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The threat of my ever-dwindling supply of vaccine, coupled with my ever-increasing difficulty in finding any kind of escape to my days is starting to make me go a little bit… odd. I talk to myself a lot now. I talk to Mum all the time too. And Tom. I’ve typed a million texts to him, and I save them all, even though I can’t send them. I wrote him a letter too, acres of real words on real paper, telling him everything, and then I fed it to the fire and watched it burn.
I’m starting to think I really need to get out – somehow. Dad worries himself half to death thinking about would happen to me if I did, and I used to do the same, but now I find I’m starting to worry more about what will happen to me if I don’t.
*
Lately Dad keeps bringing home these Living France magazines, and whatever glossy women’s mags are featuring anything at all to do with Paris. He’s trying to fire up my enthusiasm, give me something to hold on to, I know, but Paris is his ultimate solution to all this, not mine. I feel lousy thinking like that, because it’s a solution that’s totally for my benefit – and the whole situation is just so messed up that it’s beyond a joke. Neither of us actually want to go there, but it looks like that’s where we’re headed all the same.
‘Christophe was always the closest thing I had to a friend at the Agency,’ he tells me, every time the subject comes up. ‘He knew exactly what was going on, and that’s why he got out when he did – before it got too late for him, like it did for the rest of us.’
‘Yeah? Then why didn’t he tell you?’ I argue. ‘If he was such a friend, why did he leave you there?’
‘He didn’t leave me, Chloe. He sent me his address. Do you have any idea what he risked in doing that? Everything. He risked everything to give me a way out.’
‘Yeah? But what if he’s a double agent? I mean, if this whole thing was so top secret, and so intense – if he was the only one who got out, and he knew how dangerous they were, isn’t it just a little bit weird that he got in touch with you and left the super-secret details of where to find him in his covert new life?’
‘It’s not like that,’ he always says with a shake of his head when I bring it up, or when I used to – I don’t bother any more because he doesn’t listen.
‘Christophe gave me that address for a reason, and it’s not the one you think. I trust him. He’s the only one there I ever did trust, and I don’t have any reason to change my opinion of him now.’
There are two problems I have with that. One is that if this indisputably trustworthy science-genius Good Guy colleague really is a Good Guy, then why didn’t Dad get in touch with him on day one? Why isn’t he helping Dad with the vaccine right now? And two – why didn’t he talk things through with Dad before he left? Why leave and then send the contact details on? Because they found him, that’s why. They found him, and re-recruited him, and now he’s a plant – a trap we’re about to fall right into. I watch the films, I read the books, I know that it’s never that simple.
And I don’t want to go. I don’t want to run away to France, and I don’t trust this friend. It’s just another one of the awkward, corrosive secrets that Dad and I have started to keep from each other now.
I don’t tell him how much I wish I was dead instead of Mum, and he doesn’t tell me half of what goes through his head. The secrets are probably the only things that keep us both anywhere near sane.
As the days close in and even I start to notice it from behind the blinds, and as our ever-present background timer runs lower, the guilt that I constantly feel only seems to get heavier. It should be Mum here with Dad instead of me. Some days I can convince myself that it’s an absolute godsend that she’s not here, not like this. Others, I wonder how much harder, how much faster Dad might be working if it was her, and not me. It’s a nasty, dangerous thought, but it’s there, and it forces me to acknowledge it. Dad and I were never close, I never really felt like I meant that much to him. It was always Mum who was there for me. She was the one who helped me with my homework, drove me all over the place, and picked up the pieces whenever Tom and I fought and the world was ending. Dad was always at work. Now everything’s flipped around and I’m somehow his entire world, and that doesn’t always make sense to me. Sometimes I wonder if he just pretends as much as I do.
But then I remember… I never had a choice in any of this. He did.
And he chose me.
*
Trying not to think, or feel, is how I get through my days. I pretty much live in the attic now. I have a huge beanbag up there, an extra duvet which is like the War and Peace of the quilt world, and three electric heaters that, combined, can fry an egg at a hundred paces.
Whenever Dad goes into town to do the food shop, he always asks if there’s anything I want, and I spend a good part of the week trying to think up things that might make my strange prison-but-not-a-prison more comfortable. I don’t know much about what new books are out there any more, so I ask him to pick me up some old classics that I know about but have never read. It’s weird how now I’m out of school for good I’m suddenly reading “better” books than I ever was before. No more fluffy paranormal romances for me, or gore-fest horrors. I’ve started to become obsessed with the complicated language and kind of… aching darkness of old books. The things I used to read feel almost like when I try and watch TV now: garbled nonsense playing in the background that isn’t loud enough to compete with the fears in my head. I need stronger stuff. I read The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, and this one called Varney the Vampire which is fast becoming my favourite book of all time. The more I have to concentrate, the harder I have to work to follow the language and the plot, the less room there is in my head for anything else. The days blur outside the high windows of my attic, and I don’t even look up at the sky any more.
Drawing more and more into myself, the biggest change I notice is in my nightmares. Ever since it happened, there’s only ever really been one – the same scene playing out in the same way every night. There was a brief respite when we first moved in, but now it’s back, and it’s starting to feature a whole new opening scene that makes no sense. Dad and I have talked about the dreams, because it’s kind of hard not to when you wake up screaming most nights. I’ve been trying to get my sleep during the day, to keep the tears and the terror away from him. Sometimes it works, sometimes I can read all night and sleep up in the attic most of the day, but it seems more and more that the only place I can really settle to a book is up there, and sleep tends to find me after my bath and my meds no matter what.
There’s another reason I’d rather not wake him: when I wake up terrified, and he’s there beside me trying to comfort me – when I should feel safe and secure in his presence – I really don’t. I feel the exact opposite. He’s the last person I want to see; I’m scared that if there was anything dangerous in my room, or if I was stronger, or faster, I could really hurt him in that one, painfully clear moment when I remember what he did to us.
I never hear him have nightmares. I’ve always wondered why.
The dream has only ever starred me, Mum and Dad, but now a new character has found his way in, and I don’t really know what to make of him. He feels like some kind of doctor maybe, wearing a long, dark cloak with a hood that falls down low over a breathing mask with heavy ventilators to each side, and the combination of the two completely obscures his face. I don’t know who he is, or why he’s there, and it’s weird because everything else I dream about is so personal, and so real. He doesn’t speak, or even do anything. He’s just there. The only thing I hear is his breathing, rhythmic and ragged through the ventilator. I can’t see his eyes, but I can feel him watching me, and that’s all he does, watch, and breathe. He’s only ever there at the very start of my dream. He’s waiting for something, I think. I’m not sure I want to think about what.
He makes me feel even more ‘unclean’, even more repulsive somehow. Like my body is such a perversion now that even the air around me has become dangerous. Like no one could ever be safe near me.
The point at which he melts into the blackness around him is when my dream begins in earnest, and from here it’s always the same. Back to normal. I have to live through the experience over and over, every time I fall into a deep sleep.
Don’t think.
I try not to think so much, for so long, that sometimes it feels like there’s nothing left of me.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_1ed8eafd-08cf-5664-bb13-7f896350ba51)
Going by the number of times I’ve re-read Jane Eyre, and by the thickness of Dad’s sweaters, I think we must have been here for about two months or so when it happens. Summer has left us, and autumn is moving in. I’m following my well-trodden path through the days like a compliant lab rat, and Dad’s becoming ever more the quietly mad scientist with each day that passes without a breakthrough.
I have an exercise bike now, so I can work more on my fitness – a new wheel for my cage – and I decide to watch some TV while I put in some time on it. I pedal hard for almost ten minutes before the shaking starts, which means I’m finally starting to see some improvement. The first day he brought it home, I couldn’t even manage five. When I ease myself off the saddle and make for the sofa, I start to shiver. The fire must have died awhile back without me noticing, and when I stop moving the coolness of the air hits me. I think of my ‘nest’ up in the attic, but don’t fancy a double dose of stairs, so I try and warm myself up with the thick blanket on the back of the sofa instead.
The woodpile is just outside the back door, and there are matches and plenty of old newspapers folded and stacked in the kitchen. I should get up and sweep the ashes, and relight the fire so I can slump in front of its crackling, cosy warmth – but a deep lethargy seems to have set into my limbs, and I can’t make myself move. I stretch out on the sofa and bundle myself as tightly into the blanket as I can manage. I know I shouldn’t sleep like this, because I’ll only wake up even colder; I should go and put another hoodie on at least, or grab my thick duvet and burrow under that, but the longer I think about it, the less capable of moving I feel. I stare into the grey emptiness of the fireplace, and my mind drifts. My eyelids become heavy, and before I can do a thing to stop myself, I slide down into a cold, uncomfortable sleep, and the cloaked stranger brings me my nightmare.
Everything leading up to the crash in the dream is exactly the same as it was for real, but it all feels different. Things are dark and blurred around the edges, almost a little out of focus in places, and all the fear and confusion I felt at the time gets replaced by this overwhelming feeling that everything is about to change. When the nightmare starts for real, I know what’s going to happen, and how it’s going to happen, but I still have to go through the whole process. There are no shortcuts. And this time there’s no hope at all that somehow things might turn out ok. Because I know that Mum and I are going to die.
It starts out right where everything began to go wrong, on the day that Mum found out what Dad really did for a living. I come home from school, only I’m not really me in the dream, I’m outside of me… watching. There’s heavy darkness around everything I see, like I’m watching things through a tunnel. And it’s cold; so cold.
I see myself unlocking the front door and I can’t shout at me not to go in, to turn around, to go to Tom’s, to the library, anywhere but there. I can never do anything to change it, I can only relive it. I hear Mum shouting before the door’s even open, her tone and her words are venomous; raw anger and disdain drip from every syllable and she doesn’t sound anything like herself and I’m scared before I’ve even set foot in the house. I can’t make out everything she’s saying, some of the words fade in and out, but the me that’s watching already knows every argument, insult and counter-argument by heart, because I’ve been hearing them in my head since the day it happened. Because I don’t know how to make them stop.
‘…twenty years thinking I was married to someone decent, someone with morals and a bit of backbone – twenty years and I never realised what an evil, messed up Frankenstein you really are. You bastard, Martin. You complete and total bastard. “Project Rise”? How do you sleep at night? How do you live with yourself? You sick, twisted…’
‘The project was classified for a reason, Alma. What the hell do you expect?’
‘What do I expect? I expect you not to have anything to do with something so –’
‘Medical research! You knew that, I never once lied to you –’
‘You never once told me the truth either! You never once got anywhere near!’
‘How the hell could I? This is government work, MOD classified at the highest level. Do you have any idea what they’ll do to me –’
‘I don’t give a damn about what they’ll do to you, just like you don’t give a damn about the men you killed – or their families – or anyone other than your own precious self and your revolting little career. You can go straight to hell for all I care… the whole lot of you.’
‘What do you think has paid for all this? Eh? The house you wanted, the car you wanted – you can thank my revolting little career for that, you hypocritical, ungrateful…’
Around and around they go, the insults getting deeper and the point of no return becoming a tiny speck in the distance. And all I can do is watch.
‘Sick, twisted abomination…’ Those are the last words I hear from Mum before she flings the kitchen door open and storms through it. She’s white as a ghost, paler than I’ve ever seen her, but somehow she manages to go whiter still when she sees me there in the hallway.
I try to speak, but my throat’s too tight, and she grabs my arm and drags me up the stairs behind her before I can get a word out.
‘Quickly Chloe,’ she urges, pulling me into my room and grabbing clothes from my drawers. ‘We need to go. Now. Hurry.’
She leaves me piling clothes into a bag with no idea why. I hear Dad pounding up the stairs, and there’s more shouting, and crying. I don’t know how much I’m supposed to take; I don’t know where we’re going, or for how long. So I keep going until the bag is full, then I sit on the bed, and wait. Wait for the shouting to stop, wait for the footsteps to thunder back down the stairs, wait for the front door to slam, and for that final silence to descend. This is my last chance to stop it all, and there’s not a thing I can do.
I follow Mum down the stairs, dragging the heavy bag behind me, and then we’re on the driveway in the rain, getting into her car. Mum’s all raw, burning emotion, and I’m a ghost at her side. I let her shout, I let her tell me what an immoral, lying, evil monster my dad is. How medical research and military research are worlds apart, and how everything he’s ever told us is a lie. How what he was doing to those soldiers was unthinkable, unforgivable. And I stand there, not understanding, terrified, and try to defend him.
Then Mum’s driving too fast and the rain is getting heavier. The fear inside me is building. It won’t be long now. I still babble madly on, like it could make a difference. Maybe Dad was saving lives, in a way. He was saving others from having to give their lives in the first place. Surely that was a good thing? It only makes her angrier, and the angrier she gets, the harder she squeezes the accelerator.
‘You’re like him,’ she says, disgusted. ‘My god, Chloe, you’re just like him.’ She flicks a frantic look in the rear view mirror, and whimpers. ‘It’s too late.’ She doesn’t take her eyes off the mirror, as if they’re right behind us, these undead soldiers Dad apparently has at his disposal, come to chase us down, bring us back. “The project was classified for a reason.”; “Do you have any idea what they’ll do?” Tears stream down my face, mirroring the rain that floods the windscreen faster than the wipers can clear it. And faster we fly through the narrow streets, darkness pressing in all around us, the lights blurring in the rain-obscured glass. It’s coming. I scream and shout myself hoarse but I know it can’t make any difference. Mum makes the turn that’s going to kill us. I can’t tear my eyes from the speedometer; I want to look at Mum, tell her I love her, tell her I’m sorry, but all I can see is the glowing ‘70’ on the display. I hear the brakes lock up, feel the back end of the car start to slide. Steel twists and splinters around me. My seatbelt crushes three of my ribs, and the impacted passenger door breaks my left shoulder and hip. A slice of shattered windshield tears into my face, but I don’t feel it, I don’t feel any of it. There’s no pain. There’s just the warm blood on my face, and the cold rain around me. And the car spins… flips… flies… landing heavily on its roof. I hang upside down from my seatbelt and two more of my ribs crack. My leg smashed against the footwell as we flew through the air, and is broken in two places. And now it’s quiet, and still. And I look over to see Mum’s lifeless eyes staring straight ahead, and my world ends.
I’m screaming in the dark, my body ice cold and tangled up in something, and I don’t know where I am. I scream harder, and fall to the floor, my limbs trapped and useless. Brightness explodes on my face, and I feel arms around me and panic even more. Until I hear his voice.
‘It’s ok, Chloe. It’s over. It’s ok, you’re ok.’ Over and over he says it, and finally I understand that it’s true. Except it’s not, because it’ll never be over. And I keep on having to relive it like this. And I don’t know if I can do it any more.
‘Chlo, you’re all caught up in the blanket, here, hold still.’ Dad lifts me awkwardly, trying to untangle the twisted fabric from my legs, and I let him. He rests me back on the sofa, putting a thick cushion behind my head, and fussing over me all the while. ‘Christ, you’re like ice,’ he says, as he lifts my feet and swings them round. ‘Why were you sleeping down here? Why did you let the fire go out?’
I can’t form an answer, not yet. All I can see are Mum’s dead eyes. I don’t even feel the cold that’s making me shake so hard I could be having a fit.
‘Don’t move,’ he says, pulling the blanket back up over me and running for the stairs. As if I even could.
You’re just like him.
He runs back down with the thick double duvet from his bed, and piles it onto me. Then he stands beside the sofa with his head in his hands.
‘I shouldn’t have left you. I thought… Christ. I thought things were getting better. I thought this was all going to stop.’
I close my eyes and turn my head towards the back of the sofa.
How could he think it would ever stop?
*
I must have drifted off to sleep again, although it can’t have been for very long. When I wake the second time I’m warm, and I turn my head to see a bright fire dancing in the grate. The duvet’s so thickly folded down on top of me that I have to fight hard to get out from underneath it.
‘Dad?’ I call, disorientated and not understanding how I could have gone back to sleep after that.
He comes in, calmer now, although still deathly pale. He’s drying his hands on a towel, and the smell of warm spices follows him into the room.
‘I’m sorry Chlo,’ he says in a voice heavy with resignation. ‘I’ll call the hospital in the morning. I shouldn’t be working full-time, leaving you like this every day. I thought by now things would… I don’t know what I thought.’ He sighs. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘No, Dad, you don’t understand.’ My head’s still spinning but the warmth and the brief sleep seem to have accelerated my return from the nightmare, and I’m almost coherent. ‘I’m fine,’ I lie, ‘I just… I was using the bike and I got tired… I didn’t notice the fire, and I must’ve fallen asleep because of the exercise, and… it was just… I’m fine.’ It’s a weak finish, but it’s all I have.
‘Was it the usual?’ he asks.
I nod. He doesn’t know about my strange new ringmaster, but he knows everything else.
‘It will stop, Chlo, I promise you it will. It just takes time. It’s your brain’s way of dealing with things, and with the way your brain’s been… rewired… it’s only natural…’
There’s nothing natural about it, we both know that, but neither of us say it.
My eyes hurt from having fallen asleep with my contacts in, and the tears have made them doubly painful. With a bit of help, I get up from the sofa and trudge upstairs to take them out. Then I stand under a scalding hot shower until my skin starts to burn. Showers aren’t good for me, they dry my skin out even more – but I dry and dress without putting any of my lotions on. Because I’m finding it harder and harder to care. If Dad’s thinking of quitting, what’s the point in me even bothering?
He calls me down to eat; food’s the last thing on my mind but I’ve got no choice but to go because my stomach is doing its usual dance of desperation. He still won’t let me try out some protein shakes. I’m sick of having to chew my way through mountains of meat and eggs all the time, but he’s always so busy. His hours are starting to stretch almost as thin as my sanity.
‘You can’t quit your job,’ I tell him as I sit down. I don’t know why I said it, because it’s the exact opposite of what I’m thinking: you have to quit your job, or I’m going to go insane here on my own.
He chews his food slowly, buying himself time before he replies. Which gives my mouth time to dig me in even further. ‘I just need to stay awake in the daytime, that’s all. I can do that. And I’ll take things easier tomorrow. I was on the bike for too long. I just wanted to see how much I could do.’
I feel totally pathetic at this point. All I have to do is stay inside and take things easy while he works all hours to keep me alive, and I can’t even manage that.
He takes a long drink of his beer. ‘I thought…’ he trails off, struggling. ‘I thought maybe you’d turned a corner,’ he says, finally. ‘I don’t hear you cry in the night so much any more. I thought things were ok.’
Things will never be ok.
‘I have,’ I lie earnestly. ‘It’s just, maybe it was a small corner. Maybe this whole thing is about small corners. There are just so many of them.’ I’m getting dangerously close to the truth here, and I catch his look. It’s not a promising one; it’s challenging, defensive even.
‘You think you have corners?’ he says, eyebrows raised. ‘Chloe, do you have any idea what my days are like?’
‘Well not really, no, because I’m stuck here by myself all day every day, aren’t I? I don’t know anything about anything any more. I read books that are hundreds of years old, and I clean the house.’ My mouth genuinely has a mind of its own, but I’m a teenager. I’m supposed to be moody and confrontational. It’s expected.
He drains his beer, and sighs. ‘So what is it that you want? Do you want to go hang out in town for a while? Maybe have a few drinks and go dancing? Is that it?’
Well, I’ve never ‘gone dancing’ in my life, although probably this isn’t the time to mention it.
‘No, of course not, I –’
He’s angry now, and I don’t think the beer is helping. He sounds almost as petulant and childish as me when he interrupts.
‘No, come on, what is it that you want to do instead of lying around all day reading? Am I really making this so very hard for you?’
‘No, that’s not what I’m saying, if you’d just listen –’
‘I do nothing but listen, Chloe! You want to be able to taste more, you don’t want to have to eat so much food all the time, you’re tired of the bad dreams, you’re always cold. I listen. But I’m not your personal wish-granter. I’m kind of occupied just now with trying to keep you breathing.’
He bangs his fist down hard on the table at the last word, and I flinch. I haven’t seen him angry like this since the night it happened, and with the nightmare fresh in my mind it’s too much. Tears sting the back of my already sore eyes and I stare fixedly down at my plate. Whatever I say is going to piss him off now; it’s like we’ve been slowly simmering away inside this house-shaped pressure cooker, and now it’s starting to whistle and shake and someone needs to let all the steam out or it’s going to blow us both clean away.
‘I’m lonely, Dad,’ I confess, embarrassed and desperate all at once. ‘I was never exactly Little Miss Popular or anything, I know, but I had friends, I had people I could talk to –’
‘You’ve got me!’ he shouts, and I’m scared. I push my chair back from the table and I don’t know whether to run upstairs, or outside, or what. So I just sit there, staring at my feet, waiting for this to end.
‘All of this,’ he waves a hand at the house in general, ‘it’s all for you, Chlo. So you can be comfortable. So your recovery can be as pleasant as I can possibly make it. To make up for the way things were… in the beginning. And in the meantime, I spend every waking moment trying to fix you – trying so damn hard to fix you – and now I’m not good enough to even talk to?’
He doesn’t normally drink, and I wonder if it’s the beer that’s making him like this. I don’t even know where he got it from, I never see any in the fridge. What if he has a stash of it down in the basement? What if he drinks more and more, gets angrier and angrier…
My head’s telling me to shut up and back off, but my mouth is off again before I can stop it.
‘What am I even supposed to talk to you about? There’s… nothing. I have no life!’
He stands up and kicks his chair back in one fast, aggressive move, and crosses to the sink, turning his back to me as he stares out of the window. I see his knuckles tightening and whitening against the sideboard.
‘You have a life, Chloe,’ he says coldly, quietly, and it’s scarier than when he shouts. ‘Don’t ever call it “nothing”. Not after what it cost.’
Mum was terrified of him that night, and I was scared for her, but not scared of Dad as such. It’s my turn now though. I want to be sick. I want to run. He’s angry at me, and he’s frightening me; my mouth opens, and I know I’m only going to make it worse, but I do it anyway.
‘I can’t stay like this… be like this. It’s too much. You have no idea what it’s like, Dad. You can’t keep me locked up forever. It doesn’t make it all just go away. It just traps it all in with me.’
He doesn’t say anything for so long that I start to wonder if I actually said it out loud after all. And then finally he says, ‘If I let you out, what do you think will happen?’
‘I don’t know,’ I fire back automatically. ‘You tell me.’
