Sleepwalkers (22 page)

‘What do you want to come back to all this for?’

‘Who knows what we did, on duty?’

‘No one knows what we did. Not our commanding officers, not even Scrappy.’ He sees the confusion in my eyes. ‘Jesus. Scrappy. David Doolly. Doolly Do. Scooby Do. Scrappy Do. Scrappy. Walked like he had a fucking melon between his legs. Wore his night-vision goggles in bed every night.’ Still no reaction from me. ‘Not a thing? You lucky sod.’

A pause. He stares at his rifle, while my mind whirrs with new information. He’ll have a computer somewhere upstairs. He’ll have address books. And he won’t care if I take them.

‘What was it like, when you woke up, when you first woke up? Where were you?’

How do you explain that there was no moment? No ‘before’? My earliest memories involve me, four years old, watching our neighbours’ cat cowering up on the kitchen units as our dog barks like bonkers below. And this memory joins perfectly with others, all leading naturally to the moment I met my wife. And onward. There is no army life at any point, no gap where men like Jacko should fit. My life was complete.

‘I don’t remember waking up.’

‘You married?’

‘What’s my name?’

‘What does it matter?’

‘Don’t be a tit.’

‘Shoot me.’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t have it in me.’

‘If you’re chasing after yourself, the real you, you’ll learn it again soon enough. You’ll remember what we did and why I can’t sleep. You’ll start crying in the middle of the afternoon. You’ll see faces of the women we … we … you’ll be standing at the bus stop and some nice young lady with a pram will walk past and you’ll start shaking.’ His eyes are brimming with tears again. ‘I deserve it, I don’t think I shouldn’t feel this, I’m trying to take my punishment but I’ve been like this for three years now. Three years and I can’t … it’s too much. I deserve it and I’m so, so sorry but, but enough now.’

He reaches for the gun. I think seeing me has given him the strength – a reminder of what he needs to leave. And an audience. I jump forward and pull the gun away from him. And I do it easily. He has wasted away. I hold the gun and he falls to his knees.

‘Please!’

‘What’s my name!?’ I hold the gun above my head like a stick for a dog.

‘Yeah, there you are again, Nudger.’

‘My name! My fucking name!’ He just grins. ‘Why won’t you tell me? What’s in it for you … not to tell me?’

Suddenly I imagine the men are at the door. That this has all been a ruse – a way of keeping me here. I turn the gun on him. He smiles. Grateful. No, there is no trick here.

‘My name.’

‘You know sometimes I thought I loved you so much I must be gay. I could sit in a car with you for hours and hours without either of us speaking. Just driving across that motherfucking
desert. As long as I had you at my side I felt calm. Would’ve happily died with you next to me.’

‘Jacko—’

‘And I still do. Which is why I don’t want to tell you your name.’

‘Then you do it yourself.’

‘Fine. Give me the rifle. You shouldn’t want to know. You finally got out. Got a free pass. You want to run away from who you are as fast as you bloody well can.’

‘Upstairs there will be photos, I bet. You and me. Maybe the regiment. It’ll have my name.’

‘Actually, you’ll find a photo of us on the stairs, halfway up. You, me and the boys. It’s got your name, your nice official name and rank. But it won’t mean nothing.’

‘It’s who I am.’

‘No. No, you silly arse, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.’

I chuck the rifle across the room and go to the stairs. I hear him scrambling on the floor. Grabbing the gun. I walk up slowly. The stairs groan under my weight.

‘If you see any of the boys and they hear how I went, well, tell them I was proud of them. Always proud of them. Just no longer proud of me.’

There’s the photograph. Three short lines of strong men in green and khaki. Berets tilted. Smiles and thin eyes in bright sunshine. I step up so my eyes are even with the photo.

‘You should be grateful!’ the voice cries behind me.

There I am. One of the boys. Jacko next to me. A fixed grin. I count the names below to find my name, but a call below does the job for me—

‘Staff Sergeant Lee Mackenzie! I love you! Remember that I told you to stop. Because you’ll be doing this too, I bet, when you remember the rest.’

My tanned smile in the photograph gives nothing away.

The rifle does its job with a brutal, snapped retort. I hear him buckle and hit the floor, see a spray of blood hit the wall and ceiling. But I’m running upstairs to see what else I can find. I give myself five minutes before I must leave.

Lee Mackenzie is still grinning with his buddies as I slip back down four minutes later, my arms filled with papers and a lap-top computer. I stop, grab the photo too, then rush to the car. I am gone soon after. I hear no ambulance sirens or the glaring lights of a police car. James MacFarlane might well lie there for weeks before anyone finds him. I consider calling it in – a 999 call to stop him from rotting. But I’m worried that this will help them find me. They’ll see the two glasses on the table, the missing papers, computer and photograph. And these will help them know what I plan to do next.

I’m sorry, my old friend. But we’re all on our own now.

Diane was right. Carrie never heard from her again. She would still receive calls and visits – regular check-ups from various men and women who were always polite and formal – but she learned nothing more about Diane, about Ben, about anything. At least she still had the kids, but Ben’s absence only made their time together feel hollow. Carrie behaved as she was meant to. She knew what was expected, but she hated waiting for news. The silence rippled around inside her.

Joe had just stabbed Emma in the hand with a protractor when the phone finally rang and a quiet, unprepossessing voice invited her to a meeting at the Company. Emma was screaming and shoving her hand in Carrie’s face to examine ‘the damage’, while Joe himself was howling about something inexplicable. Carrie silenced them, took down the caller’s details, hung up, then soothed her children’s hysterics while a new excitement swelled inside her. She was in.

A week later, Carrie returned to the very room in the same offices where she had first been interviewed. She sat there with a glass of water and expected the elegant old man to
come in and begin things again. But when the door opened, a younger man entered. Much younger, early twenties she guessed. He wore a simple dark-blue suit and white shirt without a tie. His hair was short and neat, in fact everything about him was tidy and earnest. He peered through the door at her.

‘Carrie?’

She nodded and stood up.

‘Hello, I’m David.’ He walked over and gave her a formal handshake, not really meeting her eye. He carried two large files under one arm which he placed carefully on the table. ‘I’m sorry about how long it’s taken to get you in. Sit down, sit down, please.’

The room had a long central table, and David ushered her to one side then sat facing her on the other.

‘So. What can I tell you? What do you want to know?’

She was thrown by the openness of the question. ‘Er, well, anything. Everything.’

‘Everything? God, I don’t know if I’m qualified to go into all that!’

He seemed to think that this was rather funny. He had an uneasy laugh. It was as though the noise was somehow embarrassing and needed to be shut down as quickly as possible. He looked small in his suit, uncomfortable in his own skin. She watched his shoulders twitch and his hands move uneasily from knees to table to knees. She could tell that he dressed to make himself look important but he was really only an apprentice. Carrie tried to hide her irritation.

‘Well, what can you tell me?’

‘About what?’

‘About the progress of the project, about where things are going. All the stuff they told me when I first signed up. I know it’s part of an experiment, but there are things that don’t add up, somehow. Like what Ben did at night, where he went. No one told me what happened then.’

‘Right.’ He frowned and stared at the table. Then he opened one of the files, looked at it for a second and shut it again. He looked up at her and scratched the back of his neck. ‘Shall we start with Ben? Are you still interested in him at all?’

Interested? She nodded as casually as she could. ‘Sure.’

‘Well, he was hugely useful, a really ground-breaking case study. Changed the way we think about so much. There will be books about him one day, I bet.’ A thought struck him and he hurriedly scrawled something inside one of the files. Carrie waited as patiently as she could. When he looked up at her, his face was blank.

‘Oh,’ he said, as though he’d completely forgotten she was there. ‘Sorry, something popped into my head, wanted to get it down. Where were we? Ben. Yes. So, he was great and thank you from everyone here. I should have said that at the top. Sorry, I’m not so good with people.’ He tapped his head as though this explained everything. ‘Bit of a boffin, that’s what everyone calls me. Anyway …’

He shoved one file to his right and opened the second.

‘Well, now he’s gone, we thought you might be interested in a new case. Same sort of work. You’d move in with the subject, they’d consider you their significant other, you’d record and observe, just as before. But obviously, no case is the same and I doubt very much that they’ll last as long as that last
one. First one’s a pilot. Commercial jets, mainly long-haul. Second one would be more intense. A surgeon. He’s suffering from exhaustion. What do you think?’

‘They sound different.’

‘Yes, they do. A bit posher, both of them, but that shouldn’t be any trouble for you.’

‘I meant, they’re very different from Ben. They don’t seem damaged like him. What’s the point of them?’

He frowned as though he didn’t understand.

‘What’s wrong with them?’ she pressed. ‘The point of the project was to help people, I thought. So how are we helping them?’

‘Oh, right.’ He looked a bit bored now. He flicked through the file without much enthusiasm. ‘Here we go. The pilot’s having nightmares about crashing the planes he flies. He thinks he really might do it, is struggling to tell whether he’s awake or asleep sometimes. There’s some interesting research we want to do here, about sleep therapy, about the way professionals cope under stress. And the other guy, he’s got knife issues, it’s all a bit bloody – but you’d be perfectly safe, really.’ He snapped the file shut again.

‘And I would just observe?’

‘Sure.’

‘And they would … what will happen to them?’

‘Who knows? We never know at the start, do we?’ He smiled as though that was that.

‘Would they be taken away in the night as well?’

He didn’t reply to this. He folded his hands on his lap, looked at her with a little more confidence than before.

‘Maybe.’

Maybe he wasn’t the boffin he was pretending to be.

‘Can I ask you something else?’ she asked.

‘Please.’

‘You said he was gone, Ben. What have you done with him?’

‘Done? You make it sound like we’ve killed him,’ he said with a laugh. Carrie forced a smile to join in.

‘Would it matter, though?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘If he was dead?’ He still had his hands on his lap but Carrie felt that cool confidence in him again.

‘I just found him interesting,’ she lied. ‘It would feel like a waste.’

No one said anything for a while. She noticed a harassed young woman hurry by the door, laden down by a stack of grey, cardboard files.

‘You know the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona? The cathedral?’ he asked suddenly.

‘I’ve seen pictures.’

‘It’s a never-ending project. Men work on it knowing they will die before it’s completed. That was the norm in medieval times, but to see it happening today, it’s an incredible act of faith, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t really follow.’

‘We’re a bit like that. Our work. Always watching, checking, monitoring.’ He sounded excited as he continued. ‘Billions of pounds, dollars, yen, euros. Everything analysed and considered. Tiny jigsaw pieces which will one day give us answers about the human mind. We’ll all be dead too before the final answer comes, I’m sure. So – Ben, a waste? Hardly. He’s just another step forward.’

‘You’re saying he’s alive but in a different experiment?’

He leaned in. ‘I’m saying that you are making a mistake if you think that we ever stop working, looking and watching. You have a mind too, Carrie.’

‘My mind doesn’t feel like it’s going to teach anyone anything,’ she said.

‘Is that really what you think?’ David’s eyes were locked on her. He sat taller in his chair now. ‘After all, you’re so inquisitive.’

This didn’t feel like a compliment.

‘Do you want a coffee?’ he asked, and she was thrown by this sudden change of direction. ‘We’ve got one of those instant things where you can choose your type. They’re actually quite decent.’

He sprang to his feet and marched over to the coffee machine.

‘I’m fine with water, thank you.’

‘Yes, you had three coffees before you came out, didn’t you?’

They really were watching her. The machine dribbled a thin line of brown liquid into his cup. He stared at it, letting his last comment settle.

‘Do you know what a panopticon prison is?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘The panopticon is a type of prison designed by an English philosopher called Jeremy Bentham, in, I think, 1780-something … 1785. It’s brilliantly simple, basically a circular building, but the point is it’s designed so that the guards can see the prisoners at all times, but the prisoners can’t see the guards. And when you’re a prisoner in a panopticon prison and you’re never sure if you’re being watched or not, then your behaviour begins to alter – in case you are, you see? –
until you behave properly at all times. And yet there might be no guards at all. It’s genius, isn’t it?’ He sipped his coffee. ‘Yeah, really, surprisingly good.’

‘Why are you telling me about this?’

He didn’t reply for a moment. His expression was so cold. And then he was smiling again.