A Box of Birds

by Charles Fernyhough

  Even if you lost it in the dark, you could try looking where the light is. He’s playing with me, and I hate him for it.

  Gareth reappears at 01:40. He’s been all the way around the back of the main building and is returning from the eastern side. I start the car and reach both hands under the dashboard to the heating vent, waiting for the warmth. Gareth gazes up at a high window, turns on his heels and walks all the way back to the perimeter fence. He turns again and looks back at the coloured diodes of Sansom Central, flickering like a server in a smoked-glass cabinet. The wind blows scatterings of pre-drizzle across the car park, and cones of floodlight stand exposed. After a while he extends the index finger of one hand and holds it horizontally, like a painter measuring the proportions of a scene.

  ‘Come on, Gaz,’ I mutter shiverishly, toeing the throttle up a semi-tone or two.

  I see him glancing back at the car. He seems to remember that I’m waiting for him, and starts moving this way. Then he stops and swings the camcorder to his eye. For a few seconds he films me in the car, the guards in the atrium, then that high eastern corner of the building he’s just been studying. Rain supernovas on the windscreen in front of me. When he starts walking again, he’s headed for the main entrance of Sansom’s headquarters.

  Christ. He’s not stopping.

  A jerk of panic sets the throttle growling under my foot. I watch him climb the steps to the atrium, steadying the swing of the camcorder against his hip. He’s still metres away when the door hisses open. The guards glance up and move hands to their tasers. Their virtual lights will have labelled him already. Intruder. No access privileges. If I leave him to the guards he’ll be sectioned again. But if I go in there after him, I’ll get my own taste of Sansom’s displeasure.

  I kill the engine and get out of the car, just as the night explodes with rain.

  I can see Gareth inside, talking to one of the guards. The storyteller has gone behind the desk and is working at a keyboard. The third has disappeared. I start running. They’re not giving him a hard time, not yet — they’re still working through the possibilities, flicking through a memorised training manual for clues to whether this is a harmless crank or a terrorist attack in the making. Their manner is conciliatory, but they’re a quarter-second from triggering a major alarm. Gareth is probably telling them his plans, trying to sell them his dreams of manipulating the Lorenzo Circuit. They’re long dreams. That gives me time. If I could just tell them that he’s crazy, that he has a history of mania which has sadly just started repeating itself. Then only Gareth’s camcorder will prove that my second visit to Sansom ever happened.

  The door hisses open, and I step through into the glow.

  ‘Morning, Dr Bonham.’

  The bat. It’s still pinned to my coat. But what did he call me?

  ‘Morning,’ I try and breeze.

  Gareth is grinning at the electronic door that leads through into the rest of the building. He seems not to have noticed that the guard has just called me by James’ surname. I can see the spooky optician’s apparatus of the iris scanner.

  ‘I have unusual eyes,’ he’s saying to the guard. ‘I have total control over my iris muscles. As far as your scanner is concerned, I can be anyone I want to be.’

  ‘Tom!’ I say, scrabbling for big-sister authority. ‘I told you to wait in the car.’

  Gareth looks shocked, and then twigs, painfully slowly. He winks at me and starts jiggling about as though his shoes were on fire.

  ‘My brother,’ I tell them. ‘He’s got ... challenges.’

  I twirl an imaginary forelock. The guard lets down a seen-it-all sigh. On the inner screens of his virtual lights I’m labelled as Dr J Bonham, access code blah blah blah. He can’t yet see a photo, and he can’t know that J Bonham is actually one of his employer’s most vociferous opponents, a veteran of animal rights demos at the West Gate and now, apparently, a would-be infiltrator.

  ‘Just step up to the scanner, Doctor, and we’ll get you through.’

  ‘It’s OK. We’re not stopping.’

  I grab Gareth’s arm and pull him towards the door. Then I turn back to the uniform, waylaid by an idea.

  ‘Have you sorted out my second-floor access yet?’

  It’s a dangerous bluff, and I regret it immediately. The guard moves behind the desk and pulls forward the screen, where the full security details of Dr James Bonham are about to be displayed.

  ‘I’ll just check that for you, Doctor...’

  ‘No. Don’t bother. I have to get him home. Mother’s going to be worried sick ...’

  ‘Is this the mother I dream about?’ Gareth says.

  Alnwick Street is deserted. From the footbridge you can see the glowing shell of the Memory Centre, spotlit while its builders sleep. Forty-five kilometres away, fantastic constellations writhe over the city of Pelton. These days the denizens of the sky are animated: the scorpions crawl and the fish shimmer, and they’re each trying to sell you something. Effi is under there somewhere, high in the neglected tower of Millennium Heights. The thought comes with a pang of guilt. I was meant to go over there today.

  ‘That’s the railway line,’ Gareth says. ‘I’m round the back.’

  He’s back in my passenger seat, showing me his home movie of the east wing of Sansom Central. He’s pulled the viewscreen flat so we can both see.

  ‘This building here. The one I thought was the animal wing.’ The viewscreen freezes on a two-storey hump on the back of Gareth’s bunker. ‘It’s housing something.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘That’s the interesting bit. Come on...’

  He gets out and starts walking fast across the footbridge. I can hardly summon the energy to follow him, but I need to get him back home before he can get in any more trouble.

  ‘So how come that bat thing had James’ name on it?’

  ‘I told you, they’re always looking for new ways to get at Sansom. They had this plan to infiltrate the building using fake IDs. Someone managed to hack into the security system and change some of the user details. They’re taking a risk. Sansom play hard. You get on the wrong side of them, you know about it.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re telling me that after we tried to break in there...’

  He’s heading for the Memory Centre. The entire site is surrounded by a yellow hoarding, three metres high. The four-storey skeleton of the building gleams under the floodlights.

  ‘Come on. Let’s get in there before the place opens.’

  He pushes on a small door in the hoarding and ducks through. There’s no sign of any security, although a plaque promises 24-hour video surveillance. The Lycee’s gate-keepers are obviously not the insomniacs that Sansom’s are.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he says, leading me through a tunnel of scaffolding. ‘I come here all the time.’

  ‘You promised me you’d let me take you back home. I don’t even know where you live.’

  ‘I just wanted to show you something.’

  We’re inside the circular shell of the building, looking up at the shadows of its insides. Steel girders are threaded with cables awaiting connection. Furls of silvery insulating material gleam in the faint light. Gareth is just a silhouette in the overspill of arc-light from outside.

  ‘This is it,’ he says. ‘This is how they’re going to celebrate the publication of the map of the Lorenzo Circuit.’

  ‘It’s going to be a kind of museum. That’s what they’re telling us. You’ll come here, you’ll look around, and you’ll remember.’

  He steps over a low foundation wall and walks out into the centre of the circle. I follow him, sensing a mind returning to its obsessions.

  ‘It’s an empty system. It hasn’t learned anything yet.’

  ‘It needs some birds,’ I say.

  He looks up, his eyes moving intently across the space between the girders. I wonder what he can see up there.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We’ve done enough trespassing for one day.’

 
He’s silent for the journey out to his hall of residence. As he sees the low buildings exposed by the moon, he starts moaning a line from The Smiths. I pull in at the side of the empty road, and he gets out and stands there in the open door. His thin body shivers under the grey jacket. He’s understood something about what we’ve seen tonight, but he’s not telling me yet. His big eyes are wet with anxiety. Perhaps he’s trying to say goodbye. I feel like a furred-up disaster of a mother dropping her kid off at boarding school, barely able to wait for the moment when I can go home and drown myself in gin and tears. He slams the door and watches me go; for a moment his white shirt flickers in the corner of my rearview mirror, and then there’s just open road.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Long-Distance

  ◉

  The phone rings.

  ‘Dr Churcher?’

  Four days have gone by. It’s a bright March morning, crisp with fresh snow. Tons of it are snagged in the treetops and plastered to exposed trunk-sides, and now parcel-sized lumps are breaking off in soft small avalanches as the sun gets to work. I’m sitting in my dressing gown on my sofa, waiting for a piece of ash-heart to catch.

  ‘Gareth? Where are you?’

  I can hear traffic. He can’t be at his hall of residence.

  ‘Somewhere very expensive. They’ve got a whole suite of hi-tech conference rooms. We need to get going.’

  ‘I’m not going into business with you, Gareth. Have you told anyone where you are?’

  ‘Of course not. I’m just starting to understand how this all fits together. The trouble is, I think Sansom understand it too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, they seem interested in what I’ve found out. I’m sure they’ll be back. And this time they’ll have an offer I can’t refuse.’

  ‘What are you talking about? How do Sansom know about you?’

  ‘Simple. They have security cameras. I hacked into their network. There are cameras on the gate, in the car park, everywhere. The coverage is impressive.’

  My heart goes into a dive. ‘Are we on there?’

  ‘I could only get their output in real time. I have yet to tap in to the megalith’s memory. But we’ll be on their hard drive somewhere, doing our “Dr Bonham and her demented brother” routine.’

  ‘Don’t remind me. Did you tell James that we went there?’

  He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t seem able to say his old friend’s name. James and I haven’t spoken since that night on the footbridge a week ago. I haven’t been in to the lab in all that time. I’ve been walking in the forest, looking for chimpanzee tracks in the snow, wondering whether, in my drunkenness, I gave James my phone number. And if I didn’t, what stopped me.

  ‘I told him,’ Gareth says. ‘By the way, he says he’s got something for you. But you’ll have to go and pick it up. He’s lazy like that.’

  At least I know now that I didn’t give James my number. Which might explain why he hasn’t called.

  ‘Hang on...’

  There’s a pause. The traffic surges. I can hear Gareth talking to someone in the background, his voice muffledly imperious, the other faint and accented. I’m trying to work out if this is a satellite link. When Gareth vanishes, James told me, he vanishes completely. He could be anywhere.

  ‘Room service,’ he explains, returning. ‘I’ve got a lobster, possibly radioactive, seven slices of synthetic cucumber, and an ice-cold bottle of either liquid nitrogen or champagne.’

  ‘How do you intend on paying for all this?’

  ‘The company is paying. Don’t worry, it’s tax-deductable.’

  A siren wails below his window. Is he back in New York, trying to sell his ideas to PowerServe again?

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘Well, at some point I realise we’re going to have to go down there and see for ourselves.’

  ‘Down where?’

  He pauses. I can hear the cracking of a lobster shell.

  ‘Fluorspar Road. Lead Street. Tin Chare.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The names of the access roads at Sansom. I thought, Shall I tell her this? and then I thought, Well, I’m going to be lying low for a while so I’d better get things straight now.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Gareth. You’ve lost me.’

  ‘They paid them to leave.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The villagers. Sansom came along with a ton of cash and bought the village up house by house, street by street. There weren’t that many of them left anyway. It was a Category D village, earmarked for demolition. The place was a ghost town.’

  ‘What place? What are you talking about?’

  The earpiece fills with eating sounds. I hear the pop of a champagne cork, the sound of pouring.

  ‘The names of the access roads. They’re the names of the streets in a mining village called Echofield. Thousands of people were employed there in the nineteenth century. That land your treehouse stands on is a honeycomb. They found lead, iron, fluorspar, you name it. The mines stretched twenty, thirty kilometres, right up into the dale. I went to County Hall and found the old maps. In 1851 the biggest employer in the area was a mining village called Echofield. Sansom is built on the site where Echofield used to stand.’

  ‘So those streets are the original streets?’

  ‘You learn fast, Agent Churcher. And the railway line is the original mineral line.’

  ‘But those lines are all new...’

  ‘So I thought. When I was round the back I had a good look at the trees. There are oaks there, growing into the sides of the cutting. They have to be at least a hundred units old.’

  I remember James talking about this the other night. The Conscience theory is that Sansom are using the light railway for clandestine deliveries. But any huge corporation needs a transport system, for deliveries of all kinds. I don’t see what Gareth’s trainspotting tells me.

  ‘And that proves what, exactly?’

  ‘I don’t think I should tell you. This is a business secret. You haven’t told me if you’re in or not in.’

  ‘Tell me, and then maybe I can decide.’

  He sighs. There’s a rustling sound as he shifts position on his executive bed. I hope he’s got some clothes on.

  ‘Do you remember that hump on the back of the animal wing?’

  ‘On your video?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it wasn’t the animal wing...’

  ‘It was a motor housing. For a lift shaft. For a lift mechanism, capable of raising huge weights from many hundreds of metres underground.’

  I hear him sipping his liquid nitrogen.

  ‘All right. I give up.’

  ‘Agent Churcher. What was the prosperity of your region founded upon?’

  ‘Minerals? Zinc, tin, lead, whatever...’

  ‘Precisely. And where do minerals come from?’

  ‘They come from the earth. From mines.’

  ‘Then at last we understand. You’ve got a lift shaft going hundreds of metres underground. The tunnels are still there and the lift is still working. Trains are coming in and out, loading and unloading. They’re moving unfeasibly heavy objects up and down this lift shaft every day. They’re doing something down there, something they don’t want anyone to know about. I guessed it, and now I’ve seen it for myself. They’ve kept the layout of the village, the railway line, the entire structure. Sansom’s European headquarters is built slap-bang on top of the Echofield mines.’

  Clairvaux College is deserted. The lawn in the centre of Old Court is trimmed with a pristine carpet of snow. Not a soul walks in the cloister. I feel I should be paying an entrance fee. A hypothermic-looking porter watches me as I clonk through the gatehouse in my non-medieval shoes. I study the wall-mounted map for a moment, and catch sight of the sign for D staircase on a diagonal across the court. James’ room is 5, on the second floor. The names of the inmates are displayed on a board on the landing. James’ slide is flicked
to OUT, but I go up anyway. The stairs are wooden, the landing dark and narrow. I smell vacuum-cleaner bags and desiccated wax. This afterthought of a staircase must lead to a place that’s hardly used, where time hasn’t passed properly, so it can curse entire lifetimes with an agony of still-happening. James hasn’t even started to tell me about his past. Reminders of his presence keep squeezing me inside, and yet I still don’t know the first thing about him.

  That’s not what I’m going to ask him about, though. I’m going to ask if he knows about Sansom being built on the site of the Echofield mines. And I’m going to find out whether that kiss was the beginning of something, or the end.

  After that, who knows.

  There’s no answer from Room 5. I wait, full of lovesick butterflies, and knock again. A radio is playing in the room across the landing. Someone’s left a message on the corkboard next to James’ door, saying they’ll meet him at the Bankstown Odeon at nine. Signed B. Bankstown is in Pelton. The message is undated. I forbid myself to ask the question, but my heart answers it anyway. It’s a girl’s handwriting. He’s not been alone up here.

  The handle to James’ door is cool, brushed steel. It turns easily in my hand.

  Behind it are sunlight and emptiness. If James was ever here, he’s long gone. The bed has been stripped, the bookshelves cleared. If there were once movie posters, pin-ups of women, cars or bands, they were taken down long ago. Somehow I’m surprised that his room looks so ordinary. When I was an undergraduate, this was how they left the room of a girl who hanged herself. Hoovered it, dusted it and shunted it into a siding of time. The residence indicator permanently flipped to OUT. An agony of still-happening.