The Thing Itself (17 page)

The car was whole and undamaged in the bright morning light, and I got in. The only ointment-fly was the malfunction of the sat nav. I instructed it to return home, and it told me that the destination wasn’t logged. So I typed in ‘the Institute’ but this had no effect. On my way down I had driven through a small village almost immediately on leaving the Institute. I typed in its name: nothing. More than that I could not recall. I thought to google the postcode of the nearby village, but of course I had given my phone to Roy. I even debated with myself as to whether I should go back into my flat and boot up my laptop to search for the postcode, but then I decided that was foolish. I had driven down only the day before; surely I could remember the way back today.

So, feeling a sunshiny sensation of joy in my breast (and how long it had been since I felt
that
), I pulled away and drove to the motorway. Traffic was light and I zipped along. The fullness, from which negation was poised to detract, filled me.

I came off the M4 at the junction I had joined it, and for several miles drove recognisable roads. Then, rather frustratingly, I got lost. For twenty minutes I drove and turned, and drove, and turned back. Finally, annoyed at the selective memory of my supposed state-of-the-art sat nav, I pulled into a garage and bought a map of the local area. Using this, and with the attendant’s help in pinpointing the location of the petrol station, I made my way to the nearby village. I recognised the church, and the pub (the Poet’s Rest), but several forays into the surrounding country lanes drew blanks. I passed several farms and one large concrete water tower like a giant robot cock. But turn and turn about as I might, I didn’t seem to be able to locate the Institute. It was not marked on the map – since the thing was copyrighted to the 1990s this did not surprise me – but the buildings and grounds were very extensive, and surely the law of averages would mean I should eventually rub up against the perimeter wall. But nothing.

Finding myself driving back into the village for the third time, I stopped and asked directions of an elderly man out walking his dog. But he had, he claimed, never heard of the Institute. ‘Do you live here?’ Man and boy, he replied; seventy years. His father had been a GI, his mother a local girl. He hadn’t seen his dad after his own eighteenth birthday. Not even once. Back in Missouri. ‘Surely,’ I interrupted him, ‘you’ve heard of the Institute? It’s a very large facility.’ Never been nothing like that here.

This was daft. I cruised around some more, and then dived back into the countryside. On this foray I was suddenly reminded of an H. G. Wells story I read once. The story is called ‘The Door in the Wall’, and concerns a nineteenth-century fellow, in, I dare say, frock coat and dour hat (I don’t believe the story specifies) who discovers a certain door in a certain wall that leads him to a blissful place. But he makes the mistake of coming back into the real world, and thereafter no matter how long he lives or how assiduously he searches he cannot find the door again. The tone of melancholy resignation with which the (now elderly) narrator tells his own story is the strength of Wells’s writing at his best. But, I told myself, it was daft. The story was a metaphor. My life was no metaphor. My life was the real thing. As I was having this thought, the words forming distinctly inside my head, that U2 song came on the radio, ‘Even Better Than the Real Thing’. I swore at the radio.

For the fourth time I found myself driving, despite myself, back into the village, after following the Ariadnean thread of the country roads. It was now noon, and a lanky youth was putting out a folding sign beside the door of the pub, so I parked and went inside. That strong stench of hops and last night’s beer. Sunlight shining through the windows and coming so brightly off the waxed tabletops it hurt the eyes. ‘It’ll be a minute,’ said the youth, in the gloom behind the bar. He aimed a remote control at a telly on a bracket high up the wall.

I asked him about the Institute. He stared at me with half an inch of mouth showing between his lips. I tried him again. The set clicked and Sky Sports shone into life, the commentator mid-sentence. ‘Don’t know it,’ he said. ‘Though I’ve only lived here a year or so.’

‘Is there anyone around who knows the area better?’ I pressed.

‘I tell a lie,’ he said. ‘I’ve been here over eighteen months.
In
fact, nearer two years than one.’

‘I’ve been driving around,’ I told him. ‘Getting kind of lost. Any help would be much appreciated.’

‘It was early spring,’ he told me. ‘I remember, on account of I sowed some small salad in the garden out the back. So I suppose not so many as eighteen. Meant to do the same this year but forgot. It gets good sun, that little plot. Pint, is it?’

‘No thank you,’ I said, and went back to my car.

For a long time I sat behind the wheel and stared ahead. A sense of doom was corroding the edge of my wellbeing. Frustration. But it existed. I’d hardly hallucinated the entire Institute. Quite apart from anything else, the car I was sitting in was proof of that. So, one more time, I started the motor and drove out of the village, and cruised the roads. Ten minutes turned into twenty. The songs being played by the radio became sarcastic in tone. ‘Up the Junction’, ‘Superstition’, ‘Stairway to Heaven’. As the opening strums of ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ came on I punched the radio off – and at that very moment I drove past a tree I recognised.

I stopped the car, laid my arm along the top of the passenger seat and looked over the ledge of it as I reversed. Definitely a familiar tree. A narrow roadway, discreetly hidden by two giant labia-like hedgerows. That was familiar too. I turned up the way. In two minutes I was arriving at the gates to the Institute, with a childlike buzz inside my chest, relief compounded with excitement.

The gates were closed. The layout was such that I had to get out of the car in order to press the intercom and so gain ingress.

No dice.

Bzzcht. ‘Hi: this is Charles Gardner. Could you let me in please?’

Static.

‘Hello?’

Crchzzt. ‘No entry, mate. Buzz off.’

‘What?’

‘
Burze
off.’

‘You’re wrong,’ I said, in my surprise. ‘Let me in please. I’m, eh, affiliated with the Institute. I’m Charles Gardner.’

‘I’ve got your name here, pal. It’s on a no entry list. You’re not getting in. I’m sending one of my guys to the gate now, and I should warn you for your own’ – shzzcht – ‘that our security guards are licensed by special’ – fzzzcht – ‘to carry firearms. Get in your car and drive away, would be
my
advice.’

I stood for a moment. I could say
it took a moment for the meaning of his words to sink in
, but that wouldn’t be the truth. I grasped instantly what was happening. Kos, on her own initiative or else taking orders from Peter, was freezing me out. A ridiculous rabbit-like panic gripped me. I wouldn’t see Irma! And then, almost at once, I felt rage. They had used me: a monkey’s paw to get to Roy. He told them it had to be me, and he wouldn’t budge; so they’d reeled me in, given me just enough to get me onside, used me, and now they were discarding me. I kicked the door.

‘Let me in!’ I yelled.

‘It’s on camera, pal,’ said the voice on the other end of the intercom. ‘We
will
prosecute criminal damage.’

I kicked the door again. ‘I demand to speak to Kostritsky!’

‘Word to the wise,’ said the voice. ‘That ain’t going to happen. They want you out of the way. You think they wouldn’t
prefer
you in prison? I’d say they would. They’ – fzzk – ‘contacts in the highest strata of law enforce’ – skrzz – ‘and security services. You want to give them an excuse to prosecute you? Go ahead. It’s all recorded’ – zzhsch – ‘camera, and the police will be here in minutes. If I were you I’d get going.’

I stood there. My rage drained through me, departing who knows where. Into the earth, perhaps. It was hopeless. But I couldn’t just give up!

‘I’m coming in,’ I told the intercom. ‘I want to talk to Kostritsky.’

And the voice replied: ‘No.’ The barest essence of negation.

I took three steps back and ran at the gate. Though it had been decades since I’d done anything more athletic than lug dustbins about, I nonetheless managed to get my hands to the top. And as I strained my arms to pull myself higher, the faceless voice at the far end of the intercom – I assume it was him – flicked the switch on the electrified strip that must have been embedded there. My palms took the shock directly, painfully, on their meat. My muscles – all of them seized. The next thing I knew I was lying on the ground, hugging myself, my left ankle throbbing. It took some considerable willpower to get up and climb back into the car.

It was lucky the car was an automatic, because my left foot was too sore to pivot. Pranged the ankle falling from the gateway. The pain did not help mollify my rage. I drove slowly back down the lane, and then through the village, and towards the motorway. All the time I was thinking: three fucks. Not even proper fucks, three half fucks. Eight hundred quid, a car and three measly shags, and they had fooled me into doing their dirty work. And now I would never see Irma again.

As the M4 junction approached I saw a giant shoebox chain hotel, part of the Way Inn franchise. I was in no condition to drive, so I decided to check in. I slouched like a wounded soldier from the car park and into reception, booked myself a room – my cash caused the receptionist to raise one charcoal eyebrow, but she took my money. I asked for some ice to be sent up to my room. Then I rode the elevator to my floor staring, aghast, at the broken tramp-like figure hunched in the wall-high mirror inside the compartment. What could a woman as beautiful as Irma ever have seen in me? Why would she ever have slept with me, except that she had been instructed to?

In my room I sat on the bed to rest my throbbing ankle, and stared at the blank TV screen opposite. Ice was delivered and I wrapped a clutch of cubes in a towel and applied it. What was I going to do? It was not acceptable that I be denied entrance. I would not stand for it. They had made promises. They had made a commitment to me. They could not simply toss me aside.

Irma.

I needed to think strategically. No good just turning up at the gate again. I needed to find a way of contacting them and applying pressure. I could threaten to go public – tell the press, post what I knew online. Even as I thought this, I could see their reaction (sure, go ahead, nobody cares, nobody will believe you). Or should I beg? Plead? Promise them something? They needed me, in order to be able to liaise with Roy! They would shrug. My self-esteem crumbled further: I would promise them anything. I would say that there were things about my encounter in Antarctica that they didn’t know and needed to know, stuff I’d kept to myself. Stuff I would have to make up, of course, from whole cloth; but which might be enough to get me through the gates again.

I ordered a packet of Nurofen from room service, and took two. Then, with an inward squelch of self-disgust, I snaffled two tiny whisky bottles from the minibar and drank them both straight down.

I dozed.

Then: the strangest part of the whole experience.

When I woke it was dusk. The sound of the motorway was faintly audible, like a distant Niagara. I was chilly. My ankle gave a tweak of pain, and I reached out to it to – I don’t know, rub it, clasp it, something – and there was the ghost-boy.

I hadn’t seen him for months: in his rags and his near-skeleton frame and his egg-nog-pale skin and the scarred half of his face. Not since my dentist trip, in fact. But this wasn’t a dream. This was real. He was standing only feet from me. He was looking right at me. It was dim in the room, but there was no mistaking what I could see.

My heart paced with glolloping repeated convulsions. I breathed hard. My breath was visible, like ectoplasm.

Very slowly, as if fearful of scaring the lad away, I swung my legs, one good, one bad, over the side of the bed. ‘Now,’ I said. ‘Look,’ I said.

I don’t know why I said those two words.

The boy was looking right at me. My hand was on the bedside light switch, and I turned it on.

It wasn’t the ghost-boy. It was Roy, standing in front of me. He was maybe three inches taller than the boy – not that big a difference, really – and dressed not in rags but in the clothes I had seen him in the day before. But there was no confusing the two. What I mean is: I didn’t mistake Roy, in the murky quarter-light, for the ghost-boy. I definitely saw the ghost-boy. And he definitely changed into Roy when I turned on the light.

‘Jesus crap,’ I shrilled, actually startled by the abruptness of the transition.

Roy smiled his weird reptilian smile. His left sleeve was tie-dyed black at the cuff. He put a finger to his lips.

I stood up, quickly, and my ankle squeaked and jagged and complained. But at least now my head was higher than his. ‘What are you doing?’ I demanded. ‘Creeping in here. How did you get here and how did you get in here?’

He was real. It didn’t occur me to me to think he might be a hallucination or a dream-state confusion. He was as real as Marley’s ghost.

‘Oh but they’re squeamish,’ he said, and I knew at once he was talking about the Institute. ‘A different set of people would have just
killed
you, you know. They’re squeamish, or cautious – or maybe they think they’ll need you again. I don’t know. Maybe they think
I’ll
demand to see you again. That’s a distinct possibility, in their minds I mean. They may think they’re holding you in reserve, and if they do need you they can use their previous bait to reel you back in. Woman, was it?’

‘Christ’s sake, Roy. They let you out of Broadmoor? Did the Institute wangle that? How did you know I was even here?’

He lifted his finger to his lips again. ‘It’s a bit,’ he said, and looked to the side. ‘Chaotic over there, right now.’ He looked at me again. Hindsight tells me he was debating with himself whether to kill me, or to leave me well alone. Still, he was an Englishman, and the nature of our national character is compromise.