Being (25 page)

Inside me.

The wrong-coloured liquids, milk and oil, shimmering like mercury. The brown of something alive. Shreds of whiteness, flecks of red, a heart of pulsing stars…

It was all still there.

Of course it was.

It had always been there.

And it always would be.

I sat there for an hour or so, replaying the tape over and over again… watching the things inside me… watching the machine…

Watching myself.

My self.

When I couldn’t bear to watch it any more, I took the video out of the VCR, turned off the TV and went back to my room.

It was two o’clock in the morning.

I got into bed, turned off the light and wished I could cry.

The next few weeks seemed to pass really quickly. We didn’t really do anything, and nothing much happened, but somehow the days and nights just came and went and we gradually fell into a routine. We’d get up whenever we woke up. I’d go to the shop for bread and milk. We’d eat breakfast together, drink coffee, sit around talking for a while. In the afternoons, we’d go for a walk together – around the village, down to the beach, up into the mountains. Occasionally we’d get on Eddi’s motorbike (the tinny little thing I’d seen in the hallway), ride into Nerja and spend a few hours wandering around the shops. But most of the time we didn’t bother leaving the village. We’d sleep for a time in the late afternoon/early evening, then Eddi would start tapping away at her laptop, looking for anything that might help us find out what had happened to me. While she was working, I’d watch TV or read a book, or maybe go out for another short walk, then at eight or nine in the evening, Eddi would stop working and we’d go out together for something to eat.

We ate in the same place every night, a little restaurant called El Corazón. It was situated on a hillside lane that looked down over San Miguel, so you could either eat
inside or sit out on the balcony and watch the world going by on the street down below. That’s where we always sat. Eating and drinking, talking quietly, gazing down at the gentle bustle of village life – families going out together, young men on horses, old men on donkeys, kids on scooters and motorbikes, boys and girls, doing their thing.

We didn’t really talk about much.

Eddi rarely said anything about how she was getting on with her research, and I didn’t ask. Sometimes she’d ask me specific questions about Ryan or Casing or Kamal, or the non-existent microchip, and sometimes she’d ask me for details about my past – names, addresses, dates – and I’d try to help her if I could, but a lot of the time I couldn’t.

‘It’s not that I can’t remember anything,’ I told her once, ‘it’s just that the memories are all mixed up because I kept getting moved around so much. This Home, that Home… schools, foster parents… it’s hard to remember how it all fits together.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Eddi said. ‘My family moved around a lot when I was a kid.’

‘Really?’

She shrugged.

I looked at her, waiting for her to go on, but she just sat there smoking a cigarette and staring into the distance.

‘Why did your family keep moving around?’ I asked her.

She shrugged again. ‘It was just a work thing… my father’s job… you know…’

‘What did he do?’

She looked at me, and I got the feeling that she didn’t
really want to talk about it, but she didn’t want to explain
why
she didn’t want to talk about it either.

She took a drag on her cigarette. ‘My father was an officer in the Army,’ she said reluctantly. ‘His job took him all over the place – Germany, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Belfast – and wherever he went, he took us with him.’ She sighed. ‘I didn’t even know where I was half the time.’

‘Who’s
us
?’ I asked.

‘Me and my mother.’

‘No brothers or sisters?’

‘No.’

‘Is your dad still in the Army?’

She shook her head. ‘Both my parents were killed in a car crash when I was twelve.’

‘Christ… that must have been hard for you.’

‘Yeah, I suppose… but I was only a kid at the time, and we were never really that close as a family. My father was always working, my mother was always just waiting for him to come home… I mean, they didn’t treat me badly or anything, they were just a bit… I don’t know. They didn’t show much affection.’ Her face hardened at the memory. ‘They weren’t exactly the most
loving
parents in the world.’

‘What happened to you after they died?’

‘Not much.’

‘Who looked after you?’

‘I went to live with an aunt in Guildford.’

‘Then what?’

‘I grew up,’ she said simply.

I looked at her. ‘What do you mean?’

She shrugged again. ‘I just grew up, you know… went
to school, got into trouble, got thrown out, moved to London when I was sixteen…’

She started talking about something else then, and I knew she wasn’t going to tell me anything else about herself, so I didn’t bother asking. And, besides, I wasn’t really sure whether I believed any of the stuff she’d told me anyway. I don’t know why I doubted her story. There was just something about it, something about the way she’d told it… it just didn’t feel right.

The odd thing was, though – it didn’t seem to matter. It was as if whatever we’d both been before, whatever we’d done – real or imagined – that was all gone now. It was history. It didn’t mean anything to
us.
We were here now, and now was all we had.

So, most of the time, that’s all we talked about – now, today, tonight, maybe tomorrow.

Every night, after we’d eaten, we’d sit in El Corazón for a while – Eddi drinking wine and smoking cigarettes, me drinking Coke or water – and then we’d wander back to the flat. As soon as we got in, Eddi would open a bottle of wine and roll a joint (she’d bought some grass in Nerja), and then she’d sit with her laptop for the rest of the night, drinking and smoking until she could barely see any more, and eventually she’d stumble off to bed.

At first, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. After she’d gone to bed, I’d sit there on my own, wondering if she’d been like this before – getting whacked out of her head every night – or if it was something new. And if it
was
something new, why was she doing it? Was it anything to do with me? Was she scared, addicted, troubled by
nightmares? I didn’t know, and after a while I realized it was pointless even thinking about it. She did it, and that was that. And it wasn’t as if it was a problem anyway. She didn’t lose control or anything. She just got a little bit quiet and sad… a bit distant, a bit lost.

There weren’t any more kisses.

After we’d got back from El Corazón one night, instead of getting straight to her laptop, Eddi said she wanted to talk to me. It was some time around the middle of December by then and the days were beginning to get cooler. It was still fairly warm most of the time, but as the nights closed in and the winds blew down from the mountains, the temperature began to drop.

‘Let me just put a jumper on,’ I told Eddi.

When I came back, she was sitting on the settee with a glass of wine in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other. A joint was smouldering in an ashtray on the arm of the settee. I went over and sat down next to her.

‘I got an email from Bean,’ she said, passing me the paper.

I looked at her for a moment, then turned to the printout.

they come rnd ur plce yday,
I read. 3
sutes 1 ldy 2 bill. gry merc & blk trnst nos blkd out. smashed n & serched 4 hrs. fprints all knds. took ur pcs & stuff. crimtaped ur flt

I had to read it twice before I understood it. I read it again, just to make sure, then I passed it back to Eddi.

‘What are you going to do?’ I asked her.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘The flat’s clean. The computers are wiped. The hard drives are gone. They won’t find anything about this place.’

‘But they know who you are now.’

‘Yeah… they know who I am.’

‘And they’ll know you’re with me.’

‘Probably.’

‘So what does it all mean?’

She drank some wine and took a deep drag on the joint. ‘It means,’ she said, blowing out smoke, ‘that I can’t go back to my flat. And, unless we get something sorted out, I can’t go back to England either. They’ll be looking for me now. Even if they don’t know about Morris, they’ll have found out enough about me to put me away for something – fraud, deception… whatever.’

‘If Ryan knows you’re with me,’ I said, ‘he’s not going to let anyone put you away.’

She looked at me. ‘No… you’re probably right. If what I’ve found out about him is true…’

‘What? What have you found out?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing? But you just said –’

‘That’s it, that’s the whole point – there’s nothing
to
find out. Nothing about Ryan or Hayes or Morris, nothing about Casing, nothing about Kamal… there’s no trace of them anywhere. Even if Ryan’s people are using false names, I should have found something… but I didn’t. I couldn’t even find anything on Bridget and Pete. There’s no trace of
anything
anywhere. I’ve gone through everything – hospital records, your records, fostering records. School records. Police records. Births, deaths, marriages. I’ve searched newspaper archives. I’ve hacked into national security systems, biomechanical companies, computer companies, government offices.’ She picked up her glass,
took a long drink and relit the joint. ‘There’s nothing there, Robert. No facts, no information, no hints, no rumours… no nothing. And that’s frightening, because there’s always
something.
No one can hide everything. But, somehow, that’s what they’ve done. The only other explanation is that none of it ever happened. There
is
no Ryan, no Casing, no Robert Smith. There never was a man called Morris…’ She paused again to stub out the joint and then she just sat there for a while, staring silently into the ashtray, her eyes unblinking. I waited for her to go on, but when she still hadn’t said anything after a minute or so, I couldn’t wait any longer.

‘It
did
happen,’ I said quietly. ‘Ryan
does
exist. So do I.’

‘I know,’ she muttered, still staring at the ashtray. ‘That’s the trouble… I know it all happened, I know it’s all real… it’s just…’ She shook her head. ‘This is bigger than I thought, Robert.
Much
bigger. These people – Ryan and the rest of them, whoever they are – they can wipe people out. Erase them. They can make things disappear.’ She looked at me. ‘Do you realize how
impossible
that is these days? You’d need access to everything – the media, the law, the state. You’d need limitless power, money and resources… legal
and
illegal. Shit, you’d need to be some kind of
god.’
She shook her head again. ‘We can’t go up against Ryan. We can’t do
anything
with him. It’s probably best if we don’t even mention his name.’

She lit a cigarette and poured herself another glass of wine, and we both just sat there for a while, not saying anything.

The flat was quite cold now. The window was open and
I could feel the night air tingling on my skin. I watched clouds of cigarette smoke drifting across the room and out through the window, and I wondered why I didn’t feel too bad. If Eddi was right – and there was no reason to think she wasn’t – then I should have been worried. If Ryan and his people were that powerful, we didn’t stand a chance. We couldn’t fight them, we couldn’t deal with them, we couldn’t face up to them. This wasn’t a Hollywood film, this was the real world. And in the real world, the little guys
don’t
beat the big guys. It just doesn’t happen. So why wasn’t I worried? If we didn’t do anything about Ryan, I’d never find out what I was, or why I was here, or where I came from… I’d never find out anything. Which should have worried the hell out of me. But, for some weird reason, it didn’t.

‘What do you think we should do?’ I asked Eddi.

‘I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘I really thought I could get somewhere with this. Find out what it means, find out who’s behind it, then work out what to do…’ She stared at the floor, slowly shaking her head. ‘I thought I could do it,’ she mumbled to herself, ‘I honestly thought I could do it.’

‘It’s all right –’

‘No, it’s not,’ she said sullenly. ‘It’s
not
all right.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because…’

‘We’re safe enough here, aren’t we?’

She shrugged.

I said, ‘Do you think Ryan will find us here?’

‘I don’t know… maybe, maybe not. But that’s not the point. The point is…’ She sighed heavily. ‘We can’t stay here forever.’

‘Why not? I mean, if we start running again, that’s just going to make it easier for them to find us, isn’t it? We’ll be seen more, we’ll have to get a car, stay in hotels… we’ll be leaving a trail. But if we stay where we are, there’s no trail to follow. And we’re more likely to notice if anyone starts snooping around.’

‘What about money?’

‘What about it?’

‘We can’t live without money, Robert.’

‘We’ve got some money… well,
you’ve
got some.’

‘It won’t last forever.’

I looked at her. ‘I thought you said you had some more?’

‘I have… but I can’t get to it from here. I mean, I
could
get to it, but that’d mean going into a Spanish bank and filling out lots of forms, and then the Spanish bank would have to contact various banks in England, and they’d want to see proof of ID, which would mean lots of different IDs, and they’d need an address…’ She shook her head. ‘I could probably work out a way to do it, but it’s just too much of a risk. There’s too much information involved. Too many uncertainties.’

‘Yeah, well,’ I said, ‘it’s only money.’

She laughed coldly. ‘Only money?’

‘We’ll manage.’

‘Yeah? And how are we going to do that?’

‘I don’t know… we could always find some work –’

‘Work?’ she said, horrified. ‘I’m not
working.
Christ… I know things are bad, but they’re not
that
bad.’

‘We’ll have to do something when your money runs out.’

‘Yeah, well, if
you
want to get a job, that’s fine. But
don’t expect me to. There are better ways to make money than working.’