‘Where’s Naomi Benjamin? I need to talk to her.’
‘She’s at the police station.’
‘Is she under suspicion?’
She shrugs. ‘Can’t say, sir. They’re all being questioned.’
Professor Whybray is dead, Professor Whybray is dead, Professor Whybray is dead,
I say to myself over and over as I head for his office. I find his notebook in his briefcase and pocket it. I can’t risk taking anything else.
Professor Whybray is dead, Professor Whybray is dead, Professor Whybray is dead.
It doesn’t help. It doesn’t feel real. Another person would feel something. They might cry. Instead, I think about the escaped children. They’ll catch some. But others will evade them. They’ll live wild in forests and on beaches and in holes. They’ll raid shops for tins, dig for bugs, mill about in their cochineal uniforms until they get discarded or fall apart and they are stinking and dressed in rags and eating insects. Killing, dismembering and devouring each other and making little hand-prints in human blood.
Freddy is asleep on the floor of the car. The
Dry World
DVD is still running. I don’t bother waking him, but drive straight to the police station. If she isn’t there, I’ll go to the hospital. That is my strategy. It’s the only one I can think of. I park and lock Freddy in. It’s a risk. There is a 40 to 60 per cent chance that he’ll wake up and panic. But I have no choice.
‘I’m looking for Naomi Benjamin, from Battersea Care Unit. I gather she’s here.’ The policewoman at the reception desk scrolls through a file on the computer. I see Naomi’s name before she does. I also register the context.
Charge: sabotage.
Can Naomi really have deactivated the door codes and let the children loose? If she succumbed to whatever madness overcame Sunny and Jonas and Farooq and de Vries, then maybe the answer to that question is yes. But it’s none the less unthinkable. Or could it be that she feared what would happen to them if they stayed? I need to know.
The policewoman asks, ‘Are you her lawyer?’
I’m not cut out for deception. But there aren’t many options. I select the best. I point to the folder I’m carrying. ‘I need to speak to her right away.’
‘Interview room’s second door on the right.’
I try not to run there. I am a lawyer now. Lawyers don’t run. Not in the course of duty. It’s mostly a desk job.
The door has a small reinforced window through which I can see the back of Naomi’s head. She’s sitting in a chair opposite a female police officer who is writing notes. I knock. The WPC looks up. She is freckle-faced and fair-haired and young. She can’t be more than twenty. She says, ‘Come in’.
I enter and wave the folder. ‘I’m representing Naomi Benjamin.’
‘Well I hope you can get some sense out of her,’ sighs the young policewoman, getting to her feet. ‘She’s not exactly co-operating.’
Naomi hasn’t turned. She is sitting very rigidly. There is something odd about her posture.
‘Naomi,’ I say. She doesn’t react, so I move closer. She’s looking straight ahead. No smile. I miss her smile, and the two shallow brackets around it. I need to see them. I want to kiss her.
‘Can I have a minute alone with her?’
‘Sure. You can have five. She’s all yours.’
When the WPC has gone I squat next to Naomi’s chair and take her hand, but immediately I drop it. It’s cold. Far colder than it should be. Can shock do that? I must look it up. I stroke her hair instead. Beautiful hair. Smooth and strong.
‘Professor Whybray’s dead,’ I tell her. ‘Trampled. The children did it. They crushed out his life.’
She nods and blinks.
‘Did you let them escape?’ She looks around the room and then slowly nods.
‘Why?’
‘Because there’s one in here.’ She whispers, pointing to her chest.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It got in,’ she whispers. ‘I did what it wanted. I had to.’
‘What do you mean?’ I whisper back, my mouth close to her ear, her silky hair in my face.
‘Freddy was right. We belong to the Old World. Time doesn’t work the way you think. They’ve come back to stop us.’
Slowly she pushes me back, raises her hand, and makes a fist next to her eye.
‘No. Don’t do that. Please Naomi. Don’t.’ I grab her head and clutch it to my chest.
But she keeps her hand there, fingers splayed. I can’t stand this. I grab hold of her fingers and press them to my face. Her flesh feels well below thirty-seven degrees. It feels cold as stone. Suddenly, my breathing goes haywire and ugly noises start pouring out of me. My eyes fill with liquid that runs down my face. It’s like another tear-gas attack. Naomi just looks at me with a very gentle smile. Both hands are on her lap now. It’s a modest pose, the pose of the Madonna in Italian paintings. She doesn’t say anything. I grab her around the waist. I want to carry her away from this place. I bury my face in her stomach, her breasts. The terrible noises keep coming. I can’t stop them.
I’m not aware of the door opening. The young policewoman takes my elbow. She pulls me to my feet and hands me a tissue. I blow my nose, then shove it to my eyes.
She puts a hand on my shoulder.
‘You’re not a lawyer, are you,’ she says. ‘I mean, you’re not behaving like one.’
‘No.’
‘Then I think you’d better go.’
Back in the car, I try to get my breathing back to normal. But I can’t stop the hiccuping, or the snot, or the tears that keep coming. Freddy wakes. I tell him to stay under the blanket until I say he can come out. He doesn’t ask why I am crying. I sit there fighting it and losing.
We belong to the Old World. Time doesn’t work the way you think. They’ve come back to stop us.
What is that supposed to mean?
I start to drive. In the absence of traffic lights, I honk the horn at each crossing. But I don’t obey the speed limit.
Fifteen minutes later, I let Freddy come out and sit on the back seat.
‘Why can’t we go to the Unit?’
‘Because it’s closed. There’s been a problem.’
‘Where are the others?’
‘They left.’
‘Where to?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well we have to find them.’
‘I’m sorry Freddy K. We can’t.’
‘Let me out!’ He reaches for the door.
I slam down the child lock and keep driving.
He starts to cry.
I don’t care. I don’t care about anything. I am a robot made of meat.
I stop at a corner shop, get out and lock Freddy in the car again. They have supplies, the man says.
‘I do boxes. With tins, if that’s what you’re after.’ He looks at me sideways. ‘But it’ll cost.’
I give him all my cash.
I don’t notice the figure on the roof of the tower block opposite right away. I’m too busy loading the boxes into the car.
But a distinctive noise makes me look up.
SCHTUKKK.
There is a connection I should be making, but I don’t.
Then the noise comes again –
SCHTUKKK
– and I realise. There’s a sniper. And his gun’s aimed at Freddy. The boy hasn’t noticed. He’s still on the back seat, deep in his DVD, in the world of sand and snakes. I want to stay there and rock, gathering my thoughts. But that’s not going to work. I can tell.
So I yell at Freddy to get down, hurl myself into the car and drive.
My heart is banging. I am overloaded. For once, mental origami is no help. The paper resists me, crumpling at the first touch.
Three hours and nineteen minutes later, when I stop for petrol on the M1, I manage to unclasp my fingers from the wheel. They are pale and stiff, as though they have been deep-frozen.
Half an hour later, eighteen army trucks pass us in the opposite direction.
And I know, definitively: a new phase of human history has begun.
I used to imagine Freddy coming to live with me on Arran, in the cottage by the sea. I’d point out how the colours of the scrubland change by the minute, flashing their way through the spectrum according to the cast of the sun. He’d see how the salt sparkles on the sheer granite boulder after a storm. We’d walk beyond the cove as far as the wind turbines, and I’d explain their aerodynamics and engineering: he’d listen for a bit, then scramble up the hill by the ruined cairn, shrieking into the wind at the top of his lungs. We’d make kites, hunt for edible berries and fungi, construct driftwood boats to float in rock pools, identify bird-calls, build bonfires to grill the mackerel we’d caught, read books bursting with facts.
But nothing’s as I thought.
A month has passed since we left London: soon winter will be setting in. My decision to move to the island after splitting up with Kaitlin was fuelled by an urge to be isolated and alone. But I see now that being encircled by sea gives us an advantage over mainlanders at a time when containment is vital. Arraners have always known how to subsist on what there is. Once the fuel supplies have run out and the ferry to the mainland stops, they will have no choice but to resurrect the habits and lifestyle of their ancestors: hunting, fishing, trapping, sheep-shearing, planting and harvesting crops according to the season.
To the rear of the cottage, behind the jumble of rusted tractor parts there’s an overgrown patch of land that was once cultivated. In the summer, the purple balls of onion heads and potato flowers stood tall among the weeds; now, they’re flattened and rotting. Here’s where I’ll plant my amaranth, in honour of Jonas Svensson. Here’s where I’ll experiment with salt-resistant crops. I’m digging the soil over, a few square metres a day, before winter hardens it. Repetitive movements soothe me. While I dig, Freddy pulls out worms from the freshly turned earth, or wanders further off and rakes in the heather, returning with the bones and skulls of birds, voles, weasels, rats and mice. With his agile, filthy hands he assembles them into crude necklaces, adding twigs, berries and snail shells which he secures on nylon fishing string or horse hair he’s picked from barbed wire. Other times, he likes to burrow about in the scrubland on the far side of the bluff, collecting beetles, spiders and larvae of all kinds. Or he’ll scour the beach for crabs, shrimp, seaweed. It would be futile to try and stop him devouring what he forages. He knows what he needs, in the world he inhabits.
The morning after Freddy and I arrived, I showed him where the fish lived. Together we scooped the chickweed out of the bathtub and decanted the creature into a bucket. The rubber plug was still functional: I pulled it free, sluicing the stinking water on to the mud below so we could right the tub properly on its supporting stacks of bricks. We wiped the enamel down, replaced the plug and filled the tub with rainwater from the butt. Once the sediment had settled, we put the goldfish back. There was damage to one of its trailing fins and what looked like a tumour by its eye. But it held Freddy’s attention – or seemed to, until I suggested we give it a name. He used to like christening things.
But he just looked at me blankly. I might have been from another planet.
Since then, communication has been minimal, as if he has moved to a realm where he simply has no need of the conversations I offer. But there are occasions when he’ll be preoccupied with something – a dried-out jellyfish, a daddy-long-legs, a maggot – and I’ll catch him unawares, and get a short flow of speech. It never lasts long.
The first time it happened was when I was digging. As I bashed flints out of clods of cold earth, I told him about the belief that if you make a thousand
ozuru
, your dream will come true. I recounted the story of the Japanese girl who got radiation cancer from Hiroshima.
‘She folded and folded until she had a thousand cranes and then she made her wish. Which was to be cured. But when she found out that couldn’t happen, she wished for world peace instead.’
That didn’t materialise either. But I didn’t tell him.
‘I’m going to make a thousand
ozuru
,’ said Freddy, pulling a worm from the soil. I wasn’t expecting him to respond: my heart crashed about. The worm coiled and uncoiled between his finger and thumb. He wiped it clean.
‘What will you wish for?’
No reply. I asked again. But he just stood there and chewed his worm.
Later, I asked myself why I hadn’t pressed him further. Why I kept digging instead, harder and harder, working up a furious rhythm, concentrating on what I’d plant in the spring and summer: root vegetables, runner beans, tomatoes, aubergines, a few varieties of pumpkin, some soy.
The answer is that I get overloaded. I am slow to take things in. I know when I am not ready.
I wasn’t ready. So I dug.
Soon I must acknowledge the thing he craves so badly. He is a child. He wants to be with others like him. According to all the books I have read by paediatricians, it is normal for them to seek the company of their peers.