Edge (5 page)

    "The medium that I go to see, she's impressed with all I've told her about you. She'd love to meet you sometime."

    "Uh-huh. Well, right now, I've someone to see. You go well, Rosa."

    "And you. See ya!"

    The wallscreen blanked out.

    Miracles. Right.

    When Rosa had seen her own brain activity pulsing in sheets of colour on that same screen, she had been in awe, sitting beneath the silver tree that was Suzanne's fMRI scanner, set on castors so you could roll it across the floor, like a hairdryer from a salon. "It's kind of a sacred moment, Doc," she had said, for to her science was magic.

    Therapists focusing on the mind too often treated every illness as psychosomatic – Rosa had seen hypnotherapists before – but in her case Suzanne had been right to suggest another medical opinion, despite the two medics who had given the all-clear, suggesting that the tightness in Rosa's breathing was her own fault, caused by stress.

    If only it were ethical for Suzanne to change New Age irrationality as easily as she removed the other limiting beliefs of Rosa's mental world.

    "Dr Duchesne?" The image went straight up on the wallscreen. "Your appointment is here. With his, um, driver."

    "Thanks, Colin. Send them up, would you?"

    She disengaged her phone from the wallscreen, muted it and blocked incoming calls, then walked out into the lobby and waited in front of the lift. Soft sounds carried from the other firms on this floor – freight consultants and a marketing agency – deadened by soft carpeting and fibre-covered walls. The lift door dinged open.

    Richard Broomhall was fourteen, looked a year or two younger, and did not move until a big woman – she stood behind him – touched his shoulder. Then he stepped out, followed by the woman.

    "I'm Richard's driver," she said. "You won't want me inside, I assume?"

    "There's a coffee machine round there."

    "I'm good, thanks. Right here is fine."

    Suzanne nodded, then focused every sense on the boy, excluding the world. His eyes widened.

    "Come inside, Richard." Direct commands are unambiguous. "And sit down."

    Some teenagers respond to Wo
uld you like to sit down?
as if it might be a question, not an instruction, so she needed to set the tone. But there was no surliness in Richard's manner as he took the client seat, glancing at the fMRI in the corner.

    "You know what that is?"

    "Atomic magnetometer," he said. "You're going to look inside my brain?"

    "I'm surprised you know that, so well done. But no scanning today. So do you like science?"

    "Uh, sure." His tone said:
Doesn't everyone?

    "Any field in particular?"

    "Astrophysics. Galaxy formation. Dark matter strut formation. And I'm an atheist."

    From dark matter to religion was a leap, therefore interesting.

    "I'm curious. Tell me more about that."

    "You can't see dark matter but you can see its effects. And it doesn't matter where you were brought up, physics is the same, and anyone can do experiments to false, um, falsify theories, right? But you're supposed to believe in the same God as your father wherever you are, even though every country has different religions, because – well … they just do."

    He blinked as if surprised at the way his words had spilled out.

    "And your father?"

    "He knows… He's so, er, certain."

    "What kind of thing is he certain about?"

    "Everything."

    She could challenge that for exceptions, because there must be times when Broomhall senior looked or acted uncertain, but she chose a different route. "Is there any specific belief of his that bothers you?"

    "I… don't know."

    The hesitation told her everything.

    "If you did know, what would the answer be? And if you still don't know, just guess."

    "Knives." The word popped out. Richard blinked again, then stared at her. "He thinks it's good to carry knives."

    "Do all adults carry them?"

    "Yes." A pause, then: "Um, no. But lots do."

    "Is there anyone you know who doesn't?"

    "Mr Dutton, at school. He's brilliant and he doesn't carry."

    
Good for Mr Dutton.

    "Imagine someone with a knife were about to walk in now."

    Richard's gaze flicked down and right, his face whitening.

    "Tell me," she continued, "how you would feel."

    "Sick. Like… like throwing up."

    "How would you like to feel around knives?"

    "I…" His left hand made an unconscious gesture over his stomach. "I dunno."

    Knives brought on a roiling sensation, and he would rather feel settled. That much he had told her without words.

    "If you felt calm inside yourself, what would that do for you?"

    "I… I'd be safer? Able to work at school without worrying about… things."

    There was something there, something to uncover that was school-related, but going for it now would be confrontational. For the moment, she needed rapport; and with four sessions already booked, she could afford to postpone this line of questioning.

    And she wanted to know about his father.

    For a while she continued with gentle questions, learning about the death of Richard's mother three years ago, the loneliness of a Surrey mansion, and the way his father smelled of whisky at the breakfast table, far too often. And then there were exams, the pressure to do well, and Richard's increasing difficulty in revision. The reason for revision is that revisiting a memory strengthens it, and the principle applies universally. She wondered what bad memories Broomhall senior kept replaying and so strengthening inside his head, what pictures, sounds, and feelings needed the deadening effect of booze to let him sleep.

    But there were practical things she could do for Richard now, beginning by instructing him in the fourteen-minutes-study, five-minutes-rest cycle for optimum revising. Then she raised his hand and dropped him into trance.

    Limb catalepsy is unknown in the conscious state, an extra convincer to Richard that something new was going on: his hand would feel suspended by wires, held in place by invisible force. While the hand remained poised level with his head, Suzanne talked him down into deep relaxation. "Think back to a time when everything was all right, all was well…"

    She showed him how to bring feelings of confidence back into play when needed, and finally instructed his hand to lower – "with honest unconscious movement only as fast as your unconscious agrees to integrate these understandings" – and told a metaphorical tale, as the hand inched downward, of a novice monk graduating via the dark, fear-filled, final chamber to reach the light, only to look back and see flimsy paper dragons hanging from the ceiling: a metaphor which, in Richard's current neurophysiological state, might have profound effects. Beneath his eyelids, tears welled.

    "And you can awaken now…"

    He rubbed his eyes and smiled.

The next client was a ten year-old bedwetter, accompanied by her mother. Here Suzanne's work was subtle, directed more toward mother than daughter, changing the source of the behaviour. Next up was a webmovie scriptwriter, blocked for months because of a single cutting remark at a vulnerable time. That was straightforward, and by the session's end he was almost dancing as he stood – with ideas, he said, bursting inside his head, desperate to pour out.

    Freud said that words were once magic, while Dawkins called even birdsong "barcodes on the air", causing the state of listeners' brains to change. Suzanne wondered, as her writer client left, if he had any clue how her use of language patterns had changed the way he–

    "Dr Duchesne." This was a security override, popping up on her wallscreen. "Richard Broomhall's driver is on her way up. I couldn't stop her."

    Suzanne blinked, then exhaled, centring herself like a dancer.

    "I'll deal with her. That's fine."

    Clearly there was a problem. Forestalling the woman's actions, Suzanne pulled her office door open. The big woman from earlier was storming out of the lift.

    "Something's wrong," said Suzanne. "Tell me what it is."

    "Richard–"

    "But I don't know your name, so what is it?"

    "Lexa Armstrong, and I want to know what you did to him. Before the plod come asking."

    "Excuse me? Plod?"

    "The little bugger slid out of the car when I was distracted, when we were stopped, right? And of course I've told the police, but that doesn't get him back necessarily, so where the hell has he gone?"

    "This is awful–" Suzanne spoke fast, matching Lexa Armstrong's scared-and-angry voice, and whether that was professional voice-rapport or because of the sudden coldness dropping inside her own belly, she could not tell – "so you need to slow down and tell me more, because I don't know what happened and we need to find out."

    The long sentence, phrases run together, was deliberate, lulling, far better than staccato questions.

    "We'd just gone past the Gherkin, stopped at the lights, and there was a crowd crossing the road, some rowdy lads, some a bit suspect, kind of leery, you know?"

    "What happened?"

    "Richard must have – I just caught like a whisper, a glimpse – but he slipped his arm between the front seats – he was in back – and switched the central locking off, and then he slipped out and that was it. Gone."

    This was awful.

    "What did you do next?"

    "Left the car where it was – that's an automatic fine

– and went to look for him, calling the cops while I did it. No sign of him. He's never done anything like it, too pulled in on himself, if you know what I mean. What did you do to him, Doc?"

    "Taught him confidence too soon, or maybe that's nothing to do with it. Where was this? Near the Gherkin building, you said?"

    "Heading up Bishopsgate. You think that's maybe significant?"

    "I don't know of anything relevant, no locations that would trigger a reaction. You don't know any?"

    "No. Shit." Lexa Armstrong rubbed her face. "He's fourteen years old and soft, you know? Anything could happen to him."

    "You've told his father?"

    "Yeah, and there was a lot of yelling, but I think he's scared, too."

    What Broomhall would do to the driver who had let his son disappear in the middle of crowded London, Suzanne had no idea. And as for what action he might take against the therapist who'd seen the boy just minutes before this radical new behaviour shattered everything–

    Lexa Armstrong had probably just lost her job; Suzanne's entire career was crashing down.

    "You've got the car downstairs?"

    "Another fine, and yeah."

    "So let's go look for Richard."

 

    "After Richard ran out, he might have gone past that – shit, not that guy, it's someone else. Claimed he hadn't just sold a veil-cap to a white kid."

    "He was lying?"

    "Telling the truth, I thought, but you'd know for sure. Point is, there's a bunch of other sellers just the – oh, here we go." Lexa put the car into drive. "If Richard got the idea of picking up a veil-cap, the streetcams probably lost him in the crowds."

    They passed a turning on the left. Farther down Threadneedle Street, blood pooled on the pavement outside a bar. Bankers' duel, a lunchtime foolishness, or perhaps a disgruntled client calling out a bank employee.

    "High price to pay for voting, don't you think, Doc?"

    Lexa had noticed Suzanne looking down the street. It confirmed Suzanne's impression of Lexa: observant, her perceptions trustworthy.

    "So where would you guess Richard went? And I mean, just take a guess."

    "Could be anywhere." Lexa shrugged, betraying no unconscious gestures to suggest otherwise. "Any direction takes you into crowds around stations, overground or Tube or just on foot."

    They were passing a steel-and-glass side entrance to Liverpool Street station.

    "But that means more streetcams, doesn't it?"

    "With a harder job to do."

    "Good point," said Suzanne. "If you were Richard, what would you be running away from?"

    "His entire life, maybe? Posh house, absolutely lovely, but it don't make up for the rest. I'm not talking actual abuse, mind."

    "Of course not."

    Suzanne wondered if Richard might be running toward something, rather than away; but it seemed unlikely. In the throng surrounding the car – they had stopped yet again – it seemed impossible to track a single figure. Thirty years of being the most surveilled city on Earth had not stopped London from being a Mecca for runaways. The blur of moving faces brought home the impossibility of their task.

    "Which way shall I go?"

    "Just drive by instinct."

    "You think that will help?"

    
Maybe I'm just trying to avoid calling Philip Broomhall.

    "It's the best we can do," said Suzanne.

    "Shit. I was hoping for a miracle."

    Suzanne rubbed the inside of her arm.

    "There's no such thing, I'm afraid."

 

End of day one, 6pm and everyone going home. Beside Josh, Vikram alternately fiddled with his beard or folded his arms across the swell of his belly. From the edge of the piazza, they watched the crowds stream toward Dockland station, while high overhead, tethered to the pointed apex of Canary Wharf, a dark-green trizep swayed in the crossdraught. The airship was a symbol of eco-economic trade, the
Global Eco
²
nomy
legend in distorted yellow characters on its side.