The Fetch (20 page)

‘But
nothing
happened … According to you,
nothing
happened.’

You’re lying. You’re hiding something …

When Wilson remained
silent she repeated again, more calmly, ‘Nothing happened, you said. His mother tried to inflict self-damage. But she didn’t. You tried to inflict damage. But you didn’t go through with it.’

She leaned back, shuddering. She felt cold, despite the heat of her words.

Wilson nodded. ‘Everything you say is true.’

‘Then it
has
to come from his mother.’ She straightened again, met Wilson’s gaze as calmly as possible. ‘You
must
let me speak to the mother. Please. You refused me before. But I must speak to her. Please!’

‘She didn’t want to have anything to do with you or to know who you were. She made that very clear to me, and I’m sorry, Mrs Whitlock, but I have to respect those wishes.’

Susan slapped her hand on the table, a gesture of frustration. ‘That was nine years ago. Perhaps she’s mellowed. Perhaps things would be different now. Dr Wilson, I’m not doing this for myself. I’m not asking this out of some selfish need for one mother to face the other. This is for my family, and for Michael himself! There’s something terribly wrong with him, except that …’

Wilson prompted her to continue.

‘Except that in one way it’s very right. In one way it’s wonderful. But it
can’t
be right, and deep down I feel this. If I could just speak to the woman. On the phone even. Couldn’t you arrange that?’

Quite abruptly, Wilson stood, remaining behind his desk, clearly signalling that the interview was over. His florid face had paled around the eyes, and Susan noticed that a touch of sweat gleamed along his hairline. ‘I made some decisions in the seventies which I would not make now, and about which I feel no pride, nor satisfaction, but only guilt …’

Private abortions for ridiculous fees, private exchanges of unwanted babies for ridiculously high fees, yes Doctor, I know all about that
…

‘I want very much to forget
about those years.’

‘But I’m not going to let you,’ Susan said defiantly. She stood and smiled, then reached out a hand which Wilson slowly met, shaking the tips of her fingers as he watched her calm face.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I’m going to nag you to despair until you agree to at least tell Michael’s birth-mother that I urgently need to speak to her.’

Relishing the alarm in Dr Wilson’s face, Susan waited a moment before adding, ‘Don’t worry. I made a promise to you which I intend to keep. But I can be very persistent, Dr Wilson. Just try for me. That’s all I ask. Just try.’

The man sat down, equally defiantly, it seemed to Susan. He stared at her with an expression that dissolved from panic to supercilious contempt.

‘You paid a great deal of money for Michael …’

‘Yes. Money that I didn’t really have. A fee that has affected our lives ever since. Except that—’ she smiled at the thought, ‘Michael seems to be doing his best to pay us back.’

When she refused to elaborate, Wilson drew breath and scribbled a note on his pad. ‘Very well, Mrs Whitlock. I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Now let’s
see what you can do. Are you ready?’

‘Ready!’

‘Are you steady?’

‘Steady!’

‘Then … Go!’

On the screen in front of Michael the pin-points of light began to run, to move and zigzag, avoiding his cross-hairs brilliantly. The chair in which he sat rocked and twisted, giving a tremendous sensation of speed and movement as he chased the aliens. His fingers gripped the control sticks and he fired, but missed, then fired again, missing sometimes by only a whisker. The helmet he wore was not comfortable. It began to tug at his ears, rubbing the skin, but the game became so fascinating that he forgot about the chafing. As he concentrated on the chase and the kill, so he focused harder. He quickly learned to concentrate on just one of the small, spiralling spots. He went after it for all he was worth.

He missed again, then again he overshot, but as the chair went with him, and his cries of delight filled the room, so the target spot seemed to glow more brightly.

Get into the centre. Get closer!

He concentrated, as Françoise had told him to, on slowing the spot down. He willed it to get into the cross-hairs. He held it steady in his mind, holding it, slowing it, making it reluctant
to move, chaining it like an animal so that it could only struggle, not escape.

After five minutes of exhilaration, the ‘alien’ came into the cross-hairs.

He fired, screaming as his thumb pressed the trigger.

The spot exploded in a sequence of concentric circles and the word AAARGH appeared flashing on the screen.

Carol was clapping her hands with delight.

‘I
did
it,’ Michael exalted. ‘I
did
it!’ He removed the helmet and passed it to Françoise, who was watching him and smiling.

‘Well done,’ she said. ‘That’s one spot that will never live to fight another day.’

‘But what did I
do?
’ the boy asked. He knew this was a test of his power. Françoise showed him round to the back of the game unit, where strips and ribbons of black material told him that cable connections were in profusion.

‘The idea of the test is to see if you can manipulate the electron stream that creates the white spot on the screen. By concentrating very hard and letting the natural power – which we call telekinesis – take over, some people can bring the spot into the cross-hairs very fast. They can override the programme that governs the movement of the stream. Do you see?’

‘And I did that? I did that?’

Françoise’s hand on his shoulder was reassuring. He saw her glance away at a technician, and almost at once intuited that perhaps he had been a bit slow in manipulating the stream. But at least he had done it!

Carol had a go next – at her own insistence – and he watched her struggle with the attack game. She was hopeless, although eight minutes later she too suddenly and unexpectedly shot the target. He was glad she had been slower than him!

‘I suppose that means we’ve both got this teleskin … telekis …’

‘Telekinesis,’ Françoise corrected carefully. ‘Well, whether you have or haven’t doesn’t really matter. You have a much stronger power,
Michael. And I’d like to hear you talk about it. Where’s Carol gone now?’

Carol was peering into a dark chamber where gerbils, in a re-creation of the night desert, were scampering around, burrowing and feeding. She had adored this particular experiment when shown it earlier, but not for any reason to do with the attempts to demonstrate inter-rodent ESP (a project that had been running for years, Françoise had said tiredly), but simply because of the gorgeous little creatures themselves. Later she would be given a gift, a mating pair of gerbils, and Susan would groan at the thought of what that meant in terms of feeding, cleaning, and looking after them. With the exception of her painting, Carol was a girl of brief enthusiasms. The story of her guinea pig was still too painful to recall.

For the moment, though, Françoise arranged for Carol to be shown more of the animal experiments … those at least that dealt with
fauna intacta
.

She took Michael back to her office and sat him down in the reclining chair, letting him play with the controls for a while as she busied herself with some paperwork.

There was something very comforting in this room, Michael felt. Its walls were nothing but shelves, and on those shelves were statues, weapons, bits of glass and metal, stone heads and wooden masks … many books too. It was a feeling with which he was quite familiar from his father’s studio, and his mother’s workroom, where the books and dolls were constantly breathing their history and their mystery.

He had asked a thousand questions about the objects in Françoise Jeury’s collection. He had pressed her for facts and hints about the Holy
Grail. What did she think it looked like? She reminded him that he’d asked her about this before.

Was it still to be a surprise for his father when he found it? Yes. And how desperately he wanted to find it!

‘Sometimes, when I’m searching for it, I think it’s made of glass,’ he said.

Françoise seemed surprised. ‘Glass? The Grail made of glass?’

‘Beautiful glass, with the face of Our Lord and a swimming fish painted on its outside. That’s the Fisher King. I can see it faintly, sometimes, but I never manage to reach it. To fetch it. I always get something wrong. It’s …’ he thought hard to remember the word he had read. ‘It’s
elusive
.’

‘Tell me how that feels. Fetching. When you get it wrong?’

Michael was confused. It was something he hadn’t thought about sufficiently to articulate.

‘It’s like reaching into water for a pebble, but you see your hand going to a different pebble. Wherever you try to go, you go somewhere else, and you can’t control it.’

Françoise laughed. ‘There used to be a game in my seaside town in France. There was a crane in a case and you had to try to pick up chocolate bars. But if you tried to make the crane go to the right, it would go to the left. Everything was in reverse. It took a very skilful child to get it to work properly.’

‘I’ve seen them,’ Michael said politely. ‘In Brighton. Places like that.’

‘It’s a strange sensation.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you feel something physical like that when you try and fetch? You are almost on target, but sometimes are forced away?’

‘Yes. Like pushing through a blanket.
And the object changes sometimes, so that it isn’t the object at all. I’ve reached to somewhere else, somewhere that wasn’t in the dream. It’s like a speeded-up film of clouds and seasons. Like in the
Time Machine
.’

‘The Time Machine?’

‘It’s a film. Daddy loves it. We’ve got it on video. Years pass over this man’s head as he sits in a time machine in his laboratory, looking outside.’

Michael realized that he was sounding excited and grinned and lowered the pitch of his voice. He noticed that Françoise was watching him intently. ‘It happens to me sometimes. I reach towards something, but I get shifted into other places and the seasons change. Sometimes it’s very hot, but mostly it’s cold and wet.’

‘But you always fetch something?’

‘Not always,’ Michael said uneasily.

‘Why do you think you miss the target? What makes you miss?’

Michael shrugged. It seemed obvious to him. ‘Chalk Boy, I suppose. I can’t see anything at all without Chalk Boy.’

‘Why would Chalk Boy make you miss the target?’

Michael seemed to have no answer. Eventually an idea occurred to him. ‘Perhaps he’s like the Time Traveller, moving so fast through time that he can’t focus on any one thing. Not all the time. Sometimes he does. Did you see the wolf-girl? That was the first thing I fetched. It was like
flying
.’

‘Was Chalk Boy there?’

‘He was hiding. He always hides. But he was watching. I could hear him laughing.’

‘Can you remember how it was to fly? Can you remember in detail?’

Michael couldn’t. It was like a dream now, fragmented, colourful, but partial. He remembered the faces vaguely. He remembered reaching
for the wolf-girl. He remembered the smells of the place, such a cold place, a stone place, the odd light …

Françoise was saying, ‘Can I talk to you in a special way, Michael? Would you mind? I shouldn’t do this, of course.’ She leaned forward, meeting his gaze steadily. ‘I have to tell you very truthfully: without speaking to your mother or father, I shouldn’t do this. But I don’t think they’d say yes. So if you want to say no …’

‘What special way?’

‘I want to relax you. When you’re relaxed I’ll talk to a part of you that’s hidden.’

‘You mean hypnotize me?’

‘Not exactly. Something very new. A new technique. Something far more interesting. A way of talking to you that can hear voices in your head that even you didn’t know were there. There is no harm. We’ve developed the technique for talking in this way over the last three years. And I’ll make a record for you.’

‘What sort of record?’

‘A record of your inner voices. You’ll hear the voices you speak in your dreams. You can take it home and play it, if you want. As soon as I’ve confessed to your parents. It will sound just like you, but it’s you when you were dreaming, not when you were awake. Can I talk to you? Will you let me?’

Michael felt frightened. He liked this woman. She exuded nice, comforting smells, and much security. But Chalk Boy was shifting and restless. Chalk Boy liked to hide. Chalk Boy didn’t like to be seen, or heard. And anyway, if Françoise went into his dreams, then she might see that Michael was just a shadow, just a not-quite-boy. And he had felt so
full
talking to her. He felt real. He didn’t want her to see the hollow inside his head, the Limbo land, the sea and its monsters, the shadow that was all that was left of his soul.

He shook his head, instantly aware
that the woman looked disappointed, failing to hide the emotion before she smiled and shrugged.

‘I just wanted to ask you what you saw when you fetched the wolf-girl.’

Hesitantly, Michael said, ‘That would be all right. But you mustn’t ask to speak to Chalk Boy.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t. I won’t. I promise. What else mustn’t I do?’

‘Don’t go down to the beach. Don’t go near the sea. It’s dangerous.’

‘Then I promise I won’t go down to the sea. I just want you to tell me what you saw when the wolf-girl was “fetched”. Just that. Nothing more.’

‘All right.’

With obvious relief, she said, ‘Thank you, Michael. Now then: lean back and half close your eyes, and watch my mouth. The first thing I’m going to do is sing to you.’

‘Sing to me! Why?’

‘I’m afraid I’m not up to Tina Turner standard—’

‘I don’t like Tina Turner.’

‘You don’t? I think she’s wonderful. But my little song is a key to your mind. It’s a programme. And you’ll like it, I’m sure …’

Susan came to the research centre in time for a late lunch. She was on edge, perhaps disturbed by whatever had happened at her own meeting that morning. Françoise therefore excused herself after just a few minutes, leaving the Whitlocks to eat on their own. Later, she would take them round the British Museum, if that was still of interest, but for the moment she returned to her room and sat quietly, listening to the whispered voice of Michael’s journeying shadow, and its disappointingly fragmentary report.