first thing I could think of.
“Want to meet up later? We could swap tips for differential calculus.”
Damn, meant to work on that.
She looked at me oddly, then shrugged it off. She had a great face. Warm brown eyes, neat little nose. She looked a bit like Ada Lovelace.
“Lunch?” she said. It had the ring of a counteroffer.
“Lunch would be phenomenal.” Nonchalance, as it turned out, was not my strong suit.
She grinned hugely; apparently it wasn’t her strong suit, either.
“Twenty-three, seventeen, eleven, fifty-four,” she said.
“What?”
“Look it up,” she said. “Page one.” She tucked her hair out of her eyes one more time, shouldered her bag, and walked out.
So I looked it up: page 1, words 23, 17, 11, and 54—Don’t let me down.
NOW
The cold makes it feel like there’s frost creeping through my blood vessels. I stand on the doorstep and shiver while Rita rings the doorbell. Through the lace curtain on the front room window I see a TV flickering and an armchair facing it. A slight figure struggles out of the chair and moves out of sight. A second later the door opens as far as a brass chain allows, and a wizened face peers through the gap.
“Oh, hello, dear,” she says with the sunny gratitude of an old lady who doesn’t get visitors as often as she’d like.
Rita’s smile is tight. “Good morning, Mrs. Greave. May we come in?”
“Of course, dear.”
She slips the chain and stands aside for us, and I follow Rita over the threshold.
I look around the hallway, feeling wrong-footed. I don’t know what I expecte
d from the ominous-sounding 57, but it definitely wasn’t pink-and-cream-striped wallpaper and a gilt-framed portrait of a terrier in a tartan waistcoat.
“Make yourselves at home, won’t you?” Mrs. Greave says. She looks at me and a muscle in her cheek twitches. “That him?”
“What do you think?” Rita says.
Mrs. Greave makes a hissing sound in the back of her throat, like a disgruntled cat.
“Only got the word from Henry you were bringing a houseguest when you were coming up the path,” she says. “Thought you were compromised, nearly gave the boys the nod.”
Rita blinks and she breathes out hard. “Well, I’m glad you held off.”
“Didn’t feel like redecorating.”
The crack in Rita’s composure makes me ask, “W-what boys?”
“Snipers,” she replies briskly, “in the attic of the house opposite, with orders to shoot any strangers who try to get in. Standard security measure when things get a bit hairy, which, you might have noticed, they have today.”
I stare at her. “You just gun people down in the street in broad daylight?”
“And risk getting filmed on some local kid’s phone? Oh no, dear.” Mrs. Greave has one hand on the still-open door. “No, we invite them in, and then the boys drop them on the doormat, when they’re standing, oh . . . just about where you are now.” She gives a fractional nod towards a window under the eaves across the road. Something gleams under the open sash and my neck seizes with the premonition of impact. Then the door swings shut and I’m still standing here, heart hammering but still beating.
That’s 0 for 2 on having your skull exploded by a high-velocity bullet, Petey. Good work, keep it up.
Mrs. Greave gives me a sugary smile. “Make yourselves at home,” she says, and shuffles back into the front room, closing the door behind her, muting the voices bickering from the TV.
Rita moves swiftly, producing a big bunch of keys from under the hallstand. Little fragments of dried blood flake off her bare feet and dust the carpet. She stops by the stairs, beside an open walk-in cupboard about the same size and shape as the larder I stood in seven hours and a lifetime ago, when the worst of my problems was an uncontrollable urge to chew pottery. I glance inside: shelves of fly killer, peeling old phone directories, face-down picture frames, dusty birthday cards—one of those places where meaning goes to die.
