Weeks in Naviras (34 page)

‘Will you keep your voice down? Please. That’s a short-term thing, and being more popular since the attack means I can actually get things done. You know what it’s been like, you saw what happened to Drake and every other PM before him.’ Now it was his voice that rose. ‘All useless because of the bickering on their own benches. Has it not ever occurred to you that someone needs to run this fucking country?’

We stared at each other in silence. ‘This is over,’ I said eventually.

‘What’s over?’

‘We are, I’m done. I’m getting the kids out of this.’

‘No, you don’t mean that.’

‘It should’ve been over the day I found out you were having sex with your press secretary. I’ve been a fool.’

He looked at me in disbelief, then started to weep. He stood up, walked over to my sofa and sat down next to me. I moved into the corner, as far away from him as I could get. He put his elbows on his knees, leaned forward and pressed his head into his palms. ‘It only happened once,’ he cried. ‘Literally, once, I promise you, L.’

‘And you preserved the memory for posterity. I saw that too, James. In your phone.’

His skin seemed to be sliding down his face along with his tears. ‘It was her, L. She was the one driving it all.’

‘Then why keep a memento of it on your phone? Come off it, James!’

‘I didn’t keep it!’ He was shouting again. ‘Six months ago they approached me about all of this. Initially I said no, even threatened to speak out about it. But she’d put a camera in my office, that one time. They had a video, and they had my DNA. They said they’d bring me down if I didn’t do as they asked.’

‘They blackmailed you. She did.’

‘I don’t know if she was involved from the start or if she’s just a pawn in this, too. But I’ve only been aware of this for a few months, I promise. I’m the one who’s been a fool but for fuck’s sake, L, I didn’t know I’d ever become PM. I didn’t go out and find some cheap slut in London. I did it, I dealt with it, in what seemed to me the safest way. She was bored with her boyfriend, and, well, you know the rest.’

‘So did you sack Rosie or not?’

‘Yes, she’d been trying to convince me about Tabernacle again. What choice did I have?’

‘You could have resigned. Or taken the hit.’

‘It wouldn’t just be me taking it. How’d you think the kids would feel growing up, with that video out there? Their lives, they’d be… blighted.’

Neither of us said anything for a while. James went to the bathroom and blew his nose. He stayed in there for quite a while making me wonder if he was considering an exit, Morgan-style. Then I wondered if I should try to stop him. When he came back into the living room his eyes were less bloodshot. ‘I suppose you have a lot more questions,’ he said, sitting down in the chair opposite me once again.

‘Did you know they’d attack at Ben Gurion?’

‘No,’ firmly, directly at me. ‘They never warned me, didn’t give a timescale.’

‘Who’s they, James?’

He frowned. ‘It’s a cartel, I suppose you might say. Not the usual suspects, though. Nobody downstairs knows about it.’

Except Rav, I thought. ‘When did you realise you were in there with us. Did you think you’d died, or what?’

‘No.’

‘Explain.’

‘I knew. From the start. They told me I was going in there, after the attack. The revived me, just me. They warned me.’

‘And how’s this going to end? For you.’

‘The plan was to fight the next election, if we won then I’d step down a year into the next Parliament. Then try to keep a low profile, as much as possible. They’ll make sure money’s never a problem for us.’

‘And the plan’s changed?’

‘Well, that depends, L. I know it doesn’t look that way at the moment, but things could be good around here. I’m going to make sure we do something about the flat situation. Move us into Number 11. Morgan’s death put paid to Project Tabernacle, I promise you.’

‘They could just put the new president into the Rendering and start from scratch.’

‘Not for the time being, they can’t. You broke the Rendering, L. You crashed it.’

I suppose I should’ve felt proud, but then I hadn’t consciously done anything. ‘It was all because the alcove wasn’t there,’ I said. ‘Behind the painting in Room Seven. That’s when it started to go wrong.’

‘Yes, they worked that out, eventually, but they still don’t know why.’

‘Because the alcove wasn’t there, where me and Luis left letters for each other, each time I was in Naviras, for years. But it wasn’t there, not in the Rendering.’

‘I see.’ He looked betrayed, had every right to. ‘So with him, it wasn’t just once, it was lots of times.’

‘It went on for years, James. I wondered if you knew, or cared.’

‘Of course I didn’t fucking know! Do you think we’d have put him in there if we’d known?’

‘Then why did you? He had nothing to do with any of this.’

‘The stupid fucker wouldn’t let them into the guesthouse. He was causing trouble so they decided to add him to the simulation late-on. They thought he’d be a nice addition for you, a friend.’

This last word came out ragged, more like a gasp. I thought he’d break down, cry some more. Instead he looked up at the ceiling, then at me for the briefest moment before focusing on the wall. He pulled his shoulders back, rested into the chair. We sat listening to the noise of Whitehall, car horns underneath the chimes of the half-hour.

‘You do know if you leave Downing Street, it can’t end well, L.’

‘You want to keep a lid on it.’

‘I’m going to. We have to.’

‘You have to resign, James.’

‘I won’t. And you won’t do anything, I know you won’t. They’ll find you, and then what’ll happen to the kids?’

I didn’t answer, we sat in silence for another couple of minutes. James said he wanted to talk to me some more about this, but had to head downstairs. He’d already lost half an hour, meetings were backing up. He didn’t attempt to kiss me or tell me he loved me before he went back down.

He came back upstairs at eight o’clock. Sadie was already in bed, Bobby still up and in the living room with me. I was reading him a story. James told him to go to his bed.

‘At the end of the chapter,’ said Bobby, but James snarled back that he was to do as he was bloody well told. Bobby flinched before slowly going to his room.

‘Very big of you, James,’ I muttered. ‘Taking all this out on the kids.’

He didn’t respond to that, instead sitting down opposite me and producing his phone from his shirt pocket. ‘I had them check. Your so-called alcove isn’t there. It’s just a blank wall.’

‘No, that’s not true.’

‘I’m afraid it is true, Ellie. I don’t know why you think otherwise, but you must believe me. There’s nothing behind that painting in Casa Amanhã. They were very thorough when they captured the images for the simulation.’ He handed his phone over to me. On the screen was a panoramic photo of the bathroom, as I scrolled along it the fisherman painting came into view, placed on the sink, behind it nothing, just wall.

‘You could’ve created this image. Touched it up, or something.’

‘I assure you, this is one of the originals, from when the whole village was captured.’

‘When?’

‘A few weeks ago, I think. After Lottie died, certainly, and once Luis was out of the way.’

Of course I didn’t believe him. I had too many memories of the alcove, far too many. There was no way I could’ve invented them. I told James I’d reflect on everything, but that one of us would have to sleep on the sofa. We both knew that person would be him.

That night I lay in bed, sleepless. A thought had come to me earlier, days earlier in fact, but I’d refused to indulge in it. I’d not allowed myself any hope, had become so used to people dying offstage and having dealing with it, compartmentalise it. But that night it came back, and I had no choice but to entertain it; Rav, James, Gavin and I had all been put in the Rendering and had come back. The possibility had to exist that somewhere, maybe in the same place as I’d woken up in Virginia, they were keeping Lottie and Luis alive. The thought of that obliterated any chance of me getting off to sleep. I considered what leverage I might have, if any. Words seemed useless; threats, negotiations, what good could they do when I possessed nothing they needed? Only actions could move things, some demonstration of intent was required.

The next morning James and I had a brief conversation before the kids had woken up. He looked terrible for his night on the sofa, I must’ve looked worse.

‘I’ve been awake all night, thinking,’ I said. ‘And you’re right, James. We have to protect the kids. It’s not their fault, why should they have their lives ruined?’

‘So what are you saying.’ His face was neutral, perhaps he dared not hope.

‘I’m saying I’ll keep quiet. For now,’ My eyelids stung as I closed them. ‘We’ll go through the motions, until after the election at least. Then we’ll see.’

James nodded. ‘Maybe we can get over this, L. In the fullness of time. I do still love you, I hope you realise that. I wanted..’ He swallowed. ‘I wanted what happened to be a way of showing you that, the house on the cliffs, that was my idea.’

I gave a tired smile. ‘Like I said, we’ll see.’

Rav came up to see me after the kids had gone to school. James was in a very restricted security briefing with intelligence chiefs, those had become an almost daily occurrence. I told Rav about the Rendering, James’s claims about Rosie and the affair, and the promises he’d made me to try to buy my silence and co-operation.

Rav clearly hadn’t slept for nights, either. He looked bereft. ‘I have to resign, Ellie,’ he said. ‘I can’t do this any more. Whatever the truth is, it’s bad. That much is obvious.’ I’m not sure he knew whom or what to believe anymore.

‘Please don’t resign yet,’ I said. ‘Can you hang on, just for another couple of weeks?’

‘For what?

I paused. ‘I have to go to Portugal,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to believe either, but I have to see some things with my own eyes.’

‘I don’t see how that’s possible at the moment,’ he said. ‘You’ll have the press following you, it’ll make things worse.’

‘That’s why it’s not going to be announced. Nobody will know, not even James.’

‘Impossible.’

‘Is it? I’ll find a way out, when nobody’s looking. Maybe not this week, or next week. But one day everyone will be distracted by something and I’ll slip out.’

‘Will you take Sadie and Bobby with you?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘But Ellie, you can’t go to Naviras. That’s the first place they’ll look for you.’

‘Who?’

‘You know who. James, for a start.’

‘I don’t care,’ I said.

‘So if you go, what will I tell James? He’ll know we’re colluding. He must.’

‘Tell him I’m leaving him,’ I said. ‘It’s the truth.’

It came to me with less than 24 hours notice. The schedule for the following day came through, confirming James would go straight from answering questions in Parliament to Paris for high-level peace talks.

‘Are you happy to stay in Downing Street tomorrow?’ Anushka asked me. ‘It’s just that they’re thin on security detail, everyone’s off to Paris.’

‘Of course that’s fine,’ I said, absently.

‘Doesn’t matter if something crops up,’ Anushka was hastily replying to an email and not looking at me. ‘I can always get someone seconded if you need to head out.’

I began to think about the following day. Rav would go to Paris with James, as would the press pack. Most of his key staff would follow him to Parliament for PMQs, which gave me an hour-long window from about 11:30. At first it seemed an absurd idea, but then it started to make more and more sense. When else would all eyes around Downing Street be focused on something else, staff, press, the whole shebang?

Rid of my bodyguard my major remaining problem was Anushka, who proved much less easy to slip. I told her I’d wanted to make some private calls. I didn’t feel bad about keeping her in the dark, I was protecting her. She’d know nothing. What was the alternative? ‘Hey Anushka! Do you want to run away with me and my kids, to escape this apparent plot to mess up the world?’

Later than expected at 11:40 I saw James come out to his car in the street with Rav and Rosie. I picked up the internal phone and dialed Anushka.

‘I wondered if you could do me the hugest favour. I’m sorry to ask, but could you possibly go to the chemist for me? It’s something I need quite urgently.’

‘Of course, Ellie,’ she said, and came upstairs to pick up a sleeping pill prescription I’d been storing up for ages. I knew the nearest chemist was in Parliament Square, a 10 minute round-trip.

‘We’re going for a walk in the park,’ I said to the kids. ‘We’ll go and see the squirrels and eat ice-cream.’ Both of them cheered. ‘But you have to promise me, it’s really important that we don’t make a sound on our way down, because Daddy’s got lots of important jobs to do today and everyone’s really busy.’

I came down the stairs from the flat to find the landing empty. I went down the main staircase, everyone must’ve been in their offices watching PMQs. The front door was opened for me without any problems, no questions asked. The kids seemed quite happy, excited even. They didn’t ask why we were leaving by the front door, when the park was accessed from the back.

Rav had arranged the car, I’d insisted I left by the front door. It would be for the best, I said, if there was an irrefutable record that I left the building. Even then I wasn’t sure either of the cameramen on the other side of the street captured us as we got into the car, which turned around at the end of the road. ‘Bye-bye Number 10,’ said Sadie.

The car took us to Heathrow and I bought our tickets at the terminal. The ground agent stared at me, perplexed, but said nothing more. They didn’t stop us at security, nor at the gate. Nobody stopped us at immigration in Lisbon, nobody queried my credit card when I put down the deposit on a hire car. There were no messages on my voicemail, no texts or emails. James must’ve only found out I was missing from Number 10 when he returned from the summit that evening, by which time I was already in Naviras.

Of course it was madness to go back there, of all places, hiding in plain sight. They’d have people watching the village, surely, I thought. As we crossed the bridge heading out of Lisbon the statue of Cristo Rei seemed to frown at me. On the other side of the bridge I stopped at a service station in Almada. I called Liz Brickman from a payphone, let it ring three times before I hanging up.

It was seven o’clock at night by the time we approached Casa Amanhã. The sun had just gone down, the car disturbed tree pollen wafting along the street as I pulled up at the gates. Bobby and Sadie both remembered the house and were excited. The gates were shut, still padlocked but rustier. I could see from the road that the house was dark. For a moment I worried someone had changed the lock, but then a twiddle through the rust and it clicked. I let the chain fall to the gravel and pushed the low gates open.

‘Mummy why don’t we come and live in Naviras forever?’ Sadie said. I didn’t reply as I rolled the car slowly down the driveway and parked.

‘Stay in the car, kids. Just for a minute, please.’ I got out and stared at the house, the shutters on the windows and the doors. It seemed so wrong, for a house like that to remain closed and locked, when inside there was so much potential for life. There didn’t seem to be any structural damage though, no sign of forced entry. Apart from some new flakes in the paintwork, it looked just as I’d left it.

I walked around the house, opened the wine cellar trapdoor and walked down. The matches were still by the lantern, thankfully dry. The rest of the cellar was clean, apart from a few rat droppings and cobwebs. Lottie would have been horrified anyway, I thought, as I walked around and up the stone staircase and into the vestibule. One of the precarious book towers had fallen over, I could just make out yellowed pages curling upwards on the floor like dead insect legs. I trod on them on my way to the front doors, pulling back the big black bolts. Despite being large and heavy they opened easily enough, their hinges making just a high pitched squeal as they turned.

As soon he
saw me Bobby undid his seatbelt, reached over and unstrapped Sadie from her carseat. They both got out of the car, trooping across the driveway. I took them upstairs and managed to get them to sit on the bed of Room Five. ‘Can you get ready for bedtime please?’

I walked upstairs into the bathroom of Room Seven. There was a lot of dust, more than in other parts of the house. The painting was there, lined up dead straight. I lifted it off its hook and then stood there, holding it in front of me. Behind it there was just the whitewashed brick wall. The alcove wasn’t there.

I squeezed my eyelids closed, opened them again. No alcove. I started to question my own memories, wondered whether anything I held to be true really was. I could feel the panic coming on, put my head into the toilet and threw up.

None of us slept well that night. I brought the kids upstairs to Room Seven and the three of us shared the same bed, which Bobby was none too pleased about. They both knew something was drastically wrong, despite every attempt by me to claim otherwise. It began to rain in the middle of the night, a heavy shower that hammered the roof of the house. The poplars in the garden waved noisily in the wind.

The kids were starving and woke me long before dawn, demanding breakfast. There was nothing to eat in the house, obviously, so we walked down into the village. The shop where I’d first bought cherries had just opened; I told the kids they could have whatever they wanted, which inevitably led them to the ice-creams in the freezer. Who cares, I thought. Might as well make it seem as though we’re on holiday. The woman in the shop – the same woman as ever, older and greyer – looked at me with bemusement. What sort of a mother would let her children eat ice-cream for breakfast, she must’ve thought.

We walked through the travessa down to the beach. The bar wasn’t open, it was far too early. The amber sun was just poking around the side of the eastern cliffs. Everything was normal, the cliffs were intact. Seagulls were circling over the bay, occasionally dipping into the ocean for fish. Bobby and Sadie went to sit on the beach, leaving me to stand on the slipway. It’s all real, I thought. This is real, and always was. It never changes. The world can do whatever it wants, and Naviras will just carry on regardless. It didn’t care about anything, including me. It would be there long after I was dead, others would come and fall in love with it, just as I had. Or had I? Actually it was the people I’d fallen in love with, not the place. Now they were gone, Naviras had returned to how I’d first found it; a nice little village. Not unique, not special.

Carolina came down to the slipway, having seen the car in the driveway at Casa Amanhã. We embraced and then I looked at her. She was starting to look very much like her father, I thought, before realising that grief and shock had aged her prematurely. ‘Ellie, Will you stay here for good this time?’

‘I don’t know, Carolina. Maybe,’ I looked up at the eastern cliffs, noticed the hotel was surrounded by scaffold. ‘What’s going on up there?’

‘Oh, they’ve closed it,’ she said. ‘They had an inspection and it’s not safe, they didn’t build it properly. I think it’s going to be demolished, everyone’s quite happy about it.’

A whole day, I got. A whole day of trying to clean up the mess in the house, going for a walk up to the cliffs with the kids to find the old cottage derelict as it always had been. One night of sardines eaten in La Roda with Carolina. Just one day and night of peace and quiet, then the next morning Rosie came. I watched as she walked through the gates of Casa Amanhã, started to make her way down the driveway. I’d pulled a table and chair outside from the restaurant so I could watch for the first sign of a visitor. I’d prepared myself for someone coming sooner or later, I’d wondered if it would be her, not James. He never failed to disappoint. Bobbie and Sadie were having their lunch outside on the picnic table next to the restaurant door, heavily sunblocked despite the large parasol I’d brought out. I wanted to stand up, march down the driveway and stop her in her tracks, prevent her from coming anywhere near the house, the kids. But I couldn’t let Bobbie or Sadie out of my sight.

She drew up close to me, but not too close. ‘What’re you writing?’

‘Everything. All that people need to know, anyway,’ I replied. ‘And if you think that’s the only copy, you’re seriously wrong. Killing me won’t stop it.’

Rosie looked up to the sky, back down at me. ‘We don’t want to kill you, Ellie. I’m here because James has a message for you.’

‘What, does he want me to come home? So he can throw me in a lunatic asylum, or plug me back in to the Rendering?’

‘I know you must hate me,’ she said. ‘We never wanted you to end up feeling like this, I promise.’

‘How do you know how I feel, Rosie?’

‘Angry, frustrated, unable to believe in anything?’ She was trying to make out she felt the same way. ‘That your whole life and those you care about have been part of someone else’s little game? You made that choice, Ellie. I’m sorry to say it, but if it hadn’t been this, it could have been something else. Someone could have bombed Downing Street, or shot down a plane you were in.’

‘That someone was you, though, as it turned out. You orchestrated it, with others.’

‘Yes, I’m not going to make any attempt to dissuade you of that. But you played your part, Ellie. James never knew this house was yours, or that you’d an affair with Luis in the same bed he slept in here. On top of everything else he’s dealing with, you’ve wounded him. Look, a peace offering.’

She reached into the inner pocket of her jacket and pulled out the postcard. She handed it to me. It was a little more frayed than when I’d seen it last at Ben Gurion, it had been crumpled, folded perhaps.

I squeezed my eyes closed. ‘How long ago did this all start? For you.’

She kicked the gravel on the driveway. ‘I was recruited six years ago, just before James was made a whip. The project had been bubbling away for about a year, under the surface.’ She looked back up at me. ‘They never shared it with the British government, as it happens. I know you found out about James and me.’ She actually looked a bit sheepish. ‘I’m especially sorry for that, Ellie. I can assure you, it only happened once, I know that’s almost impossible to believe, but it’s the truth. The only reason I let it happen at all was so we could harvest James’s DNA.’

‘I guess you’re telling me all of this because you’re about to have me bumped off.’

‘Oh, we could’ve done that last night,’ she smiled, smugly. ‘With a missile from the drone we’ve had periodically flying over this village. Trust me, you’re no use to us dead, Ellie.’

I looked up into the empty sky. ‘How’s that?’

‘Because you were liable to reject the Rendering. Your reset caused a malfunction in the system, and ultimately you were unplugged prematurely because you continued to reject it. All of you, Morgan, Gavin, Rav, you were all supposed to stay under for quite a bit longer, but because you crashed the simulation we had to stop it, which means Project Tabernacle never fulfilled all its objectives.’

‘Well I’m glad,’ I said.

Rosie shrugged. ‘Nonetheless, we need one more scan of your brain, Ellie, just one. To confirm their hypothesis about your rejection rate. For what it’s worth, there’ve been ninety-six people who’ve gone into the Rendering, and not one has ever been displaced in the simulation during a reset before. I suppose you should be proud, in a sense. You seem to be unique.’

‘I rejected it because the Rendering was incomplete.’

‘True, but that in itself doesn’t account for the synaptic behaviour you displayed. Maybe it was the meds you were taking for your depression, we can’t be sure. Anyway, we’re prepared to cut you a deal. Please, let me show you something.’ She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out her phone, pressed the screen and held it out to me.

It was a pair of line graphs; two wavelengths undulating in a slow, gentle pattern. On the left of the screen were two words: ‘Luna’, and ‘Rar’.

‘This is Lottie and Luis,’ she said. ‘Their synapses, actually. They don’t move much, not like those of someone who’s awake, but they’re perfectly healthy. We’ve kept them in the Rendering, helps to keep their brains ticking over.’ She tapped on the screen, then held it up to me again.