Heartstream

by Tom Pollock

  “Here you … sorry, I’m still stuck on you wanting to blow up Parliament?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like Guy Fawkes.”

  The smile on his face became blissed out. “Yeah.”

  “Guy Fawkes, who has been burned in effigy annually for four hundred years and counting.”

  “Well, sure, people get tetchy about it, but at least they know his name. All my life, I’ve only ever been a Jenkins of the Beaconsfield Jenkinses; it’s all I’ve ever been going to be. I just wanted people to know who I was.” He came over all misty-eyed.

  “It’s overrated,” I told him. “Trust me.”

  Despite myself, I liked Will Jenkins of the Beaconsfield Jenkinses, with his runny nose and cuffs he chewed when he was thinking. He drew me a (really good) picture of the peonies and I asked Joy for tape so I could stick it to my wall. We met again and again in the garden over that endless summer. He listened, enthralled, to my stories of being flayed alive on the Internet, and in exchange he geeked out to me about explosives, enthusing about the differences between anti-personnel and anti-structural like he was comparing the powers of his favourite superheroes.

  And I talked to him about you. I had to talk to someone or it would have chewed its way out of my chest, and since I wouldn’t talk to Smith and didn’t trust Joy, he was it. I told him about all the love I had for you, bottled up behind my ribs and turning hour by hour, day by day, to acid. I swore blind to him that the moment I got out of that place I was going to find you and cherish you and be the best mum in the world to you.

  And then one day – it was autumn by then; the brown leaves whipped around us in vortices, the wind was vicious and we were the only two outside – he turned to me. “You know they won’t let you out of here while you keep talking about her like that, right?”

  “I don’t talk about her to them,” I said.

  “I know. But still, they know. They know she’s all you think about, and they won’t let you go until you let her go.”

  “Which means they won’t let me go, ever.” I sighed, and felt a kind of settling. I’d known it was true for a while, but it was the first time I’d said it aloud. “Which means it’s time for plan B.”

  I reached into my jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. Puzzled, he took it and opened it out. It was his picture of the peonies, the tape still stuck to its edge because I hadn’t wanted to tear it.

  “Other side,” I said, and he turned it over and read the notes I’d taken in tiny careful handwriting, and which – if everything he’d told me was true – outlined an explosive which could be made from chemicals used on the premises, and was powerful enough to blow through the locks on our doors.

  I squeezed his wrist; his spit-soaked sleeve was freezing against my hand.

  “Can you make this?” I asked.

  A siren-shriek from outside brings me back to myself. My heart lurches up to speed like an outboard motor. I cast about myself. I’m slumped against the door frame of the kitchen, but I don’t know how long I zoned out for.

  Where are you? Where are you? Are you still here? Have you left me, like I left you?

  The world sways and swims around me as I head down the hallway. I can’t remember the last time I slept.

  You’re not in the downstairs loo, or the spartan bedroom that was Evie Simms’s last resting place. Increasingly frantic, I mount the stairs. I push on the door to your room, and there you are, on your side on your bed. Knees tucked in like when I carried you. Duvet rucked around your feet, eyes closed. You never even knew about my lapse of attention downstairs. A pang of longing seizes me, to put that pillow more fully under your head, to tuck that pretty winter-tree-patterned duvet up under your chin, to…

  Stop, I plead silently with myself. You have to stop.

  I swore I wouldn’t do this. I swore. I renounced you. It hurt like cutting out my own heart, but I did what I told them I’d never do. I gave you up.

  I told myself I’d made peace with the fact I’d never see your first steps, hear your first words, that you’d never call me Mama.

  I didn’t come here for you. I said it over and over, a mantra inside my head. I clung to it when you first rounded the kitchen door and saw me, and my heart lurched towards you. I had to tense every muscle in my legs not to run to you, every sinew in my neck and mouth not to beg you to remember me. I knew that if I did, you would reject me – a certified madwoman you’d never seen before claiming to be your mother, of course you would – and that rejection would destroy me.

  And I will not be destroyed. I promised myself that over and over too, back in that prison with its perfumed garden and its smiling nurses and its needles and its lies. I will not let them break me: not your father, not the woman who made herself your mother.

  Not even you.

  I am here to find proof of what was done to me: that is enough. That has to be enough. I can’t hope for more.

  And yet, you stir, and your face shifts towards mine, and all the feelings I so carefully tamped down and sealed off pour back into me like gunpowder towards a fuse. It feels like no time has passed since I held you in my arms, like my heart has just now begun to beat again.

  Oh God, what have I done to you? What am I going to do?

  Your eyes snap open then. And I freeze, my blood thundering, because I can see him in them.

  You stretch your back, like you’ve woken from a trance, holding my gaze the whole time, and I’m so afraid of what you’re going to say to me that it’s all I can do not to flee, out of the house and down the path and into the waiting cross-hairs of the police marksmen.

  I will not be destroyed.

  You open your mouth; every muscle in me seizes up.

  You say, “It doesn’t make sense.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Amy

  “What doesn’t make sense?”

  She blurts it out, awkward and off-balance, a guilty expression on her face, like she’s been caught in the act of something embarrassing. Though what could embarrass her now is anyone’s guess, given that she’s already openly threatened to blow up her own …

  Say it, at least to yourself.

  I clench my jaw; my mouth is full of too much spit and I swallow hard.

  … her own daughter.

  My head feels like a wasps’ nest, vibrating, buzzing, angry.

  “Why?” I ask.

  I stand, slow, unsteady, but I stand. I can just about focus on the gaunt, frightened-looking woman in the bomb vest, but the world around her is fuzzy.

  “Why would Mum do all this to you, trap you in a mental hospital, blackmail the staff, why would she take that kind of a risk, why expose herself like that, just to have me?”

  “She…” She hesitates and her expression hardens, but she forces the words out. “She loved you.”

  “Yes,” I say. “She did. After weeks and months and years of feeding me and changing my nappies and reading to me at bedtime and driving me to school and making packed lunches.”

  Polly winces with each word, each maternal detail, and I’m not sure why I’m dwelling on them. I don’t want to hurt her exactly, but it’s a kind of defiance and a kind of loyalty. I might not have been her daughter, I’m saying, but she was my mother.

  “But that love had to have a beginning, and to trap you in that place the way you say she did, she would have had to make preparations. What, you think you just happened to land in the care of a shrink who had a dick pic out there she could burn him with? Mum was methodical in this, just like she was in everything else. She was precise, she did research. And while she did all that, I was just a bag of cells in your uterus. So, why? Why do all this for me?

  Polly winces. “She … she didn’t do it for you. She did it to me. She hated me. Evie was…” She barks a short bitter laugh. “She was the best friend I’ve ever had. She was kind and smart and generous, but she was also a true believer. So much of her, her world, her status with her friends, her sense of herself, was
wrapped up in her belief, in her need, for Nick to be Ryan’s lover.”

  She recites it calmly, fluently. The past seventeen years have clearly given her a lot of time to think about this.

  “But he wasn’t; I was. She couldn’t believe that, but in the end she couldn’t evade it either. So she had to make it not true. She had to destroy me.”

  I try to reconcile that kind of insane jealousy with my logical, methodical, kind mother, and my brain just rebels. I can’t see it. But then, seventeen years is a long time, and what has this whole endless, impossible day been if not proof that I didn’t know her the way I thought I did?

  “OK,” I say slowly. “But even if that’s true, what about … the father.” I still can’t make myself say my. “He just ignored me all my life? He let all this happen?”

  “Ryan…” Her mouth shapes the words three times before sound comes out. “He never wanted you in the first place. It took me a long time to see it, but he didn’t. He wanted you to go away.”

  “It’s a pretty big step from wish I’d been a bit more careful with my penis to I’m OK with abandoning my baby to the care of a psychopath and conspiring to falsely imprison her mother,” I object. “Especially with seventeen years to dwell on it. He was a rich guy with no problems paying child support. He must have had some other reason than just not wanting to give up partying. He must have…”

  I tail off as the thought clicks into place. I walk straight past her and down the stairs. I hear the steps creak behind me as she follows, but I don’t look round.

  The kitchen is dim, sunlight barely bleeding through the blinds. Is it just me, or is the hubbub of activity out on the street – the purr of engines and the crackle of voices – a little louder, a little more urgent than it has been?

  The big flat screen is dark and I have to scrabble around under the table, sticking my thumb with a shard of Mad Hatter teapot, before I find the remote.

  Polly arrives at my shoulder. I suck my injured thumb and switch on the TV.

  It’s still on the BBC news. A skinny dude in a suit and turban speaks to camera backed by stock prices, but the ribbon at the bottom of the screen reads: Heartstream hostage situation enters twentieth hour – terror link confirmed.

  Terror link confirmed. I feel my throat narrow. I hit rewind. The coverage cycles back. It’s not long before I see an aerial view of my house, spinning slowly clockwise on the screen like it’s floating on a freshly poured cup of tea, then the picture cuts to footage of the street outside. Police cars, high-vis tape, reporters, stragglers, bunches of flowers and hand-drawn cards taped to nearby trees like I’m already dead. A close-up of my driveway, where fragments of my living-room window still glitter, and my stomach clenches at the rust-coloured stains among them.

  I rewind further back to yesterday’s programmes; and yes, there he is.

  Pause.

  London’s mayor. Adrian R. Rijkaard stares belligerently down the lens. I’ve frozen the picture on him brushing his hair out of his eyes, and his right shirt cuff has ridden up, showing a thin sliver of darkness that might be the beginning of a tattoo. I hear a hissed breath at my shoulder. I look at my gouged thumb, remembering how the teapot became shattered.

  I haven’t ruled terrorism out of your face, you duplicitous little shit.

  My phone still lies on the table, beside Mum’s secret one. I gather it, and Polly does nothing to stop me – I’m not even sure she notices. Her gaze is still locked on the screen, her nostrils pinched and lips pulled back like she’s staring at a scorpion. I open Wikipedia.

  Adrian Ryan Edgar Rijkaard is a politician, author and musician who is the eighth and incumbent Mayor of London.

  I scroll down, and hit

  Musical Career, 2016-2026

  Main article: The Everlasting

  Under his stage name, Ryan Richards, Rijkaard was a founding and continuous member of boy band The Everlasting until they went on permanent hiatus in April 2026. Along with other founding members Nick Lamb, Dion Butterfield and Stefan Wilhelmsen (Stef Williams), Rijkaard recorded six albums, all of which were certified multiple times platinum…

  It started in the US, I remember Mum telling me, with Reagan. Then Schwarzenegger, then Trump. It was only a matter of time before it showed up here. Fame as the passport to power, to everything. She’d found it hilarious and terrifying. “People think you must make a good leader, just because they happen to know your name,” she’d snort. “They’d probably vote for Mickey Mouse if he pinned a rosette on.”

  I’d vaguely known that the mayor used to be a pop star; I might even have heard some of his songs, although I couldn’t be sure. I’d never paid much attention; it was old, stuff my parents would have listened to…

  I let out a long breath to steady myself, and then study that face. I look left to the still snarling woman next to me. Yes, it’s there if you looked for it. He’s become pouchy and his hair has gone grey early. The life Catherine Canczuk has been forced to live has eroded her face almost beyond recognition. You can’t see it if you only look at one or other of them, but if you mix his face with hers, you get something like a beaten-up version of the one staring back at me from my Heartstream profile pic.

  An illegitimate kid with a vulnerable teenage fangirl isn’t exactly the must-have accessory for every budding politician, and people on the news keep saying he wants to be prime minister one day. Yes, I can see why our mayor might’ve decided he didn’t want anything to do with me.

  Polly’s lips are moving. She stares at the screen through a film of tears and it almost looks like she’s praying, but then I make out the words:

  “I dreamed last night I rode a white horse, rode a white horse to the ocean…”

  I have no idea what she’s on about. Maybe it’s a poem. I get to my phone to google it, when a subheading on the mayor’s still-open Wiki stops me cold.

  Political Career

  Anti-Terror Controversy

  I stab it with my thumb.

  Immediately upon entering office, following the Tulse Hill bombing, Rijkaard made several changes to the Metropolitan Police’s anti-terror strategy, local policing powers having been substantially devolved to the so-called big three city mayors in June 2026.

  This new strategy included rules of engagement for terror scenarios that gave much greater latitude for the use of force, as well as guidelines on the use of new technology (particularly intra-limbic transducers) in the interrogation of terror suspects. Rijkaard received backing for these changes from Home Secretary Julia Ogunawa and widespread praise from the British media; however, some human rights organizations expressed concern that the use of the transducers was a breach of suspects’ human rights.

  Intra-limbic transducers, I think, putting my hand to the back of my head where the burred hairs are tipped with sweat. We just call them patches.

  There’s a link to a main article. I thumb it, and the story it tells is one I already know by heart. All streamers do.

  There was a man, Ibrahim Karimov, who was rounded up in the Tulse Hill aftermath, but Ibrahim was a plumber, who just happened to share a name with one of the bombers. When it became undeniable that he had an unbeatable alibi, they had to release him, and when they did, he went on TV and told his story.

  They’d stuck patches to his head, he said. And they’d made him stream, first off an advanced appendicitis patient, then off a guy on suicide watch, then off some woman with end-stage cancer. The mayor went on TV too, and admitted it, but said it wasn’t technically illegal, since no “incremental harm” would have been done.

  That statement became famous among us streamers. A punk band even called themselves Incremental Harm and got popular with people who used Heartstream, even though they were, in my opinion, shit.

  “And the white-crested waves, they crashed in the caves…” Polly’s still singing to herself. She’s picked up the remote from where I left it, and she hits play.

  “We haven’t ruled out terrorism,” he grates, pla
ying tough for the cameras. Is that what he has lined up for her?

  “… but there was never a sound of you.”

  She hits fast forward. Cops tape off cordons and footballers score goals and celebrities dance under spotlights at dizzying speed, until there’s the mayor again, and she hits play.

  “We have identified the hostage-taker,” he’s saying. “She is considered extremely dangerous, has significant diagnosed mental health conditions and has been known to associate with terrorists, including a man who plotted a foiled attack on the Palace of Westminster.”

  “Mayor Rijkaard, does this change your strategy for dealing with her?”

  “We are still working for a peaceful resolution; force is always a last resort.”

  Fast forward.

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

  Rijkaard’s back on screen. I stare at him. This man is my father. As I try out the thought, the kind, placid face of the man I’ve always thought of as Dad appears in my mind. Did he know? Obviously he must have known he wasn’t my father, but did Mum tell him the rest? No, I think. I don’t know what story she sold her husband to pretend to be my biological father, but it had to be less risky than she’s the mayor’s kid and I’ve got the real mother jammed up in a mental ward.

  Polly keeps rewinding, playing, rewinding again, seeking out every instance of his face, but wincing each time she sees it. It’s like she’s jabbing her tongue into a mouth ulcer, over and over again.

  Play.

  “… as I previously announced, the woman holding Amy Becker is a highly unstable individual who was until recently being treated for delusional psychosis. Moreover, the police have received evidence that she was radicalized while in hospital, and we cannot rule out that this kidnapping may be the start of a coordinated terror attack on our great city. All options are on the table to bring this situation to a speedy resolution, and I shall be working with Commissioner Khan to do just that.”