by Tom Pollock
Mum always said she found that quote inspiring.
I rub my eyes and lift my finger . . .
NOW
. . . to the doorbell, but something makes me hesitate. There are no lights on in the front of the house, but given the time, that’s hardly surprising. Even so . . .
I crouch beside the brick-edged flower bed. The soil’s still damp from the rain and a rich, loamy scent wafts when I turn over the fourth brick. I breathe a little easier. A lot can change in two years, but the key’s there, pressed into the earth. A worm burrows its way into hiding; Lucky git, I think.
Because the voice I can never quiet is whispering to me.
What if I freeze? What if I panic and get us both killed?
Fear mounting on fear mounting on fear: like an ocean wave rearing over me, waiting to crash down. I have no choice but to walk in its shadow.
Just walk.
I let myself in as quietly as possible, but the key in the lock still sounds like a bone splintering. I pause for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. There’s a semicircular table by the door. On it is an open Tupperware box, with one set of keys inside it, and beside it, another, different set, outside on the wood. Otherwise, the hall is completely empty, just walls, ceiling, and carpet. No pictures. I slip through a door to the right and find myself in the kitchen.
A tank battalion of Tupperware is drawn up on the countertop, 14 boxes in all. Underneath the Braille labels, I can still make out marker pen, old labels he’d had to abandon as the disease chewed up more and more of his retinas: SALT, BASIL, TURMERIC. Dr. A likes to cook. Bottles of oil and vinegar stand against a wall, spirit shot-pourers screwed into their necks, their stations marked by dots of dried superglue on the tiles. A fully stocked cutlery canteen sits out on the surface. I imagine him navigating this place by touch and memory, fastidiously tidying after himself, so everything will be where he needs it for next time. Everything with a place, and everything in its place.
The carving knife missing from the fancy Japanese rack all but screams its absence.
Beyond the kitchen is the living room. The furniture is pressed up against the walls. Cables are tied down. Every table has more Tupperware boxes, containing everything from neatly stacked denominations of change to remote controls. Oddly, the books in the case against the back wall are jammed in any old how, flopping and falling like a house of cards. I wonder if that’s because Dean reads to Dr. A. I hope it is.
I retreat to the hallway. The front door beckons, its inset glass gold with streetlamp light. I could just leave. But that empty slot in the knife rack won’t let me. I turn and mount the stairs.
There’s barely any light on the landing, and in another house the shape I see as I reach the top step could have been anything: a tangle of sloughed-off clothes, a jumble of bags, haphazardly arranged to trick my eye into seeing knees, elbows, a spine. In any other house, but not in this compulsively, necessarily tidy one. It’s all I can do not to cross the landing at a run.
It’s only when I’m close to that I recognise him, and my breath catches with guilty relief. It’s not Dr. A; it’s Dean. I put my fingers on his neck. He’s warm, but for a miserable, heart-hitch of a second I feel no pulse. Then—thank god, there it is; a solid, strong 52 beats a minute.
“Dean?” Dr. A’s voice is strangled, tremulous. “Please, Dean, answer me.”
It’s coming from the room on my right. I stand, place my fingertips on the door, and push.
The bedroom’s as neat as the rest of the house, except for two things: the bedsheets, sloughed and rucked like an arctic waste seen from a plane window, and Dr. A.
The muscles in my chest lock hard at the sight of him, and for a moment I can’t breathe. He’s in a half crouch in the far corner, the front of his pyjama shirt dark with blood from what looks like a broken nose. His beard is matted with it. His hands curl and uncurl uselessly, bleeding from slashes across palms raised against the black-clad assailant he can’t see.
I watch as, despairingly, he tries to run out of his corner, crying “Dean!” but Bel shoves him down with one gloved hand to the chest. Her other hand holds the knife.
“Dean’s going to be fine, Dr. A,” I say quietly. Bel turns to look at me but doesn’t speak. “She didn’t come here for him.”
“Peter?” Dr. A cries. “Peter, what are you doing here? RUN!”
“That’s what she told me to do.” But looking at her, I feel my pulse ease and the tide of nausea recede from my throat. Even like this, poised for murder over a man I’d considered a friend, she calms me.
“She told me to run,” I continue, “and I thought she was trying to protect me, like she’s always done. Turns out, she was just trying to get me out of the way, so she could do this.”
Bel takes three quick steps back into the corner of the room so she can watch us both at once.
“I was protecting you,” she says quietly. “He manipulated you, Pete. He betrayed you.” There’s a pleading tone in her voice, and despite myself, I feel a spike of pride.
Bel, this killing engine, needs me, just me, to believe her, side with her, to not blame her.
And I don’t blame her. I know it’s not her fault.
“Peter,” Dr. A is gasping. “Please, I don’t understand. What’s happening? I don’t know what she’s talking about. Tell her. She’ll listen to you. She’ll listen.” His voice tightens up, and a keening sound escapes his throat. I cross the room to him, casting a wary glance at my sister in the corner.
“Come on, Dr. A. It’s all right.” I keep my voice as calm as I can. “Sit down. Your legs are shaking.”
“But D-Dean.”
“Dean will be okay, I just checked on him. He’s fine.” I take his hands. They’re an old man’s hands, meaty and white-haired. His palms are slippery with blood. I ease him down onto the carpet until he’s sitting with his back against the wall, bare feet splayed out. I settle myself cross-legged in front of him.
“How long have you been my maths teacher, Dr. A?” I ask gently.
He gapes, uncomprehending.
“How long?” I press.
“F-four, or five years?”
“Five,” I confirm. “And do you remember our first lesson together, five years ago?”
“N-no?”
“It was probability. My first time with it, and I loved it: ‘The odds of any two independent events occurring purely by chance is the probability of one times the probability of the other, so that the odds of both together are lower than the odds of either one alone.’ Remember that?”
He nods, perplexed. “Peter, what are you—?”
“There are fewer than a hundred legally blind teachers in the country,” I say. “That makes the odds of any given teacher being blind about one in six thousand. Now, what do you think the odds are of me, a giant maths nerd, purely by chance, getting a blind maths teacher, for five years running, especially when . . .”
But I don’t need to finish the sentence; I can see on his face that he already knows what I’m going to say.
When blindness is the only thing that can protect you from me.
I’ve been watching his eyes the whole time, but of course they’ve never focussed on me. He trembles, plucks at his beard, makes small noises that might be abortive attempts to speak.
He’s afraid—but his fear is all his own.
“You’re part of it,” I say softly. “You’re one of them.”
And then Bel’s there, crouching beside us, so soundless that Dr. A doesn’t react when she holds the knife over his shoulder, just where his pyjama shirt flaps open, and draws a thin shadow across the liver-spotted skin over his collarbone. Her knuckles pale as they tense around the handle. I study Arthurson’s face. He betrayed you. Bel’s not wrong. Mum did too, and Ingrid. Everyone has, except Bel. Bel’s doing this for me. What right do I have to question her?
“Don’t,” I breathe, so quietly that for a moment I’m scared she didn’t hear it, but the knife doesn’t move. “Leave him,” I tell her.
“Why?”
My eyes find hers in the dark.
“So you know you can.”
She looks away.
Don’t, I think. Don’t be what she made you. You don’t have to be. Think again. I try to pour it into her, all my doubt, my hesitancy. It’s exactly seventeen seconds, but it feels like an eternity until she speaks.
“So . . . what do we do with him?”
We. I breathe a fraction easier.
“How much longer will Dean be unconscious for?” I ask.
“The guy on the landing?” She shrugs. “Some.” I am momentarily scandalised by her lack of precision.
“Tie him up,” I say, looking down at Dr. A. “Dean can find him when he wakes. Drop every phone and computer in the house in the toilet; that should buy us enough time.”
It’s both a relief and a little sickening that she doesn’t ask Time for what? We were always of one mind.
I head for the door without looking to see if she’ll follow.
Outside on the street, it’s like it never happened. The moon is full and bright, the pavement speckled with frost. A sound like damned souls being torn apart in some subdimension of hell comes from one of the gardens behind the terrace; so presumably some foxes are having sex. Bel no longer has the knife. I washed it up and put it back in the rack while she was gathering up the phones. A kind of apology, I suppose.
She’s twitchy. She’s up on her toes ahead of me as we walk, talking a lot about nothing.
“How did you know?” I ask. “About Arthurson?” Somehow I doubt she’d worked it out based on probabilities.
She shrugs. “They had a teacher watching me too: Ferris. He gave Arthurson up.”
After you did what to persuade him? I wonder, but I don’t ask.
Instead, I say, “I don’t blame you, Bel. I know it’s not your fault.”
She stops walking, turns her head.
“Fault?” She speaks slowly, carefully. “You think I’m ashamed of what I’ve done?”
“Bel, sixteen people are de—” But she cuts me off with a hand gesture. I shrink back. I’ve misread her. And I can see it now, in her face: anger feeding off anger feeding off anger. I can hear it in the way her sentences almost overlap.
“Those men terrified their wives,” she says. “They did it for years so they could control them. They inflicted years of fear, and doubt and pain—years—and they made those women believe they deserved it. All I did was kill them. They got off light.”
“What?” she demands as I stare at her. “You going to try to tell me it wasn’t right? That what I gave them is worse than what they did? Really? You?”
I don’t speak. I can’t.
“No,” she says at last, and in my mind I hear her accusation from the hospital bed, all those years ago: You tried to leave. “You know better.”
She shakes her head and keeps walking. “I let your maths teacher go because you asked me to, but don’t expect me to change, Pete. I like me.”
I do too, I think. She’s done terrible things, things that will stalk my nightmares for years, but the fact is, I can’t stop loving her. And I don’t want to.
And she’s not the only one, which is what makes it necessary to say, “I don’t expect you to change, sis. In fact, you can’t. Not yet. There’s still something we need to do.”
She pauses midstep. She doesn’t look round. She knows what I mean. Of course she does.
“We can’t just leave her there, not with them.”
I hear the bloody-minded determination in my voice. I inherited that from her. We have to give her a chance. Maybe she can explain, maybe there’s a side I’m not seeing. We can’t just leave her behind. I can’t. She’s my mum.
“Can’t get to her,” Bel says shortly. “I don’t know where they’re keeping her.”
“No, but I do.”
Recursion: 5 Days Ago
My sister stomped into the kitchen, scratching sleepily at her head, took in the devastation, shrugged like it was no big deal, and dropped to her knees in the middle of it. I rushed to her side, and we worked together, sorting and tidying, rebuilding and making right. We’re quite the team.
“. . . In order for the subject to most effectively promote RW’s violent tendencies . . .”
A red-pelted wolf bounding through a forest of numerals. She’s my inverse, my opposite. Without her, I’m incomplete.
Quite. The. Team.
NOW
Ding-dong!
The bell is offensively cheery for five in the morning, but the door opens before I’ve counted to three, and the eyes in the wizened face that appears around the edge of it have no hint of sleep clinging to their corners.
“Mrs. Greave!” I cry, throwing back the hood of my anorak. “Good to see you! Pete, Pete Blankman. I was here five days ago with my mum. You might remember her—she was . . .”
But the words gushing blood from an abdominal wound never make it past my lips, because 57’s ancient doorkeeper has thrown her door wide open, her face set and grim. She stares over my left shoulder and nods.
“Who are you nodding to, Mrs. G?” I look theatrically back over my shoulder and follow her gaze to the dormer windows of the house opposite, their panes aglow with the blue dawn light.
“Oh right! The boys. Your snipers. Well, they want me alive, at least I hope they want me alive, so a head shot’s out. Leg, then? Ankle? Knee? Oh lord, spine? Would they try to paralyse me? Too much to hope they have tranquilisers, I suppose; I could use the sleep . . .”
My gabbling makes no discernible impact on Mrs. Greave’s oaky features, but it buys me a few extra seconds.
“They are taking their time, aren’t they? Do you suppose their guns have jammed? Could they be on a tea break? Hell of a time for it, not that I don’t get the appeal of a nice slice of Battenberg, but still . . . Anyway, I’m sure they’ll be right back.”
A ratcheting crack splits the air and the muscles around my spine seize, then relax. It was only the latch on the front door to the house opposite, shockingly loud in the early morning hush. Mrs. Greave and I watch as the door swings inwards.
When the figure steps from the doorway onto the street, my prattling bravado shrivels inside me.
Bel is barely recognisable. Her hair and clothes are streaked with blood, dark and clotting. She’s drenched in it, not like a killer, more like an abattoir labourer, stretching sore muscles after working all day at the slaughterhouse. Her eyes, white amidst all that red, are unblinking as she crosses the street.
Demon.
That’s what our headmistress once called her, and now she really looks the part. Behind her the door she’s emerged from hangs open like a portal to hell. I can’t help but imagine the tableau she must have left behind to look like this, marksmen dismembered, or impaled on the blunt barrels of their own rifles. Even her gait seems unnatural, stately and yet impossibly quick. In an instant she’s standing in front of us; the metal stink of her surges into my nostrils. Mrs. Greave looks stricken. Her eyes flicker from one to the other of us, and a tight breath wheezes from her throat.
“Maze. Keys,” my sister says softly. “Now.”
Mrs. Greave doesn’t give us any trouble. She’s still trembling when we lock her in the upstairs linen cupboard. Bel looks pleased with herself, trotting blithely back down the stairs, trailing bloody fingertips across the portrait of the tartan-clad terrier. She roots around in the backpack she’s left by the door and pulls out a black box about the size of a deck of cards.
“Wi-Fi jammer,” she says, mistaking my stare for a question. “Same one I used to block the signal from the cameras at the museum. You said they’ve got CCTV down there.”
<
br /> I keep staring at her.
“Of course, being a pro security service, it would be just plain embarrassing if they used wireless cameras, which is where these”—she pulls a couple of harnesses out of the bag, studded with small LEDs—“and this”—she tugs out a nine-pound club hammer—“come in. Not exactly subtle, but . . .”
I’m still staring.
“What?” she asks. “Listen, right now the top brass are most likely bickering over whether they can deal with me by themselves, or if they need the cops, and if they do call the cops, how are they going to keep the location of this place secret? My bet is they’ll try to take us alone, so we probably have a bit of time, but not for certain, and not forever. So please, can we get going?”
She turns to the hall cupboard door, pulls it shut, and puts in the key. I’m on the third step, staring.
“We had a deal,” I say. My voice is small, betrayed. “You promised.”
She shrugs. “And?”
“You said you wouldn’t kill anyone.”
“Unless it was in my unavoidable self-defence,” she corrects me, holding up a lawyerly finger.
“That”—I point at her slowly stiffening shirt—“as a fashion statement is less ‘unavoidable self-defence’ and more ‘ecstatic bloodbath.’”
She shrugs but smiles. “Yeah, but it’s a fashion statement; those are almost never true. Don’t stress, Pete. The snipers over the way are out for the count, but otherwise right as rain.”
“What’s that all over you, then?” I demand. “Ketchup?”
She shakes her head. “Ketchup doesn’t dry right. This is mostly just water, syrup, and food colouring, but still . . .” She grins wickedly. She pulls the collar of her shirt aside to reveal an immaculately bandaged cut stretching along the length of her collarbone.
“Gotta have some of the real stuff, for the smell. Come here.”
She holds out her arms to me, and I go obediently. Of course I do. The blood smell punches me in the stomach, but the rest of her—her strength, her warmth, her solid self—are so familiar and so right that I collapse into the hug, and she has to hold me up.
