I folded my wings and whistled. Soon dog noises could be heard, shadows that panted and wagged their stumps for tails and breathed meaty delighted breath when they found me again.
I got out of there. I put them on their leads and we walked back through the town, but this time we avoided Heriot Row; instead, I used an online map to find a way to the vet’s office. By the time we got there it was after 9 pm, and Alison had said she was checking Teacake around ten. I stood outside for ten minutes looking at the lit windows over her surgery before it occurred to me that this might be Alison’s flat. I could smell her dinner faintly through the open window.
I knocked on her door and she opened it with a round cross-stitch frame in one hand and bifocals on the end of her nose.
‘What’s happened now?’ she said sharply.
I was finding it hard to speak. It was as though what I’d seen on Holyrood could somehow pour out of my mouth like horror movie blood. Not that I knew exactly what I’d seen; and that fact was probably the worst of it.
She stepped back and I went in. Her flat smelt of beans on toast. There were cats on the sofa beside a squashed place where Alison must have been sitting. She brushed biscuit crumbs off the broad shelf of her bust and put her embroidery away.
‘You’re really worried about Teacake, aren’t you? Come on, I’ll take you down and you can see for yourself.’
I followed her down an interior staircase to the back office, where she flicked on a desk lamp. The rest of the practice was dark and smelled of urine and antiseptic. The dogs were sniffing and wriggling with excitement. Pull it together, Pearl.
‘Since you think it might have been a poisonous frog, I’ve tried an anaesthetic that decreases the permeability of the cell membrane and blocks the receptors to some of the most common batrachotoxins. It may help. The good news is that his heart rate is stabilising, but he still can’t move his legs. Is there anything left of the frog?’
Why can’t I lie? She looked at me like I was a little kid holding a broken vase behind my back.
I said, ‘Do you think Teacake will live? I mean, without a specific antidote?’
Soft empathy in the curves of her face. ‘I don’t know. He’s made it this far. We’ll just have to see what develops overnight.’ She was watching me carefully as she spoke. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there? What do you need?’
This kind of offer isn’t unusual. People tend to go out of their way for me. I don’t have to ask. They offer. Usually they aren’t so up front about it, though.
‘I think Bethany may have been abducted from her home,’ I said heavily. ‘I would have called the police, but I’m not convinced they could do anything.’
She pointed her finger at me.
‘I knew you weren’t an old friend!’ She lit up like a sparkler. ‘You’re some kind of government agent, aren’t you?’
Heat flared in my face.
‘What makes you say that?’
Alison laughed out loud. ‘It’s just you’re packing some muscle there, and look at you carrying that briefcase . . . But I get it. You’re undercover. I won’t say a word to anybody.’
I looked at the briefcase.
‘It is kind of a giveaway,’ she said gently. ‘So what is it you need?’
‘There’s something I have to take care of. Can you keep the dogs here? And, if I’m not back by morning, could you check on the cats at Bethany’s house?’
‘Of course. Is that all?’
Two Phones’ phone announced a text. My heart rate spiked.
She was excited. I sensed the way her muscles trembled beneath her skin. I let her take me back upstairs and make me a cup of tea. I watched her dunk an Abernathy biscuit with the enthusiasm of a child. I closed my eyes so she wouldn’t think I was staring at her. I soaked in the feeling of her instead. Emotionally she felt like a bruised peach, but I could feel her protection as a real warmth around me.
‘Thank you,’ I said softly.
She frowned.
‘How are you going to find Bethany?’
Another text on Two Phones’ phone.
‘Excuse me.’
The first text said:
Wife going to parents for weekends with kids. Advise.
The second text was from a different number.
Not Nevis. Maybe Singapore. Raratonga.
The first one could be innocent but I couldn’t help thinking of Dr Sorle’s wife and kids. I wrote back: Don’t touch family. Everything under control. Delayed.
I didn’t know what to say about the second text without giving away that I didn’t know what it meant, so I didn’t answer.
‘Ben Nevis is a mountain,’ I said aloud.
‘It is that.’
‘And what does it have in common with Singapore and Raratonga?’
‘Rara-who?’
‘Tonga.’
‘You got me.’
I closed my eyes. I couldn’t think rationally anymore. Too much had happened. I could feel the briefcase, so close to me– and yet so far. I needed to find a way to put it back into myself. The birds in that strange world with its plasma sky, they would know what to do. They would know how. But where were they? Inside the briefcase, somehow . . .
With the fire.
And/or the quetzlcoatlus.
Putting myself back together clearly wasn’t going to be a straightforward thing. The thought of opening the briefcase was intimidating. I needed a metaphysical bomb defusal kit.
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Alison said.
My eyes jumped open. She was refilling my tea cup.
‘I should go,’ I said. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay in the warmth of Alison’s living room with the cats and the softly ticking clock.
‘Do you want to crash here tonight?’ Alison said. ‘I know you were planning to stay at Bethany’s but if you’re worried about being alone . . . I mean . . . I don’t know what I mean.’
We looked at each other. I don’t know what she was feeling because it wasn’t any of my business to touch her mind that way, not in these circumstances, so I restrained myself. I wasn’t a part of the Resistance anymore, and I wanted to be a person with her.
‘That’s really nice of you,’ I said. I was feeling disloyal to Marquita. It wasn’t even sex I wanted. I just wanted to lie my head in someone’s lap and be safe. Even for a moment.
‘But . . .?’ said Alison, smiling.
‘But there’s something I have to do.’
‘There is! And you came to ask me to look after the dogs and I said I would. And you’re going now.’
She stood up, flustered. She thought she had overextended herself. I wanted to hug her.
‘Actually,’ I said suddenly. ‘Do you think I could just use the yard out back for something?’
‘The yard? Well, yeah, sure. Use the yard. I’ll show you out the back door.’
* * *
She let me into the yard and switched on the porch light. The rain had stopped but it was chilly and there was a faint smell of diesel from the road. The yard was enclosed by high stone walls on three sides and the practice building itself on the fourth. Alison’s van was parked to one side and there were two recycling bins, but this left a square of wet asphalt about six feet on a side where I could lay the briefcase down.
‘Could you switch that light off?’
‘I promise I won’t look,’ said Alison. ‘I’m going back to my needlepoint. It requires ferocious concentration, you know.’
‘It’s not you,’ I said. ‘It’s them.’ I indicated the buildings that overlooked the yard. She shut off the light and left me out there in the darkness. I heard her go upstairs.
I wiped my palms on my trousers. The briefcase was strobing slightly in the ultraviolet and I couldn’t be sure, but I kept thinking I could hear sounds coming from inside it. The sounds were faint and hard to distinguish from the hum of the boiler in the veterinary practice and the soft singing of the electrical equipment in the yard next door
and the sibilance of traffic moving through puddles. I might have been imagining it, but the presence of the briefcase somehow seemed to organise the white and almost-white noise of the environment and convert it to an implied music. Oh so softly, the briefcase was calling a tune.
I knelt and put my palms on the naugahide surface. You are mine but you’ve been made into something else. I am yours but you don’t know me anymore. How do we put ourselves back together? Where to begin?
The briefcase wasn’t locked. It didn’t even have one of those flimsy combination locks on it. All it had were brass closures to either side of the handle, each of which flipped open with a small brass button that slid in a groove. There was nothing to it.
I put my thumbs on the buttons and tried to slide them.
The buttons did not move. At all. There may as well not have been a groove.
So I tried them one at a time, in different sequences. I grabbed the closures and tried to pull them out of their sockets, but I couldn’t seem to get a good grip on them. I had big fingers and they were small devices. Small but strong.
I could hear the air coming out of my own nostrils in frustrated little snorts.
Damn!
I should have known, of course. Trying not to be angry, I sat back on my heels. How can you not be angry when someone steals a part of you and then turns it against you and locks you out of it? How can you not be angry when someone locks you out of yourself?
OK. Maybe I was a little angry now.
I put my fingers on the seam where the top half of the briefcase met the bottom. The hinges weren’t particularly strong. I could probably rip it open, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I decided to part the halves of the briefcase by just a crack, get a glimpse of the inside without damaging the structure.
I couldn’t get my fingers into position. They kept slipping off. I sat back and manoeuvred the briefcase between my legs so I could get a better grip on it, but no matter how I turned it I couldn’t get my fingers into that crack. I worked on the hinges. I dug into the naugahide with my nails – it was already damaged in places – but I couldn’t seem to make a dent in it.
I stood up and looked around. There was a utility room between the veterinary practice and the yard, just big enough for two people to stand in. It had a washing machine, a deep freeze, and some shelves with odd things like horse-shoe picks and dog leads, gardening gloves, a screwdriver—
A screwdriver. I picked it up and went back to the briefcase. I put the sharp end into the joint of the briefcase, but again I couldn’t get a purchase. I found a piece of broken brick and tried using that to drive the point in, but I missed and hit my own hand.
Sucking my own fist now, I was starting to feel really foolish. How had Kisi Sorle opened the thing? Did it have some kind of open sesame? If it did, how come I of all people didn’t know it?
I grabbed the handle, about to reposition it for another assault, but the briefcase had suddenly become heavy. Heavier than lead. I couldn’t move it at all.
It felt like somebody was pulling my cock and I don’t even have a cock. Like that.
On the other hand, a heavy object is always a challenge to me. I set myself up to lift it. I had something to prove here.
When you move a big weight, the heavy effort comes first, your fast-twitch fibres sprinting for their lives, burning themselves out while the slower ones catch up, en masse, moving the load. And then, suddenly, there’s a point where it’s easier to move than not move. Easier to keep going than to stop. Sir Isaac’s inertial mushrooming of events. Statistically, that one point where the pebble starts the landslide, that point is the answer to everything. Imbued with a deep magic. And yet: so what? Because without the heavy lifting and the long incremental endurance you got nothing. You. Got. Nothing.
As always when I lift, the world parts like a pair of lips and I can see its language emerging from the mouth of the cosmos, I glimpse realities that are folded up dimensions of where I am. It’s a rush better than flying, better than sex.
But even as my consciousness drifted down into the realms deep within my atoms, my ligaments were hitting fail point. Capillaries in my eyes broke and my vision blurred. As the effort went on and on I realised that if I tried any harder I would tear muscle off bone, pop a joint.
I let up. Walked in a circle, away from the briefcase and back, staring at it like it was an alligator.
Then I went back in and grabbed it again.
This time instead of being heavy it was light. Too light. I picked it up like it was air, lost my balance, and fell hard on my left side as the briefcase tugged at my right hand just as it had done on the plane. The muscles of my hand were spent; involuntarily I let go and the briefcase sailed across the yard. It hit a metal recycling bin with such force that it punched right through the side of the bin and crashed into the contents leaving a hole behind. Empty plastic bottles poured out and rolled on to the pavement like a little noisy sea.
I charged over to the bin, lifted the lid, and dragged the briefcase out. It was undamaged and had returned to a more normal weight.
‘Who is making that infernal noise?’
A pale chubby face appeared at the top of the yard wall. Unshaven. Nose red with drink. Flashing eyes. The man’s white breath floated away from him and vanished.
I set the briefcase down but put one foot on it just in case it was thinking of going anywhere.
‘Oh!’ exclaimed the man, pulling himself higher and setting his elbows on the top of the wall. He had a can of cider in one hand, and he waggled it slightly as though judging how much was left inside. ‘Sorry about that. You’re a person. I thought it was those bloody cats again. Everything all right over there?’
I narrowed my eyes. ‘Everything’s fine.’
‘Where you from, then?’
‘Long Island,’ I said in my best Long Island accent.
‘Right, well, I hate to sound suspicious, but is that actually yours?’
‘Of course,’ I said – and I didn’t even convince myself. What must it look like, me with my screwdriver, my brick, and my temper trying to open a briefcase in a back yard at ten thirty at night?
‘Well, because, you know, I am in fact an expert locksmith,’ he said, and actually winked. He smiled with a mouthful of yellow, jumbled teeth. ‘I sleep on the street purely out of inherent honesty. I could get into any building on this road. Any one.’
He gestured with the cider can left and right.
‘I can pick any lock. Truly.’
I picked up the briefcase and walked over to him. He was a mess in the way of a bombed-out house. In his interior there were personal possessions, good furniture, books, music, clothes – but they were thrown everywhere and covered with dust and rubble, and rats had moved in. It was a sad place, but someone was still living in the ruin.
‘OK,’ I said simply. I reached up and clasped his cold, dirty hand. He looked startled; then he held my gaze. His eyes were bloodshot and the pupils were overlarge, but he was trying hard to focus on me. I tugged and he kicked and he came scrambling up over the top of the wall and tumbled into the yard. The cider spilled in a foamy splash.
‘Never mind,’ I said. I leaned into his emotional patterns. So much wasted ability. The urge to repair was strong. ‘You don’t need that. It doesn’t even work.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t fucking work.’
He picked up the can and slurped up the remainder of it, then chucked the empty tin back over the wall. ‘It doesn’t work. But it’s what I do. Let’s see your lock. Christ, it’s dark over here. Dark for dark business, is that it?’
‘I can see fine,’ I said.
‘Right, well there’s no lock here, is there?’
‘I thought you could pick any lock.’
‘There has to be a lock.’
‘I’ve seen someone open it. It opened for them. Just not for me.’
‘Well, there’s no lock.’
‘There is.’
‘
Isn’t.’
It went like this. Then he said, laughing,
‘Listen, you silly cunt. It’s not locked at all. It’s fucking glued. We need a cunting knife. Sorry, excuse my manners. We need a sharp knife.’
He reached into his pocket. I gripped his forearm like a vice. He yelped and stared at my hand on his arm, which he now could not move at all.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No knives. No cutting.’
‘I was only going to get a cigarette. I’m unarmed. Reach in my pocket and see for yourself.’
I let him go. I wasn’t afraid for myself; my reaction had been fear for the briefcase, for what would happen to me if it were damaged. Don’t know what possessed me to think it could be damaged; nothing was making much sense by now.
Shaking, now, the man took out a packet of cigarettes and put one between his lips.
‘Suicidal, I know,’ he said, lighting up. ‘We’re all going to die, anyway.’
The back door of the practice opened and the light came on.
‘Conor?’ sang Alison. ‘What are you doing here? What is going on?’
News from Mars
‘Yo, Alison,’ said Conor, blinking in the sudden light. ‘We were just having a friendly discussion about the art of lock-picking.’
Alison came outside in her slippers. She calmly took in the sight of the screwdriver, the spilled bottles, and us. I had hastily gotten to my feet, keeping hold of the briefcase, but Conor winced when he tried to get up. I put out my hand to help him. He was cold and his back hurt. There was other pain, too – nebulous, non-local, but no less real. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d looked deep into his neural architecture to see if I could help. Sometimes in the past when I’d done this, the simple fact of me being there had been enough to cause a change. It seemed that my presence caused a shift in a person’s attention that initiated some internal process in them. Some part of them could take it from there and they’d feel better. Other times I used to use the geometry of HD to give a bioelectrical nudge.
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