The Glimpse (33 page)

Frank snorted and clipped the lid on his pen. Ana smiled, relishing his discomfort.

‘You’ve struggled,’ she continued, ‘and now you think you’ve made it. In a couple of years you’l realise that there’s no satisfaction in talking to a bunch of neurotic teenage Crazies. You’l grow bitter and that faint light pulsing at your very core wil go out for ever.’

‘Enough!’ Frank shouted. He pounded his clipboard on a coffee table with filigree legs. One of the legs snapped.

The clipboard slid off, papers spiling loose on to the floor.

‘Forever is a very long time,’ Ana said.

‘Forever is a very long time,’ Ana said.

‘Emily Thomas,’ he snarled, ‘admitted to Seven Sisters’

Mental Rehab Home in May 2031 after the death of her parents in a house fire that left her catatonic.’

Ana tried not to alter her body language, but instinctively she sat up straighter as the alarm bels began to go off.

That
was an extremely unlikely coincidence. A decade ago the Mental Rehab Homes were only starting up, like the Communities. The chances of the real Emily Thomas 303

having been institutionalised as a child were slim to none.

She stared at Frank.

‘What do you have to say?’ he asked.

‘Dr Cusher is more creative than I gave her credit for.’

Frank flipped up the second layer of his ridiculous glasses and grinned. ‘A conspiracy,’ he said.

She wanted to slam her foot into his stupid mouth and smash that smile. Instead, she smoothed out her face and relaxed her body, the way she’d always done with the Board.

‘Just cal my father and let him see me with his own eyes.’

‘Wel, I’m sure that would be a fascinating encounter.’

Ana was worried now. Frank was too certain of himself.

He knew something. She trembled, cold in her flimsy He knew something. She trembled, cold in her flimsy robe.

‘You see,’ Frank said, bending over to gather up the papers, ‘the eminent Dr Ashby Barber was Emily Thomas’s physician at Seven Sisters for the five months she was there.’

Ana’s mouth popped open. She couldn’t stop it. Clearly someone had fabricated Emily Thomas’s psychiatric history because there was no way the real Emily Thomas could have been treated by her father. He’d had al of a dozen patients while he trained to become a psychiatrist as part of his research into schizophrenia. But why would Cusher bother? They had plenty of other, much better ways to torture boys and girls. An invented file to break down a patient’s delusion seemed far too subtle for any of the off-the-wal psychs at Three Mils.

‘Not so verbose now, are you?’ Frank said.

Ana managed to close her mouth. She kept her facial 304

expression blank, but she knew if he looked close enough he’d see the fear.

‘Wel,’ Frank said, stretching. ‘Now I’ve got your attention, I’d like to show you this news clip I found on the net this morning.’ He waved a hand in front of his chest and his interface booted up, projecting coloured light into the air in front of him. From his suit pocket, he extracted a wireless speaker and set it down on the oak sideboard beneath the mirror. Then he turned Ana’s wheelchair to face the parlour door. He stood behind her, the light from his interface automaticaly focusing on the white surface ahead.

the white surface ahead.

A reporter stood outside the iron gates to Ana’s home.

Frank pointed his finger over the virtual arrow key and the reporter began to speak.

‘Ariana Barber, daughter of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Ashby Barber, was returned to her father’s home in the Highgate Community early this morning.’

The image cut to a limo door opening in the dusky half-light. A tal girl emerged. Her long hair flicked out beneath the coat she was using to shield her face. Ana’s father took the girl’s arm and guided her away from the cameras, towards the house.

Ana stared at the screen. She couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.

One time, years ago, when Tamsin watched al the old films she could get her hands on, they’d seen a 1950s thriler about a private investigator who was afraid of heights. During the film the investigator was forced to climb up a tower. When he looked down, the camera zoomed in and puled away at the same time, making the 305

building’s perspective shift unnaturaly. Ana’s head felt like that now, simultaneously expanding and contracting as she attempted to grasp what she was seeing.

‘Dr Ashby Barber and al of the smal Highgate Community are deeply relieved by this unexpected turn of events,’

the reporter concluded.

the reporter concluded.

The image flickered and vanished. Ana looked at the space it left behind, the gears of her mind locked down.

Frank wheeled her chair around. Triumph lit his face.

‘It’s something of a conundrum, wouldn’t you say,
Emily
?’

Ana gazed straight at him, though she barely saw him now. Why would her father pretend she’d been returned home?

It came to her like the slow forming image of a photograph dipped in developer. He knew where she was. He planned to leave her in Three Mils. Just like Jasper. Her limbs seized up. Excruciating pain sliced through her chest.

Her organs felt as though they were colapsing.

306

25

Tamsin

Ana lay on a mattress. Around her people spoke. But she didn’t care about words. They prodded and snapped fingers. But she was too tired to tel them to stop.

Sometimes others lay down too. Sometimes it hurt to breathe.

Al the time she felt a crushing emptiness.

The earth turned from the sun in tiny jolting fragments.

She began to believe it would never turn back.

Then a bel hurtled through time towards her. And something changed. The people stopped coming.

Her body unfurled from its bal and found its way inside the main building. It dragged her upstairs. It bumped into things. It sat down. The hand paddled a plastic spoon through brown liquid. Something scorched her throat.

She let out a cry. A spoon clattered into watery soup.

She blinked and looked down in amazement. She hadn’t even realised she was eating. A bread rol lay split in two by her bowl, large air holes gaped through the dough.

She pressed a finger into the crust. It was as solid as dry earth. She wondered how she’d managed to halve it.

Girls and boys around her muttered to themselves, chairs scraped, mouths moved behind scabby hands.

Everywhere there was staring, crying, lost and empty looks.

307

After lunch, she returned to Studio 8. Sat on a mattress in the dark. Watched grey phantom girls wander in and out, vanishing into the blackness each time the hazy sun dipped behind cloud, reappearing in the doorway, silhouettes haloed by afternoon light.

She became aware of burning sulphur tickling her nostrils. Tilted her head towards the smel. Saw a flame in the darkness. A pale, patchy hand held a match.

She folowed the flame as it glided back and forth. A black vine tattoo flittered in and out of the light. Close by, so close she could feel warm breath on her ear, Tamsin so close she could feel warm breath on her ear, Tamsin spoke.

‘Oh good,’ she said. Her words formed slowly. ‘You are there. I was beginning to wonder.’ The flame loomed towards Ana’s nose. Suddenly, it withdrew and extinguished, leaving behind wisps of smoke. ‘It’s easy to tel which ones are going to fal to pieces in here,’ Tamsin continued, stil speaking slower than normal. ‘Almost always happens within the first twenty-four hours.’

Tamsin sat cross-legged on the mattress beside Ana, though Ana had no idea how long she’d been sitting there.

‘That’s when they get a taste of what they’re realy in for,’ Tamsin said. ‘Psychs know they got to start the therapy fast. Just to groove you in, make sure you know where you stand. You listening to me, Barber?’

Ana observed the spectral figures in the doorway.

Ghosts had it better off than these girls. Here, bodies were trapped in loony dump hel, while their spirits were broken into pieces and scattered in the past.

‘You, though,’ Tamsin continued, ‘you come back from 308

your first time in the tanks as though you’ve just been on an invigorating jog around the block.’ She grinned. ‘You always were a bit odd. That’s part of the reason you and I became friends – me the poor girl in the Community with parents who were barely able to scrape by and you, the quiet, motherless country girl. I used to wonder whether, if you’d had normal parents and hadn’t spent your first eleven years home-schooled in the middle of nowhere, you’d be like al the others. Now I know. You nowhere, you’d be like al the others. Now I know. You wouldn’t. You’re different, Ana. In the whole ten-year history of the Pure test, you’re the only person who the Board has ever retested

– except for the batch that they
had
to do after your dad got off the hook. And when they found out you were a Big3 Sleeper they gave you a reprieve until your eighteenth birthday and officialy broke the rules of Pures and Crazies so that you and Jasper could be bound. And then you get yourself committed here looking for him.’

Tamsin laughed.

‘And I thought of the two of us,
I
was the wild one! ’

She peered at Ana, waiting for a response. ‘The important thing is to get through the therapy,’ she said.

‘Once you’re through that, it’s not so bad here. As long as you don’t get addicted to the pils.’

Ana tried to move, do something, say something, but it was like the life had been sapped from her body.

‘Hey, remember that time we cat sat for a friend of your dad’s, and we locked ourselves out of her house? We had to break in through the letter box to get back in.’

A vague sensation fluttered through Ana. A feeling she’d almost forgotten. The simple pleasure of hanging around 309

in the Community with a friend she could trust, a friend who made her laugh.

‘Or that summer evening we snuck into the Highgate golf course, stripped down to our underwear and swam across the lake to see if the rumours were true; to see if across the lake to see if the rumours were true; to see if there was a way out of the Community without going through the checkpoint?’

Ana remembered the stench of stagnant water. The echoes of their laughter rang in her ears.

‘It’s things like that which keep you going in here.’

No,
she thought.
It’s things like that which make this
place
unbearable.

A cold hand gripped her chin, twisted her face so she was looking into Tamsin’s brown eyes.

‘Ana, please. Don’t give up. Otherwise you’l drift away.

I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it happen a hundred times. The special therapy is the worst bit. You only have to get through a couple more days.’

Ana blinked. She suddenly thought of Helen. Helen would have faced the tanks alone this morning.

‘Is Helen back?’

Tamsin let go of Ana’s chin. ‘The girl trailing around after you yesterday?’

Ana nodded.

Tamsin shrugged and angled away.

‘What?’

‘No,’ Tamsin said. ‘She won’t be back today.’

A hard bal of trepidation appeared in Ana’s chest.

‘Why?’

‘Rumour has it she totaly flipped out when she got to 310

the tanks. The lovely Dr Cusher put her under anyway. I heard they had to resuscitate her, so I guess she’s been taken to hospital for overnight observation. You’d be amazed how often that happens around here.’ Tamsin struck another match against the floor. ‘Or maybe not.

They normaly return, though. Eventualy.’

Ana stared at her old friend. It was hard to believe that this was realy the same girl she’d thought about and missed more than anything, for the last seven months.

The girl she’d once spent every waking minute with when they were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old.

‘You disappeared,’ she said.

Tamsin’s free hand began to trace the tattoo vine on her neck.

‘Not on purpose,’ she laughed. But the bitterness in her voice was like a seam of hard metal through rock. ‘One day, not long after your dad packed you off to the country for the summer, I snuck out of the Community. I always wanted to go to the cinema. Remember?’ Her pale lips rose in a genuine smile. ‘Remember how I dreamed of being an actress? Anyway, I was in East Finchley, buying toffees from one of those pick-and-mix stals and this two-year-old kid came by with his mum.

Started crying cos he wanted sweets and she couldn’t afford any. Fel on the pavement, kicking, screaming, thumping his hands. Just a tantrum. But the Psych Watch turned up. The mother began to panic. Soon she was turned up. The mother began to panic. Soon she was kicking and screaming too. Some big bloke arm locked her. A guy in a white coat stuck her with a needle.

I couldn’t just stand there and watch—’ Tamsin broke off.

In the dim light Ana saw tears in her friend’s eyes. ‘Been 311

here ever since. No word from my family . . . The Watch took my ID. I heard they can sel a Pure ID for a fortune in certain circles. At first I tried to tel the psychs, but it was useless. The more I insisted, the more they put me into special therapy.’

Of al the strange things Ana’d imagined about Tamsin’s disappearance, nothing had come close to this.

‘But what did they do with your parents and your brother? How did they stop them from going to the Wardens?

How did they make them leave the Community?’

‘Leave?’

‘When I came back at the start of term,’ Ana explained,

‘your whole family had gone. Someone was running your dad’s shop. I asked just about everybody where you al were and the only answer I got was that your family had relocated.’

Tamsin pushed a palm hard against her forehead. ‘I always wondered why nobody came,’ she said. Her lips began to tremble. She plugged her hands over her mouth began to tremble. She plugged her hands over her mouth but a sob broke through.

Sadness rose over Ana like the tide. Her cheeks itched and she realised they were wet with tears.

Tamsin gulped down air in spasmodic gasps. She sniffed, hopelessly trying to pul it together. ‘Does your dad know you’re here?’ she asked.