The Three (25 page)

NAME: ANONYMOUS111

Don’t leave us in suspense.

NAME: ANONYMOUS2

Yeah, Orz. We’re on yr team, dude!!!!

NAME: ORZ MAN

I’ll tell u tomorrow if it works. If it doesn’t I will be curled in a ball, slitting my wrists and sobbing.

NAME: ANONYMOUS286

Victory is yr only option Orz! You can do iiiiit!!!!

[After Ryu left the message board, the following exchange occurred]

NAME: ANONYMOUS111

Netizens… I think I know who the princess is.

NAME: ANONYMOUS874

Who?

NAME: ANONYMOUS111

Orz said that the princess’s family is well known. He also said that she lives near the Yoyogi station.

Hiro lives in Yoyogi.

NAME: ANONYMOUS23

Hiro????????? Miracle child Hiro? Android boy?

NAME: ANONYMOUS111

Yeah. Hiro is staying with his aunt and uncle. They’ve got a daughter. Checked through the footage of the memorial service. Spotted a girl who looks like Hazuki in the crowd standing near the family, and another one who is not as hot.

NAME: ANONYMOUS23

Our humble Orz is in love with Android Boy’s cousin??? GO ORZ!

17 April, 12.30 p.m.

God. It’s been a while… How are you, Mandi? Do you know, even though I’ve been rambling into this fucking thing as if you’re my closest friend or Dr K substitute, it struck me the other day that I couldn’t remember your face. I even went on Facebook to check out your profile pic to remind me what you look like. I told you how much I hate Facebook, didn’t I? My own fault. I stupidly accepted friend requests from a shed-load of people without checking them out properly first. Bastards hate-bombed my wall and Twitter account because of the Marilyn thing.

Mandi, I’d like to apologise for ignoring your calls. I just didn’t… I had a few bad days, okay? More than a few, let’s be honest. A few weeks ha ha. I couldn’t see an end to them. Stephen… well, you know. I don’t want to go there. And I haven’t done much about sorting out what we can keep in amongst all this drivel. I haven’t done much of anything, to be honest.

It was too soon. All this. It was too soon after the accident. I can see that now. But I’m thinking maybe we can rework it later after I’m… after I’m feeling more like myself. Not in a good place at the moment, you see.

Some days I find myself looking at photographs of Jess, trying to spot the difference. She caught me at it the other day. ‘What are you doing, Uncle Paul?’ she asked, all sweet and cheery, damn her. She has this way of creeping up on me.

‘Nothing,’ I snapped at her.

I felt so guilty that the next day I went to Toys R Us and spent the equivalent of a down payment on a car on product-placement toys and other crap. She now has the entire set of extortionately expensive My Little Ponies, as well as a bushel-load of themed
Barbies, which I know would make feminist Shelly turn over in her grave.

But I’m trying. God, am I trying. It’s just… she isn’t herself. Jess and Polly used to love the stories Stephen made up for them–silly takes on
Aesop’s Fables
. I tried making one up the other day–a version of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’–but she looked at me as if I’d gone mad.

Ha! Maybe I have.

’Cause there’s this other thing. Last night I did a Google marathon again, trying to get to the bottom of how I’m feeling about Jess. There’s this medical condition. It’s called Capgras Delusion. It’s really rare, but people who suffer from it are convinced that the people they live with have been replaced by proxies. Like changelings. I know it’s mental even to think like this. Dangerous even… But at the same time, it’s actually reassuring knowing there is a particular syndrome that would explain it all. But it could just be stress. That’s what I’m clinging to right now.

(
Clears throat
)

And Christ. It’s been busy. What with Jess’s first day back at school. This we could use, I think. It’s just the kind of thing readers want, isn’t it? I think I told you Dr K and Darren decided that it would do her good to get back after the Easter hols. It wasn’t ideal, her doing home schooling. I’m not much of a teacher and… it meant interacting with her for hours.

The press were out in their droves as usual, so I put on the performance of my life, all smiles, could have got a BAFTA for my role as ‘Concerned Guardian’. While the hacks howled outside the gates, I walked her into the classroom. The teacher, Mrs Wallbank, had got the kids to decorate it; there was a big ‘Welcome Back Jess!’ banner hanging across the blackboard. Mrs Wallbank is a strapping too-jolly woman who looks like she’s fallen out of an Enid Blyton novel. The sort of person who spends her weekends visiting heritage sites, hiking hairy-legged up wind-swept hills. Just the sight of her made me want to get rat-arsed and smoke a pack of Rothmans (yes, yes, Mandi, twenty a day now, though
never in the house. Another bad habit to hide, ha ha, although I’ve discovered that Mrs E-B isn’t averse to a sneaky ciggie).

I soon found out that Mrs Wallbank speaks to the children like adults, but treats grown-ups like retards. ‘Hello, Jess’s uncle! Now don’t you worry about a thing. Jess and I will be just fine, won’t we?’

‘Are you sure you’re ready for this, Jess?’ I simpered.

‘Of course, Uncle Paul,’ she said, with that complacent smile I’ve come to loathe. ‘You go back home and have a fag and a vodka.’

Mrs Wallbank blinked at me, and I tried to make a joke of it.

Feeling that sense of relief I always feel whenever I’m not around her, I ran out of there.

Outside, I tried to ignore the hacks’ usual questions: ‘When are you going to let Marilyn see her granddaughter?’ I muttered the usual bollocks about ‘when Jess is feeling up to it’, etc. etc. Then I jumped in Stephen’s Audi and just drove around a bit. Found myself in the heart of Bromley. I parked and went to Marks & Spencer to buy something special for Jess’s first-day-back-at-school supper. And all along I knew I was just playing a part. Pretending to be the caring uncle. But I can’t… I can’t stop thinking about Stephen and Shelly–the real Stephen and Shelly, not the Stephen who comes to me at night–and it’s only the thought of not letting them down that keeps me going. I keep thinking that if I throw myself into the part, eventually it will become reality. Eventually I’ll get back onto an even keel.

Anyway, I was standing in the queue, clutching a basket full of those ghastly pasta ready-meals Jess likes so much, when I found my eyes drifting over to the Wines of the World section. Pictured myself sitting down, right there, and gulping bottle after bottle of Chilean red until my stomach exploded. ‘Come on, love,’ the old woman behind me said, ‘there’s a till open,’ and that snapped me out of it. The cashier recognised me straight away. Gave me what I’ve come to call a standard ‘supportive smile’. ‘How’s she doing?’ she whispered conspiratorially.

‘Why’s it always about her?’ I almost snapped. I forced out something along the lines of, ‘she’s doing wonderfully, thanks so much for caring,’ and somehow managed to leave without punching her in the face or buying the whole of the alcohol aisle.

24 April, 11.28 p.m.

I’m doing okay this week, Mandi. It’s better now that she’s at school. We even spent an evening together watching a
The Only Way is Essex
marathon. She loves that appalling reality programme, can’t seem to get enough of spray-tanned morons talking utter shit to each other in nightclubs, which should worry me slightly. But I suppose all her friends at school are into that kind of rubbish, so I should look at it as reassuringly normal behaviour. She’s still relentlessly cheerful and well-behaved (just once I wish she’d throw a tantrum or refuse to go to bed). I keep convincing myself that Dr K’s right, that of course her behaviour is going to change after going through all that trauma. It’ll just take time for us to adjust. ‘Jess,’ I asked, during a commercial break–a relief from all the banality on screen. ‘You and me… we’re okay, right?’

‘Of course we are, Uncle Paul.’ And for the first time in ages I thought, it’s going to be fine. I’ll get over this.

I even phoned Gerry to let him know I was ready to get back to work. He asked about the recordings of course, said your publishers were on his back, desperate for me to send through more material, and I made my usual excuses. They’d have an orgasm if I sent this through unedited.

But I’ll sort it out. Yeah.

25 April, 4.00 p.m.

Phew. Big big day, Mandi. Darren’s just left (God, he can be an anal twat, went through the cupboards and the fridge to check what Jess was eating, which I’m fairly sure isn’t standard procedure), when the phone rang. As you know, it’s usually either the press or a tenacious religious freak who’s somehow managed to
scalp or bribe someone to get my new number. But today, surprise, surprise, it was one of the alien abduction people. They’ve been keeping schtum since I sicced the cops onto them just after Jess got out of hospital. I almost hung up straight away, but something stopped me. The guy calling–Simon somebody–sounded fairly reasonable. Said he was phoning to see how I was doing. Not Jess, but
me
. I had to be careful; ten to one the phones being hacked, so I let him do most of the talking. I didn’t really have to say much to be fair. As I listened, I almost felt like I was watching myself from across the room. I knew it was mental to give him the time of day. He says that what the aliens do–he called them ‘the others’, like in a lazily scripted B-movie–is abduct people, place a microchip inside their body and use ‘alien technology’ to control them. He says they’re in cahoots with the government. It made me… why not be honest? No one else is going to hear this. Shit, okay… Look, on some level it made a weird kind of sense.

I mean… what if Black Thursday is a government experiment thingy after all? There are an awful lot of people who believe there’s no way those kids could have survived those crashes. And I don’t mean the obvious nutters like those bible bashers. Or the freaks who think the kids are possessed by the devil. Even that investigator who came to ask Jess if she remembered anything about the crash stared at her as if he couldn’t believe she was alive. Sure, in the Japanese crash there were other people who initially survived the impact, but they didn’t last long. And how exactly
did
Jess survive? Most of the other bodies… well, they were in pieces, weren’t they? And that Maiden Airlines plane looked like it had been through a blender when they started dredging it up from the Everglades.

Okay… deep breath, Paul. Calm the fuck down. Lack of sleep, it can screw with your mind, can’t it?

29 April, 3.37 a.m.

He’s back. Three nights in a row now.

It sounds crazy, but I’m getting used to it. I no longer get a fright when I wake up and see him sitting there.

Last night I tried to talk to him again. ‘What are you trying to tell me, Stephen?’

But he just said the same thing he always says, then disappeared. The smell is getting worse. I can still smell it on the sheets, even now. Rotten fish. Rotten… flesh. Fuck. I can’t be imagining that, can I?
Can I
?

And… I have an admission. I’m not proud of it.

I couldn’t take it last night. I left the house at four a.m.–yeah, that’s right, leaving Jess alone–and drove to the all-night Tesco’s in Orpington. Bought myself a half-jack of Bells.

By the time I got home it was empty.

Hid the bottle under the bed with the others. Mrs E-B may be my new sneaky fag ally, but she’d be horrified at the number of empties I’m collecting. I’m getting out of control; got to cut back again. Got to stop this shit.

30 April

So much for my resolution to get my act together.

I’ve just been through Jess’s bedroom. I don’t know what I was expecting to find. A ‘To Serve Man’ manual maybe, like in that old
Twilight Zone
episode, ha ha.

(
Paul’s laughter makes way to sobbing
)

It’s okay. I’m okay.

But she
is
different. She is. There’s no getting away from that. She’s even taken down all her old Missy K posters. Maybe aliens have good taste.

(
Another laugh that turns into a sob
)

But… how can she not be Jess?

It has to be me.

But…

It’s getting harder to hide all this from Darren. I can’t allow myself to crack. Not now. I need to cover all bases. Get to the bottom of this. I’ve even considered giving in and taking her to see
Marilyn. But would the fat cow even be able to tell if there’s something different about Jess? Shelly hated going round there, so Marilyn saw the girls less than I did. I suppose it’s worth a shot. She is Jess’s flesh and blood, isn’t she?

But in the meantime, I asked Petra, one of the yummy mummies at Jess’s school, to bring her daughter Summer over to play this afternoon. Petra’s always emailing and calling and asking if there’s anything she can do to help, so she jumped at the chance. She even offered to collect the girls from school and bring them here.

So… I’m leaving the recorder in Jess’s bedroom. Just to check. Just to be sure. See what Jess talks about when I’m not around. It’s what a good uncle would do, isn’t it? Maybe Jess is in pain and will open up to Summer and then I’ll know that the way she’s behaving is because she has what Dr K calls ‘unexplored trauma’. They’ll be here in five minutes.

(
Sound of approaching children’s voices, which get gradually louder
)

‘… So you can be Rainbow Dash and I’ll be Princess Luna. Unless you want to be Rarity?’

‘Have you got
all
of the ponies, Jess?’

‘Yeah. Paul bought them for me. He also bought me Pageant Gown Barbie. Here.’

‘Oh cool! She’s so beautiful. But it’s not even your birthday.’

‘I know. You can have her if you like. Paul can get me a new one.’

‘Really? You’re the bestest! Jess… what are you going to do with all of Polly’s toys?’

‘Nothing.’

‘And, Jess… did it hurt? When you got burned?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will the scars go away?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘What doesn’t?’

‘If they go away or not.’

‘Mummy says it’s a miracle you got out of that plane. She says I’m not to ask you questions about it in case it makes you cry.’

‘I’m not going to cry!’

‘Mummy says you can cover the scars with make-up later on so that people won’t stare.’

‘C’mon! Let’s play!’

(
For the next fifteen minutes the girls play ‘My Little Pony meets Barbie in Essex’.
)

(
Distant sound of Paul’s voice calling them to come downstairs for a snack.
)

‘Aren’t you coming, Jess?’

‘You go first. I’ll get the ponies. They can eat with us.’

‘ ’Kay. Can I really have Pageant Gown Barbie?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re my bestest friend ever, Jess.’

‘I know. Now you go first.’

‘ ’Kay.’

(
The Dictaphone captures the sound of Summer leaving the room. There’s a pause of several seconds, followed by the sounds of approaching footsteps and breathing. Then, a second later:
‘Hello, Uncle Paul.’)