The Uninvited (25 page)

‘You’ll see a lot of role-play like that in here,’ says Naomi. ‘Victor thinks it involves food. Hunter-gatherer stuff. By the way, Hesketh. I just wanted to say, I’m so sorry about Kaitlin. Poor Steph. She’s devastated.’

‘They’re lovers.’ I wasn’t planning to say this. It just came out.

‘I know.’

‘So you’re a lesbian too?’

She laughs. ‘I don’t see how that follows. As it happens, I’m not, no. As if it’s your business.’

Next I want to know if she has a boyfriend, but since this might be perceived as not being
my business
either I ask, ‘Do you have children?’

She shakes her head and makes a face that might be either rueful or humorous: I am not sure which. ‘Nope. And you know what? Lately I’ve been pretty happy about that.’ Is this what Freud called
gallows humour
? ‘Look at them.’ She gestures at them in a broad arc. ‘A new generation of unhygienic, insect-eating murderers. That’s the population crisis sorted. Did you know that condom sales have gone through the roof? And people are queuing up to get sterilised?’

I do a mental flow chart. ‘Well it would certainly be good for sustainability,’ I say, remembering some of my conversation with the Swiss demographer. ‘But it would be bad for the economy in the short term.’

She laughs. ‘A passion-killer on every front then.’

I take another sideways look at her breasts. D. D is good. ‘I haven’t lost the sexual urge myself.’

‘So I see. Victor told me about your unique skill set, as he called it. But we need good staff and beggars can’t be choosers.’ The grooves on either side of her mouth reappear. I can’t fathom her. But I’d like to try kissing her. Professor Whybray comes back from his phone call.

‘Some new data’s come in,’ he says. ‘I need to go and check it. Let’s meet in the Observation Room. Naomi, can you finish off the tour? You can skip the staff room and the dorms.’ And he is gone.

I like Naomi. I also like what is inside her Coral Sunset sweater. Though if we became intimate, we would have to have a discussion about the palette of her wardrobe.

‘The canteen.’ She points to a door on the other side of the playground. Inside, about forty children are congregated at long trestle tables, grabbing and jostling. They are wearing beige overalls over their uniforms, and scooping food directly from unmarked tins into their mouths. ‘They won’t use knives or forks,’ she explains.

‘What’s in the tins?’

‘A fresh, nutritious balanced diet in recyclable ring-pull containers. The kids inspect them quite thoroughly first. If one’s dented, they won’t touch it. They seem to know you can get botulism from damaged cans. Almost like an instinct.’

‘So on the one hand they’re anxious about food contamination. But on the other they’re happy to eat live, unwashed grubs?’

‘Welcome to our world,’ says Naomi. Her phone rings. She listens, then says, ‘Christ. OK, I’m on my way.’ She finishes the call. ‘Sorry, Hesketh. There’s been an incident.’

‘You get a lot of those?’

‘Too many to count. The Observation Room’s on the third floor. Catch you later.’

It’s spacious, with rows of seats facing a mirrored window through which you can see a roomful of twenty children. Microphones hang from the ceilings.

‘You’ll find their interactions remarkable,’ says Professor Whybray, turning from the control desk to greet me. He adjusts the volume and immediately there’s a cacophony of grunting, humming, tongue-clicking and hooting. Here and there is what sounds like a word. ‘Record as much as you like. You’ll be seeing groups of twenty on a half-hour rota system.’

‘What are the non-English languages of this cohort?’

‘Arabic, Urdu, Gujarati, Polish, etcetera. I hereby appoint you Battersea Care Unit’s Chief Linguistic Consultant. Among your other duties. Get started, boy.’

I spend the rest of the day alone in Observation, taking notes. The staff supervising the kids I’m observing have a desperate look, as if constantly aware of the menace the children represent. I wonder how many of these youngsters are killers. The atmosphere is one of barely controlled chaos. Freddy is in the last group to occupy the room. It’s four o’clock: he’s looking listless and is beginning to yawn. Other parents are already showing up to fetch day children. When the numbers thin further, I put my head around the door of Professor Whybray’s office.

‘I’m taking Freddy home now. He’s wiped out.’

‘Of course. Miranda’s got a car and she lives near Fulham. You’ll find her in the playground. Ask her for a lift. First impressions?’ He signals me to sit.

I pull up a seat and glance through my notes. ‘Linguistically, the grammar’s very crude. There’s no comprehension problem. In English I’ve heard
over there
,
this way
and
fuck you
.
Lap-sap
’s
common as a term of abuse. I heard
dupek
, which means arsehole in Polish. I heard
yallah
three times. It’s Arabic for hurry up, or go, or come on. Also
ikenie
. It’s Japanese. It means sacrifice. I couldn’t work out the context. So we have a mish-mash of up to fifteen different languages. There’ll be a whole phrase here and there, but never a whole sentence. There’s a lot of signing. I’m trying to map it. But I’ve seen the eye gesture repeatedly, used as a greeting. Take a look at this.’ I open my laptop and show him Sunny Chen’s suicide drawings.

He points to the hand-print. ‘We see a lot of kids making that mark,’ he says. ‘In the sand or on the walls. I hear from the Home Office that the police say it’s been popping up as graffiti in the last few weeks. Always at child height.’

‘And look at this eye.’ I point. ‘See the similarity to the eye gesture the kids make? Originally I thought it was an all-seeing eye. Maybe a deity. But—’

Naomi comes in and takes a chair.

‘We lost three volunteers,’ she announces. ‘One of them seemed headed for a full-blown breakdown.’ She glances at the eye. ‘Hey, that’s interesting.’

‘Why?’ asks Professor Whybray, alert.

‘Because I just saw the psychiatrist’s report on the Spanish twins. It said they both had the same nightmare, the morning before they attacked. It was about infected eyes.’

I jump up. ‘That fits!’

‘How?’

‘Because the ophthalmologist’s report on Svensson raised the possibility of his eye condition being connected to food poisoning. Apparently, some bacterial infections that begin in the gut can compromise the nasal cavity and put pressure on the optic orb, causing it to swell. If that swelling process is aggravated by bright light, it would explain the sunglasses.’

Naomi says, ‘So the signal denotes membership of a kind of trauma club. Involving eyes that get infected and swell and then – what?’

‘The word Jonas Svensson used was
pop
. If the eye infection’s untreated, and exacerbated by intense sunlight, the eye could effectively burst.’

There’s silence as we consider this. Outside, the rain begins to fall, slamming against the picture window. Then Naomi says, ‘Since we’re into speculating, Victor. Have you tried out your Big Theory on Hesketh yet?’

He hesitates. ‘I’d like to hear it,’ I say.

‘OK. Maybe you’re quicker off the mark than I am, Hesketh. But wherever they think they’re living, it isn’t here. This behaviour belongs to a very specific place. A place they feel at home. The more time they spend together here, the more they tune in, and the more time they spend in the . . . other world.’

Yes, I think. Freddy’s is another world. A parallel world with its own rules. A world with no adults, no toilets, no fresh food, a world with its own landscape and props, its minerals, its food sources, its rites and rituals, its gestural password, its hierarchies, its own unassailable imperatives.

Stephanie comes home late, exhausted. She heads straight for the kitchen, opens a bottle of wine, and pours herself a glass. She nods at me. ‘Want one?’

‘No. But there’s some dinner if you want it.’

‘I’ve brought you Kaitlin’s car,’ she says, tossing me the keys.

‘How about checking on Freddy? He might still be awake.’ He fell asleep on the way home. When Miranda dropped us off I woke him briefly to get him into the house, then took him straight upstairs.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m human, Hesketh. This is hard for me. Don’t expect miracles. Let’s eat.’

I’ve defrosted one of Kaitlin’s aubergine bakes from the big freezer in the cellar. I hand Stephanie a plate. We consume our food in silence, not looking at each other. But I can feel my anger building.

Finally I say. ‘He’s just a child. He was in a dissociative fugue state when he attacked Kaitlin. Being a psychologist you’ll be familiar with that? As in, he was unaware of his own actions, and therefore not entirely responsible for them?’ She toys with a forkful of food and doesn’t answer. ‘He’s still Freddy. His DNA hasn’t altered. He’s the same boy.’ She finishes her glass of wine and pours herself another. ‘Take a brain scan and there’ll be nothing new, nothing that wasn’t there before. It’s a new phase. He’s talking less, that’s all.’

She slams down her glass. ‘Christ, have you quite finished? Listen to yourself! He tries to kill his mother and your only observation is that he’s
talking less
? I’m sorry Hesketh, but Freddy’s not the same. None of them are. You know that. If anyone’s deluding themselves here, it’s you.’

‘No. That’s not in my nature.’

‘Oh no?’ her face is flushed from the wine. Or rage. Or both. ‘Then how come you failed to include crucial information in your Dubai report?’ She glares at me. ‘Come on, Hesketh. The girl on the skyscraper site.’ She is right. I committed what is called a
sin of omission
. But I knew I was doing it. I was fully aware. I don’t speak. ‘And you still have that bruise, don’t you?’ You’d think it would have faded by now. But it’s as clear as a fresh tattoo. ‘Which didn’t go in your report either. Have you told Victor Whybray
that
yet?’

I look at the swirls of grease the aubergine has left on my plate and begin to rock.

Kaitlin used to call me ‘waterproof’, referring to the ‘impenetrable skin’ she claimed I had: a heavy rind that protected and distanced me not just from her, but from life itself. If I am ‘waterproof’ I am thankful for it now. But Stephanie’s mention of Dubai unsettles me. She is right to imply I am guilty of evasiveness. Or worse.

I saw the child-sized figure.

But was she or wasn’t she real? And if she scared de Vries and the others so much, why didn’t she scare me?

My contract with the world holds that there are no secrets we can’t unlock, with persistence and time, because everything has a precedent. But now it is beginning to seem that there are two worlds: the world I have known and inhabited all my life, and still cling to, and the world beneath it, which I have glimpsed through myth and legend, but never perceived as a whole and never believed to be anything other than one of the multiple explanations man gives to ascribe meaning to his existence. But now this shadow-world – vivid, irrational, primitive – has begun to take a grip. Not just on those around me, but now, in a way that defies all I know – on me.

Awareness of the dividing line between facts and conjecture, science and faith, is part of my hard-wiring. Or has been. I have seen and studied the titanic power of the human mind to create and give succour to monsters.

All I can conjecture is that whatever is shaking the foundations of the reality we know, it is something we have summoned.

CHAPTER 11

The practical side of looking after Freddy was never my forte, but when he joins me in the bathroom the next morning, after I’ve emerged from the shower, it’s clear he needs cleaning up. ‘Freddy K, you’d better wash your hair. And then brush it. It’s filthy. And it’s getting all matted.’

‘Mum does that.’

I stop drying my hair and look at him. Has he forgotten what I told him? That Kaitlin has brain damage and might not wake up again?

I crouch down to his height and observe his freckles. ‘Well Freddy K, the thing is, Mum’s not here.’

He shrugs and mutters, ‘Mum does it.’

‘Freddy Kalifakidis. Aged seven. Old enough to do it himself. Official.’

He shouts: ‘I said Mum does it!’

‘Freddy K, Freddy K, Freddy K. Why do you think Mum isn’t here?’

He shrugs. Then his lip wobbles. ‘I’m not washing it. Or brushing it either.’ His voice is shaky. ‘My mum does that. That’s what my mum does. My mum. My mum.’

I finger the tangled black mass of hair on his head. ‘Freddy K. Mum’s in hospital. In fact, I’m going to visit her there this morning to say hello from both of us.’ Stephanie wants me to see
the extent of the damage.
Last night, during our uncomfortable meal together, she insisted on it, and I acquiesced. ‘Do you remember why she’s there?’

‘No!’ His eyes open wide, then squeeze shut. Big tears burst from the corners and trickle down his cheeks. The slight curve of their surface magnifies the freckles. He wipes his face with his hand. It comes away covered in snot. ‘I don’t want you to tell me, OK? So don’t tell me!’ he shouts. ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, don’t tell me!’ He covers his ears with his hands and a shudder works its way through his small frame.