5 Out on your own
Liam slept. He curled up on the sofa with his knees tucked under his chin, his hands shoved into his face. Babies in the womb curl up in this way. It’s the most compact, tidy way for them to fit into such a confined space. Animals in shock curl up like this, too. It’s a defence mechanism, a way of trying to shut out the horrors of the world and retreat into a safe, sheltered, enclosed space.
~
Liam woke, stiff and aching. He had been curled up tightly on the sofa, a position he didn’t like, one which made him uncomfortable.
The flat was in gloom, the curtains drawn even though it was still light outside. Kath had the radio on in the kitchen, voices talking in tinny, scratchy tones.
Liam took his phone from his pocket and flipped it open. Still nothing.
He stretched, his legs poking out over the end of the sofa. He remembered Mr Mendes at the house, the look on his face... the complete lack of recognition. The empty house, talk of new tenants. How could there be new tenants when Liam’s parents owned the house? He remembered the shock as DC Parker told him that there was no record of any police investigation into what had happened at Liam’s home the day before. And the Special Intelligence men here, the two Mr Smiths and the nameless Scot who seemed to be in charge.
At this, Liam stiffened and levered himself upright. He peered around the room, but it was empty now. No sign of this afternoon’s visitors. He settled back into the sofa.
All these incidents... Everything that had happened over the last two days seemed like scenes from a bad dream, a fevered hallucination.
Maybe he had just woken up from it.
But he knew that couldn’t be true. If it was, then why wake up here and not back at home, or even back at NATS?
Everything seemed detached. Unreal. He wondered again if he had gone mad. There was that buzzing in his head again, that sense of the world closing in.
He got up, and went through to the kitchen where Kath sat on the high wooden stool, idly flicking through a magazine. She looked up, and smiled awkwardly.
“I’m hungry,” said Liam. He found it hard to say much more.
She nodded. She was looking after him. She made him some food – beans, microwave chips, an omelette – and brought it through to him in the living room. She watched as he ate it, and afterwards he felt calmer again. This was what they called comfort-eating, he supposed. Food to settle the jangly state of his thoughts. Food to straighten his head.
~
He woke again, and it was morning.
He remembered the evening, another awkward time of a few exchanged words, of two people uncomfortable together. Familiar, yet strangers.
And the night. Dozing and waking, over and over, unsettled by the streetlamp and the noises of the city. Kath had been awake through the night, too. He could tell. He remembered the previous night, her outburst, her hatred. Nights seemed to be worst for her. She seemed more exposed at night.
She cooked him breakfast again. They hardly exchanged a word. It was as if they had exhausted all their small talk and had run out of anything more substantial to say.
Afterwards, calmer, he gathered his things into his weekend bag.
Kath leaned by the window, half looking out into the street and half watching Liam. “What are you doing?” she said.
“I’m going back to school. It’s Sunday. I have to be back by six. I might as well go this morning.”
She looked anxious, eyes widening. “You can’t,” she told him. “You heard what they said. You have to stay here, with me, until this is all over.”
“What is there to wait here for?” said Liam. In the night he had realised that Kath wasn’t the only thing in his life left ... un-erased. There was NATS, too. There were Anders and Hayley and all the others. Skiver, too. “If I don’t get back on time they’ll mark it against me. I can’t get kicked out of NATS.” He had been about to add that she must know how easy it was to get turned out of NATS if you don’t make the grade, but he stopped himself.
“You can’t go back to that place,” said Kath. “NATS is the last place you want to be right now. Ever.”
Her failure at NATS still hurt, clearly.
“They want me,” said Liam. “I belong there.”
That hurt her. No-one at NATS woke in the night to tell him how they couldn’t stand him to be around.
He checked his wallet for his return ticket.
Kath hadn’t moved from the window. “They’ll be watching,” she said. “They’ll be looking out for you.”
“Who?” said Liam. “Who are ‘they’, Kath? What do they want with us?”
She shrugged. “They were here yesterday, weren’t they? Special Intelligence. They told you they were always around. Look out for yourself, littl’un, you hear?”
She still stood by the window. She wasn’t going to come across the room. No goodbyes, no farewell hugs. She couldn’t stand to be near him.
Liam nodded. “Look after yourself, too,” he said. He didn’t understand, but he knew his sister had problems of her own. The night terrors, the erratic behaviour, the pills. He slung his bag from his shoulder, and took his phone from his pocket. “I’ll call if I hear anything,” he said.
She nodded. “Me too.”
She stayed by the window as he went to the doorway, then he was heading down the narrow staircase to the front door.
Outside, on his own, he was aware that she was watching from above but he didn’t look up. He paused by the door and looked along the street. It was thickly parked up as usual, but there was no sign of the white Volvo, no sign of anyone sitting in a car, watching and waiting.
He ducked his head and went out, across the road to the far pavement. Walking along towards Unthank Road, he glanced back but Kath was no longer visible in the window.
~
He waited for a long time outside the station, watching the taxis arriving and leaving, the people heading to and from their cars. The station had a grand entrance, a brick extension with stone-edged arches where taxis picked up and dropped off passengers. Up above this entrance, the clock hands edged round.
This was the only way in. It would be easy for them – whoever they really were – to watch.
He waited until another taxi arrived, and while its passengers climbed out and sorted out their bags, Liam ducked his head and darted through into the station. He stopped by a cluster of telephone booths and looked around anxiously. Nothing.
He felt a bit foolish, then. Was all this cloak and dagger stuff really necessary? Why would anyone be watching for him?
But Kath had seemed convinced. And he remembered the three visitors yesterday. They had been deadly serious about their business, whatever that business might be. He looked up at the departures board, even though he knew the trains left at ten past the hour.
He had twenty-five minutes to wait.
He headed down Platform Two to the far end, where two men with notebooks and cameras stood. He wanted to be as far away from the main part of the station as possible. He dropped his bag and slumped to sit cross-legged beside it. The two trainspotters gave him a glance then returned to their conversation.
He followed the time passing on his wristwatch, all the while staring back along the platform to the ever-changing mix of people around the ticket office, the shop, the telephones and coffee shop. For some reason he was expecting to see the men in suits, the Mr Smiths or maybe the “policeman” from Friday. It could be anybody, he realised. These trainspotters who barely paid him any attention might at any time reveal that they knew him, that they had been waiting for him in case he decided to leave the city. That woman, walking across to the telephones. She had glanced along towards Liam and the trainspotters. Could she be the one who had been set to watch the station? Was she calling in the Smiths right now as he watched?
A rumble on the tracks, and the train was approaching, then roaring past. It stopped and people emerged. There weren’t many travellers today, not on a Sunday.
As these people walked away from Liam, others walked in his direction, looking up at the train, deciding which door to enter by, where they would sit.
Liam stared at them.
He should move, he knew. He climbed to his feet and walked up to the train.
Just then, he saw a man in a suit and dark glasses approaching, a black attache case dangling from one hand. Liam stopped. Was this it?
The man looked at him, then past him. He walked on by, not breaking his stride, and then entered the first carriage.
Liam walked further along the train and joined a carriage in the middle. There were lots of empty seats. He chose a pair of seats near the door, dumped his bag in the window seat and sat in the aisle seat, where he would be able to see along the carriage.
Again, he felt a strange mixture of foolishness and of being terribly exposed and vulnerable. Was all this really necessary? But at the same time, if it was, then did he really think that his childish games of hide and seek, of catch-me-if-you-can, would be enough to outwit professionals?
He was only doing his best.
He slumped in his seat. He looked along the carriage at the handful of other passengers, speculating about who they were and what they were doing. What else could he do?
~
He could think. He could go over and over in his head all the things that had happened, all the incidents that made no sense.
They had to make sense, though. They had happened. His parents had vanished. The house had been trashed, then cleared. The fake policemen had been there. The Special Intelligence people had visited Kath’s flat. Mental Mendes had failed to recognise him. Kath couldn’t stand to have her own brother in the flat.
These things were fact. They might make no sense. It might be impossible to see what connected them. But the one thing that bound them together was that they had happened to Liam this weekend.
So why him? Why Liam?
Maybe that was where his thinking was being led astray. Maybe it wasn’t just Liam. Maybe he was a peripheral figure, a bit part player in someone else’s story – his parents’ story, perhaps. That might explain why it made so little sense: he was only seeing a very small part of the picture. Why should it centre around him? It made more sense that he was witnessing events that centred around someone more important.
But that still left him struggling for an explanation.
Things had changed around him. What had the Scot called it? Erasure. Bits of Liam’s life were being erased all around him.
One question worried him almost as much as anything else: were the changes in his head, or in the outside world?
If they were taking place in his head that meant that at least some of his memories were false, that his understanding of the world could not be relied on. It meant that he was insane. But if these changes were really taking place in the outside world, that might be more worrying altogether... What was he up against, if they, that mysterious they, could manipulate the world to this extent? All evidence of entire lives was being deleted. The memories of people like Mr Mendes were being changed and blanked out.
They were rearranging the world around Liam.
Yes, that was the most disturbing possibility of all.
The train rolled past the big warehouses and grain silos at Diss and pulled up at the station. Liam looked along the carriage to see who was getting out. A woman with two small children. An old Chinese man.
Liam stood, moved towards the open door and stepped out. No-one else from his carriage made a late move to leave the train. He was confident now that he was not being followed. He had a fifteen minute wait until the two-carriage local train set out on the East Suffolk Line. He bought a chocolate bar and a packet of crisps from the machine, and went to wait on a bench surrounded by tubs and hanging baskets.
He checked his phone, something that had become a reflex action, and always with the same result. No missed calls. No messages. He sat back and waited.
Whether all these events centred around him, or they were merely part of someone else’s story, it was Liam’s life being messed with. It was Liam’s parents who were missing, his home that had been wiped away. He had to hang on to what he had.
And he had to work out how to fight back.
~
Wolsey station was at the end of the branch line. It was a small, red-brick building, sitting across the end of the single track. Liam walked through the building, the glass-panelled ticket office to his left, and emerged on the pavement.
He didn’t have the taxi fare to get back to NATS and there were no buses on Sundays. Normally, his parents would have given him the money for a taxi, but he could hardly have asked Kath...
He shouldered his bag and set out on the long walk. Passing through the small seaside town’s dense terraced streets, he could soon see the Mere. Wolsey sat at the top of a shingle point that jutted south for a few miles to the derelict army base, Wolsey Camp. A wide, muddy creek wound between the point and the mainland and here at Wolsey it opened out into a broad, shallow, salt-water lake, the Mere. Across the water, Liam could see trees, fields, and in the distance the two flags which flew from the roof of the main NATS building.
He felt a sudden surge of pride at the sight. This was his place, his school. Until now, he hadn’t quite realised how much he had been hanging onto that thought: that despite everything, he always had NATS.
In his line of sight it was about a mile to NATS, but because of the Mere, and the winding creek that cut inland from Wolsey, he had a walk of about six miles ahead of him.
He set out, glad that it was another cool, grey day. He remembered the trip out from the school to the station on Friday, riding on the back of Jake’s motorbike. It had only taken a few minutes. He remembered the wind rushing by, yanking at his hair, roaring in his ears. He remembered the sense of complete freedom, the last time he had felt anything remotely like freedom. It had been like reaching the peak on a rollercoaster before crashing down the steepest of slopes.
He had hoped that someone might pass him in a car, a teacher, perhaps. Someone who would recognise him and stop to give him a lift the rest of the way. But the roads were quiet this afternoon.
When NATS came into view again, Liam’s legs and shoulders were aching, his feet sore. He had removed his fleece and tied it around his waist. He was thirsty and tired and hungry. He just wanted to get back into his room and flop.
He reached the wrought iron gates and looked up the long straight drive lined with poplars. The school building sat at the far end, always a striking sight along this avenue of ancient trees. There were people there, someone on the steps, some others walking across in front of the building. Normal life ... the very idea of a normal existence seemed foreign to Liam right now.
He paused to put on his school tie, then trudged up the drive.
Two girls sat on the steps, studying something on the small screen of a mobile phone. Rebecca Mills and Hannah Jessop. They barely glanced up at Liam as he turned to the right, to follow the gravel road around the side of the building. Beyond them, a blond senior Liam half-recognised looked across at him. He was a French kid, a loner. The seniors didn’t tend to mix with the main school. This boy watched Liam curiously as he passed.
Emerging from the deep shade of the yew trees, Liam could see that there was a cricket match going on. He considered going over to watch, but the thought of his room proved too much of a temptation.
He came to the entrance to Sherborne House, which occupied this end of the main dormitory wing of the school building. He flipped the perspex cover of the keypad and thumbed the security code to get in.
When he pushed at the door it stuck firm, and he realised he hadn’t heard the soft click of the lock releasing.
He thumbed the number again, more carefully this time, but still the door wouldn’t give.
Even now, he wasn’t too concerned. Sometimes, if you got the number wrong and tried again, the lock wouldn’t respond, as if it was still stuck after the first try.
He paused for a few seconds, plenty of time for it to clear.
When he tried again, and the lock refused to release, he started to panic.
~
It was happening again.
He needed help. He needed somebody to step in and tell him it was all some awful mistake. Someone to sort it all out.
He heard voices. Laughter.
There were some girls sitting out on the grass just around the corner. One of them was Hayley.
He approached them, warily.
For a long time, they didn’t look up, and in all those long seconds Liam was able to cling to the hope that this wasn’t going to happen, that another part of his life had not been erased.
And then they looked up. First Laryssa, then Tsuki and Naomi.
And finally, Hayley.
She looked at him, first fixing his eyes, and then her glance skipping over his features. There was no recognition in her look.
“Hayley?” he said.
She frowned. Just as you would if a stranger came up and greeted you by your name.
“Do I...?” she said, letting the words tail off.
“It’s me. Liam.”
Someone said something he didn’t quite catch, and Hayley looked away, pulled a face, and the girls started to snigger.
Liam backed away. His world had been wiped out.