by Tom Pollock
“So she isn’t really sick?” I feel a jolt in my stomach.
Dominic Rigby’s mouth opens in a shape that might be a scream or laughter, but there’s no sound to tell us which.
“She wanted to fight,” he murmurs. Spittle gleams on his jaw where the wire stops his mouth from closing. “She wanted to fight, but I couldn’t let her. I couldn’t. They would have killed her. Like they did my boy.”
His voice drops to a whisper.
“I was there. When they came for her. I lied to her. I told her it would all be all right.”
His eyes close. He’s so still that for a moment I’m worried we’ve killed him, but then I see the steady rise and fall of his chest.
“Come on, Pete,” Ingrid says. “We should go.”
It’s only then I notice the way she’s avoiding looking at his face. I guess she doesn’t want to empathise with this man, and I don’t blame her, but we don’t have what we came for, not quite.
“Mr. Rigby,” I say carefully. “You said my mother read her speech from ‘another one of those black notebooks.’ What did you mean, another one?”
“Your sister had one too. Kept reading it as she paced around me. Like she was psyching herself up.”
It’s like someone’s let all the air out of my lungs. I turn to Ingrid.
“Let’s go.”
In the doorway, she mutters in my ear. “Something’s not right. Even if they wanted to put the arm on him, 57 wouldn’t have sent your mum. She’s a research scientist. She has no field experience.”
“They didn’t. She went on her own account.”
She shoots me a startled look, but it’s obvious enough that she shouldn’t need to read it from my face.
Mum didn’t conceal Ben’s death for 57; she concealed it from them. And that meant she had to know that Bel was behind Ben’s disappearance. Had we been less careful than I thought? Or had she simply seen one of the Rigbys’ posters and put two and two together? But for what kind of mother does 2 plus 2 equal “my daughter’s committed murder”?
The IC nurse is loitering outside, checking off items on a clipboard.
“How was he?” she asks.
“Fine, he’s sleeping now.” I try to smile, but I seem to have forgotten how to coordinate the component muscles, and my expression caves in like a matchstick house.
The nurse nods sympathetically. Her face is a kind of small kindness dispensary. “It’s . . . well, it’s good he saw you.”
As we walk out, past the ranks of beds, Ingrid falls in beside me and, as ever, says what I’m thinking.
“Terrible way to spend your final hours, in this place, alone.”
“Yes,” I say.
She nods thoughtfully and says, “It’s exactly as I would have him.”
Recursion: 2 Years,
8 months Ago
You could argue I should have picked up on the warning signs, but the point at which I really knew I’d screwed up was when the ceiling caught fire.
I’d left the window open to get rid of the smoke, but it had been dead calm all day; the clouds hung like vast anchored ships in the sky, and you’d have to be a witch to foresee the gust of wind that blew the end of the curtain into the metal bin, a bin in which the remnants of the first two ARIA notebooks were merrily burning.
The flames raced up the drapery like a candlewick and feasted on the ceiling paint, which, joy-oh-joy, was flammable too, bubbling and spitting and blackening merrily.
At this point, somewhat belatedly, I panicked and tried to make a run for it. I know, I know, delayed panic isn’t like me, but it’s tough to shit yourself in a timely fashion when you’re as thoroughly drunk as I was.
Something else that’s tough when you’re drunk? Running. Especially when one leg’s in a cast.
I face-planted hard, scraping my face over the carpet.
“Ow, fuck,” I muttered, clutching at the small ember of a friction burn glowing on my nose for a good four seconds, until I felt heat on my back and remembered that the inferno of possible future burns raging only eight feet above me were probably more of a concern.
I flailed and struggled, but I didn’t seem to be able to get up.
The door banged open and a pair of fluffy monsters appeared on the carpet at my eye level. Only, I thought, in the nightmarish imaginings of a slipper company executive could those things count as bunnies. I was briefly aware of the crackle of flames before they were drowned out by the fire extinguisher’s roar. Flame-retardant foam drifted from above like grey snow, kissing my scraped-raw nose.
The demon bunnies squelched past me on the now-sodden carpet, and I rolled over to see Mum perched on my bed. She was wearing Look No. 101: I don’t have to put up with this kind of shit from lab rats.
I struggled to get up.
“Don’t get up,” Mum said.
I stopped struggling.
She peered at me solemnly from over the top of her reading glasses. The lines around her eyes contracted into tight little webs of suspicion, and then Look No. 101 gave way to an expression I’d never seen before, and one I really, really didn’t want to see again.
“Peter William Blankman,” she fairly hissed. “Are you drunk?”
Wait, I know this one. Style it out. This is definitely one of those times when you do not tell the truth. No, Peter. Just tell her no.
“Yes.”
Bugger.
“What”—and every word was distinct and cold—“did you drink?”
“Dry martini,” I said. “Lemon peel. Only without the vermouth, and . . . we didn’t have any lemon.”
“So . . . neat gin.”
“It’s Agent Blankman’s drink. He’s a spy,” I added helpfully. “Spies are cool.”
“And how much of this sophisticated cocktail did Agent Blankman imbibe?” In terms of deadliness, Mum’s voice was now somewhere between anthrax and the electric chair.
“Only about this much.” But it was tough to hold my finger and thumb a reassuring distance apart when they were blurring in front of me.
In retrospect, I might have overdone the gin. In my defence, it was my first experiment with alcohol. You might have thought that a tot of the rot was just the thing for a young man with a tendency to jump at shadows, but I didn’t generally drink for two very good reasons: (1) Judging by my . . . enthusiastic relationship with food, if I started relying on liquor to get me through panic attacks, I would be reduced to a dribbling wreck in a skip by midmorning of every day with a vowel in it, but more important, (2) . . .
“Your father drank,” Mum said.
The bite had gone out of her voice. Now she just sounded immeasurably tired, which was worse. I’d once asked her why she’d kept his name, why Bel and I both bore it. She’d grunted and said, I got it from him, he got it from his dad. It’s not his name any more than it is mine. Besides, the alternative is my father’s name, and he was a prick too.
She looked at me and sighed. “Alcohol, pyromania, this isn’t you, Pete. What’s going on?”
I eyed the burnt-out wastepaper basket.
“It was meant to be a sort of . . . Viking funeral.”
“A Viking funeral,” Mum echoed. “A Viking spy funeral.”
“Double cool.”
“If this was a funeral, may I ask who the guest of honour was?”
“Me,” I reassured her. “Although, I’m not dead.”
“That”—Mum eyed me steadily—“remains to be seen.”
She gingerly picked through the bin, but finding only ash and blackened card inside, turned to the ARIA notebooks queued up for immolation on the corner of the desk. I swallowed, my throat raw from the booze and smoke. I wanted to get up, to wrestle them away from her, but my leg, the fug of alcohol, and a growing awareness of the truly mythic scale of the trouble I was in kept me pinned to the c
arpet.
She read without speaking for more than fifteen minutes, the only sound the scratch of pages turning. I watched her eyes scan the aborted blueprint of my personality, and felt very small, and very cold.
“How long have you been doing this?” she asked at last.
“I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t,” I replied truthfully.
“So you thought that you, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy, could mathematically map the evolution of your consciousness—a problem which has baffled the greatest minds in the world—in your spare time with a paper and pen?”
“Well, in my defence I would have asked a computer,” I replied, “if I could phrase the question in a language a computer could understand.”
She closed the notebook and laid it on her lap, took off her glasses, and looked at me gravely.
“Why?”
I stared at her. Why? Why did she think? She’d just seen me splayed out across the page in my own handwriting. Wasn’t it obvious?
“Because I couldn’t bear not knowing,” I said.
“Not knowing what?”
“If it would always be like . . . this . . .” I said hopelessly. “This”—I pointed at the cast, and the red welt scarifying on my brow—“and this. I wanted to know if I’d ever be able to walk into a roomful of strangers without feeling like my chest was being crushed, or sit in a cinema without being scared of the dark. I just . . .” I spread my hands helplessly. “I just wanted to stop being afraid. I thought if I could pin myself down in an equation, I might get a bit closer to fixing myself.”
“And today you put a match to it.” Mum’s tone stayed as neutral as distilled water from Switzerland. “Why?”
I remembered Gödel’s shriven face, staring at me from the book.
“Because it’s a pipe dream. There’s no way of even knowing if there is an answer, let alone finding it. The whole thing was a mistake.”
There was a long silence, broken only by dripping from the extinguished ceiling.
“Yes,” Mum said softly. “It was. Come with me.”
Notebook still in one hand, she grabbed my wrist with the other, pulled me up, and dragged me downstairs. “Ow, ow, ow!” I protested. “Slow down, my leg!” But irritation turned to disbelief as we ploughed through the doorway under the staircase. The thump-thump-thump of my cast turned hollow on the basement’s bare wooden steps.
She can’t. She can’t be taking me to . . .
She was.
In front of us, dark and weathered, lock secured by a combination keypad, stood the door to Mum’s study.
Mum was forever threatening to extract our brains through our nostrils using Egyptian mummification hooks if we skipped school, or paint us with honey and feed us to hungry chinchillas if we left messy saucepans in the kitchen. The penalty for breaking into her study, though, was much simpler, and much starker:
Try to get in here, she’d said, standing us in front of this very same door the day after our seventh birthday, and we’re done. You leave this house. You never, ever come back. Understand?
We did. She’d never had to repeat it.
The warning was so dire that now my muscles stalled when she tried to lead me across the threshold.
“It’s okay, Peter.” She held out her hand. “Come on, look.”
After all the fevered imaginings of my seven-year-old self, the four-by-five-metre room was more than a little disappointing. No mutant experiments, no reanimated corpses, not even a tangle of glass pipework bubbling over with noxious chemicals; just a desk, a laptop, and row after row of white shelves. The desk was old, one leg so worm-eaten it looked like a good shove would break it. The shelves were filled with identical black notebooks.
“What am I looking at?” I asked.
“Mistakes.”
She pulled down a book, flicked to the middle, and showed me: it was a beautifully detailed sketch of an octopus, springing from undersea rocks. It was surrounded by Mum’s tiny, cramped handwriting.
“This is the blue-ringed octopus. Mistakes copying its genetic code from generation to generation not only gave it the only octopus venom that’s potent enough to kill a human, but also the ability to camouflage itself perfectly against its surroundings.”
“This”—another shelf, another book, a sketch of an insect embedded in a fossil—“is Rhyniognatha hirsti. Mistakes made it the first creature on Earth to be capable of flight. This—”
“So,” I interrupted. It was rude, but I could feel this conversation rattling away down the tracks, and I couldn’t bear the inevitable platitude coming at the end of the line. “The octopus gets to change colour, the bug gets wings. I get dubious bowel control around spiders and loud noises. I won’t lie to you, Ma. It’s tough not to feel a little shortchanged.”
She didn’t even blink.
“What’s 187 squared?” she asked.
I rolled my eyes.
“Well?”
“34,969,” I replied. “But . . .”
“Camouflage and flight are adaptations to a threat environment, Peter. So is that.” She slapped my notebook, the ARIA notebook, into my chest. “There’s some incredible work here. I am stupendously proud of you. Do you think you would have been able to do that if you hadn’t been exactly who and what you are?”
I didn’t answer.
“Want to know what my biggest mistake was?” she asked.
“What?”
“You.”
I gaped at her.
“I was twenty-four, all career all the time, single and living off baked beans, spite, and ambition on a graduate-student income. You think if God had invited me to choose from the menu I would have picked twins?”
I could only stare at her as she smiled.
“You think the fact that I didn’t intend you means I regret you?” she asked. “You think I love you any less because you weren’t in the plan? We have to love our mistakes, Peter. They’re all we have.” She laid a hand gently on my cheek. “Don’t feel like you need to burn yours behind you, and don’t ever, ever, feel like you need fixing.”
“So, what? I’m perfect, just as I am?” Train pulling into platitude central; please mind the gap to the real world as you disembark.
“Perfect?” Mum laughed. “Evolutionarily speaking, perfection’s just the art of embodying as many fuck-ups as possible while staying alive,” she said. “Perfection’s a process, Peter, not a state. No one’s perfect. What you are is extraordinary. Exactly as I would have you.”
She pulled me into a hug, and I clung to her.
“It’s like the fear’s stalking me,” I whispered. “I can feel it in the back of my mind all the time, just waiting. I just . . . I don’t want to be afraid anymore.”
“I know, honey,” she said, and clung to me fiercely, like she’d never let me go. “I know. I’ve got you.”
She said it over and over, murmuring into my hair. It took eleven times for my sobs to quiet. “I’ve got you.”
NOW
I doubt the catering’s up to much, but let me tell you, if you’re a fan of plastic, an Edinburgh psychiatric ward is the place to be.
Eight and a quarter metres away from me, on the other side of what only Caledonian optimism has allowed to be called the “Sunroom,” a man and a woman sit side by side with plastic knives and plastic forks, shovelling plastic-looking food into their mouths from unbreakable plastic trays, all the while sitting on a sofa covered in vinyl, which is, lest we forget, a kind of plastic. Three yellow plastic geraniums sit in a plastic vase on a plastic table under a plastic-framed window. The window itself, alas, isn’t plastic, but the glass is shot through with steel wires, so that none of the residents can shatter it and use a shard to open up their own or each other’s throats. They’ve gone for a scab-brown carpet, though, so I guess you can’t be too prepared.
�
��Do you have any idea,” Ingrid whispers, leaning towards me, “how stupid this is?”
She’d asked me the same question at 4 this morning in the car park, bundled up against a hacksaw wind, laptop open on the bonnet of a car to catch the hospital’s Wi-Fi: the digital surgeon, up to her elbows in the intestines of the National Health Service’s record system.
“I know exactly how stupid this is,” I’d told her then, but she’d pressed on regardless.
“LeClare has already been to see Rigby, remember? She’s watching him. When she gets word his dead son’s been visiting him . . .” She shook her head in disgust. “She’s not going to jump to haunting as an explanation. If she doesn’t already know we’re in Edinburgh, she will by tomorrow. Petey, we have to go, now.”
“Then go. I’m staying.”
“Why?”
I don’t answer, but in my mind Bel squeezes my hand while I lie in a hospital bed. Who did this to you, Pete?
Ingrid’s expression, etched by the laptop light, was helpless. But she understood, and she made no move to go.
“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. “Now, hand me the laptop.” She passed it over and I backdated the record seventy-two hours, the minimum notice period for doing anything in the psychiatric arm of our great medical bureaucracy.
“Pete,” she huffed, but her tone was conciliatory. “How come you know all this stuff about mental hospitals, anyway?”
I didn’t need to reply. She could read it off my face. Because if I’m an expert in two things, Ingrid, it’s numbers and being scared. And the numbers around mental hospitals are particularly scary.
Around thirty thousand people are detained against their will under the Mental Health Act every year. Then comes the ambulance, the hospital, and the key turning in the lock. From that point on, the state takes control: decides when you eat, when you sleep, when you wash. And if you resist—out come the rubber restraints, the knee in the spine, the haloperidol dripping into your strapped-down arm, spinning your stomach, and dampening your world to fuzzy apathy.
