Solomon's Keepers (5 page)

Pointing. ‘And without the make up?’

‘I would make that effort, yes. What do you think?’

‘Well maybe. Are you really a soldier? Perhaps it should be my turn next? I can let go and you can do the protective bit.’

‘Interesting. You’d better give me a number I get you on.’

‘Here, don’t let this fall off.’ She puts a sticker on his arm. ‘I put these on the equipment I leave out and about. The mobile is me, the other one is the department.’ Suddenly she seems unsure, rethinking. ‘Good luck. Sorry if I held you up.’

Four

Consciousness returns as a sensation down your back, a yielding and separating as the ingot weight of you starts to shift. Uniformed figures, female, have you trussed and are lifting. Your whole body is trembling and the room howls with deranged electronics. Your face is wet with tears, slick with snot, and held fast in a vice of sweaty plastic. You swallow and a plum bursts in a curtain of glue. You can feel touches down the length of your body. Cool air finds seaweed between your legs. Are you naked? Your arse feels bright as a baboon’s, shiny and hot. What’s happening?

Someone is calling to you from across an ocean. Rees, we’re just moving you. I fucking know that. Making you more comfortable. The hell you are! Take the blowtorch off my wrists and ankles. Take the clamp off my face. Let me breathe!

Very good, Rees, excellent!

They are peeling strips of skin out of the crook of your elbows, probably some kind of sample. Two more are rolling a heavy shroud up your legs. Couldn’t they even wait till I’m fucking dead? Get off me! You try a kick but find you’re swaddled up to your waist. Your head is locked tight, arms in belts. They are obviously bent on smothering you.

Faces gather into a kaleidoscope above. Expressions of strain and earnestness, obviously phoney, white out to memory as they flip on the lights to grill your retinas. The fat one has something in her mouth. Is she eating you?

Nearly there, Rees. One, two, three…Hot feminine breaths and the grunt of effort as they hoist you on to a bed. Well done, Rees. Whatever accent is that? All of a sudden it’s hilarious and you can’t help laughing. Cover me up you crazy bitches and let me be.

Whow – don’t even think of using that fucking needle on me…The struggle switches off at the neck.

A solitary nurse attaches a drip and the background electronics dwindle to a hum. The lights dim to merely harsh. You don’t hurt. When she turns, she gives a little smile and busies herself raising the side of the bed. You’ve never seen her before but something about her is deeply familiar, archetypal. The simple earnestness in her face, pale plump arms, the practiced movements, are all breathtakingly beautiful. She is going to leave you in peace. You are doing very well. The extraordinary calming effect of a simple kindness is working. You close your eyes and feel that you could sleep.

This needs calibrating. It’s a mess. There’s an idiot at the controls. You know how things are, how things look on the outside, how they feel on the inside, how one mood should grade into another. Let’s have some fluidity, some grace, some control here. This is like turning over cards, like emotional Snap!

What was that? She is still there, bobbing about at the side of the bed – then truffling about underneath and thinking she’s out of sight so you won’t notice. She ought to try that without the deafening noise. As soon as she knows you’re on to her she stands up and leans across, boobs in your face and blonde hair everywhere, breathing hard and forcing the covers down on your chest. Probably thinks she can crush you. You hear the crackle of an apron. Is she going to swing her leg over? Cow! She thinks the better of straddling you and lurches backwards, rattling some sort of metal stand. ‘There we are, Rees.’ Is she drunk? Am I? All done. I’ll leave you in peace now.

The smell is hospital but the décor isn’t. The strip-light overhead dangles from a plaster ceiling rose that once deserved a chandelier. It casts a hard light on cream painted walls and striped green and white drapes, tied back at the waist to reveal a full height window. Outside, there’s a garden with ancient shrubs and a beech torso posing in mist.

It feels early but the sound inside is of airy corridors already alive with the chatter of dishes and the progress of eccentric wheels. A trolley negotiates the doorstep with a brief but comprehensive percussion and a buffet of disposable packages and plastic containers jostles into view. Rees’s eyes follow its squeaking wheels across sheets of green vinyl flooring which curl at the edges like old lasagne. A small walnut-faced woman in a blue sari follows, shoving at an angle. She selects some packages and places them on a crowded table at his bedside. She changes one plastic bin bag for another. The machine on the floor bleeps but she ignores it and throws her weight behind the trolley.

When she sees his eyes are open she breaks into a smile, surprising in its warmth. ‘Good morning. You’re awake at last. That’s very good.’

‘Hello he says, ‘that lot for me?’

‘I can leave you some water.’

She puts a small bottle on the table by the bed and gives an anticipatory glance. ‘Dr Brodzky will come and see you in a little while. Just rest and relax.’

She turns to leave.

‘Wait a minute. What’s your name?’

‘I’m Tekla.’

‘Where is this, Tekla? What is this place? Where am I?’

‘We’re looking after you. Dr Brodzky will see you later. He’ll be very pleased you’re awake now.’

She makes to leave again.

‘Wait a second. Don’t go.’

‘I’ll tell them you’re awake,’ she says.

Brodzky comes to see him. He’d only come to see them as candidates once or twice before the implant and he’d seemed a kind of Pierrepoint figure, taking a quick peek at his charges to guess the weight and the drop. Then it had been the operation itself. Now he cuts a benign figure, a stocky, middle-aged man with wide features and a boyish fringe of blond hair. He has a white coat worn open over a shabby pullover and old twill trousers. He could be a professor but his eyes are too worldly for an academic.

‘Good morning. My name is Jozef Brodzky. Do you remember me? How are you feeling?’

How was he feeling? ‘Lousy, confused…hungry, maybe?’

‘Ah, good, that all sounds appropriate. You seem quite lucid, not so…erratic as of late. That’s very good. I delegate the hunger part. Frankly, my young friend, I wouldn’t be in too much of a rush if I were you – but I’ll deal with the other feelings. To unconfuse you – You remember I’m the guy who did the Solomon operation, you remember that much, correct? And they haven’t been looking after it quite as well as I’d hoped, sending you out into trouble rather early, yes?’

‘Where are we?’

‘It doesn’t matter. You’re safe now. You need to rest’

He remembers a plane ride, being carried down steps and seeing puddles on tarmac at night. There were open spaces and lights at a distance on a perimeter fence. Was that this time or when they did the implant? He doesn’t know.

‘Not Britain?’

‘You wouldn’t even be able to pronounce the name so I won’t tell you.’

‘Not a regular base?’

‘Oh no. This is where Solomon was born and where it has to live – in the land of non-disclosure – although Belvoir will take on the medipac interface and some of the software development in future.’

‘So what happens now?’

‘We’ve patched you up. You may notice a few minor effects but I wouldn’t expect very much except maybe getting tired quite quickly. We have switched the external monitoring on. That sucks up a few calories. Now, for a little while at least you are my property and what I say goes. Orders; okay? The important thing is to get you fully recovered. Rest, young man. Try to sleep. I’ll be back before long.

He tries. But memories start to crowd in.

‘Forget what you’ve seen, Rees. Remember only this. This level of investment, of experimentation, of sacrifice – is not undertaken lightly. Perhaps you’ve had a glimpse of the commitment – but believe me you’ve seen only the tip of the iceberg. Make good use of it. It comes at a price.’

Was that Dooley? Not his Dad. He can still remember his Dad too:

‘What’s the highest mountain in the world? Everest. Right. And the second highest? K2? Good, AND THE THIRD? Mmm. Exactly, nobody knows. We don’t care, do we? Nobody is interested. What does that tell you? Don’t be an also-ran in life.’

He remembers his old self. Remembers running, silver trophies proliferating on the sideboard. Learning that performance always asks for more. Once it lifts you out of yourself and into a sphere of universals there is no going back. Is that why he’s here?

When did he first conceive of the future? He remembers a time before there was anything there, when it was buoyant with possibilities but empty of facts or limitations. Before other people spotted it and filled it, like a skip, with their worn ideas: qualifications, jobs, family, and all the other ballast of reality. Thinking about that is like running around the sky. Everyone wants to know your choices – what will you be? What will you do?

All the months of waiting and game playing and bullshit from all sides. Months of negotiations behind the scenes, one day stymied, next day on.

He goes back earlier. After Brett died, three years of school came and went in a series of incidents. The abiding memory is of parents flanking him in the headmaster’s study, dark talk of alternatives, of motivations and connections, of finding his way, and more suitable paths.

They talked of skills and training but never of the arbitrary way that life comes and goes; the big override. His Dad had been invalided out of the army by a bomb. He had been highly trained, had a great future. Now he walked on stiff legs and gave in on arguments. He never spoke of it. His Mum would talk of sacrifice when she wanted to lend weight to what he was supposed to do; her other word: education. He didn’t see the connection. Maybe he got the wrong end of the stick because it turned out the best alternative for him was also the army after all. At seventeen and out of options, he had been willing to talk to some people his Dad had known who he said might help. They weren’t too bothered about incidents, maybe nobody told them, and they liked the trophies. It might even be possible that in time he could make it into officer training. There was a place that looked suitable and he applied.

Then the tractor incident hit the press. It started as a fight over a girl; her boyfriend, Jimmy, and his mates waiting for Rees on his way home. Looked like they’d taken a fence to pieces and they used the sticks on him – caught in the middle of them until he could break and run. He didn’t want to go home like that. A mile beyond Jimmy’s was a farm where Rees worked in the summer. He knew they kept the keys to the barn on top of the oil tank and the keys to the machinery on pegs inside. He took the front tractor with a fork lift and drove through Jimmy’s back fence. It was a big place. He started with a couple of turns over their vegetable patch and took out a shed or two and a gazebo hiding in fancy shrubs. The greenhouse went up like a musical spray and the big stone sundial on the lawn shrieked as he clipped it. He did the tennis court next, battering their changing hut and dragging a train of wire netting round to the front lawn where he left the whole rig with the forks dropped on to the soft top of Jimmy’s dad’s sports car.

There was blood all over the seat as well as all over him.

A week later his application came back, rejected.

It was the summer term before exams and the school excluded him. He spent a month not knowing what to do or where to go. He took exams, pointlessly, in a room on his own, daydreaming, and flunked every one.

The big override. Dad went to see some old friends at the regiment to get behind the rejection. Pattern of unsuitable behaviour. They couldn’t fix it but there was something else: an outside chance. There was a scheme that was new and different and very secretive. They only told him because of who he was and having shared some stuff together in the old days. It wasn’t being made public. There was a tough physical selection process and certain mental characteristics they were looking for. Some of his issues might even be a plus. They were prepared to waive a lot of the usual criteria for the right people. They also needed people below the usual entrance age. They didn’t know how to get them. His Dad couldn’t even explain it when he came home but his Mum was already talking it up as a way in.

He remembers the officer looking him up and down and telling him to sit down.

His eyes steady and unblinking, this guy starts talking. He says it could be a no-brainer. With a smile Rees doesn’t quite get, he says that provided he was seriously interested in being in the army somewhere, he couldn’t lose. Because all those who started the programme would at least get through to other sections even if they failed the selection on this one. That was because it would count as a transfer and so they would waive the conditions for new entrants. Did he see? It opened all the doors. ‘There will be a lot of points given for participation in this one. I can’t tell you that officially, but I think you’re a smart kid and you can understand how it works in practice.’

He doesn’t understand. But it goes on. His Mum, Dad and he all sign a paper to say they understand and accept the secrecy of the programme and will not divulge any information from the briefing. What information? They are there half a day and nothing else is written down. Rees sits between them, in a line, and they listen to three different officers. The first one tells them that it’s a tough selection, residential over some months and it pays a full salary from the outset. That’s unusual he says. He repeats that all entrants will be offered at least something elsewhere. His Dad shuffles in his seat at this point and exchanges glances with his Mum. It is a new section, attached to the highly regarded Special Reconnaissance Regiment because it is secret and unorthodox. Usually they only transfer people in after initial training elsewhere. This is different.