Heartstream

by Tom Pollock

  Who on earth are they?

  I haven’t had a chance to look at the handset since it booted up. A cloud of blocky apps obscures the wallpaper, but when I sweep them aside, I see two pretty young girls in braids and braces, grinning right into the camera. They’re definitely sisters, maybe even twins. I’ve never seen them before.

  A stock photo, maybe? Perhaps it was just the wallpaper the thing came with and Mum had never bothered to change it; but generic wallpaper’s normally sunsets or tropical frogs or some similarly bland picturesque shit, isn’t it? Not actual, real people.

  Banging on the door makes me jump. My mouthwash-slicked fingers slide over the phone and, for a heart-stopping moment, I almost drop it between my thighs into the toilet bowl.

  “What are you doing in there?” Polly yells through the wood.

  “What do you want? A lecture in biology?”

  “I haven’t heard anything in a while.”

  “I’m just waiting for the last few … drops,” I snap back. “After the last time you locked me up, I don’t know when my next toilet break is coming, so I’m making the fucking most of it!”

  That seems to shut her up, for the moment at least.

  I eye the bolt on the toilet door. It’s no thicker than a pencil, the screws holding it in already halfway out of the wall (another tiny chaos Mum would never have tolerated). Polly could easily have it open if she wanted. I don’t have long.

  My thumb hovers over the text icon, but in a momentary spasm of uselessness, I realize I don’t know either of Dad or Charlie’s numbers by heart. I stab the email app instead.

  The inbox loads, and I just gawp. The screen is full of names I’ve never seen before.

  Suzanne Jamieson

  Zaha Patel

  Nick Groomsman

  I scroll down, glancing from the names to the subject lines:

  Re: Bed Availability in G Ward

  Dosage limits for alprazolam in advanced cases

  I feel a little pang in my heart. Is that why Mum kept her secret phone? Was she maintaining a private dialogue with her doctors? Maybe she thought we were sugar-coating her diagnosis, and wanted it from them straight.

  I think of her moving through the house each night, setting it in place for the coming day. How badly she needed order in her world; how much the chaos in her cells must have terrified her. This was as close as she could get to control.

  I open the top email in her inbox. Dear Ben, it begins. I blink. Did I just happen to land on a misaddressed email first time out?

  I tab back out and go to the next one. Dear Ben,

  And the next one. Ben.

  Hi Ben!

  Dear Dr Smith.

  Dear Ben…

  I exit the email app and breathe out, staring at the two smiling girls. I was wrong. Mum didn’t keep this phone to talk to her doctors. It wasn’t her phone at all.

  Mum nicked some doctor’s phone?

  My mind races. Is there some kind of app only doctors have, maybe? Something to do with prescriptions? Was she sneaking her own meds? But it’s not like there were any drugs they refused to prescribe her; and anyway, where did she get the damned thing?

  More banging on the door, and I start, sweat stippling my forehead.

  “Are you all right in there, Amy?” Polly sounds genuinely concerned.

  “Hang on!” I scramble, and yank the flush. “Just washing my hands.”

  I move to go back into the email app – I’ll work this out later; for now, I need to get a message to Dad – but my fingers are trembling and I hit the wrong icon: not email, but the friendly green maps one that’s right next to it. Swearing under my breath, I go to close out of it, but then I freeze. The little blue dot showing the location of the phone has appeared on screen, but the map it’s overlaid on doesn’t show our street. It doesn’t even show London.

  According to this phone’s GPS, it’s in a big house at a crossroads surrounded by fields in the middle of Surrey. Which is weird because, looking out of the narrow bathroom window, I can see a street sign with an SE22 postcode.

  I stand frozen for several seconds, the slamming of my pulse in my ears drowning out the taps as I fight to make sense of it. Polly could be hammering the door down right now and I don’t think I’d hear her.

  I think back to the invoices strewn across the living room. Invoices for the digital security Mum sold, protection against the million and one dirty tricks someone on the Internet can use to sneak into your online life. I was wrong about her for the second time in as many minutes. This phone isn’t stolen.

  It’s a clone.

  The handset’s here with me in East Dulwich, but the operating system it’s reading from is loaded onto its twin in the leafy Home Counties.

  I exhale. I’m shaking so hard, the map in front of me blurs. A voice swims up out of my memory.

  She never threw anything away.

  The tone Polly said that in – it wasn’t a surmise based on the contents of our living room drawers – she said it like it was a long-recognized fact. She didn’t guess it; she knew it.

  She knew Mum.

  Mum never threw anything away she thought might be useful one day, but she never kept anything without a purpose either. There are lots of reasons you might keep a secret phone; there are probably a few you’d keep a stolen one; but there’s only one reason you’d keep a cloned one …

  … to spy on the owner of the original.

  I shoot another glance at the bathroom window. It’s too small to climb out of, but she’s diligently sealed it with bomb tape anyway. Thorough, methodical, just like Mum.

  I don’t know what the connection is between my mother and the woman in a bomb vest waiting not so patiently for me to finish evacuating my bladder, but I’m starting to think that maybe, just maybe – despite her streamer’s haircut – I’m not it.

  There’s a loose tile where the floor was cut to install the toilet. It’s the work of a moment to turn off the phone – I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to charge it – jam it in the gap and replace the tile.

  “OK.” I set my shoulders, staring myself down in the mirror. “I’m coming out.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Cat

  The dancers loom over me in their weathered finery. I gaze up at them on the pitted walls. On each of their corroded faces, I picture an expression that Ryan might wear: shocked, delighted, furious, betrayed.

  Trembling, I rub my thumb over my phone. His reply still shows on the lock screen.

  What’s the rush? OK, I’ll be there as soon as I can.

  I’m not sure why I chose the Dance Hall. Maybe because, even now, it’s the place I’ve felt closest to him, and I hope he feels the same. Right now, I feel like I need all the help I can get.

  “I dreamed last night I rode a white horse, rode a white horse to the ocean,” I sing softly, my breath ghosting out into the lamp light. “And the white-crested waves, they crashed in the caves, but there was never a sound of you. So I rode to New York, but amid all the talk and the traffic and noise and commotion, the yellow cab drivers and far-war survivors they hadn’t heard tell of you…”

  I go on, my voice getting stronger and stronger with each verse. I vaguely wonder what passing strangers on the street outside would make of the mysterious pop ballad B-side coming out of the condemned building, but it feels better than the silence, so I keep singing.

  “I rode my white horse to a secret city, the streets were paved with staaaars …”

  “… but wherever I ride, I know I’ll decide to stay wherever you are.”

  He’s standing by the entrance, one hand still pushing the hoarding aside as his voice dies in the air. He smiles that perfect, curious smile and at once I’m ashamed I ever doubted him. Of course he’s here; of course he’ll stay with me. Ryan loves me.

  I quirk an eyebrow at him. “You just happened to arrive on that line?”

  “Well, you know, fifty per cent of everything is” – he pauses dramatic
ally for long enough to cross the rubble-strewn floor and kiss me – “timing.”

  I laugh. “Which means you’ve been waiting out there since the third verse, waiting for your cue.” Listening to me sing, I think, but don’t say. I feel a hot pinprick in each cheek at the thought, but it’s not unpleasant.

  “Middle of the second, but not because I wanted to make a dramatic entrance. I just like listening to you. Besides, in this place, it felt appropriate.”

  “Why in this place?”

  “Look down.”

  I do. At first all I see is dust, small stones and mouse droppings, but then I notice the way the street lamp glow, peeping in through the manifold holes in the roof, speckles the floor with points of light.

  The streets were paved with stars…

  “‘White Horses’ is about this place?” I ask, agog. “This is your secret city?”

  He beams at me, and suddenly I feel so close to him, knowing that this place, so precious to us both, is the foundation of my favourite song.

  “What’s the emergency?” he asks, breathing on his hands and rubbing them. I guess it’s cold, but I can’t feel it. You could sear steak on my forehead right now – I suppose that’s the baby. That’s every second thought in my head now – I suppose it’s the baby. Knees hurt: baby, a bit dizzy: baby, funny gurgle in my abdomen: baby. I listen to my body like a little girl listens to an old house she’s been told is haunted, attributing every creak and shudder to the mysterious presence growing inside me.

  “If this is a pretext for a late-night hook-up,” he says as he wraps his arms around my waist, “then don’t get me wrong, I applaud the thought, but we’ve got a morning TV slot tomorrow, and the bags under my eyes look like a pair of fat dudes in hammocks as it is, so…”

  “I know,” I stammer, “I’m … I … I’m sorry, I just…” My pulse is hammering hard, and that makes me think of the baby’s even faster heartbeat; and for a split second, against all reason, I think he’ll hear it, that my secret will give itself away before I can get the words out.

  “Hey, hey, what’s wrong?” He tilts my chin up and gently presses his lips to mine until I stop shaking.

  “I’m so hot it’s a wonder I haven’t set you on fire,” I mutter.

  He laughs. “Can I get a judge’s ruling on that? Ding! Unanimously agreed. And extra points for the confidence.” He pulls himself in closer. “That’s a turn-on.”

  “No, I mean physically hot.”

  “So do I.”

  “I mean, like, thermodynamically. I suppose it’s the baby—”

  We both freeze, me with my mouth still shaping the word so it trails out babeeeeh, into the empty air.

  I’m the first to recover the power of speech … ish. “I didn’t mean to … that wasn’t… It just came out… I…”

  I had a super complex triple-backflip dive planned into this conversation, and instead I just belly-flopped because I misjudged the length of the board. Oh well, I’m in it now. He’s still gaping at me like he’s been put on pause, so I grab his hand and lurch awkwardly into the silence.

  “I … I am. I’m pregnant. It’s been almost three months but I only found out yesterday. And yes, I’m scared and a little freaked out, but I’m also happy.” I breathe out long and slowly.

  He opens his mouth, but before he can speak, I say, “And I’m keeping it.”

  He blinks. His mouth is still open. He shuts it again.

  “Ryan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know you didn’t say any actual words just then, right?”

  “Yeah.” He blinks again and shakes his head like he’s just waking up. “Yeah, sorry. I, uh, three months? How is that even possible?”

  “Well, when, um, a mummy bear and a daddy bear—”

  “I mean, how did you not know?”

  I shrug. “It’s not like I’ve ever done this before. I had a bunch of things that are symptoms of pregnancy but they’re also symptoms of, like, six hundred and fifty-seven other things I found on WebMD.”

  “I just figured you’d know, like in your gut.”

  “I don’t have some earth-magic mystic insight into the contents of my uterus, Ry. I find out what’s going on in my body the same way you do – a bunch of vague and confusing signals, a dollop of wishful thinking and an eventual trip to the doctor.”

  “But you’re sure.”

  “I’ve had a scan. I saw both feet. Yes, I’m sure.”

  He winces. “I mean … you’re sure about keeping it.”

  A knot ties itself in my gut. “Yes,” I say. I’m trembling, but I make my voice firm.

  “’Cause you’re—” And thank God, thank God, thank God, he catches himself. “I mean, we’re pretty young.”

  I tighten my grip on his hand. “I’m old enough to know what I want.”

  He swallows hard. In his eyes I can see him going through the same process I did, flipping down possible futures like faces on a game of Guess Who. I watch him anxiously, hoping he’ll like the one that’s left. He seems to study me back, as though trying to gauge my thoughts. His eyes dart from my face to my stomach to my hands and back again. He looks around at his secret city, closes his eyes, and breathes out. He looks at me for a long time. I smile at him, trying not to let my desperation show.

  “Well,” he says, “I think it’s great.”

  “You … do?”

  “Yeah! I mean, you know I’ve always wanted to be a dad, right?”

  I actually didn’t know that. Before I came, I pored over his last year of interviews like they were the entrails of a chicken, trying to divine some sense of how he might react. He was asked, of course, about his plans for a family, for a future, but all we got was a vague “Right now I’m focused on the music” robo-response.

  “I mean,” he goes on, “it’s a lot to take in, of course, but…” He gives me the smile I know from seventeen music videos, five album covers and one point nine bajillion magazine spreads. “We’re going to have a baby.”

  Abandoning all pretence at coolness or control, I fly at him and hang off his neck, kissing his cheeks and his forehead and then finding his lips and melting into them.

  When, at last, I come up for air, I ask, “How should we tell people?”

  He looks at me sharply. “You want to go public now?”

  “Don’t you?”

  He hesitates. “Yeah, yeah, of course I do, but … it’ll be carnage. The full-on Cirque du Pap, every inch of your life, every minute of your day. I want to spare you that if I can.”

  “And can you?”

  He sucks in air through his teeth and thinks about it. “No.”

  OK, that’s blunt. He must see my expression, because he rushes to reassure me.

  “But we can ease it, together, maybe. If we’re careful. Besides, you were always as keen as I was to keep this quiet.”

  Only because I didn’t want my head decorating the spikes on Evie’s fancy wrought-iron bedstead, I think, and my stomach hollows out a little at the thought of her face. My brain races away, composing the tweets and notes and updates, imagining the digital munitions that I have no doubt are heading my way. Still, avoiding that is just one of the options I don’t have any more.

  I guess that’s the baby.

  “I don’t think quiet is an option, Ry. I’ve only seen it on TV so far, but from what I understand childbirth is noisy. And messy.”

  He makes a face. “We’ve got time before that.”

  “Six months,” I say. “Three at the most until I start to look like I swallowed a VW Beetle, which might prompt a question or two from my more inquisitive friends.”

  “OK.” He starts to pace, the rubble on the old music hall floor cracking under his heels. “OK. Leave it with me, OK? We’ve got … people who do this kind of thing for a living.”

  “Have your babies?”

  “Tell the press about them.”

  “Your babies? You’ve got enough love children out there that it’s an industry
?” I’m teasing him, still glowing with his affirmation we’re going to have a baby. But he doesn’t laugh.

  “I mean, these people help us with sensitive news, so we can control the story when one of us makes a…” He tails off, not wanting to say mistake. But I know that’s what he was going to say, and even though I know it’s the truth (and it’s not like it was deliberate on my part either) it still feels like a little punch in the stomach.

  He sees my reaction and comes back to me, cupping my head in his hands. “I love you, OK? Trust me. Do you trust me?”

  I look deep into eyes that, just six months ago, I never would have believed would look back into mine.

  “Of course I do.”

  “It makes a huge difference, how this kind of thing breaks. And our guys, they’re the best at making sure it happens the right way. So please, please, Cat, don’t tell anyone. Leave it up to me.”

  His eyes are so wide and earnest and worried for me that I can’t help but nod.

  “Soon, though, right? As secrets go, this is a big one to keep, and it’s getting bigger by the day.”

  “I’ll call them about it this week,” he promises, and kisses me, as though sealing my silence with his lips.

  My phone buzzes in my coat pocket. I dig it out and look at it over his shoulder. It’s from Evie. I slide the message open and suddenly feel like the inside of my stomach has iced over. This time I don’t think it’s the baby.

  The message is one word – Explain – and a link. The URL says it’s to The Sun’s website. Fear parches my throat, but there’s nothing for it. I thumb the link.

  IS THIS THE VOICE OF RYAN’S SECRET SQUEEZE?

  Below it is an embed of Ryan’s disastrous parkour video; it links back to YouTube, which is weird, because I’m sure he originally posted it to his Instagram.

  “Ry?”

  “Yes, babes?”

  “You know when you posted that video of you doing parkour to your Instagram?”

  “Yeah?” He’s barely listening. He’s squatting on the rubble, knocking a pair of small stones together, like a bored toddler pretending he’s making two dolls fight.