by Nikki Owen
He hesitates, a frown spreading on his forehead and then, finally, he grabs my arms and though I flinch at the touch, he drags me across the throng of people through the dance floor.
It is awful. Crowds of heads and bodies and arms dance and gather all around me without, it seems, any specific direction as to where they are going. It is all random, the movements of the people, the shouting and laughing and screeching setting off all the time around me like fireworks and, as Chris pulls me along, someone bumps into me, then another and another, and each time it makes me jump and I look to them, unsure as to why they would be touching me, the shock of the sensation temporarily forcing me to lose any flicker of focus I may have. And then I move again and I say to myself, Get across the room. Get to the exit. Get away from the people firing guns. I say it over and over, fixate on the verbal process, hoping it will be my thread line out, but the music beat is heavy and I lose the trace of my thought. Desperate as we move, jostled, I start reciting mathematical theory to give my mind even a tiny bit of order and numerical control until, finally, we reach the far exit where a metal bar shoots across and where the noise just slightly dissipates.
Chris comes to my side. ‘Are you okay? You’re murmuring.’
I try to focus and watch his lips move. The ear buds are still in and I take one out and try to slow down.
‘I have never been to a club,’ I say, gulping.
‘I … right, right.’ He pauses, glances round the room then looks back to me. ‘Breathe, yeah? Do what you told me to do back when I was shot and breathe.’
I do as he says, feel the tightness in my chest lighten a little as the music in the club changes to a slower beat.
‘Awesome!’ Chris says, grinning. ‘Taylor Swift! This one’s called Begin Again. You like it? It’s different from her other ones, cos this one’s about hope, you know, not breaking up and stuff, and …’
Chris talks on as I blink and look round and see that, mercifully, the neon lights have faded to be replaced by lower, orange yellow glows that fall in soft puddles on the floor as couples now, men and women, women and women, men and men, they all stand two by two, their arms locked around one another’s hips, swaying to the slow tune, to the chorus and words and gently sung melody, and I get a feeling, a sensation in my stomach of a knot, a knot that leaves a hole behind it that I want to fill but I don’t know how.
Chris stops talking about Taylor Swift and tugs at my arm. I flinch and he pulls away.
‘Why do people find this kind of environment gratifying?’
He shrugs. ‘I dunno, it’s … it’s fun I guess.’
I look round. Fun. I consider the word. ‘Fun,’ I say, turning now to Chris.
He smiles. ‘Yeah.’ He pauses, makes eye contact and I force my eyes to do the same, not allowing them to look down as they automatically tend to do, but instead direct them at Chris’s face, then look away, then back again, trying to mirror what he is doing without it ending up in me staring at him for too long.
‘Are … you all right?’ he says as I am trying to copy what he does.
‘What?’
‘You said what again.’ He grins and shrugs his shoulders. ‘See? Fun.’
Ahead of us there is an exit and as Taylor Swift continues to sing, I shuffle past Chris, stop and observe the door. For a second, I switch from the door and watch from the muffled cocoon of the headphones the swell of arms and legs entangled on the dance floor, the smiles plastered to drenched twenty-something-year-old faces. And I think: Is this what it looks like, fun? Is this what I have missed?
Chris catches up.
‘We are going out this way,’ I tell him, pointing to the door that, from what I can deduce, should take medium force to prise open.
‘This one? Isn’t it wired?’
‘Negative. There is no alarm or trigger, so therefore no alert can be generated, therefore keeping our cover safe.’
‘What?’
I point to the door. ‘We have to go through the exit.’ Chris leans in. ‘What? Did you say you want me to open it?’
‘No, I can do—’
‘I’ll do it. Don’t you worry.’ Stepping in front of me, he pulls at the handle, but nothing budges. Moving back, he smears sweat from his brow, and, sizing up the exit, he then proceeds to slam his body into the door, his torso lighting up an orange slow-dance glow as he travels forward. Yet, still the door remains shut.
‘Ow.’ Chris rubs his arm. ‘Fuck.’
‘It won’t open,’ he shouts as I barge past him. ‘We need another way out.’
The music has increased in volume and I can feel myself beginning to zone out again. I have to get out of here.
‘Move.’
Chris frowns. ‘What?’
But a neon light flashes, just one, and, with the crowd ahead laughing now, shouting, the cacophony of voices rising, I don’t want to spend a second longer in here. Taking a run up, I ram myself into the door, so hard, so desperate to escape that the exit, when I smash into it, flies open on the first go and I spill out into the fresh air, coughing as I catch my breath.
Chris runs out behind me, slamming the door shut. ‘Fuck, you’re strong!’
I catch my breath, relieved to be outside in the quiet, the music from the club now a low hum of beat that hits my feet on the floor but nothing else. Spitting out the stale air of the club to the road, I lift my head and immediately begin to scan the alleyway. It is dimly lit under the umbrella of dark clouds and weak sunshine, and when I breathe in I get old cigarette smoke, bitumen and distant damp vegetation.
I check the time. ‘We need transport.’
‘Oh. Right. Yeah.’
Turning to the right, I start to scour the road and spot a lone red car, small, Spanish-made, box-shape and sturdy. I stride over to it and find myself wondering who left it here. A young university student, perhaps, or a local waitress working the summer in Barcelona who’s now on a trip home to see her boyfriend, catching up with old school friends, maybe. I find myself contemplating what that must be like, to be free to move without hiding, how nice that must be.
Chris catches up and as he looks around, I am already examining the vehicle. I have never, to my knowledge, broken into a car before, but it could be possible that I have done so whilst with the Project, whilst influenced by drugs or by something or someone. I think through what I need to do, and so deep in thought am I that, at first, I don’t hear the click. It sounds again, and I jump, alert, but when I scan the car, I get a surprise: Chris is in the passenger seat.
‘How did you break in?’
‘I didn’t,’ he smiles, all teeth. ‘The door was open. And look.’ He holds out a palm. ‘The keys were in the glove box.’
‘Oh. Okay.’
‘So let’s hit the road, yeah? Go get Balthus. Don’t want to run into, you know, those guns again.’
‘Yes.’ I glance up and down the road and check that all is clear. ‘Yes. Where are we going? Our final destination—I do not know it as I thought it best I did not in case we were captured.’
‘Huh? Oh, right. We’re going to the monastery, to Montserrat Monastery. It’s straight on—just take a left at the top then just keep following the road on up. It’s only five or so minutes away.’
Slipping into the driver’s seat, I take the keys, watch the mirrors and start the engine. I throw a sideways glance at Chris. He is checking his shoulder wound and wincing and as I watch him, a strange thing happens: I smile.
He looks straight at me. I whip my head forwards, my features arranging themselves back into a frown.
‘Um, Maria?’
‘What?’ I say, eyes ahead, not daring to look, adrenaline rushing into my bloodstream.
‘You’ve still got my headphones on.’
‘Oh.’ I look down at myself. The wire is swinging in front of my abdomen, the bottom if it gathering in a circle in my lap.
Feeling my cheeks flush, I slip off the headphones, hand them to Chris and, wiping sweat from my face,
kick in the clutch and start to drive away. Even though my eyes are focused on the road, I sense Chris staring at me then he leans his head back and closes his eyes.
In the mirror I see his face, see his chest rise and fall. I drive counting each breath and find the way it moves in time with my own gives me a strange sense of comfort.
Chapter 20
Undisclosed confinement location—present day
Ramon opens the lid of the blue box by his side and extracts something that I realise with a gasp is my journal from my childhood and teenage years. The cover is hard and black, the word Journal embossed in gold lettering on the front, and when Ramon handles it, his fingers sliding over the once-shiny casing, his tips touch two initials that sit tucked in the bottom right corner of the front page.
‘Initial M.M,’ Ramon says now, his eyes on the journal then rising, slowly, to me. ‘It’s in Papa’s writing.’
I feel suddenly unsafe, vulnerable, but I cannot pinpoint why. I shift in the seat, the rope on my wrists and ankles digging into my skin so I can feel it against my bone. ‘How did you get my journal?’
His hand glides over the cream pages as he opens the book and, when he glances upwards, his eyes are damp. ‘It was at Mama’s house.’
I blink in the semi-dark, thinking. He is right: I stored my journal along with others at Mama’s before I left for England and my secondment in the London hospital. So why can I recall that and not the events in the run-up to my arrival here?
I look over to Ramon where he sits now on the crate and try to understand what is happening. The torch he has brought shines bright over to the far wall and I want to look round, study what sits behind me, but, each time I move my neck, a sharp pain shoots from my shoulder right down to the base of my spine, and my muscles cry out to be relieved of the stress position that has been continuing now for a long time.
Beside me, the timer ticks. I track it, focusing on the ordered sound of it, getting some small relief from it, from the odd routine in the chaos the predictability of it provides. If I can determine the space between each dose of the drug I am being administered, I can perhaps determine what drug it is, but it will be hard. Many medicines are given at similarly consecutive doses, and the only hope I have is diagnosing which drug I believe the Project may have used.
Which drug my brother may have used.
‘So,’ Ramon says now, ‘let’s look through your journal.’
Panic flies up. ‘No.’
He pauses, looks up. ‘M, it’s okay.’ He turns to a page and lets his finger trace the words that I see, in the weak light, are mine, scribbled years ago when I tracked my thoughts every day, when I was trying to forge a record of what was happening to me, even though I could not fully remember it all. I start to get hot. I start to run through scenarios of possible negative outcomes and eventualities in my head as I imagine what events could happen if anyone reads my private thoughts. There is such a thing as too much information. That’s why I don’t like to look into people’s eyes.
‘Let’s see,’ Ramon says now, ‘if this journal of yours will help you.’ He breathes out. ‘If it will help us all understand a little bit more about you.’
‘Ramon, no.’
But, instead of halting, he turns one more page and as his fingers move, the timer beside me ticks and ahead a spider scurries along the soot-stone floor and disappears into a hole that the darkness swallows up in one, single bite.
Montserrat mountain, nr. Barcelona.
25 hours and 20 minutes to confinement
The clouds are swollen and black, the sun struggling to push past as we drive up the mountain to reach the abbey.
The car we have taken is old and the tyres splashy and so each time I take a turn on a bend in the road, we jostle inside the vehicle and I have to make myself focus on what we are doing, where we are going in order to stay calm.
I have not detected the black van since we began the last leg of our journey. Chris now checks the road, his head hanging out of the seemingly permanently rolled down window and as I watch him, I worry that, because we have stolen a car, we will be jailed.
‘We must return the car,’ I say, taking a left then a right as the route chicanes up to the mountain top.
Chris drags his head back into the car. ‘What did you say?’
I repeat my sentence and he rakes his fingers through his hair where the wind has shaken it up.
‘You’re worried aren’t you?’
I do not reply, but instead grip the steering wheel, not wanting to contemplate prison and jail and ever being caught again.
‘Look,’ Chris says now, ‘think of it as … borrowing. We are simply borrowing the car and we will return it. Okay?’
I think about this. ‘Okay.’
The sun bursts out suddenly casting rays of struggling light onto the car bonnet, shrivelled petals of burnt orange scattering onto the trees by the roadside, onto the rocks and the old buildings and onto the birds that swing together in packs of pendulums across the marble sky.
I wind down the window and a breeze drifts in. The air is chilled with thick, damp moss and I shiver. As I do, Chris looks over to me but says nothing, and I find myself thinking that I am glad he can cope with my silence. Outside, bats click in the clouds, the ink-swirled sky streaked with their flying shadows and as we drive upwards near our final destination now, the serrated edges of the Montserrat mountain dominate the skyline, sharp, unforgiving blades slicing into the sky.
The breeze picks up to a wind, and goose pimples pop up all over my skin. ‘I am cold.’
‘I saw a blanket on the back seat,’ he says. ‘You want that?’
‘Yes,’ I say, then hesitate. ‘Please.’
Chris secures the blanket on my lap as I continue to drive. I concentrate. The touch of his fingers on my legs, the smell of him is distracting, his odd, sugary baking mixture sweat blending with the damp, pungent vegetation of the outside air. Chris’s hair flops to his eyes. I fight back the urge to brush it away.
When we arrive at Montserrat Monastery, the scalp of the sun peeks out from behind an army of dark clouds, throwing a deep pink glow over the terrain as if it had been dipped in a vat of candy, while behind us, the dust from the road sparkles a phosphoresce of light and colour that dances in the wind and swirls ropes of deep orange in the sky.
I release my foot a little on the gas and the vehicle slows.
‘So,’ Chris says, craning his head at the view, ‘d’you know this area?’
I scan my data banks. ‘Our destination is Santa Maria de Montserrat—it is a Benedictine abbey,’ I say. ‘The mountain it sits on is 1,236 metres above the valley. The monastery is forty-five kilometres from Barcelona and was founded in 1025 AD.’
From the corner of my eye, I see Chris’s stare. ‘You’re like a human Google.’
‘I am not.’
He smiles. ‘Google.’
I steal a glance.
Pulling the steering wheel round, I inch the car forwards by a corner, edging through a small chicane until, curving the final bend, we see it: Montserrat Monastery. It rises into the horizon, looming ahead into view, an ancient, colossal, religious sanctuary of sand-coloured stone blocks and arches so high that even the bloated rain clouds behind cannot barge past.
I drive forward, staying slow, searching for a suitable place to park. ‘Balthus said to meet here, yes?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Chris says nodding then, frowning, leans forward. ‘Hang on a minute, is that..?’
I follow Chris’s eye line and shriek. I slam on the brakes, slide the car against the abbey wall and, flinging open the car door, run out.
‘Hey!’ Chris shouts. ‘Wait!’
But I ignore Chris’s shout and instead sprint across the wide-open courtyard, stumbling as I run, scraping the heels of my palms against a low wall, the fabric of my jeans chaffing my skin, but I don’t care because she is here. Balthus connected with her and brought her, and now she is safe.
I scr
eech to a halt. There, just two metres from me now standing next to Balthus, is my friend. Relief, joy, happiness all rush up inside my head, the emotions coming fast, all at once and the only way I can let it out, the only way I can process it is to whoop and clap over and over, unable to stop the feelings from leaking, neurologically ill-equipped to know how to keep a lid on it all.
‘Patricia!’
‘Doc!’ Patricia runs over. ‘I thought I’d never see you again.’
The smile on my face is so wide, my cheeks ache. ‘You are here! Are you safe? Why did you come?’ My words tumble out so fast that my head starts to spin and I have to really concentrate on my breathing to slow down.
‘You okay? You good? Doc, I couldn’t stay away. I was so worried about you, and Balthus got in touch after everything that happened in London. He said Dr Andersson was after you.’
‘The Project have not found you?’
‘No.’ She smiles. ‘They’ve not been in touch at all.’
I keep my eyes wide open, not wanting to close them, scared that if I do, she may, like a magician’s assistant, disappear and I will be without her again, without my guide. She looks the same as I remember her, the same long limbs, same giraffe neck, same skin the colour of milk with tattoos on her arms of a blackbird and the Virgin Mary, and when I sniff the air her familiar scent of warm baths, soft towels and talcum powder drifts back to me.
‘You are not in prison,’ I say.
‘No.’ Her shaven head glistens under the sun. ‘They put me on parole.’
‘Parole,’ I say, trying out the word as if it were the first time. I sniff her again, the smell of her skin giving me an instant comfort I haven’t felt in six months or more.
She raises her hand to mine and slowly, I do the same. They rise, our arms, inch after inch until, finally, our fingers fan out—one, two, three, four, five—and touch, our way of communicating, my safety net. We stand there smiling as I inhale her scent some more and I think of a tiny bird flying in the sky, and in my heart and head I feel elation, sheer elation. We remain like that, the two of us connected until, gradually I turn, vaguely aware of two other bodies close by.
