A Box of Birds

by Charles Fernyhough

  ‘Great. I can come back to your treehouse and play doctors.’

  I stand in the bathroom and pull at the neck of my nightie. There’s a cut on my collarbone where I fell on the metal box. I can feel the sting of the wound on the right-hand side of my skull. I peel back the tape on my left arm and see how my skin has become a blistered smear of Pyronox. I feel different, light-headed, strangely restored. Whoever has tried to hurt me has only made me stronger. Out to destroy me, they might just have made me more the person I am.

  PART THREE

  ◉

  The Moor

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Avatar

  ◉

  Somehow I’m expecting to find my treehouse ransacked, the stove kicked in, all my drawers and cupboards tipped out onto the floor. But my only visitor has been the runaway chimp, McQueen, who has climbed up onto my balcony and eaten all the banana chips I left out before I went to Florida. For all I know, the security man is still roaming the forest with his rifle, his bloodlust no weaker for his now having officially changed his allegiances.

  ‘Christ,’ James says. ‘You really do live in a treehouse.’

  ‘I used to. Once I get sacked from my job I’ll be living under a tree.’

  ‘They won’t sack an innocent victim of terrorism,’ he says, dumping his rucksack on the balcony table. ‘They’ll let you get better first. Hey, wasn’t I going to help you change that dressing?’

  He stands at the rail and looks out over the distant sprawl of Sansom. I fill a hot-water bottle and lay it on the sofa in the living room. I unstick the tape on my arm and check on the glistening, meat-smelling wound. There’s a message on the machine from Daren, saying that Effi was discharged yesterday and is now safely back in front of her TV at Millennium Heights. The world moves on without me. I hold the hot-water bottle to my stomach and feel the pain easing, the bloody forgetfulness of my loss.

  ‘How are you doing?’ comes his voice from outside.

  I go back out onto the balcony, where he’s reading something at the table. I notice the cover of my old science notebook, the moth-death crush of dried flowers under sticky-backed plastic, and my heart makes a fist.

  ‘You could have asked...’

  He frowns, not even the forethought of an apology, and keeps turning the pages of the notebook. I unearthed it at the vicarage last Christmas, and found it so grimly fascinating that I had to bring it back here with me. My fastidious teenage-girly handwriting, neat little haloes crowning the is. How carefully I set them down, these naïve scratchings at all the impossible questions of my childhood. I was barely into my teens when I started writing it, on holiday from my boarding school in Suffolk. A geeky, tallish thirteen-year-old, sprouting in all the awkward places, not even remotely interested in boys. Even then, curiosity was like an itch in my brain, and the only things that could scratch it were hard, bright, indisputable facts.

  ‘I want to understand how conscious humanity could arise from blind evolution ... ’

  ‘I wrote that a long time ago.’

  He runs his finger down to the bottom of the page. ‘Wait, I like this bit. The only way of answering this question is by Science. All we have to go on is the evidence of our senses. It is thoroughly perilous to forget this lesson.’

  I’m hot. I feel like the burn on my arm is fermenting. But I can’t have a shower because of the dressing they taped to me before I left the hospital. All I can do is sit down.

  ‘You believed that, even back then?’

  I can’t tell if he’s serious. He’s worked up about something, but he won’t tell me what it is, and his deflections are so scattergun that I can’t even tell if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that’s happened. He seems to be acting this part, like he acts them all, playing hide-and-seek with the very idea of himself. It’s as though he wants to show off the layers of artifice that shroud a person, to prove the trueness of the self below. If that’s his game, he’s wasting his time. I’m too tired to be convinced of anything.

  ‘I still believe in it, James. It’s because I believe in it that this has happened to me.’

  ‘Sometimes you have to give up on what you’ve always believed in, if you know it’s wrong.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, maybe we’re not going to make any progress until you start believing in something else.’

  ‘Stories, you mean? David Overstrand’s fairy tales? Look, Gareth’s life is in danger. Someone’s just sent me a home-made bomb. I haven’t actually got time for any more stories.’

  He doesn’t answer. He seems caught up in a thought, anxious about where this attack has taken things. His knowing smile has gone. Perhaps it’s his own beliefs that are being threatened here, as much as mine. He looks up, squinting at the sunset further up the dale. April is carrying on where March left off: with radiant sunlight and the scent of resin blurring the air.

  ‘Where did they find me?’ I ask him.

  ‘In the hallway, when they got back from the demo.’

  ‘Were you there?’

  ‘No. They’d gone on ahead. I was staying behind to film the clean-up.’

  ‘And what time was that? How long was I lying there?’

  ‘I don’t know. What do you remember?’

  I see Bridge’s face again, staring into mine. The Lorenzo Circuit gets to work, knitting together its fragments of imagery. Her face coming out of the shadows and blurring in a bar of sunlight. I don’t know if it happened. I don’t know if I’m the same person who opened that box and exploded in pain. But the Circuit convinces me that I am, weaves the connections at the very moment I most need them. Consciousness is a confection, the fantasy of a brain obsessed with finding coherence, and I’ve been trained not to trust it. I remember waking up in hospital; I remember the soft slide of him into me. But maybe they were stories too.

  ‘I can see myself opening the box. I can’t believe I was so stupid. You get trained on this stuff, how to deal with suspect packages. But a bomb would have weighed something. This just seemed to be made of air. I was too out of it. Distracted...’

  The child in the hallway, crying for a way into the light.

  ‘You can’t have been expecting that, Yvonne. No way. You feel safe with us, don’t you? You’re one of us now.’

  It’s funny: I don’t remember making that choice.

  ‘Where did they take me?’

  ‘To the Royal Infirmary.’ He sounds as though he is trying to convince himself of something.

  ‘Straightaway?’

  ‘I don’t know. Bridge called the ambulance.’

  He slides the notebook down onto the table and stretches back, closing his eyes. There’s something vulnerable about the gesture, this cautious determination to make himself at home. It’s not arrogance, for once, but an appeal for protection. It’s as though he’s now ready to say sorry, but the object of his apology keeps leaping out of view. Instead he reaches down to the belt of his jeans and unbuckles it absent-mindedly, then tightens it again. His skin above his waistband is coppery in the sunset.

  ‘We need to get going,’ he says. ‘You ready?’

  ‘I just got out of hospital...’

  ‘You’re fine. The doctors wouldn’t have discharged you if they didn’t think you were fit to go.’

  ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, James, but somebody’s already trying to kill me.’

  ‘They’re trying to scare you. If they were trying to kill you you wouldn’t have just walked out of hospital. The police said it was twenty-five grammes. That’s tiny. That’s why the package was so light. It seems to have released some kind of gas which knocked you out. They want you to promise never to work with animals again. They don’t want a dead vivisectionist. They just want a retired one.’

  ‘Why are they attacking me now? I’ve been working with animals my whole career. Nothing like this has ever happened before.’

  ‘Well, maybe things have finally caught up with you.’

&nb
sp; His fingers make a tense claw on the corner of the notebook. He flips it up and grins at the dried-flower pattern on the cover. I want to believe that this nonchalance is all a show, a sign of how much he’s been scared by this. But I’m not sure. I can’t make sense of him today.

  ‘I need to go online. I’ve got to find out who did this to me...’

  My FireBook clicks out of sleep. The lilac interface of Des*re blooms from the dock. He reaches across and pushes the laptop shut.

  ‘No, Yvonne. You’re not going to learn anything from a networking game. Trading webcams with your secret admirers is not going to tell you who sent you that bomb, any more than it’s going to help you to find Gaz. When he vanishes, he really vanishes. He’s done it before. We’ve got to work this out for ourselves now. You have to try and remember what he said to you.’

  ‘I’ve told you. He didn’t say anything.’

  ‘He must have said something. You’re the only person he trusts. You’re the only one who’s got the information we need to find him.’

  Memory again, overpowering me in a flood. Gareth in the shell of the Memory Centre, staring up through the girders at life forms that could not be seen. Wishing the birds into existence.

  ‘He wants to stimulate people’s memory. He’s got some idea that it’s the secret of human happiness. He’s interested in the technology that Sansom have been working on. I just wish I could see how it fits together ... ’

  ‘OK, so we have to get into the mines. Find out what this technology is that he’s talking about. We have to go down there and see for ourselves what’s going on. That’s the only way we’re going to find Gareth.’

  ‘Why can’t we just go to the police?’

  ‘And tell them what? The bit about you helping Gaz to lay a sniffer on the Lycee’s top-secret system? Or the bit about you rolling up to Sansom in the dead of night and trying to persuade their security men that you’re royalty?’

  I catch him looking at the Chinese amulet. I haven’t taken it off since he gave it to me, the night before everything changed.

  ‘Why are you being like this?’

  ‘I’m not being like anything. I’m the way I am.’

  ‘You’re the way you choose to be.’

  He stares out at the ruins of the sky. There’s a bruised looseness under his eyes, signs of sleeplessness. Sometimes he has the face of a hassled executive, a kind of clammy, bloated frazzlement. I wonder what happened to the face he deserves.

  ‘Things happened to me. They shaped the way I am. The way I am, not the way I choose to be.’

  ‘Your true self?’

  ‘Yeah. OK.’

  ‘Is this about David?’

  He sighs. ‘Everything is about David.’

  ‘Can you tell me about it? Those things that shaped you? Your story?’

  He yawns. ‘What do you think?’

  That haunted look. It’s as though the things that have hurt him were re-running their effects on his face, like those time-lapse photographs where someone speeds towards death in front of your eyes.

  ‘You told David.’

  ‘David told me. I didn’t know what this Bankstown Underpass stuff was all about. I needed him to see it.’

  ‘What happened at Bankstown Underpass?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘What kind of everything?’

  I give him a moment, hoping that he’ll snap back into this reality we used to share. He gets up suddenly, tossing the notebook onto the table.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m going down to the Peer Review. See if anyone wants to get steaming.’

  He doesn’t know the code. He stands at the door, waiting, till I go over and key in the unfunny joke of Mateus’ birth-date. Even with the stairwell open in front of him, he doesn’t move.

  ‘Your problem, Yvonne, is that you can only work at one level of explanation. The rational mind is always trying to take things to pieces and find evidence of its own works. The heart watches, and laughs.’

  ‘So observed David Overstrand?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  He stares into the depth of the stairwell and sways forward alarmingly. You’d think his body was just a way of getting down there, out of here, like a weight a diver might throw to drag himself to record-breaking depths. He puts one hand up on the frame of the door and starts to descend the rough larch steps. At the first landing he pauses briefly, and I think he’s going to throw a glance back at me. But if he did he’d see nothing but the daylight at the top of the stairs. I’m gone, invisible, the floor the lift doesn’t stop at. Whatever he struggled with at Bankstown Underpass, he’ll have to deal with it alone.

  There’s a myth about Des*re. When you reach a certain level of connectivity, the experience changes. The blocky, low-res interface of a computer game is lifted away. The virtual takes on the shimmer of the real. It’s a moment of intense, vertiginous consciousness, the boost of hereness and nowness that can finally link up all your disconnected moments. I always thought it would happen gradually: a slow awakening, the faders of sensation creeping up so minutely that you don’t even notice the reality you’re coming round to. But this is nothing like what I knew before. I’ve made it through to the next level, and it’s a different world.

  There’s no interface, for a start. No lilac banner, no welcome page. As soon as I’m logged on I’m actually there, impossibly in the scene. Somewhere in the hyperlinked world I’m standing in a wet car park on a dreary afternoon. A squally breeze is blowing across the asphalt. I recognise the domed austerity of Sansom’s European headquarters, the lights of the atrium with the insect-black figures of the guards inside. Behind it is the lift housing that Gareth showed me on the camcorder. There’s a red sports car, parked with its passenger door ajar.

  Try your cursor keys.

  The message scrolls up at the bottom of the screen. This hunch that he’s out there. Now. Online.

  I press on the forward arrow. The car comes closer. Surprised at this new responsiveness, I edge forward again. This shouldn’t be happening, but somehow I’m moving through the scene. My visual field is no longer tied to fixed surveillance-cam angles. I’ve become a hand-held consciousness, controlled by cursor keys. Is there someone out there too, a robot Yvonne whose eyes I’m seeing through? Some kick of rationality wants to deny that this is possible, and yet it’s happening: I’m walking towards the car and angling in towards the open door. Beads of rain glisten on the smooth metal of the roof. Inside there’s the silhouette of a man.

  Get in.

  I cursor forward some more. I reach into the drawer, pull out my virtual lights and tug them carefully over my ears. There’s a moment of blankness while the lights connect wirelessly, and then I’m back inside this startling new vividness. In another nudge of the cursor, I’m in the passenger seat of the car. Next to me, with his hands resting on the wheel, is Gareth. He’s sitting, staring out at the building with an ironic, movie-star squint. He’s an avatar, his features smoothed out by computer graphics. Half man, half cartoon. But it’s him.

  You took your time.

  A bored elevator-voice repeats his words back at me through the rain.

  You didn’t make it easy for me, I type. Where are you?

  Come on, Miss. You don’t really think I’m going to trust that information to an internet connection?

  The goggles are like a vice behind my ears. I push my fingers up under the arms and feel the pressure ease on my temples.

  You’re in danger. You have to help us to find you.

  I’ve already told you, Miss. I’ve told you everything I know.

  I wait for him to look at me, but the lights of Sansom have him hypnotised.

  Is this safe? I thought you were trying to hide away.

  Don’t worry. We’re not in the real world. They can’t find us here.

  I look over at the guards in the atrium. They don’t seem to have noticed the people in the parked car.

  How have you done
this?

  I haven’t done it. *You’ve* done it. We’re in a scene from your memory, Miss. You’re telling this story, not me.

  He looks at me through the gloom. His eyes are blue and shining.

  Really? Since when could you hack into my memory?

  I always said I’d turn up when you were least expecting it. You have to go and find the Saxons. They’ll show you how to get down there. Without anyone noticing, that is.

  Into the mines? Have you been there?

  I’m in too much danger. They’re making things very difficult for me. They’re ruthless. I turned down their money, and that made them angry. I need you to do this for me. I think I know what they’re doing, but we’ve got to know for sure.

  And then you’ll tell me where you are?

  You’ll know. If you’ve understood any of this.

  He reaches forward and twiddles the dial of the radio. There’s music, something sawn, something set gently ringing.

  You were hoping I’d have guessed already?

  You need more help. You’ve got to prove to me that you remember what I told you.

  You didn’t tell me anything, Gareth.

  He looks at me. I’ve taken a risk in typing his name. His raytraced eyes have thickened into two fat exclamation marks. Then the blueness returns, and he gives a slow digital smile.

  Listen, I have to go. Send me a signal when you’ve worked it out. Change your icon. I’ve told you everything. I let you into a secret no one else could understand. Not James, not anyone. And now I need you to show me that you care about that. I’ve done my bit, Miss. The rest is up to you.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Saxon Kingdom

  ◉

  I wake up crying. Sunlight answers, tells me I haven’t been to bed. It picks out the scalloping of my laptop keys, skids off the white ceramic of the stove. Reality is here now, and it disappoints. The wallscreen is winter-pale. The sleep light on my FireBook pulses gently. This body I’m stashed in feels soft and heavy, yet somehow veined with fire. It is an awakening so intimate and reliable that I can’t ignore its message: I’ve been dreaming. What I saw back there was all vivid distraction. There’s no getting back to it, knowing what I know.