I sweep through the whole flat, both rooms, the bathroom (again), corridor, kitchen, and look out of all the windows. Nothing. Not even cats or urban foxes stir. No barn owls fly, no insects chirp. No sirens, even. London asleep.
Oh, sweet holy fuck, I’m seeing things. I don’t have enough enemies, so I have to invent them.
* * *
The thing is, I have a history of psychosis dating back to childhood. Molly does. After my release from the mental hospital, they gave me pills, which I did not take. Probably not the best move. This feels different, though. I’ve never seen things, and I don’t feel that creeping paranoia, that restlessness, that impending doom, that goes with my breakdowns. I do not feel mad.
I decide to start taking my pills again. That’ll sort it out.
* * *
It doesn’t. I keep seeing mollys, standing in the rain among a crowd of people waiting for a bus, behind the counter at a deli untouched by the other waiting staff, on the television squeezed between the newscasters, among the crops on the allotment outside my window, floating above my bed after midnight, waiting on a zebra crossing while I pass in a bus, always staring and tracking me.
These mollys are different from the kind Molly Prime used to encounter. For one thing, other than the first, they are not violent. They are usually expressionless or look disappointed in me. There is, I suppose, no overt hostility, even though I expect it. I wait, and after fifteen or twenty minutes, they disappear. Except one time when a molly followed me onto the tube and stayed with me for two hours. I have tried to touch them. For a time this was impossible, as they avoided me when I came near, but they apparently cannot read my mind, because I faked motion in one direction and caught one in the other. She wisps out of my hands. Until that moment I wasn’t sure whether they were solid or not. I am sure that nobody else can see them.
I suppose I killed enough mollys to warrant a haunting, but I don’t believe in ghosts, and I hate problems that I cannot punch into submission.
After three weeks of this, I’m on edge. I wonder if I’m being given a message by my body. One day I grab a knife and cut my forearm lightly, but enough to draw blood. I let it drip to the floor and wait. Ten minutes, half an hour, two hours, and nothing happens to the blood except drying and flaking. I wake up every few minutes and check on it, but no growth. For the next week I cut myself every night and don’t follow the blot, bleach, burn rules that rattle around in my skull from my Prime.
I am still sterile. My blood does not grow mollys, but my mind does. Ultimately, I grow used to these ghosts, I become less alarmed, and with time I learn to ignore them. They still have the most alarming wide-eyed stares, but I become adept at subtracting them from my visual field, and life continues.
Five
I should have known that I was under some kind of surveillance, because I get a phone call from the cleanup people for the first time a few days after I start taking the medication. They call me at work, during my lunch break, which is considerate, I suppose.
“We want you to come in for some tests.” He gives an address on Uxbridge Road close to Ealing Broadway.
“This is not . . . I’m working.”
“Leave for the day. Say you are sick, Molly.”
Click. Hangs up.
I rack my brain and memory, such that it is. I have no recollection of these people ever calling Molly. They are responsive, antibodies that show up when something is awry. They have no reason to activate now, unless I am showing signs of something being wrong and I can’t see it.
Am I going in to meet with them? No. For one thing, I hate being told what to do. More important is what they will probably do to me. The tests they want to run may not be purely psychological, if I’m reading the situation right, which means they are likely to find out that I’m a molly, not the Molly.
I am, as the Americans say, getting the hell out of Dodge.
* * *
I have at most thirty minutes, maybe forty, before they realize I’m not on the way to them. I have the taxi park on double yellow lines and leave the engine running because I want to be able to leave quickly. As I rush up the stairs, I realize I have no plan, no allies, no bolt-hole.
The key is in my lock when I hear footsteps from down the corridor. It’s dark in that direction, overhead lights out. I see her coming, but when she steps into the light I’m taken aback, but only for a second. It’s her. The woman I killed before. Or, am I seeing things? Like I’ve been seeing mollys?
“Molly”—she shows me her hands, empty—“I mean you no harm.”
“You said that the last time,” I say. “Who are you?” I’m not interested in the answer. I’m edging closer to get her within striking distance.
There is no such thing as fighting dirty or fighting fair. These are categories for the weak, or the unfit. Your sole purpose is to survive, which you will do by winning each conflict, every time. You use everything in your environment, you use every body part you can muster to your purpose, you break every oath, disappoint every friend, throw sand in every eye, but you win, and you walk away. Let those play actors in the sports arena worry about rules.
The mollys I see don’t talk to me. They don’t stick around. I blink, look away, then back, but she is still there. Should I warn her off? My mother says no, my mother says attack and kill.
“My name is Tamara and I just want to talk,” she says. Her hair is tied in an African print scarf.
I nod. She’s wearing an open coat, might be a weapon in there. Her eyes flicker away from mine for an instant, and I know there’s someone behind me before I hear the footfalls. I resist the natural instinct to turn. I punch Tamara in the center of her face, crushing her nose, almost lifting her off her feet. She makes no sound as she falls. I turn, and am surprised to see another Tamara coming at me, but this does not make me hesitate. She has learned some basic hand-to-hand skills somewhere, but she’s not very good. Karate, I think. I avoid her strikes easily, grab her right arm, turn my back into her, and fling her over my shoulder. While she’s winded on the floor I kick her head until she’s out. I’m breathing heavy and my knuckles hurt. I’m out of condition, or I never was in the condition Molly Prime was in, and where her hands were callused mine are smooth from soft living.
I search both the tamaras, find one small gun between them, the kind of .22 you slip into a handbag. I drop it in the cavernous pockets of my ruffled skirt. I can hear thumps, getting louder, like people running toward me. I get into my flat and take a few seconds to look around, knowing I’ll never see it again. I catch myself in the mirror, eye shadow running down my face from the sweat. I look like a sad clown.
I wish I had time to pack.
I smash an occasional table and pick up one of the legs just as the door breaks inward and three tamaras charge in. I go low for the first, whacking my improvised club against her kneecaps. She goes sprawling, and smashes her chin on the ground. The second grabs my club-hand, just as I intended. I kick her in the crotch, then bodily lift her and slam her into the third.
There are more. I fight, I win.
There are more still, jostling for the chance to get to me.
I fight, I win.
More still. I shoot the gun until it’s empty.
More.
Then it’s all pain and blackness.
Transcript
Clothes. Need new clothes. I can’t fit into any of my trousers and my jackets are impossible to wear. T-shirts and slack-waists is what I need. Think elasticated, XXL.
I can feel the cold where the mass is growing. This must be what Leon felt, the poor sod. Maybe this is how I’ll go: cold spreading itself from my core until the rest of me joins it and my heart stops, followed by my brain.
I mustn’t dwell on that.
These days I focus on crushing my pills, dissolving them in water, and forcing them to stay down. I can’t tolerate solid medicine anymore. And look at this.
[PD rolls up sleeve and shows skin to camera. Unclear wh
at he intends to demonstrate because of poor lighting of the scene.]
Jaundice.
My liver is packing up.
Not a good sign at all.
[cut]
Six
My short life has been full of pain and darkness. I grow weary of it.
As light comes back: Tamara.
Tamara is like me, or rather, like Molly Southbourne. She has duplicates, scores of them. She is different in that she does not appear to have killed any of her duplicates, and they don’t seem to be hostile to her either.
I awake in a house with all the tamaras, and there is no violence unless I initiate it.
It’s a converted church, deconsecrated. The windows I wake to are not stained glass, but they are arched and elaborately worked.
“Don’t be afraid, Molly, we are not here to harm you,” says one of the tamaras.
To be fair, they have consistently said this. It’s finally sinking into my head that they mean what they say. I am tired of punching them, tired of fracturing their skulls and biting their ears off.
The room is pleasant in many ways. The bed is comfortable, with soft pillows, clean, fragrant bedding, and an electric blanket. The room is warm. There are cut flowers in a vase on a desk by the window. There are no paintings on the walls, but the wallpaper is a repeating motif of leaves, petals, and curling vines that I find soothing. Which makes me suspicious.
“Is this real, or am I dreaming?” I ask. Which is silly, because what would she tell me if I were dreaming?
“Everything will become clear, Molly,” says the tamara.
“Where’s your Prime?”
“‘Prime’?”
“The original. Tamara. Where is she?”
“Downstairs. She is very keen to speak to you.”
“Good, because I am very keen to speak to her. Where do I find her?”
“She’ll find you.”
I leave the room into a corridor that is on the second floor, with rails that look down on an open area that would have been the nave of the church, but is now a day area. There are tamaras everywhere. Some are plaiting each other’s hair, others studying, one dancing with a Walkman attached to her ears, a few playing chess, all dressed differently, with different haircuts. Do they all live together in harmony, with a Coke and a smile? I have a picture in my mind of a queen bee, a tamara with a gigantic swollen sac that is constantly pushing out tamaras. I imagine the kind of free-for-all that would result if I had as many mollys in this space.
Every tamara that I pass greets me, from a formal “Good morning” to a nod or raised eyebrow and a “Hi.” One asks if I’m hungry. I am pointed toward the bathroom and spare tampons. This level of civility is not what I’m used to from a kidnapper.
When I see Tamara, she’s dusting a framed print, and it’s obvious that she’s the original. Maybe it’s a body language thing, maybe it’s because she comes right for me with a broad smile, but I know before she opens her mouth.
“Molly Southbourne, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” she says. “I’d offer my hand, but it’s a bit dusty. I’m Tamara Koleosho. Do you like the picture?”
It’s a black-and-white photograph of a young black man in a suit sitting on a stool and leaning on a coffin. The background suggests he’s on a ship. “Seems a little macabre and sad,” I say.
“It’s even sadder than it seems. That’s Jacob Wainwright in 1874. He was a freedman who brought David Livingstone’s corpse back to the U.K. This is a photo of him arriving at Southampton. It is said that people marveled at how refined and educated Jacob was, and wanted to extend friendship to African countries as a result. Thanks to Belgium, it didn’t quite work out that way.” She uses the duster one final time and turns back to me. “Don’t worry, you’re safe here.”
“From what? Kidnapping?” I ask.
“Ahh. I’m sorry about that.” She puts her hands out in front of her, open palms. “I want you to know that you are free to leave. If you want money for a taxi to take you home, or if you want one of us to drive you, that’s fine. All I ask for now is that you either listen to me or ask me questions so that you can understand the situation. You don’t have to, but it’s for your own good.”
“What’s in it for you?”
“Can we come back to that after I’ve explained?”
Her voice is rich, deep, and friendly. I can’t believe she was the same person who attacked me. She’s not, obviously. She’s wearing a loose maroon blouse and deep blue jeans. Her feet are bare and she smells of cinnamon or nutmeg, something like that. I always mix the two up. She indicates that I should sit on the divan.
“Where’s that name from? Koleosho?” I ask, mangling the pronunciation.
She laughs. “Ko-le-o-sho. It’s Yoruba. It means ‘one who builds houses for wizards’ or near enough.”
I stare at her.
“You’re angry. You’re still angry that we had to subdue you to get you here, and to keep you until you calmed down,” says Tamara. “Let me apologize again.”
“Tamara,” I say, “who are you and what do you want with me?”
“I’m like you,” she says. “When I bleed, duplicates grow. You can see them all around the house. It’s an amazing gift.”
Gift? Is she high?
She tells me her mother was Nigerian. As part of shoe-wielding Nikita Khrushchev’s Cold War attempts to create a bloc of socialist states on the continent, the Soviet Union started offering university scholarships to black African nationals in the 1960s, an attempt to win minds newly independent from Western colonial influence. This was one of their most subtle programs, the others being to provide matériel, advisers, and logistics for armed insurrection, with Angola being the quintessence. Tamara’s mother was one of those selected and sent to Russia.
“I don’t know if she volunteered or was coerced or tricked, but she was experimented on, with no obvious adverse effects. She left Russia with a petrochemical engineering degree and returned to Nigeria for a couple of years before moving to London for postgraduate studies, met my dad, and before you know it, bam! Me.” She seems tickled by this.
“So you don’t know what happened to her in Russia?” I ask. Or to my own mother. Molly’s mother.
“No,” she says. “But I know somebody who does.”
“Your copies. How do you get them to behave?” I ask.
Tamara answers cheerfully, “We all have a common goal, which is to survive.”
“So you train them? Break them?”
“The duplicates? They’re not horses, Molly, why would I break them?”
“Don’t they . . . attack and try to kill you where they’re made?” I’m getting irritable now, because I think she’s playing with me.
She stops, stands, and looks me in the eye. “Do yours?”
“Don’t you have a number? Who do you call for . . . cleanup?”
“I don’t understand your question, Molly.”
I show her my tattoo. “This is the number I call. For help. When . . . the bodies . . .”
“Who picks up the phone when you do this?”
“I don’t know. I think they’re some kind of government agency. But they’re trying to help, to keep things secret when we . . . when you defend yourself from the duplicates.”
“Why would you . . . oh. Oh, Molly. Did you kill your duplicates?”
“That’s what my mother . . . that’s what . . . yes.” Something dawns on me just as the opposite dawns on her.
“I don’t kill my duplicates, Molly. And they don’t attack me. But there are people who are trying to kill us, and they sound suspiciously like the people you’ve been working with.”
* * *
Imagine if everything you have done all your life was unnecessary. Imagine if you were told right now that breathing is not needed for survival, that nobody else, no other human, bothers to breathe.
Tamara tells me there is a kill squad, and they exterminate duplicates and leave the primes. All her life, M
olly, my Prime, had been doing their job for them, living by a code that ensured her duplicates would be efficiently liquidated. The squad just had to keep track of her, and she even did that for them by phoning them.
How could Molly have been so wrong? How could Mykhaila and Connor have taught me this? Why were my duplicates the only homicidal ones? What does this group want with the primes? I remember them asking me to come in, and I shudder.
When I can think again, I realize that Tamara is afraid of me. They all are. The duplicates have stopped moving at random and are paying more attention, responding to my anxiety. I make a judgment.
“I’m not Molly Southbourne,” I say. “I’m a duplicate.”
Tamara does not react, not visibly. “Where’s your original?”
“She killed herself. She could no longer take the constant slaughter.” I give her a précis of my own story.
She looks down for a moment, trying to process it all. “So you’ve never killed a duplicate yourself. You’re not at fault.”
“I have. I remember every broken neck, every stabbing, every final breath. All those memories are in me, Tamara. I might as well have done it myself.”
Three tamaras draw near, defensive.
“It’s okay,” says Tamara. “It’s okay. She’s fine.”
“I’m not fine,” I say.
“She isn’t going to hurt me.”
The tamaras take steps back, but remain in positions close by.
“I think you need to meet Vitali,” says Tamara.
“Who’s Vitali?”
“Vitali Ignatiy Nikitovich. Older than God and knows more about us than anyone on the planet. He’s the reason I knew about you and the kill squad. He found me, I found you.” She turns to the tamara closest to her. “Please get her some appropriate clothes. We’re going out.”
Seven
We drive for two hours in the night, not stopping for petrol, food, or full bladders.
The Survival of Molly Southbourne Page 3
