Being (21 page)

‘Why did you kill him, Robert?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Why did you kill him?’

‘Who?’

‘Dr Casing.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ I said, ‘I read about that in the papers. Very good. By the way, he’s a professor, not a doctor.’

‘He was a doctor.’

‘He’s a professor. Kamal told me. A consultant surgeon. Gastroenterologist.’

‘Who’s Kamal?’

‘I know what you’re trying to do.’

‘I’m not trying to do anything. I just want to help you. Look, if you give yourself up now, a good solicitor will get you off on a manslaughter charge. You’ll get ten, fifteen years at the most. You’ll probably be out in half that. But if you keep on running, you’re only going to make things worse for yourself. You can’t run forever, Robert. We’ll never stop looking for you. And wherever you go, we’ll find you.’

‘Do you think I’m
stupid
?’

‘No.’

‘What’s the matter with you? This is
me
you’re talking to. Robert Smith. I was there, in the hospital. You don’t have to make up stories for me. I was
there.
I know what happened. And I know what’ll happen if I give myself up. I
know
what you’ll do to me.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘You’ll cut me open. You’ll lock me up.’

‘Why would I want –’

‘Tell me what you look like.’

‘What?’

‘Tell me what you look like. Describe yourself.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re not Ryan.’

‘Of course I am.’

‘What do you look like?’

‘Robert –’

‘What do you
look
like?’ I was shouting now.

‘I’m tall,’ Ryan said calmly. ‘Six feet and a bit. Black hair. Grey eyes.’

‘Grey?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s your ID number?’

‘One one nine, one two, one two.’

‘Are you a policeman?’

‘No.’

‘Describe what happened.’

‘When?’

‘At the hospital.’

‘You know what happened.’

‘I know. I want you to tell me.’

‘You attacked Dr Casing with a scalpel –’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘It was –’

‘You’re not Ryan. Let me speak to Ryan.’

‘Look, Robert, I’m sure you didn’t mean to do it. It was a mistake. You’re under a lot of stress. I understand that –’

‘You don’t understand anything.’

‘Robert –’

‘You weren’t there. You don’t know anything about it. You don’t know why Ryan wants me. You don’t know what he knows, what I know. You don’t know –’

‘You’re not human.’

His words froze me.

You’re not human.

I stared through the windscreen, not knowing where I was for a moment. All I could see were lights – orange lights, white lights, red lights… streaming through the darkness, like liquid, like metal… like tiny stars. I kept looking. Mesmerized.

You’re not human.

Did he really say that?

I tried to think, to put things in order. One… two… three… four… five… put them in a line, one thing after another. Things that happened. Things that happened. Sounds, movement, words, feelings, intent.

I couldn’t think.

‘We’ll find you, Robert,’ Ryan said distantly. ‘Wherever you go, whatever you are, we’ll find you.’

I shut off the phone.

My stomach hurt.

I stared at the lights in the darkness.

∗

Have you ever seen inside yourself? Do you
know
what’s in there? Think about it. Imagine it. You don’t know what’s under your skin, do you? You
think
you do. You
think
you’ve got all the usual stuff – heart, lungs, stomach, liver – but how do you
know?

You don’t.

You see pictures in books, pictures on TV. You read about stuff. And you just assume that’s it. Guts, blood, bones, organs – that’s what you are. But you don’t know anything about it. You don’t know if it’s really there. And even if it is, you don’t know how it works.

You don’t control it.

It controls you.

I couldn’t do anything for a while. Couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, couldn’t think. All I could do was sit there in silence, staring blindly through the windscreen at the never-ending streams of light – orange, white, red, silver – pulsing like stars in the darkness. Like liquid, like metal, like countless glimmering particles…

‘Robert?’

… like strings of stars, like crystalline compounds with radiating shards.

‘Robert?’

I blinked my eyes and looked at Eddi.

‘Give me the phone,’ she said firmly.

‘Uh?’

‘The phone.’ She held out her hand. ‘Give it to me.’

I passed it over. She checked the connection was cut off, then pressed a few buttons and glanced at the display. As I watched her, I could feel things coming back into focus again. Eddi, the car, the motorway, the lights… the lights were just lights. Headlights. Tail-lights. Motorway lights. I breathed in and rubbed my eyes.

My belly still hurt – a deep, distant ache.

I breathed out, wincing slightly.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Eddi.

‘Yeah… yeah, I’m all right.’ I looked at her. ‘Look, I’m sorry –’

‘You should be,’ she said. ‘That was just stupid… ringing Ryan.’ She shook her head. ‘Stupid beyond belief. What did you think you were
doing?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know…’

‘You don’t
know
?’

‘I had to speak to him.’

‘Why?’

‘To find out… I had to find out…’

She sighed and shook her head again. ‘And what did you find out? What did he tell you?’

‘Not much…’

‘Well, there’s a surprise.’

‘He was trying to confuse me. He was trying to make me believe his lies…’

‘Of
course
he was. What did you expect him to do? He’s not going to tell you the truth, is he? He wants to unbalance you, get you confused. He wants you to make a mistake.’ She looked at me again. ‘This is big stuff, Robert. Whoever these people are, and whatever it is they want from you, they won’t stop at anything to get it.’ She glanced at the phone in her hand, turned it off, wound down her window, then looked back at me. ‘So, no more stupid phone calls – OK?’

I nodded.

She looked in the rear-view mirror, waited for a car to pass by in the outside lane, then looked in the mirror again. Another brief pause, then she switched the phone to her right hand and quickly dropped it out of the open window.
I heard a faint clatter of shattering plastic, and when I looked over my shoulder I saw the remains of the phone disappearing under the front bumper of an articulated lorry.

Eddi wound the window back up and carried on driving.

For the rest of the journey, Eddi asked me questions and I tried to answer them. She asked me what happened at the hospital again; I told her. She asked me to describe the thing I’d found inside me; I described it. She asked me about Ryan, Casing, Morris, Kamal; about Bridget and Pete, and my other carers; about my schools and the Homes I’d stayed in. She asked me about my childhood, my memories, my life.

I did my best. I tried to think about it. I tried to remember the first few years of my life, but I didn’t know if the things I remembered were part of my life or just part of a story.

‘All I really know about anything is what I’ve been told,’ I explained to Eddi. ‘I was told I was abandoned at birth. I was told I was looked after by the nurses at the maternity hospital. I was told they named me Robert. And I was told that when I left the hospital I went to live with a couple called Smith, but I don’t remember anything about them.’

‘Nothing at all?’ Eddi asked.

I shook my head. ‘I was just a baby. I can’t remember anything – no faces, no voices, no sense of place. I don’t even know how long I was with them. I can remember most of my other carers… not in any detail or anything, but I sort of remember bits of them. You know, bits of houses, bits of faces, bits of times…’

‘But nothing about the Smiths?’

‘No.’

It was strange, trying to think about it. I knew that I had
been
a child. I could remember growing up, getting older, getting bigger. I remembered getting feelings that I’d never felt before.

I
had
grown up.

‘What did Ryan say?’ Eddi asked me.

‘Sorry?’

‘On the phone… what did Ryan have to say?’

‘About what?’

‘Anything…’ She glanced at me. ‘Why did you ask him what he thought you were?’

‘Did I?’

She nodded. ‘You said to him, “What do you think I am?” You asked him that twice.’

‘Oh, yeah…’ I shook my head, as if it was nothing. ‘I was just letting him know that I’m not an idiot. You know, like, what do you think I am – stupid?’

‘Right… so this was when he was trying to make you believe his lies?’

‘Yeah, I suppose.’

‘And what about anything else? Did he tell you anything at all?’

‘Not really…’

‘What about when you asked him where he was?’

‘He said he was in London – Queen Anne’s Gate,
SWI
. I think he was probably lying.’

‘Queen Anne’s Gate?’

‘Yeah.’ I looked at her. ‘Do you know it?’

‘The Home Office is in Queen Anne’s Gate.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘It could mean anything.
He could have been lying, in which case it means nothing. Or he could have been telling the truth, which could mean he works for the Government.’

‘Why would he tell me the truth?’

‘To make you go looking for him. He tells you where he is, you go looking for him, he’s waiting for you. He’ll have cameras, guards, people on the street watching out for you. You wouldn’t stand a chance.’

‘Not even if you were with me?’

She smiled. ‘What do you think I am – stupid?’

We finally got to Leeds around ten o’clock. The rain had started falling again and the city streets looked cold and hard in the night. I was tired and hungry. I wanted to know when we were going to stop, and where, but I couldn’t be bothered to ask. I’d had enough of talking. I was sick of the sound of my own voice. So I just sat there and watched the streets pass by.

We drove on, following the signs to the airport. After a while, I began to see the flashing lights of low-flying aeroplanes in the distance up ahead. As the airport got closer, I could hear the drone of planes flying over us, and I started to feel the reality of what we were doing, and where we were going. We were leaving the country.
I
was leaving the country… with a girl I hardly knew. I was going somewhere else, with someone else, and I didn’t know how I felt about it.

Then Eddi started slowing the car, and I looked out and saw that we were turning into the courtyard of a hotel…

And I started feeling another reality.

∗

There was only one room available – an executive double.

‘It’s quite expensive, I’m afraid,’ the woman at the reception desk said. ‘But it’s all we have left at this time of night. If you’d booked earlier –’

‘We’ll take it,’ Eddi said, passing her a credit card.

While the receptionist pressed buttons on her keyboard and Eddi filled out a form, I picked up a
Daily Mirror
from the desk and started flipping through it. I couldn’t find anything about me – no photographs, no stories, no lies.

‘Thank you, Mrs Rogers,’ the receptionist said to Eddi. ‘You’re on the second floor. Through the doors, down the corridor, the lift’s on your right.’

I folded the newspaper under my arm and we took our bags up to the room.

‘You don’t
look
like a Mrs Rogers,’ I told Eddi as she opened the door.

‘Don’t I?’

I shook my head. ‘I knew one once. She was a cleaner at one of my Homes. A dumpy little woman with a big hairy mole on her face. Everyone called her Kenny.’

‘Why?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

We went inside and Eddi locked the door behind us. It was a big room – double bed, loads of cupboards, plasma TV, fridge, armchair, desk, settee. The bathroom gleamed with chrome and glass, and there were two white bathrobes laid out on the bed. I watched Eddi as she went over to the window and pulled back the edge of the curtain. We were at the front of the hotel. I could see headlights
streaming on the road outside. I glanced at the bed, wondering what I was wondering, then I turned on the TV and started clicking through the channels.

‘Is there anything in the newspaper about you?’ Eddi asked.

‘I couldn’t find anything.’

‘Check the news channels,’ she said, nodding at the TV. ‘See if there’s anything about Morris.’

While I searched through the channels, looking for Sky News or BBC 24, Eddi went over and picked up her holdall, then took it into the bathroom and closed the door. I heard taps running, zips unzipping, things rattling…

I turned my attention back to the TV. There was lots of news, lots of rolling headlines – murders, bombings, wars, disasters – but nothing about a dead man in a barn. I muted the TV and sat down on the bed. It was soft and comfortable. I gazed around the room… remembering another hotel room… another night. I put my hand inside my shirt and felt the scar on my belly. I looked down at the bite mark on the back of my hand. I rubbed my right arm where the bullet had grazed me. The wounds tingled slightly, but there wasn’t any pain.

I glanced over at Eddi’s rucksack, imagining the carrier bag full of cash inside. £10,000. It was a lot of money. I could live on that for a while.

I thought about it.

I could see myself getting up off the bed, picking up the rucksack, then quietly leaving the room. I could see myself doing it… walking down the hallway, down to reception, out into the cold rainy night. Getting in the back of a taxi, telling the driver to take me to…

Take you to where?

I closed my eyes.

I couldn’t see anything.

When Eddi came out of the bathroom she was wearing a long woolly jumper, a pair of long woolly socks and not much else. Her skin smelled soapy and freshly washed, and she was drying her hair with a towel.

‘Did you find anything about Morris?’ she asked me.

‘No.’