Execution Plan

by Patrick Thompson

  I sat in the chair Dr Phipps offered me. He looked about as tired as a person can get without keeling over. He wore the traditional white coat and kindly expression. He looked like someone’s favourite uncle.

  I told him about my hallucinations.

  ‘That’s a relief,’ he said. ‘That’s the first case today that hasn’t involved excessive dampness. Well, you survived the waiting room so there can’t be much wrong with you. How many fingers am I holding up?’

  I told him. He shone lights into my eyes.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Do you have any other symptoms? Do you find it difficult to balance at all? How’s your attention span?’

  They were fine, I told him.

  ‘Well it’s not likely to be anything too awful. You’d be having more symptoms if there was anything terribly amiss. Did you think you had a brain tumour?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Yes. Most people do. Well, most people that I see. They have a headache, bang, it’s a brain tumour. That’s not awfully likely to be the case. I do want to send you for a scan, but to be honest I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. Try to steer clear of computers for a while, to give your eyes a chance to relax.

  ‘Are you feeling stressed at all? Is anything playing on your mind?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. It was true. I had a decent job, I had gadgets to occupy my time. Apart from the hallucinations I had no troubles at all.

  ‘Stress can cause that sort of thing sometimes. I suppose you’ve read all of the stuff in the newspapers about BSE?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well try not to worry about that. It’s not likely to be that. We’ll be picking up the real fallout from that one in about 2010. But try not to worry about it. I try not to. I’ll get you an appointment for a scan. Give this to the receptionists and they’ll arrange it. You can get back to me if they find anything. I’m sure that they won’t. Thank you, Mr. Aston.’

  I handed the note to one of the receptionists on the way out, after waiting the obligatory quarter of an hour while she determinedly failed to notice me. She told me the hospital would be in touch with a date for my scan.

  Tiff’s mother gave me a little wave on my way out.

  IV

  A month later, I went to the hospital. They didn’t do the sort of scan they wanted to give me in Dudley, so I had to go to a small unit outside Arley, a tiny village on the banks of the River Severn.

  It was a bright new building on one floor, on a plot of land surrounded by nicely arranged shrubbery. It looked like a Pizza Hut from outside. From inside, it looked like a lost set from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  Chirpy young staff sent me to a cubicle to swap my clothes for a gown so that everyone would be better able to see my bare arse. All of the staff looked like they’d escaped from an Australian soap opera. They were all young and lively and optimistic and tanned. They wore loose-fitting uniforms in various pastel shades. A pair of young nurses, one male and one female, led me to a white room holding an enormous cylindrical machine.

  ‘I’m Brooke and this is Paul,’ said the female one. ‘We’ll be looking after you. All you have to do is lie in there for a while and the machine will do the rest. We build up an image of the inside of your head.’

  They arranged me on a bench. It glided inside the machinery.

  They built up an image of the inside of my head.

  Sadly, there was nothing wrong with it.

  V

  They were certain. They were positive and the results were negative. My brain was physically intact, no unexplained lumps or unusual holes.

  Whatever had caused my hallucinations wasn’t in my head. They told me that some foodstuffs might cause visions, like the ergot-infested grain that gave rise to many of the religious visions of past centuries. Cheese could cause nightmares, as I knew. Some antidepressants could trip you out, as though being depressed wasn’t enough to cope with.

  I didn’t think it was anything I’d eaten. I was reassured but I’d wanted an answer. If I’d lost half a lobe of cranial matter, that would have been that. I’d have learned to live with it. Or without it.

  There could still be crossed wires somewhere. Something that didn’t show up. Sometimes that happened, and you’d end up hearing the colour blue or seeing the smell of frying fish. I tried not to think about what I might not be thinking about, the possible gaps in my mind. I wanted to play video games but they were bad for me. According to intermittent reports in the dumber tabloids, they were bad for everyone.

  I got bored, sitting at home doing nothing. It was the evenings that were getting to me. In the day, I was at work, and that kept me occupied.

  After work, I was on my own. I decided that I needed some company.

  I didn’t feel like seeing Dermot. He was too lively. I needed more restful companions. I called Tina and arranged to go round for tea the following night.

  VI

  Bewdley was unusually quiet. Most weekends, it was crowded with tourists. If it was flooded even more would turn up. That evening, midweek and out of season, it was like a ghost town. A few couples walked along the riverbanks. Ducks – also in couples – stood sleepily and watched them pass. The sky was making its way towards night.

  I parked in the long-stay car park and didn’t pay. I walked along the river to Tina’s house, dodging couples. Ducks eyed me beadily. A flying V of Canada geese hissed out of the sky and landed noisily on the water, looking at the world with the expressions of hitmen. Ducks would accept bread from you. Geese would knock you down and rifle your pockets.

  It was a warm evening, and Roger had set up a table and chairs in the tiny back garden. It was surrounded by a tall wall of local stone, and felt isolated and peaceful. It wasn’t overlooked by anything. Tina had done a salad and Roger had made crab cakes and potato wedges. He was still kitted out in French Connection clothes. Perhaps they were sponsoring him. The interior of their house still had the amber glow. Perhaps they’d bought that, too. Perhaps it came in buckets and you topped the room up if it ran low.

  ‘Tina is just getting herself ready,’ said Roger. ‘Can you drink, or are you driving?’

  I said I could have a little drink, and he poured me a hefty measure of his latest red.

  ‘Not sure we should be having this with fish,’ he said. ‘Do crabs count as fish? More like insects really, aren’t they? All legs and feelers.’

  Tina arrived, in a white peasant blouson and unlabelled blue jeans. She’d had her hair cut into layers so that it looked natural, except that hair didn’t naturally look that good. You needed to pay a good stylist to get it to look as though no one had been near it for weeks.

  ‘No Dermot?’ she asked. ‘I thought you two were inseparable.’

  ‘Hardly,’ said Roger. ‘What do you drink with insects?’

  ‘Depends what they ask for,’ she said. ‘I’ll have a glass of that red, if you don’t mind.’

  He poured her half a glass. She took it and sipped, nodded, said ‘mmm’.

  We sat around the table. It was a cheap white plastic one from an out-of-town garden centre, and the chairs gave under you. It still felt like being at the Henley regatta. It was some sort of emanation the two of them gave out. Roger seemed elegant and expensive, Tina rich and mysterious. They were comfortably off, and you could feel it. It wasn’t a matter of money. I was earning a lot, by Dudley standards, but my flat wasn’t going to get an amber glow unless it caught fire.

  As we ate, they interrogated me.

  ‘So, how are things?’ asked Roger. ‘Still single?’

  ‘At the moment.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll meet someone at work,’ said Tina. ‘I read that seventy per cent of relationships start at the workplace.’

  ‘Not my workplace,’ I said, thinking of Tracy Brady and her bubble perm.

  ‘Not enough material there?’ asked Roger. ‘Perhaps you could try a dating agency.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I insisted. ‘I’m happy by myself.’

/>   Tina hid her down-turned mouth by pouring wine into it. Roger put an arm on the back of his chair so that he could study me more directly.

  ‘Any other problems?’

  ‘That’s not a problem,’ I said, and then, thinking that perhaps they might have some useful advice, ‘but there has been something. I’ve been to the doctors.’

  Tina put her glass on the table but kept hold of it. Roger continued to pick at his food with his fork while I told them about my hallucinations. By the time I’d finished, Tina was also facing me, one arm on the back of her chair.

  ‘So the tests didn’t find anything,’ Roger said. ‘So you think it’s you going off the rails, yes?’

  I nodded.

  ‘It might be something else,’ said Tina. ‘No one else saw these things, you said? And they were things you’d seen while you were playing games? Perhaps you’re manifesting them as signs of something else. Perhaps you have something buried in there that you can’t get at.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said. ‘Unless it was that business at Borth. You still don’t like mirrors, do you?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Not much, no. But you’re afraid of them. We do have them in the house. And I don’t think you have any in your flat, do you?’

  Roger was beginning to look uncomfortable with the conversation. I could understand that. Suddenly he was the only sane person at the table, outnumbered two to one.

  ‘Have you thought,’ she asked, ‘have you ever considered going back to Borth?’

  NINE

  I

  I had never thought of going back. After the experiment ended I went downstairs while Betts and Tina were still talking about clearing up the mess.

  What did they know about mess? I was the one in a mess. I had lost half of of my past. A hole had been driven into my memory. When the mirrors crashed, at the end of the experiment, I ran to the halls of residence with my hands over my ears, afraid of what I might hear. I looked only forward, knowing that something was out there in the damp air.

  I went to my room and grabbed as much as I could force into a bag. I walked across the marshes and fields to Borth, under the drizzle. Every ten paces I had to look around to assure myself that no goblins were scampering down from the mountains to worry me. I didn’t want to use the road because I knew Tina would try to find me there, if she tried to find me at all.

  I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want to see anyone. The Welsh rain crawled into my clothes. The whole landscape was the colour of wet cement. Water from the drenched fields got into my shoes. The wind was blowing in off the sea; I had to turn away from it to breathe. It was like swimming. It was like drowning.

  I reached the first half of the golf course and walked onto it, because the grass was shorter there. I didn’t want a golf ball catching me on the head, but I didn’t want to stay near the college. Another world had stuck its nose into our world. I wanted to get back to the West Midlands, where there was only the one world.

  I darted across the road to the other half of the golf course, and ran over that to the sea wall. When I climbed to the top of that, I looked around. Nothing was coming after me. The only cars were on their way inland, as was the sky, propelled by the wind. I could only see the tops of the college buildings through the hanging drizzle. I slithered down the seaward side of the wall and onto the beach, which is longer than the town. Gulls dangled in the sky like scraps of bad weather. Where the sea hit the pebbles it was battered into a greyish foam which flew at me in grubby-looking clumps.

  I walked along the beach in the direction of town. The sea wall hid most of it. I could see chimneys and television antennae picking up both available channels. I walked along the beach behind the houses until I was level with the railway station, and then crossed the sea wall back into the town.

  It was empty. No one was around. Out of season, the town closed itself up. The tat in the shops went back into storage, the number of jobs dropped by nine-tenths, the locals sat indoors and waited for next spring.

  The railway station is just behind the town. The town is a single long road with houses and shops on each side, and the station sits behind the inner line of houses, as far from the sea as you can get in Borth. A single poster pinned to a notice board on one of the platforms flapped in the salty wind. It was too faded to read. There was a small ticket office, which was closed. I was alone there, looking at the rails. I looked behind the flapping poster and found the timetable. There would be a train in about another three hours, heading out to Aberystwyth.

  Why hadn’t I gone there instead? They had a real University there. They didn’t get nightmares to step out of mirrors and spoil your day. They had a pier. They had amusements.

  Borth had amusements. I could occupy myself for three hours, with an amusement arcade. They didn’t close out of season because there were always enough students with enough money to keep them in business.

  I went to the amusement arcade.

  I found the future in there.

  II

  I didn’t mention any of that to Tina as she sat in the back garden of her country house, eating crab cakes and potato wedges and laying into Roger’s wine collection. There was nothing back in Borth for me. I’d left my course unfinished and I didn’t bother to finish it later. I could program, and I got jobs without anyone ever asking to see a certificate. I told Tina that I had never thought of going back.

  ‘Perhaps you should,’ she said. ‘I think most of your problems started at Borth.’

  Well, she would know, I thought. After all, she’d been there with me. I hadn’t looked her up, afterwards. I’d avoided her. She would occasionally send me letters, which I would ignore. She’d finally tracked me down – two years later – by pestering my parents until they gave her my latest address. I had been flattered that she’d made the effort. She didn’t phone, just turned up one day and hugged me. I misinterpreted that, but she didn’t hold it against me.

  So, she thought that my problems started at Borth.

  ‘I think they did,’ I said. It was true. Perhaps my hallucinations were fallout from the experiment.

  ‘I’d be careful, digging things up,’ said Roger.

  ‘He can be careful,’ said Tina. ‘He can go right on being careful until he gets one of these things while he’s driving home, and then he can be carefully cut out of the wreckage. I think he needs to get to the bottom of this. Going back to the source of it might help. I did pass my course, you know.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Roger.

  ‘So let’s help him along. I still think that these things might be manifestations, things that you’re dragging out of your imagination. What do you want to do about it?’

  ‘I don’t want to do anything,’ I said. ‘I’m frightened to go back to Borth.’

  ‘Perhaps we won’t need to,’ said Tina. ‘Perhaps we could talk to Betts. He helped to set the whole thing up, so he might be able to tell you what to do. I could try calling the college for you.’

  ‘There won’t be anyone there at this time of night.’

  ‘I’ll call tomorrow then. I’ll let you know what I find out.’

  I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted her to find Betts. I’d spent a lot of time getting safely away from Borth. Perhaps it would be sensible to let sleeping dogs lie. By that time the crab cakes were cold and the wine seemed to have partially congealed. It was no longer very pleasant. It felt too thick and heavy. So did my head.

  Tina started to clear things away to the kitchen.

  ‘What has she told you?’ I asked Roger when she was out of earshot. ‘About Borth?’

  ‘She’s told me quite enough,’ he said. ‘I know about the business with the mirrors. Haven’t you ever wondered why she got you to do that?’

  ‘We got paid for it.’

  ‘Did you really?’

  Of course not. I was off to the West Midlands before anyone could give me any money.

  ‘Well, T
ina did. I ran off.’

  ‘Yes, she did. Which is why I asked you whether you ever wondered why she got you involved in it?’

  Tina returned before I could ask him what he was talking about.

  ‘Been chatting?’ she asked. ‘Good, I like to see everyone getting along. I didn’t get anything for afters, there was a queue at the co-op. I think we’ve got some biscuits, if you’re still hungry at all?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Cheer up. It won’t be that bad. At least you’ll get things sorted.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Good. Well, let’s have another glass of wine. And I’d quite like a full one this time.’

  III

  After that, the evening was uncomfortable. Tina and Roger were quietly but palpably at loggerheads about something. I was worried about tracking down the source of my problems. I was also worried about what Roger had said about Tina.

  For an hour or two I tried to get him away from her, but wherever we went she’d turn up with an imaginary job to do. In the end I said that I had to go and left them to the washing up. Tina gave me a light hug, Roger gave me a heavy look. As the door closed I could hear them beginning to discuss me.

  Away from the amber glow of their house, the sky had turned darker than the river. Night was well on its way. There were no stars and the moon was half-cut and blurred, sitting behind a skein of thin cloud. The ducks had all left the water to stand on the river bank with their heads turned back to front. The chip-shop windows had been turned opaque by steam; inside, indistinct forms queued. The antique shops were all closed, the pubs were all open. There was no traffic, and even with the streetlights glowing it felt as though Bewdley was still in the early eighteenth century. It felt as though I was in a different time.

  I didn’t hear the footsteps at first. They were in time with my own, trailing me. When I heard them I stopped, and they stopped a step or two later.