Induction Day
An uncomfortable night. A few random dreams. But inevitably back inside the enigmatic Dome.
In this dream I was lying on a poolside sun lounger. Caroline was next to me, reading a novel, but generously allowing our feet casually to brush against each other. Fountains splashed into the pool.
The place wasn’t busy, and everyone I could see was a friend: Caroline’s house-mates, the guys from the pub quiz team, old mates from college and clients from work.
My blonde-stereotype sister Lizzy was wearing a black bikini tied on with fragile-looking bows. She was tossing a ball around the pool along with three Computer Studies guys from college. They were almost limp with unquenched lust. From the anxious looks on their faces I guessed they were wishing they had mobile internet access sewn into their beachwear so that they could secretly google Witty Things to Say to Girls.
It was all perfect, except for the sense that something deadly was lurking outside the Dome.
I clambered off the sunlounger and inspected the edge of the Dome. Outside it looked like November, dank and grey. An evil-looking rain, yellow-tinged and sticky, was dropping steadily from the sky, splattering against the glass like bird-lime.
Rubbish was piled outside. As I focussed my eyes in the greyness, I wondered if shapes were moving among the heaps.
This Dome looked like the last bright place in the world. I walked round its entire edge and the view hardly changed: hills of rubbish on the outside and the lurking sense of danger, just out of sight.
All I could think was, they’re not getting in. I’m not letting them in.
I was completely disoriented when I did wake up in some kind of holiday resort the next morning.
This wasn’t the Dome of my nightmare, happily, but nor was it anywhere I ever remembered. I watched dark green palm trees sway against a bright sky. I sensed, rather than felt, a female presence next to me.
I glanced out of the corner of one eye and saw in a moment of terror that the female was Keziah, sleeping in a bikini. With skin as chalk-white as hers, not a great choice, I thought.
We were at the side of a swimming pool.
In panic I looked down at my own body: a thong. Somewhere down there, nestled amid my gentle and congenial contours—so reminiscent of the Yorkshire Dales—a thong.
A further shock: my arm had a tattoo, a heart with the initial J in one corner and K in the other. Little turtle doves were flying round the heart.
At that moment Keziah also opened her eyes. She blinked, rolled over, puzzled for a second.
‘O Keziah,’ I said.
Keziah sat up. ‘Completely not funny,’ she snarled, looking down at herself.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Jamie. What are you doing?’
‘What am I doing?’
She looked around ‘This is the Hotel Splendide! You’ve been messing around in my head!’
‘I haven’t done anything!’
‘And find a towel or something. You look disgusting.’
‘Look—’
She herself had summoned into being a piece of African cloth, which she was busy folding around herself.
‘Over there,’ she pointed. ‘In the changing room.’
I jumped up and trod over the 1930s rose-and-white concrete slabs, which were hot to the touch.
‘It’s locked.’ I rattled the changing-room door. No, not locked. Not even real. Just a piece of stage scenery, a fake changing room.
‘Can’t you magic up a towel?’ she called over.
‘Give me a minute to concentrate,’ I said. ‘I’m not having a good morning.’
‘Honestly Jamie,’ she said, finishing tucking in the African cloth with one hand and with the other holding out a pink bath towel that she had just imagined into being.
I trudged back and took it off her.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Jamie!’ she said. Not with an ellipsis, indicating entreaty (‘Jamie…’). It was a ‘Jamie!’ with an exclamation mark, wielded like a baseball bat. ‘This is a precious’ (thwack) ‘place’ (thwack) ‘of memory’ (thwack) ‘for me—’
‘It’s not his world,’ interrupted a voice. ‘It’s mine… and I bring peace.’
A tallish, erect man of late-sixties in appearance (late-sixties both in age and in the last time his clothes were fashionable) was walking across the swimming pool. He wore jeans, an open-necked shirt and a ponytail. The twist of fabric in his ponytail was a scrap of the same flowery material as his shirt. An earstud gleamed. His skin was the shade of orange that says on the packet Burnished Bronze, but looks and smells like Extra Value Fake Tan. The stuff was thicker in his wrinkles. His feet, curiously, were on backwards, the heels pointing towards us.
‘Peace!’ He said again, splashing over the swimming pool. ‘Peace from you to me. My peace to you. Hello and welcome to Paradise.’
‘This is the Hotel Splendide,’ said Keziah, sullenly.
‘… Where you used to come with your dad. I retrieved it from your memories. A little taste of Paradise. Also a unique example of French West African modernist colonial architecture.’
He reached the side of the pool and stepped out. He kept trying to twist his feet the right way round, but they wouldn’t go.
He looked Keziah and me slowly up and down. ‘I see you’re not ready for the full beauty of the human form. Shame.’ He pointed at our swim things which glowed slightly, and then turned into our normal clothes. ‘I am your god! One of them, anyway.’
The tattoo disappeared as well, thank goodness.
‘Hello,’ said Keziah.
‘Hello,’ said I.
We stood around awkwardly. He had a glittery look in his eyes and I thought he was going to put his arms around us. ‘You can call me the Lord.’
‘The Lord?’
‘Convention,’ he said. ‘Also recognition of genius. I’m the Lord. You’re my people. May as well start off on that footing, loosen up later.’
‘What if we don’t?’ asked Keziah.
‘Ah. Outside your habitat’—he waved vaguely—‘is a boiling mass of hot yellow rain that rots you down. Bones into glue, that sort of thing. And out there are evil spirits who will enjoy sucking out your life as you twist and turn in pain. Some of them are artists which is something. But most of them, just brutal. No class. We’ve saved you from that.’
‘Why have you messed around in my memories?’ asked Keziah.
‘To make you feel at home. The Hotel Splendide has fond memories for you, Keziah. Jamie likes swimming pools. I built a place for you to become friends. Paradise. It connects your two worlds. I built it in your sleep. Your world is over there,’ (he pointed to a door marked GIRLS in the wall) ‘and yours, Jamie, is on the other side.’ I noted a door marked BOYS. ‘I expect this is where you will spend most of your time. We’re going to extend it together. Your Eden.
‘My partner and I will help you. He’s called Gaston but is happy to be known as the Overlord.’
Keziah looked him up and down.
‘No thanks,’ she said.
The Lord glared at her.
‘What do you mean, no thanks?’
‘What do I mean? Go away, leave me alone. I’d rather be dead. That sort of no thanks.’
The Lord seemed to have an unfathomable expression on his face. It might have been shock. Eventually he spluttered,
‘This is Paradise! This is your idea of Paradise! I fetched it myself from your memories. Hurt me too. Look at these burns here on my arms and legs.’
‘I don’t do lecherous old men,’ said Keziah, steadily, planting herself right in his personal space.
‘No?’ asked the Lord.
‘No.’
‘I can end this right now,’ spat the Lord, twitching slightly as if about to sprout a claw. ‘One snap of my fingers. One snap. You impossible little cow. One flick of my head and you’re out in the yellow rain. Out there—’ he pointed vaguely to the sky—‘You’ll beg to die
and you won’t be able to.’
Keziah didn’t take her stare away from him, and stepped closer.
‘Do it then. I don’t care.’
Expressions were chasing themselves across the Lord’s face like shadows across a hillside on a windy day.
‘I might,’ he said eventually. ‘I really might. The fact is young lady, my partner and I understand you’ve been under stress, and that you may say things you regret, and so we’re going to make allowances. You might like to think things over.’ As he finished the sentence he reached out, picked up Keziah by the scruff of the neck, walked to the girls’ side of the pool and tossed her over the wall. I heard a crumpled landing, followed by a curse.
He looked over the wall for a few seconds, then turned to me. A smile was stuck on his face. It looked like one he’d got out of a book.
‘Jamie,’ he walked towards me, still with the rented smile. ‘She certainly has spirit. I’m sure I can talk sense with you.’
I gulped.
‘Me?’ I said. ‘Erm—yeah. I’m open. You know. I—I—I’m obviously grateful that you… rescued us. Yeah. You have to have an open mind.’
‘Excellent,’ said the Lord. ‘Open mind. Very good.’
‘What will it involve?’ I asked.
‘Happiness. The adventure of your lives. Your dreams coming true.’ His smile was still hanging on his face, like he’d forgotten to move it. ‘However. We weren’t expecting all that trouble from Madam over there. I think —um—my partner and I will reveal ourselves to you further in due course. Visit us tomorrow morning, after breakfast. Here in Paradise.’
Then a cloud came—a bit oily, like an exhaust fume—and hid him from my sight.
I watched him disappear, then called over the wall to Keziah. ‘Are you OK over there? Would you like a drink?’
I heard a curse.
‘I’ll take that as a no,’ I said.
Back in my side of the habitat, with the care of one doing an oil painting, I recreated the River Cam, Cambridge’s compact little river, complete with one of those flat-bottomed boats called punts on which generations of students and tourists have propelled themselves using a pole to push against the riverbed. Punting has long been the best way to waste an afternoon, see the sights, drink wine and flirt with girls. I sat with the reconstituted Caroline while her house-mate Mel stood barefoot on the back of the boat. Mel was a sturdy, athletic girl, a secondary school games teacher, a bit dim, whom I’d also called into being. Her painted toenails were slightly chipped, as is the way with hockey players. She pushed the pole against the riverbed and we slid along.
I’d done the picnic. Caroline’s idea of a picnic involved salad, prawns, tiny sandwiches with the crusts cut off and obscure upper class things called ‘devils on horseback’—not your authentic English cuisine: pies, nachos, dip, samosas and bhajis.
‘Do you think being a pet is a bad thing?’ I asked her.
‘It would be if you owned it,’ replied Caroline, rummaging in the hamper.
‘If we could for once,’ I suggested, ‘not turn every conversation onto my failings, I might enjoy the change.’
‘But you’re such an easy target,’ said Caroline.
‘I’m trying to work something out,’ I said. Mel poled us under the stone Trinity College footbridge, and we became echoey for a moment. ‘If creatures more powerful than us wanted a human being—me, say—as a pet, which I think is what is happening, and offered to look after me very well, so that I was happy, should I say yes?’
‘I’d say they were mad,’ said Caroline, who had been horsey in her youth, and like many well-bred English girls, seemed to have a touch of equus in her ancestry. ‘Think of the mucking out.’
‘Assume that was taken care of.’
‘A big assumption.’
‘Assume it anyway.’
‘I can see it would probably suit you,’ said Caroline, disapprovingly. ‘Fodder. Sleep.’
We glided under another bridge, Mel choosing the middle span to avoid hitting her head.
‘I am dead,’ I protested. ‘What choice do I have?’
Caroline found what she was looking for. ‘Ah, a tomato. How good of you to think of me.’
‘I’m dead and beings out there are bigger than me. What else can I do?’
‘You could put up a fight, like Keziah is doing.’
‘I get the feeling they will win.’
‘She stood up to them.’
‘Not really. As far as I can see, she was just being herself. She treats everyone the same way. Say hello, bite their head off.’
‘No,’ said Caroline, thoughtfully. ‘She gave them the chance to get rid of her, and they didn’t. That’s a win.’
‘I think they were being patient.’
‘Perhaps they were bluffing. Perhaps they need her for something. Perhaps they even need you.’
‘Hard to see what for,’ I said. The girls both nodded thoughtfully. Mel poled us towards the Mathematical Bridge on the Cam, where you have to turn the punt. ‘They may want to show me as a prime specimen of a human male,’ I said. ‘I could understand that.’
Very late that evening, I was watching the fire in my lighthouse lounge. Caroline had gone to bed (she still insisted on her own room; even I couldn’t believe in a Caroline who would alter the habits of a lifetime). I was concentrating on the fire and the turn of the lighthouse-beam.
‘Jamie.’
The shock of hearing my name in an empty room made the hairs on my arm stand on end.
‘Lizzie!’ I said, looking round.
‘Jamie… ’ The room was empty.
‘Great,’ I said aloud. ‘Now I’m hearing voices.’
‘Jamie, what have you done?’ At the sound of her voice, my carefully constructed world flickered out, then flicked back, like a candle-flame in a gust.
‘Lizzie!’
Spooked, I walked through the lighthouse—up to the light, outside and around the balcony, back inside, all the way down to the kitchen, out of the door. Silvery moon, calm sea. No Lizzie. I returned inside and took some slow breaths.
I cut a slice of fruitcake from my pantry and took a chunk of Wensleydale cheese from the fridge. Then I climbed the stairs back to the lounge, banked the fire, and fired up a movie. Somewhere part through Blade Runner I managed to swap my waking world for my sleeping one, without hearing any more voices.
But I did, of course, return to the mysterious Dome.
And somebody was still trying to get in.
In this increasingly annoying dream I looked up and scanned the top of the Dome for any weaknesses. Then I started to pace again slowly round the edge.
Other things being equal, this Dome was a resort you’d never want to leave. Perhaps my subconscious was trying to create a Paradise of my own. In which case, many thanks, subconscious. But something was trying to get in.
I was now sure that people were moving among the piles of rubbish outside the Dome. Worse, they were people I’d spent my life avoiding: the air-headed, the boastful, the in-your-face, the stupid, the depressed, the anxious, the neurotic, the boring and the mad.
Halfway round the Dome I found a leak. This was new. The noxious yellow rainwater that fell against the Dome was seeping in. A trickle ran all the way into the pool. None of my friends were looking out for this. With a quick thought, I created a roll of duct tape and carefully taped over the crack in the floor. Then a second time, then a third and a fourth.
I was wondering whether I shouldn’t create some concrete and pour it round the Dome as an extra seal, when I noticed a bulge in the duct tape. A knife-blade poked through, then sliced back and forth.
I watched it move.
I’m not letting them in. I imagined two high voltage wires, one in each of my hands. Crouching down, I touched the knife with them. I heard a crack, then one of those humming-power-station noises.
A cadaverous figure scrambled up and looked at me through the glass of the Dome, clutching h
is hand. He was over seven feet high, heroin-addict gaunt and wearing a Sam Spade raincoat and hat. The little I could see of his face was white and streaked with welts. The eyes were hollow and glowed a dull red.
‘No!’ I said, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me because of the Dome. ‘No! You’re not getting in!’ I called out of my mind a concrete mixer and started pouring concrete over my duct tape.
I vaguely noted that I was being quite reckless. Being terrified helped, as did being separated from the ghoul by a concrete wall and thick glass. The ghoul didn’t seem to know what to do.
I slopped concrete over the leak and willed it to solidify.
The ghoul glared in frustration. ‘Go away!’ I mouthed.
He let his hands fall back by his side, looked at me for a further second, then scrambled over the rubbish and out of sight.
I re-lined the whole Dome complex with my concrete. I saw this wasn’t the first time repairs had been made. This place had been patched up often.
Around me, the funfair wheels turned, the fountains spurted, the wave machine stirred the pool and my friends screamed and bellowed. A rock anthem filled the air: someone had found the juke box. I returned to the lounger. My hands were still shaking.
When I woke up, I had breakfast, left my lighthouse, gingerly stepped back into the Hotel Splendide—in swimming things of my own choosing this time—and chose a deckchair, ready to meet the Lord.
I took that 600-page epic Total Javascript, one of my favourite books, which contained absolutely no ghouls, no car crashes, no nightmares, no lawyers. Blessed, blessed computer manuals. I was engrossed until I heard a cough.
‘Oh hello,’ I said, shutting the book. The Lord was standing in front of me. Next to him was a short, bulky figure with a brown suit and a bristling moustache. He looked like one of those ancient pedigrees of pig that were bred to produce candle tallow.
‘Jamie!’ this one barked, looking me up and down. ‘Name’s Gaston. CEO, chief dealmaker. You can call me the Overlord.’
‘Er—thank you,’ I said.
‘Need a little chat.’ I think Gaston meant this as a fatherly whisper, but it came out like the thunder of those bull elephant seals that the BBC likes to film in the Weddell Sea and show in lush documentaries on Sunday nights.
He ushered me to the middle of three deckchairs set in a kind of arc at the poolside, with a table of nibbles and drinks in front of us. My deckchair was midway between upright and reclining, so I had to shuffle into it. With Gaston clambering into his deckchair next to me, I felt there were chins and folds of skin everywhere.
‘Leopold. Do your stuff,’ said Gaston the Overlord.
‘Jamie,’ said the Lord, also known apparently as Leopold, ‘what do you know about nuclear physics?’ He was sitting on the edge of his deckchair, looking keenly at me.
‘What?’ I said. ‘I—er—the maths was a blur. I’ve read bits.’
‘Your scientists know about a Universe filled with matter and energy. That’s only part of it. If you’re going to include everything (we call it the Omniverse), you have to include all the spirits—a whole other creation. Fortunately, nuclear physics is a good guide. Atomic particles and eternal spirits have a lot in common.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘This isn’t the place to go into detail,’ put in Gaston.
‘I was merely outlining the general principles,’ said Leopold, a little testily.
I was having to swivel my head from one to the other. It was like watching a tennis match.
‘Jamie,’ continued Leopold, ‘the things that make up atoms last forever. So do the things that make up spirits. Atoms bounce off each other. Spirits also bounce off each other. Matter and spirits, of course, don’t bounce off each other. They pass through each other.
‘The Overlord and I are spirits—godlike spirits. Inside your body when you were alive was a human spirit. That’s the part that’s really you; the part that has survived death.
‘Humans, of course, don’t know much about the spiritual world because you spend all your days in the material world. We, however, do live in a spiritual world, so we can help you. Is that clear?’
‘Fair enough,’ I said.
‘If your friend Keziah had listened to us, she wouldn’t have wasted a day and set us all back in your programme,’ grumbled Gaston.
‘I’m coming to that,’ said Leopold. ‘Now, Jamie. What do you think you lack? Most of all?’
‘It would be nice not to be dead.’
‘Irrelevant.’
‘I miss my ex-girlfriend a bit. I was trying to get my web-maintenance contract with the hospital renewed. And my favourite Afghan restaurant has shut down.’
The Lord and the Overlord looked at each other. The Lord continued.
‘These are all examples of a general principle. Think what all humans lack. What is the cry of the human heart from birth to death and beyond?’
‘It’s difficult when I’m put on the spot like this. Not curry, I suppose.’ I said. ‘Obviously not. Could you give me the first letter?’
‘Happiness,’ snapped the Lord.
‘Right!’ I said. ‘Happiness. Of course. Happiness.’
‘Moments of happiness,’ said the Lord, ‘exist as tiny sub-spiritual particles. Like the neutrino in physics, they’re essential to the universe. Like the neutrino, moments of happiness barely interact with anything. They’re elusive. They slip through your fingers. That’s cruel irony, since all spirits need them. All spirits yearn for them.’
‘I didn’t know you were going into all this detail,’ muttered Gaston. ‘I think you just might be confusing him.’
‘We haven’t confused him. It’s an essential part of the teaching,’ insisted the Lord. ‘Are you confused, Jamie?’
‘Erm,’ I said. ‘It’s beginning to come clear. I—obviously…’
‘You see, he understands it perfectly. Every spirit needs Happiness. But Happiness is rare. What strikes you about your Western culture?’
‘It’s unhappy?’ I guessed. I didn’t believe this myself, but you know how it is when a teacher is in full flow. You just go with it.
‘Exactly!’ said the Lord. ‘For all that everyone is surrounded by things that genuinely promise happiness, there’s a poor return. That great concert doesn’t quite deliver. That new thing you buy, disappoints. That meal leaves you feeling fat rather than fulfilled. You sit around and think, “Am I the only one feeling this way, pretending a happiness I don’t feel?” You aren’t.
‘Yet you’re on the right lines. You need to improve things a bit—extract more happiness from the opportunities around you. Squeeze more value out. Up your percentage of happy moments. Which is where we come in.
‘There’s something else that you may not have noticed. No spirit beings. Aw, you have people dabbling in horoscopes. You have people hugging trees and wearing crystals, but it’s all fringe. They don’t know what they’re doing. They wouldn’t know a spirit guide if he appeared in front of them and breathed on bread and made toast. It’s one of the tragedies of Western cultures over the past 300 years that you’ve ditched the spirits. You abandoned formal religion, fair enough, had its day, but you chucked out the baby with the bathwater. Out went the spirits. Out went Happiness.’
I began to think there was a flaw here but I couldn’t put my finger on it. ‘So how,’ the Lord went on, ‘do you find Happiness?’
‘You could earn money if you knew that,’ I said.
‘I intend to,’ rasped Gaston.
‘Get back to following the spirits,’ whispered the Lord, leaning forward, his mouth closer to my ear than I would have preferred. ‘Why? Because the spirits know. Billions of years surfing through space. We see interactions between Happiness and spirits. We show you how. We add value. We improve your odds. Every little helps.’
He looked pleased with this. ‘It’s an art though,’ he added. ‘Not certain. Still mysterious. Nevertheless. Do what we say—and you get happ
ier.’
‘OK,’ I said, not knowing what else to say.
‘Do you believe it?’ asked the Lord.
‘Er—yeah,’ I said shrugging. ‘Yeah. OK.’
‘You see,’ said the Lord to the Overlord. ‘You simply have to lay it out. I told you he’d get it. Anyway,’ he turned back to me. ‘You’ll be wondering what your first instruction is.’
‘Will I?’
‘It isn’t good for man to be alone,’ barked Gaston. ‘That’s it.’
‘Look,’ snapped the Lord. ‘Who’s doing this? You or I?’
‘Time management,’ insisted Gaston. ‘Get to the point.’
‘I am coming to the point,’ said the Lord with dignity. ‘Not everything is about efficiency. Relationship isn’t about efficiency. Jamie, spirits need to be in community. Like subatomic particles. Humanness is manifested in pairs. It’s not good for man to be alone. We made sure we put two of you together in this habitat. It cost us quite a bit. Jamie, you have to get Keziah on board.’
‘I what?’
‘You and Keziah need to follow us together. As a single spirit on your own you might as well not bother. You have to get into a relationship with her before we can do much with you.’
‘I think that might be impossible,’ I said.
‘I don’t see why,’ said the Lord. ‘Male spirit/female spirit; proton/electron. What’s hard about that?’
‘You’ve had plenty of time,’ harrumphed Gaston.
‘Time!’
‘Yes,’ said the Lord. ‘There was pressure to speed things up, even from the Overlord here, but I thought, no, they’ll have transplantation shock to overcome, then they need to find their way around the habitat, and I hope they’ll find each other. “We just have to be patient,” I said to myself.’
‘We gave you six full days,’ said Gaston. ‘Six full days, everything you wanted. The whole world of your minds to explore. This wonderful safe habitat. Six days, no return on our investment.’
‘You didn’t seem to manage that,’ said the Lord. ‘So we gave you a bit of help. Do you like Paradise? The swimming pool here? I designed all that. Her memories; your desires; a romantic setting. There you were, next to each other on sunloungers. Somehow you managed to mess even that up.’
I was aware of my jaw going up and down and no sounds coming out.
‘These things might be a bit more subtle than that,’ I protested. ‘You expected… I mean good grief…’
‘We manage,’ said the Lord with a glance at the Overlord. ‘The Overlord and I. And we’re much more incompatible. Aren’t we?’
‘The point is,’ said the Overlord, ‘we can’t keep faffing around. You have to sort it out between you and Keziah, or the whole thing won’t work.’
‘That’s the end of the lesson,’ added Gaston. ‘We need the cloud, Leopold.’
A cloud enveloped them. ‘I hope that will get things back on track,’ I heard Gaston the Overlord mutter before his voice was gone.
‘They can totally stuff that idea,’ I said to Caroline. It was the afternoon of the same day. I was shooting clay elephants on a grouse moor. Mel was firing off the clay elephants using a trebuchet and I was blasting them out of the sky with rocket-propelled grenades. When they blew up, whamsplat, I had them dissolve into a firework display.
‘There’s relationships and relationships,’ said Caroline, who was wearing outdoor-girl shorts, hiking boots, and pink thermal layers.
‘Caroline. Please don’t be so free with the R word. I’ve spoken to you about this before.’
‘Don’t be infantile,’ she replied, not passing me an RPG to better make her point, and pushing her glasses back up her nose. She’d be a lot better with contact lenses. ‘It’s ridiculous for you and Keziah to be sitting at the opposite sides of your cage and both sulking.’
We heard the yoink of the trebuchet and watched a clay elephant trace out a parabola over our heads. Mel was a hardworking girl who liked the simple tasks.
‘Your point?’
‘You might as well be friends. You might as well work together.’ The rain and wind was flicking at Caroline’s hair and she brushed it out of her face.
‘It wasn’t my fault that we’re not.’
‘That’s arguable.’
‘I was just being me. I am what I am. She’s the one who’s insufferable.’
‘Really.’
‘Anyway that’s just what Gaston and the Lord—Leopold—want us to do, be friends. It’s playing into their hands!’
‘Which is why they won’t stop you.’
‘Mel!—would you stop sending these things over for a minute? That one nearly took my head out.’
‘Sorry,’ shouted Mel cheerfully from behind the trebuchet.
‘Call her up,’ said Caroline.
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Call her up.’
‘If I wanted to be nagged, I’d have created my mother,’ I grumped.
We shot off a dozen more clay elephants, which gave me an appetite, and I was wondering about creating a takeaway Osama’s booth there on the grouse moor, when I heard this:
‘Well, I’m here again, Jamie.’
Lizzie. Out of nowhere.
‘It’s my lunch hour, so I thought I’d pop in.’
‘That was Lizzie!’ said Caroline.
‘I know that’s Lizzie. This happened to me last night. I heard the same voice.’
‘You didn’t create her from your memories?’ asked Caroline.
‘Caroline. Who in their right mind would create another Lizzie? I need help to solve my problems. It’s just her disembodied voice keeps coming out of nowhere.’
‘That’s what disembodied voices do, come out of nowhere. Otherwise they wouldn’t be disembodied,’ Caroline was saying pedantically, but something was going wrong with the world. The sky, I noticed, had turned from grey to black.
‘I bought you some grapes,’ continued Lizzie. ‘They wouldn’t let me bring them in, so I had to eat them outside. Which is why I’m a bit late.’
Something was happening to my chest—a deep pain, ballooning up.
‘You all right?’ asked Caroline, but she, the grouse moor, Mel, the trebuchet, the clay elephants and everything were fading rapidly to black. My chest was in terrible pain and I had to keep heaving it up and down just to get air in my body. I could only feel one leg. It was itchy.
Everything flickered off. System crash, I thought. Fantastic.
How had breathing been so easy all my life? It was nearly impossible now.
Lizzie’s voice was still speaking, blonde and relentless. ‘Jamie, I hope you’re still in there, bro. It’s Monday today. You had your crash on Friday. They cut you out and they’ve been trying to stop the bleeding. Then they said you had a punctured lung, which made me think like a burst balloon, you know. Pssshsht! I’m surprised you didn’t go flying round the hospital.
‘Anyway I think they’ve mended that.
‘They also said there’s not much brain activity, and what there is is chaotic. I said that sounded like you. There’s some things—haema-somethings—that they’re a bit worried about. That’s because of the fractured skull. They were trying to explain it all to me but I said, don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll sort it. It was so icky. I’m telling them definitely not to switch anything off.’
I tried to say, Lizzie, I’m here, but like in a nightmare, I couldn’t.
‘What else can I tell you? I got a couple of nice new tops, but I don’t suppose you’ll be interested.’
Suddenly the pain and darkness disappeared.
The grouse moor rematerialized. Caroline’s upside-down face was peering down at me. Grey eyes: a beautiful oval face, especially if she’d take the glasses off and pay for a haircut every so often instead of clipping her curls in front of the mirror.
‘You all right?’
‘You all disappeared,’ I said confusedly. ‘Lizzie started telling me about some tops she’d bought.’ <
br />
I looked at Caroline for a long moment, my head spinning and beads of sweat still on my face, trying to order my thoughts. ‘I need to phone a lawyer,’ I said.
We got back to the lighthouse as quickly as we could. I snatched the mobile phone and texted Keziah.
‘Please can I c u? Important.’
She texted back:
‘v busy.’
I tried again:
‘Life & death! Honest.’
She texted back:
‘u r contemptible.’
‘I am sorry 4 being c.’
There was a pause in our texting. Finally she wrote,
‘r u decent?’
To which I replied,
‘No thong.’
Then on second thoughts added: ‘ie thong + + +.’
After a lengthy pause I heard her knocking on the lighthouse door. I let her in and we were quickly sitting round the wooden table with mugs of tea. I introduced Caroline, then told Keziah about my blackout.
‘I was in my body again, in hospital. What if we’re not dead, Keziah?’
‘After I was thrown out of that Hotel Splendide place I heard you sucking up to the Lord,’ said Keziah, not having listened. ‘Why did you do that?’
‘Because we don’t have many options, that’s why.’
‘Can’t you see what he’s like?’
‘I happen to think you can’t fight all the time. You have to pick your moment.’
‘Oh, right! You’re really going to pick a moment.’
‘I might just be being realistic.’
‘Or you might just be being spineless. He’s going to abuse us Jamie. It’s all over his face.’
‘He’s called Leopold, the Lord. I met the other one, Gaston. He seems all right. Bit gruff.’
‘You being a reliable judge of character.’
‘This relationship business,’ I said, hesitantly. ‘It’s bad. They want us to have one.’
‘That’s why you called me over...’
‘No, Keziah, I’m telling you that because that’s what they told me. That’s how the land lies. I called you over because when I blacked out I thought I heard my sister Lizzie speaking to me. We might both be still alive in hospital. On life support or something.’
‘I don’t want to think about that,’ said Keziah.
‘You might have to. Look,’ I said. ‘There’s a certain pragmatism in going along with Gaston and Leopold isn’t there? While they’re not harming us?’
‘There’s also a certain pragmatism in fighting them, every moment, every inch, all the time.’
‘Because you’ve taken against them.’
‘Because I know what abusers are like.’
Another knock at the door disturbed us. Caroline said, ‘I’ll get it,’ and opened the door on the Lord, who strode in without invitation. He looked like he had dressed hastily.
‘I’ve just been watching what’s happened,’ he said. ‘I was away for a bit.’ He ran his fingers through his greying hair, as if collecting his thoughts. ‘Jamie, I’m guessing you might have been troubled by dreams and hearing voices? They’re just a hangover from death—false memories. It’s like when you behead something and it starts twitching. Same with the mind.’
‘Lizzie was saying things I’ve never heard her say before.’
‘That’s normal. Things get jumbled. Nothing to worry about.’
‘I could feel pain, like I’d had a car accident.’
‘Yes, yes, perfectly normal. Did she mention any days having passed?’
‘Yes she did. She told me it was Monday on earth… three nights and four days after the crash.’
‘How long do you think you’ve been here?’
I totted up. ‘About a week.’
‘Precisely,’ said Leopold. ‘You see, your spirit’s had a trauma. You are most definitely dead and Keziah’s right. You’ve got to move on, get over it.’
Then he turned to Keziah.
‘Miss Mordant, I know you don’t want to cooperate with us. I want to tell you that the Overlord and I are eternal beings of incredible power. You do have a choice: you can do what we say now. Or you can do what we say later. We will break you in, Keziah. We always do and we will.’
Keziah’s green eyes were staring him down, furious, like when a teenager is told off.
‘That’s that, then,’ said Leopold. ‘Glad to clear that up. Nice to see you two together. I’m off. We’ll meet for breakfast tomorrow.’
‘Breakfast?’ I said. ‘Let me do that. I can do breakfast.’
‘Don’t make it early,’ said Keziah.