Birdkill

by Alexander McNabb

‘I don’t quite understand, Bill. On our guard against what, precisely?’

  ‘Journalists, snoopers. Anybody nosing around.’

  ‘What does this whistleblower have that we should be so concerned about?’

  ‘We don’t know. But it’s as well to be cautious. We don’t want anything to derail the select committee next week. How’s the Shaw girl?’

  ‘She’s settling in nicely; her amnesia persists yet otherwise she should rehabilitate perfectly well.’

  ‘You’ll need to keep an eye on her. Keep her close. This may just blow over, but we can’t be too careful.’

  ‘When do you expect you might get more detail from Parker?’

  ‘That’s just it. It wasn’t Parker told me. It was Raynesford. Parker’s not taking calls.’

  ‘Oh. I see. Right. Well, I’ll splice the mainbrace or whatever it is.’

  ‘I’ll call you if I hear more.’

  ‘Thanks Bill. Good chap.’

  Hamilton replaced the handset, his brow furrowed. He tapped his pen on his notepad and sighed. He rolled it between his palms contemplatively. He let it fall to the desktop, irritated at the threat to his routines and plans. Trust Parker to go to ground.

  He reached for the handset again and thumbed a rubber keypad made for smaller, more agile hands than his. ‘Heather? Could you ask Simon to join me when he has a minute?’

  Archer was a good fellow. He would sort things out.

  Robyn backed into the lounge bar of the Sloop Inn, shaking her umbrella. The warm, beery fug greeted her, outbreaks of laughter rolling across the busy room. She snapped the umbrella shut and slid it into the elephant’s foot holder, arrested for a second by the grotesque object before seeing it as a thing of pottery, not dried flesh.

  The group was sitting on the back wall of the lounge. Robyn recognised them all apart from a larger lady and a slim brown-eyed blonde. She struggled to remember the names as she wove between the tables towards them, shrugging off her coat. Someone Gray beginning with an ‘m’. And a music teacher. Simon Archer turned and rose to greet her.

  ‘Here we are! Welcome, welcome. What can I get you?’ He moved the coat folded on the seat to his right.

  ‘A G&T please, Simon.’

  ‘Coming right up. Anyone else?’

  A chorus of ‘no’s and the Gray woman’s ‘Yes please, Simon. Same again.’

  Robyn leaned across the table to shake her hand. ‘Hi, we haven’t met. Robyn Shaw.’

  ‘Emily Gray. With an ay. As in squirrel, I’m an American import. The name, not me. I grew up in Chichester, actually.’

  The hand in hers was warm, larger and jangled with rings and bracelets. ‘I’m just Shaw as in George Bernard, but there the resemblance ends.’

  ‘Shame,’ David Thorpe called over. ‘You’d look lovely with a nice white beard.’

  Robyn laughed dutifully, aware this might turn out to be one of those nights that left you with a pain in your cheeks.

  ‘I’m Lorraine,’ said the blonde. A Northern Irish accent. ‘I teach music at the Institute.’

  ‘Welcome to the end of the week,’ Thorpe beamed. ‘As you saw from my class the other day, they can be a handful. Friday can never come soon enough as far as I’m concerned.’

  Robyn slid her coat over the back of her chair and sat down. She smiled across at Heather, who was drinking a pint of something brown. Old Frog’s Nipple or something like that. Archer returned from the bar with the drinks. He slid Emily Gray’s red wine across the table to her and handed Robyn her G&T.

  ‘Cheers.’ Robyn toasted the assembled company, who dutifully raised their classes to clink together.

  ‘To our new member of staff!’ Archer cried out.

  Robyn could feel her cheeks ache already.

  They ate well. Robyn took the roast of the day, beef and all the trimmings, and it was a delight. Archer and Heather joined her. The others had fish and chips. ‘Best in the South of England, I swear,’ Thorpe enthused, urging his choice on the others like an evangelist as they ordered. Now, the meal finished, he pushed his plate away and sat back to wipe his lips and crumple the serviette onto the plate. ‘It’s one thing I could never get the French to understand, fish and chips.’

  ‘The French?’ Robyn sensed a fellow expatriate.

  ‘I was based in France for five years, place called Larroque. Came back last year. Was pretty worried about the move, tell the truth. We were based in the Tarn Valley. Sun, enough wine to swim in, gorgeous food. I put on three stone.’

  ‘Why come back, then?’

  Thorpe clearly hadn’t anticipated such a direct question and Robyn noticed from Heather’s wince the others knew something she didn’t. He grimaced, glanced down at his drink and looked her in the eye. ‘My wife and I split up. She ran off with another man.’

  He finished his drink in a long draught. Robyn didn’t know whether to kick herself or throw her arms around him. ‘I’m so sorry. I had no idea.’

  ‘It’s okay. There are worse ways to lose a wife.’

  Robyn pulled a face. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like she dies slowly in your arms. That’s what happened to Sue, Hamilton’s wife. She died last year.’

  Crestfallen, Robyn imagined the grief hidden behind Hamilton’s crusty formality. ‘I didn’t know. That’s terrible.’

  ‘Come on, enough about the bloody past.’ Simon Archer was on his feet, his hand on Robyn’s shoulders. ‘My shout. David, another one of those?’ Thorpe nodded, handed his glass over. ‘G&T Robyn?’

  ‘Please.’ She lifted the tonic can on the table. ‘Just a G and ice, I’ve got enough T.’

  Emily Gray leaned forwards, her top parting to reveal heavy, pale breasts. ‘Talking about the past is discouraged at the Hamilton Institute,’ she confided, tapping her finger against her nose. ‘We’re about the future, apparently. Keep your past to yourself. Nobody knows what’s locked away there, that way. Especially the kids. They don’t have pasts, so you’re as well not to ask.’

  Robyn’s own past was patchy enough. They’d be welcome to it if she could ever get it back. She reached out and touched David Thorpe’s arm, horrified to see he was teary-eyed.

  He smiled at her touch, tried to brighten up. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up. France.’

  ‘I don’t mind if you don’t. We all have pasts.’ Robyn glared at Gray, who was busily quaffing her red wine, holding the glass in both hands. ‘Although I’m missing a chunk of my own.’

  ‘How so?’ Thorpe raised an eyebrow.

  ‘If I knew that, I’d probably know what I’m missing.’

  ‘Here we go!’ Archer placed drinks in front of them. ‘Talking about personal things, is that really your Audi? The white one?’

  ‘Yup.’ Robyn took her drink, pride in her heart. ‘She most certainly is.’

  Heather was all goggle eyed at her. ‘Doesn’t it scare you?’

  Robyn snorted. ‘Absolutely not. I love her to bits.’ And drank, thinking the only thing that was really scaring her right now was inside her.

  Robyn walked home alongside Thorpe and Archer. Heather and Emily were ahead of them, Heather steering Emily’s rather erratic progress. The rain had abated, the road wet and a fine mist in the air.

  ‘She’s pissed again.’ Archer was sour.

  Thorpe chided him gently. ‘It’s her outlet. She’s a fine teacher. We’re none of us hardly sober.’

  Archer put his arm around Robyn’s shoulder. ‘Planning tomorrow, young Robyn. You need a hand?’

  She wove her hand in front of his arm and slipped it across his collar bone so her arm was on top. She flung her other arm around Thorpe’s shoulder. ‘I need a hand like a fish needs a bicycle. I’m a one-woman planning mean machine, so I am. Those kids are going to be planned out of their minds or my name’s not Robyn Shaw.’

  Archer laughed, dropping his arm. ‘I think we’ve had a dose of the old Dutch courage ourselves!’

  ‘Simon, Simon. As the Arabs say, you don’t
know me.’

  Thorpe shielded his eyes against the headlights of the oncoming car. It splashed past them and uphill. The gates of the Institute were floodlit ahead of them. ‘Were you in the Middle East, then?’

  ‘That I was.’

  Archer’s voice was bluff. ‘Enough talk of the past. It just causes trouble, like tonight. Let’s leave all our pasts where they are for now, eh?’

  Robyn thought briefly of kicking up a fuss about that, but decided she’d rather go to bed. She’d had too much to eat, plenty to drink and was feeling tired now. She didn’t have the energy to pick a fight, much as she’d have liked to.

  ‘Fine. Bygones are bygones.’

  ‘Attagirl.’

  SIX

  A Past Lived In Dreams

  Robyn woke up crying out, flailing at the duvet as if she were drowning and the water was bearing down on her, pressing the breath from her heaving lungs.

  She lay in her own body’s dampness. The clock showed five am. She felt awful. She gathered herself, then twisted across the bed and reached down for the plastic bottle of water she’d brought up with her last night. She twisted the lid and drank, spilling it on the sheets but she didn’t care. She pulled the neck away from her dry lips, gasping.

  It was still tearing at her mind. Flying leaves and breaking windows. Jasmine, sweet gorgeous jasmine heavy in the humid evening air. Rain and billowing curtains. And sand. Sand and blood and flies.

  The sound of voices stilled her. She had opened the downward-hinging window to let some cool air in when she had staggered into bed last night. Now it let in the cold and a snatch of conversation hushed by a sibilant rebuke.

  She stole out of bed and over to the window. Shadowy figures were stumbling between the dark trees out by the research centre domes, headed towards the boarding school. They looked bowed, exhausted.

  Robyn pulled on her baggy pants and jacket and slipped down the stairs to her living room. Picking up her key card, she let herself out. The light in the corridor clicked on and she froze in the doorway, her gaze fixed on the little black camera dome mounted in the ceiling at the end of the corridor.

  She backed into her living room and closed the door.

  It was a red sky morning. Robin lit her Swedish-style funky fire and curled up with a coffee, planning her approach to teaching English Literature to ferociously intelligent adult children who were yet, underneath it all, children. She tried to put herself in their shoes, to imagine what it must be like to understand stories of romance, loss, tribulation and failure, triumph and glory and yet truly understand none of these things; to have no experience of life and yet hold all its knowledge.

  She turned the conundrum around in her mind, reaching for her laptop and searching Amazon for books on teaching gifted students. It struck her as odd the Institute would employ a teacher with no experience of what was clearly a highly specialised and demanding discipline. She was going to be winging it and that felt wrong to her. But then maybe her lack of experience could work for her, break open new approaches. It had better do, because come Monday she’d be facing two classes a day for the week.

  Delving into the texts available online, she was soon downloading them to her Kindle, mildly horrified at the cover prices. Two hundred pounds later, she decided she had enough to be going on with and settled down to dive into her new acquisitions. She didn’t surface until after midday, and then only to answer the clamorous doorbell.

  Simon Archer stood at the door. Robyn regretted answering it at all. She was holding her coffee cup, wearing flip-flops, baggy pants and a torn Fight Like Apes t-shirt. Her hair must be a sight, too. Dressed in a Ford shirt, neat jeans and a fawn jacket, he smiled uncertainly. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to…’

  ‘Hi Simon, come on in. Can I get you a coffee?’ Like, fuck it. She turned from the door and headed for the kitchen.

  He closed the door behind him and stood in the living room. ‘That’s fine, I wasn’t planning on hanging around long. I’m a bit behind on my planning, actually.

  ‘How can I help?’ She boiled the kettle and rinsed out her glass coffee jug, spooning in precious ground Blue Mountain and letting the hot liquid splash around before pressing the filter into the jug’s neck and zipping up its little neoprene jacket.

  ‘Last night, or more precisely this morning. You were disturbed by something.’

  Robyn studied the jug for a second before turning to him. ‘About five o’clock? Yes. I thought I heard a noise outside my room, but there was nothing there.’ She tried to think of a polite way of asking what the hell it was to do with him, but the light had clearly triggered the camera and an alarm on a console somewhere. ‘Do you routinely monitor staff movements?’

  He had the grace to look embarrassed at least. ‘No, no, of course not. But the security system logs unusual events.’

  ‘Unusual events? There wasn’t anything unusual.’ She poured her coffee. She wiggled the coffee jug at him and he shook his head. She walked into the living room with her mug. ‘I don’t understand.’

  He was properly on the back foot now, looking flustered and starting to blush. She curled back up on her cushions and placed her coffee on the side table. ‘Are you going to sit down or just stand there all day?’

  ‘I’d, I’d best be going, actually. Just thought I’d make sure everything was okay with you.’

  ‘Never better, Simon. You can let yourself out, then.’

  The door shut behind him and Robyn closed her eyes. Round one to Robyn, then. Only she wasn’t sure what she was fighting. She went to pick up the Kindle and thought better of it. She had read enough to know she was never going to take enough in to make a difference by Sunday. She’d just go in with no preconceptions and find out from them what their world was like. Propelled by her annoyance at Archer’s visit, at least in part triggered by him finding her looking like a scarecrow, she decided to go up to London. She reached for her mobile and called Mariam.

  ‘Hiya.’

  ‘I was thinking of coming up for the night. Got a room spare?’

  ‘Of course. I’m working late but if you don’t mind waiting we can do a takeaway? Key’s in the usual place. Frank is out this week, so you won’t have to do any chili eating competitions.’

  ‘Brilliant. I’ll call you when I get there.

  Robyn changed into boots, jeans, jumper and leather jacket. She shoved her wetbag and a change of t-shirt into her backpack. At the door she paused and turned back, sliding her Kindle and notebook into the bag. She skittered down the stairs, her keys jangling in her hand. Striding out into the carpark, she clicked the TT’s remote and slung her bag into the passenger seat. Her own was cold and she hit the warmer button, listening to the lovely sound of that engine roaring into life. She swung out of her parking space and towards the gates. She saw the small, still figure at the edge of the woods. Martin was like a statue, utterly immobile and devoid of emotion. He watched her. He was still there in her rear view mirror as she turned into the driveway, the gravel crackling under her wheels.

  Robyn woke to Mariam’s gentle, insistent pressure on her shoulder. She was fully clothed, curled up on Mariam’s spare bed. Well, Frank’s. Mariam lodged with a rugby-mad Australian metal trader called Frank. She pushed herself up to sit on the edge of the bed, rubbing at her sandy eyes.

  ‘Shit. I just crashed. Rude bitch. What time is it?’

  ‘Half nine. You’re okay. You looked wrecked when you came in.’

  ‘You look pretty knackered yourself.’

  ‘Thanks. Anyway, you look wreckeder.’

  ‘Where’s Frank?’

  ‘On a long weekend break with some leggy piece from Bromley called Alison.’

  Robyn gave up a silent thank you. Although she generally enjoyed Frank’s company, he could be exhausting if you weren’t feeling in the mood and right now she was relieved not to find herself invited to a drinking beer from your tits competition or subjected to other Frank-ish forms of entertainment. ‘So what gives? I wasn�
��t kidding about you looking tired, you’re panda-eyed.’

  Mariam shoved Robyn’s shoulder. ‘Cow. Seriously, I’m busy, babe. Crazy busy. The new job is a thousand times bigger than I thought it was going to be. We’ve got a major US military whistleblower on our hands and I’m supposed to be heading the whole thing up. I’ve actually got a guy in hiding and journalists from the Guardian and the Telegraph turning up in the office tomorrow.’

  Mariam offered Robyn a hand to pull her up. Robyn’s mouth was dry and her head ached. ‘Wow. You’ve hit the big time.’

  ‘Seriously? I sort think I have. Fancy some eats?’

  ‘God, yes.’ Robyn followed Mariam downstairs and into the kitchen.

  ‘Chinky okay?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  Mariam reached into the cupboard and pulled out a bottle of red. She peeled the lead sleeve off and uncorked it with a couple of savage twists.

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘I’ll order it in a couple of minutes. What’s your news, then?’

  Robyn put her glass down on the counter, the fruity, dark wine heady on her palate. ‘No news, as such. I’m picking up bits and bobs here and there. And it’s all, well, a bit strange. The Hamilton Institute, I mean. The place is like a high security jail for exceptionally talented children. They’re kept in a separate part of the campus to the teaching staff, there’s a research team who work in a centre behind locked doors and we don’t get to go near them. They even have a separate car park and entrance. There are cameras all over the place.’

  ‘Sounds like a prison camp.’

  Robyn nodded. ‘It can feel like that. There’s no school on Fridays, they spend Thursday evening and Friday doing research stuff. We get to take Friday off to do planning work, apparently they’re really demanding as pupils, but I haven’t actually faced a class yet. Well, not for a lesson at least.’ The memory of feeling her mouth stitched up, the stitches breaking and the gout of blood were still too vivid. She took a gulp of wine and for a second the richness of it made her nauseous. Robyn collected herself. ‘Whatever research they do, I don’t know. I’ve been on a tour of the place and I know less now than when I started out on it. I’m starting to find it all a bit spooky, tell the truth.’