The Uninvited (24 page)

It’s a dull day, with thick wads of stratus cloud on the horizon, layered like insulation material. Apart from birdsong, it’s very quiet, with no planes overhead and very little traffic on the roads. Many cars are parked at skewed angles, as if abandoned in a hurry. On eight occasions a driver honks his horn at us. As we skirt the vast orange ziggurat of Sainsbury’s, a man behind the wheel of a huge lorry waves his arms angrily, as if to sweep us out of his line of vision. From a pedestrian point of view, the A308 is an unappealing stretch of road. Things improve on the A3220, but by the time Battersea Bridge comes into view, we are getting tired and Freddy starts to complain that his legs hurt, so I take the handlebars and stoop down to push him from behind. The rucksack weight of his comatose mother – my psychosomatic grief symptom – is still there. I would like to have a discussion with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross about the significance of this, and how she envisages it developing.

On Battersea Bridge we stop on the pedestrian walkway to sample the panorama. Freddy rests on his bike and stares, but makes no comment when I point out Albert Bridge to our left, downriver, the Physic Garden, and the Victorian lamp-posts that stud the bridge itself. The Thames is a dull brown, flecked with silver. I see a man on a roof scanning the horizon with binoculars, and make a mental note to start carrying my own. I estimate we are still 1.2 miles from our destination. No vehicles pass us, but there’s a cluster of human figures on the far side of the bridge, on the opposite walkway, heading for the north side of the river. As they come closer I make out three adults and a child. Two men, one woman. The child is a girl. I guess that like Freddy, she is being escorted. She is taller, but not much older. Ten perhaps.

Just as they are about to pass us, the child stops. She looks up and her hand flies to her brow, as if she is about to give a soldier’s salute. But it’s a fist she forms. Then quickly she opens up her hand like a stretched starfish with fingers splayed, then closes it again just as rapidly. Two seconds is all it takes. But it’s long enough for me to make a connection that tightens my throat and precipitates an intense storm of thought.

When I glance at Freddy he’s already returning the salute, closing his fist at eye level and then opening it.

Within seconds, the little group has passed us. I turn and stare at them. The girl doesn’t turn to look back, and Freddy is gazing at the river again.

‘Freddy K. That signal she gave you. That girl. You gave it back. What does it mean? What were you saying to each other?’

‘What are you talking about?’ I think of the ‘all-seeing eye’ on Sunny Chen’s drawings: an eye with rays emerging from it.

‘She signalled to you and you signalled back. Like this.’ I show him. Again and then again. My excitement is turning to agitation. I need an answer. Right now. ‘What does this mean, Freddy K? What does this signal mean?’ I may be shouting.

He shouts back. ‘You’re a freakman, Hesketh. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘She made a sign at you and you made a sign back, I saw it! Like this!’ I imitate the signal again. The sign of the eye.

‘NO!’ he shouts. ‘I didn’t do anything! She didn’t do anything! I don’t even know her!’ His face is pink and hot-looking with rage.

I can’t tolerate lying. But I can’t prove he isn’t telling the truth.

‘Come on.’ I start walking fast, folding paper mentally in an angry rhythm: a single sheet that gets smaller and smaller and smaller, beyond the nine folds that are physically possible, until it is a dense cube. By the time I turn left on to the B305, Freddy’s whimpering. I don’t want him to cry.

‘All right, Freddy K?’

I reach down and hug him. The bike wobbles as he clings to me. I close my eyes. ‘It’s OK, Freddy K. I’m sorry I shouted.’

For the remainder of the journey, I push him on the bike.

Apart from a very small sign on the outer gate, Battersea Care Unit does not draw attention to itself. We park the bike under a fire escape. The building, set back from the road on an industrial estate, is a warehouse conversion spread over three floors. The reception area is unmanned, but there’s a computer and clear instructions regarding the electronic registration system. The names Hesketh Lock and Frederick Kalifakidis are already on a list marked SIGNING IN TODAY. I tick the box to confirm our arrival and scan in our identification documents as prompted. I notice a CCTV camera angled at us from the corner of the ceiling. A message saying CLEARED appears on the screen with a code number: 5672. I am to use it to open the red door and proceed with the child to the third-floor reception facility. We take the stairs. The walls are either bare brick or a milky yellow that Dulux calls Sundance. The third floor is a large, airy space overlooking an internal courtyard below, dominated by a spacious sandpit filled with children.

The swirl of cochineal bodies makes me think of swarming blood cells.

Freddy is instantly galvanised.

‘Hey, cool!’ He points at them and grins and I see the dark-haired pixie from page 392 again.

There’s a lot of noise down there. The red uniforms consist of loose elasticated trousers and jackets that zip at the front. The children’s first names are stencilled on the back of the jackets in large black letters. Many of them are much younger than Freddy. There is the usual racial mix, for London, with skin colours ranging from Ecru to Burnt Ebony. Many – the fair-haired kids especially – are wearing sunglasses. There is a slide and a set of swings, but the kids aren’t using them. Those in the sandpit are digging industriously, raking its surface with their bare hands, or just sitting and sifting sand through their fingers. Elsewhere, there are groups clustered around the five rowan trees.

‘And hey, look in there!’ Freddy has turned, and he’s pointing to a room to our left with a glass door, through which we can see more red-clad kids circling, some at a run, others sauntering. When fish shoal, or birds flock, their movements are simple to model mathematically. I can imagine the same models applying here. Elias Canetti’s classification of crowds comes to mind too:
the crowd always wants to grow; within the crowd there is equality; the crowd loves density; the crowd needs direction.
Two female staff in white jackets stand at the edge, supervising what is effectively a bio-mass in a state of dynamic flux.

‘Hello, Hesketh. And you must be Freddy Kalifakidis.’ We both turn. Naomi Benjamin is just as striking in the flesh as she was on the screen. We shake hands. You couldn’t tell on Skype, but she’s a few years older than me – perhaps early forties. Big dark eyes. Short, dark hair and freckles. A short white jacket – it must be the staff uniform – over a Coral Sunset sweater and Charcoal jeans. ‘Freddy.’ She squats to greet him at eye level, giving me a view of her impressive cleavage. I will inevitably stare at her breasts in an inappropriate manner. I may even be doing so now. Kaitlin always accused me of being prone to this. ‘I’m Naomi. Welcome.’ She smiles and grooves form around her mouth, which means she must smile a lot. But unlike me, Freddy isn’t interested in Naomi Benjamin: he’s manoeuvring himself sideways in order to get a better look at the kids in the gym room. ‘I’m going to take you to the nurse. She’ll ask you some questions and then you can join the others. OK?’

‘Yeah!’ He punches the air with his small fist. ‘Bye then, Hesketh.’ He doesn’t seem at all fazed. I feel a pang. Am I going to lose him to this milling tribe so soon?

‘In a while, Crocodile,’ I tell him.

‘See you later, Constipator,’ he says. He changed the Alligator a year ago, after a visit to the doctor.

I turn and watch them walking off together.

Naomi has a very firm-looking bottom.

‘Can I let you in on something?’ says a voice in my ear. I whirl around. ‘There are advantages to being my age. Fewer distractions.’

‘Professor!’

‘Hesketh!’

He clasps my hand. We shake long and hard, and then he hugs me. He’s wearing a white jacket like Naomi’s. I am very happy to see him.

‘Delighted to see you, boy. Are you still very keen on justice?’

‘Is it something you turn your back on?’

‘Then you’ll agree it’s not fair that you’re still looking like a pin-up while I’ve turned into an old crock with angina and varicose veins.’

I can see that he has aged. But when he smiles, he’s like a crinkled child. ‘Let me give you a quick tour.’ He drapes his arm across my shoulders just as he always used to, and together we walk down the stairs. The Unit has been running for a month, he explains. ‘But since Sunday, it’s been crisis management. There’s no telling if it’s peaked. And there’s certainly no keeping a lid on it any more. We figure that if we can understand the syndrome, we can work out how to reverse it. But it’s a race against time and right now, we’re losing.’ He glances at me sideways. ‘In fact, I’ll be frank and tell you I’m not hopeful. Some of the other units are experimenting with drugs. They’ve found they can suppress some of the symptoms. But these are strong medications with unpleasant side effects. They can’t be used in the long term. And they don’t address the underlying cause. Whatever that is.’

Freddy’s not having drugs, I think. Full stop.

At the bottom of the stairs he unlocks the door with a card-swipe.

‘Like a prison,’ I say. It’s just an observation of fact, but the professor turns and looks at me. His eyes are like they were when Helena was dying: wild, with dilated irises. Have I made a gaffe?

‘It
is
a prison. A very necessary one. From which, as you can see, they can’t escape.’ I nod. It’s not quite sinking in that Freddy’s becoming a prisoner. But I realise it needs to, and that I must adjust my perceptions accordingly. ‘We have army backup if we need it. But believe me, your boy’s safer in here than on the outside. There’s quite a crackpot movement developing. We’ve had staff targeted too.’ His smile is a small joyless wince. ‘For aiding and abetting extra-terrestrials in their nefarious bid to rule the world.’

We enter the outdoor playground area, where he waves at the three supervising staff: a thin, muscular young man – I saw him before, on Skype – a girl of about eighteen with one arm in a sling, a semi-shaved head and a big red scar on her scalp and an older woman sitting on a bench. All three have the same alert, flitting look you see on the faces of bodyguards. ‘We have twenty medics but it’s nowhere near enough. The staff you see here are volunteers. The young one there: Hannah. She joined us straight from hospital. Her sister Jodie killed both their parents. They were all in the car. Kid grabbed the wheel and forced them off the road. You’d never guess she was a murderer, would you?’ He nods at a small girl with an angelic face and wildly matted hair, sitting with a group of others sifting sand through their fingers. ‘Not everyone’s up to it. Some’ll stay a day and decide they can’t handle it. Others don’t even last that long. Most parents who leave their kids here can’t seem to get away fast enough. They get emotional when they see them like this.’ He stops and chuckles suddenly. ‘Naomi let some nuns in yesterday. But it turned out they were here to try out some sort of exorcism. So that was the end of that.’

He stops and puts up a finger: we stand and listen for a moment. Some of the children are making low hooting noises. Others are clicking their tongues.
Picture the monkey cage.
‘Their language degrades very fast in here. You’ll hear snatches of speech, but it’s pretty minimal.’

‘Glossolalia?’

‘Except that I’m sure the sounds actually mean something. They’re communicating. That’s one of the things I’d like you to investigate.’

‘Freddy used a Cantonese word yesterday,’ I tell him. ‘He said
lap-sap
. It means rubbish. It’s possible he heard it from me. But I was surprised. One of the saboteurs used it too.’ I wonder: How long before Freddy starts hooting and clicking like the others?

Suddenly, the muscular man shouts, ‘Hey, stop!’ and charges up to a small boy who has wandered over to the corner of the sandpit where he has lowered his trousers, apparently to defecate.

‘That’s Flynn,’ says Professor Whybray. ‘He’s ex-army. Useful.’ Flynn grabs the boy around the chest, hauls him up, and marches over to a door marked TOILETS. ‘We get a lot of that. In the dissociative state basic knowledge is absent. Hygiene. Literacy. Speech. Take that one there.’ He’s referring to a blonde, skinny girl aged about eight. She’s standing still, with an alert and watchful look, both hands poised in mid-air, her line of vision constantly shifting. Suddenly, she makes a swift grab into the air and closes her fist. ‘Hattie’s our number-one insect-catcher.’

I think of Freddy eating woodlice.

‘Does she—’ Just then the girl slams her hand to her mouth and licks her palm.

‘Strange, how when you spend time around something, it comes to seem quite normal. Excuse me,’ says the professor, reaching in his pocket. ‘Phone call.’ He walks off to take it, stuffing a finger in his other ear. On the other side of the playground a door opens and a small figure enters.

‘Freddy K!’ I call out. Naomi’s following.

He’s clad in a red suit too big for him. I’m expecting him to run up and greet me, but instead he peels away and heads for some children squatting in a circle, all evidently focused on something. Within seconds he has been absorbed into the cluster. Naomi joins me and we stand watching them. The clucking and hooting reminds me of the soft babble of hens. A small blonde girl seems to be the ringleader of Freddy’s group: she’s clearly giving orders. Freddy looks anxious, then joins the others in an odd miming act involving furious digging movements.