Kristin (2 page)

Three

Thom arrived at his mother’s detached house
in Bermondsey at around five-thirty. The temperature had plummeted and snow had
started to fall. The door opened and her ageing face cracked with emotion. She held
out her arms and hugged him until his ribs hurt.

‘My God, I’m so glad to see
you,’ she sighed, with relief.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Better for seeing you.
Come in quickly, you must be frozen?’

He closed the door and
followed her to the kitchen, watching as she brought the kettle back to the
boil with a trembling right hand that had affected her since a severe stroke
three years earlier.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said,
shivering against the door frame.

‘About what?’

‘Sorry I wasn’t here.’

‘Don’t worry. I didn’t even
know anything had happened until I
  
switched the wireless on, but it just felt like something was wrong as
soon as I woke up. I don’t know, I opened the curtains and everything seemed
... final, hopeless. Does that make sense?’

He nodded. She handed him a
mug of Earl Grey tea and they moved into the lounge. He had so many memories of
the room and it had changed little since his childhood. He looked at the old,
bottle green armchair in the corner and felt happy for the first time in days.
It was here he’d sat as a young boy, with his father, and listened to hour upon
hour of wondrous stories from the master.

His mother had lowered
herself slowly into the same chair thirteen years ago as his father had
confirmed the news she couldn’t bear to hear, that her youngest son, Nicholas,
had died riding pillion on a friend’s motorcycle in the Rotherhithe tunnel.

And it had been in the
chair she’d taken the telephone call informing her that her beloved husband,
George, had passed away in hospital of a heart
 
attack following a routine operation.

Here, too, he’d somehow
managed to make love for the first time, with Amy Stanton, a fellow student
from Goldsmiths College. Sixteen years on he could still hear her shortened
breath, feel the beauty of the naked form that had devoured him with its
burning fire. His pulse quickened.

‘God, I miss them, Thomas,’
she whispered.

‘So do I. Every day.’

‘Nick would have turned
thirty this year.’

‘And Dad would be ...
sixty-eight?’

She nodded solemnly as the
old wall clock ticked more seconds away. ‘Have you seen the papers this
morning?’ she asked, handing him a neatly folded copy of The Times.

He scanned the front page
with apprehension and loathing: “FALSE ALARM, BUT PRE-EMPTIVE WESTERN STRIKES
INEVITABLE,” and tossed the broadsheet onto the floor. Maybe the Islamic
fundamentalists had it right, perhaps America really was the “Great Satan”? And
maybe all those nations in league with it were equally responsible? After all,
it was the Americans who’d started the ball of insanity rolling at the end of
the Second World War. Robert Oppenheimer certainly had a great deal to answer
for in Thom’s eyes. He must have been a man lacking in anything more than a
modicum of humanity.

Now that the British,
American and French embassies in Riyadh, Damascus, and Amman had closed the
governments of the West no longer shared a dialogue with the Middle East. It
was a complete standoff, and the world held its collective breath. It waited.

‘Thom, how has it come to
this, isn’t there anything that can be done, isn’t there still time for
negotiation?’

Negotiation
?
Thom
had never understood the grievances of such people, the concept of Jihad. He
wasn’t able to comprehend what these people wanted of the West. Surely they
could no more expect him to go and live in the desert and pray to Allah five
times a day than he would ask them to abandon everything they know and embrace
Western culture in all its facets? He’d sometimes wondered if it might all just
be a simple question of jealousy — the old story of the haves and the
have-nots, rather than being anything to do with which God you happened to
believe in, which devotional code you lived by. ‘How do you negotiate with
people who have no desire to talk, no clear demands, no rational motive, people
without a conscience?’ he answered. His eyes flashed to the paper, and half way
down the front page he saw a vivid
 
orange image of a nuclear explosion in full bloom, headed by the simple
but bold caption: “NORTH KOREA: JUST A MATTER OF TIME”.

North Korea’s nuclear arms programme
had advanced as rapidly as it had under the guidance of a renegade Russian
scientist, Aleksandr Lushnikov. Two decades of his expertise had enabled his
new masters to become the superpower of the East, ahead of the Chinese. Kim Hae
Kyong’s unrecognized administration had refused to abandon its nuclear arms
programme and its missiles were trained upon its neighbour, South Korea, and
cities in Europe, Britain, and the United States.

He sipped some tea and thought
about his nightmares, of his need to divulge their content, their cryptic
absurdity, and he worried how she would react to hearing what he was about to
tell her. ‘I’ve been having dreams, strange dreams. I’m on a hill top, up by
Greenwich Observatory I think, and I see the bomb explode. I feel incredibly
strong, strong enough to stop it. But last
 
night was different. I was impotent and the mushroom cloud
just spread, turned the whole city to dust and then ... ’

She raised her eyebrows.

‘ ...
I watched you die
.’

Margaret Sharman stared
silently into her cup and swallowed dryly. Now she would shock her surviving
son. ‘Do you remember that white cat from next door — you were very
young, five or six?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘There was an accident out
in the road, we heard the screech of the brakes, but before we do anything you
ran out and saw it lying there in a pool of blood. You were very upset.’

‘I don’t recall that.’

‘No, well you seemed to
forget the whole episode and your father and I agreed we shouldn’t mention it
again, or try to find an explanation for what happened next.’

‘What did happen?’

‘Something quite
unbelievable. You crouched down next to the cat, placed a hand on its stomach
... and it started to twitch. Then it pulled itself to its feet. You patted it
on the head and it ran off.’

‘Must have just been
stunned.’

‘
Stunned
,
with all that blood
? No, Thom, it was
dead.’

‘What are you saying ...
that I brought it back to life?’

She didn’t answer.

‘ ... But that’s not
possible.’

‘I knew from the second you
were born that you were very special, and not just as a son, which you are of
course. I knew that you’d have a very important role to play at some point in
your life, I just wasn’t sure what it would be.’

Her words took him back to
the awful day he’d said goodbye to his
 
brother forever. Now he would have to reveal a secret, in case he never
got another chance.

‘What are you thinking
about?’ she asked.

‘Nick’s funeral. There’s
something...something I’ve never told you. It’s just that, well, before the coffin
vanished behind the curtain ... I heard ... a voice.’

She put her cup down and
sat back.

‘It was barely discernible
... but it was Nick.’

‘ ...
He talked to you
?’

‘He said we weren’t to
blame Ritchie for his death, that his friend’s survival would be punishment
enough. Then he told me to look after you and Dad. He said that although I may
have to make the ultimate sacrifice I would one day realize my destiny, but
that I should beware a stranger I would meet in the future as they would not be
... of this world. He said that he loved us all, and wished us happy lives.’

She stood slowly, picked up
the cups and carried them through to the kitchen, where she began to cry as
he’d never heard her cry before.

Four

Thom had no recollection of Sunday whatsoever,
and woke at ten the following morning, slumped at the kitchen table. He found a
large glass, filled it with twenty year old whisky and drank it. Then he phoned
work, told them he was sick, and refilled the glass.

By the time he found her he was barely able
to stand. Two girls were antagonizing her, hovering over her like vultures. One
of them spat in her face then they stepped away, laughing, and the other girl
threw a half-f drink can and its contents spilled down the front of her
coat. He ran at them, ‘Piss off, you slags!’

Kristin looked at the
spattering of fizzy liquid, her anger boiling and tracked them as they fled, as
their laughter, their stiletto footsteps ricocheted off
  
the icy walls.

Suddenly, the younger of
the two women crashed to the ground holding her head, squealing as blood ran
from her ears and her eyes, gushed from her nose. The older girl pulled her up
and they ran, hysterical.

‘Are you all right?’ he
asked.

‘Bitches! They have spoiled
my coat, the one you gave me.’

‘We can get it cleaned,
let’s get out of here,’ he slurred.

He held out a hand and she
grasped it, but as her skin made contact his palm burnt. He let her go, and she
fell heavily against the wall. She glared at him mistrustfully, breathless. ‘
... Must have been static, I’m sorry I let you slip.’

They walked quickly to the
northern exit, took the lift and crossed the road to the station. At Canary
Wharf they found a coffee shop on the top floor of the mall.

‘What happened back there?’
he asked.

‘Back where?’ she replied,
coughing over another of his Dunhills.

‘...With those girls?’

‘Bitches have been
bothering me for a while.’

‘You get a lot of that?’

‘Some. That bitch has paid
the price.’

‘ ... Looked like she hit
her head?’

She glowered.

He glanced out at the busy
lunchtime concourse. People swarmed, laden
 
with bags and trolleys full of food and supplies they hoped
might keep them alive a little longer if the worst happened. On a plastic bench
outside a boutique a young mother rocked her baby. He wondered whether the
child would reach its first birthday? ‘What do you think ?’ he asked her.

‘About what?’

‘Do you think we’ll still
be here this time next year?’

‘Not all of you.’

Her words cut through him
with their cold certainty.

His hand began to burn again.
He looked down. It was blistering badly.
He must have done it himself that morning
,
on a hot pan or
something
,
that was why it had hurt when he
’
d helped her up
. God knows he’d been drunk
enough to have done virtually anything. But now he was sobering fast. ‘It’s a
waste,’ he said.

‘What is?’

‘Your life, as it is.’

‘I have never known
anything else.’

‘But we meet, we talk, and
then ... I mean, what will you do now?’

‘Go back down there, it is
where I belong.’

‘I can’t let you do that
anymore.’ He leaned across the table and made her an offer, one that she
grabbed without hesitation, smiling slyly when his eyes left hers for a split
second. Her acceptance would change his life forever, and alter the destiny of
the human race.

Five

Thom opened the lounge door of his apartment
and she wandered in, astonished anyone could live in luxury so diametrically
opposed to her own, paltry existence. Sliding off her shoes she walked barefoot
on the sumptuous pile of the royal blue carpet, and ran her fingertips lightly
along the back of the red leather sofa.

He took off his coat and
threw it over the back of a chair as she drifted into the bathroom.

‘Is this for bath-ing?’ she
asked.

He followed her. She was
staring down into the deep, cast iron tub with fascination. ‘ ...
Yes
,
of course
...
’

‘I would like to bathe.’
                 

He left the room and
fetched an oversized white towel, yellow cotton T-shirt and black tracksuit
bottoms. When he returned, she’d stripped naked and his need for her burned.

‘Shannons?’ she asked.

‘ ... Yes ... yes they were
Shannon’s,’ he stuttered.

‘Is it normal?’

‘ … Is what normal?’

‘To
take off clothes, when one bathes?’

He was dumfounded.

‘Do I look un-pleasant?’

‘ ...
Unpleasant
?’

‘Without my clothes?’

‘No.’

‘Ah ... pri-vacy.’

As she closed the door on
her benefactor something inside her required that she despise him, but she
fought the overpowering demand and an excruciating pain tore through the fabric
of her soul, an experience her innocence would not permit her to comprehend.
But she would comprehend. Soon.

Thom took a sharp knife
from a drawer and began slicing vegetables. He switched the portable television
on and then off — he’d avoided the media wherever possible since he’d
seen Saturday’s paper and had no desire to be informed now. If it happened, it
happened, he just didn’t wish to know if it was about to happen ... he jumped
as something extrinsic to the world in which he lived, something cold,
threatening, closed in behind him. Water drops hit the tiled floor in
protracted rhythm. Something breathed, sniffing him with suspicion. But he
turned slowly to find emptiness, and inhaled air as rank as rotten meat. On the
floor were two wet, bare footprints.

Gripping the wooden stock
tightly in his hand he pointed the knife straight ahead and crept into the
soundless, static lounge. He forced his paralysed legs to move, passing through
the open door onto the dark landing. Disorientation hit him:
Where did the
blackened
,
distorted
doors in front of him lead to
?
What would happen if he opened one of them
,
entered the room
?
How would he
find his way back to the kitchen, to safety
? But the landing stopped
spinning and his fear subsided. He opened the first door, looked into the
bedroom and closed it before taking three paces to the right and checking the
spare room. At the bathroom door he heard her splashing cleansing water over
her perfect, ivory skin.

He shuddered, wandered back
to the kitchen and resumed slicing up the vegetables with the razor sharp
knife. A movement outside distracted him. He looked down onto the street to see
something moving in the gutter — a bird, a magpie. His magpie.

Thom put the knife down,
walked down the stairs and out into the road. He stooped, examined the
creature. In the matter of seconds it had taken him to reach it the bird’s
agony had ended. It’s beak gaped, its eyes were glassy, extinct.

With his mother’s
recollections of his childhood experience fresh in his mind he placed a hand on
the bird but it was still, without life, and he was quite powerless to help it,
as he suspected he would be. He picked the magpie up and put its body beneath a
thick hedge on the other side of the road. But as he closed the door there was
a rustling sound, frenzied flapping and he watched, bewildered, as the bird
took noisily to the sky.

Thom had seen dead creatures before, and
creatures that were merely stunned. Some had even played dead in an act of
self-preservation.
But the magpie had died.

The neck of the bottle
hovered over the rim of his glass.

‘More ?’

‘Sorry? Oh, yes,’ he said,
returning to her.

‘This wine is a good wine,’
she enthused, holding her glass up to the light. ‘
Look ... it is the colour of blood
.’

‘ ... It’s a Château Mouton
Rothschild — five years old.’

‘But I feel strange.’

‘I should go easy if you
haven’t drunk for a while.’

‘I have never drunk
alco-hol.’

There was no lie in her
voice.

‘It makes you forget every
thing. Now I can not remember what the tunnel bitches looked like.’

‘It has that effect.’

She leaned back in the
chair and blew her cheeks out, closing her eyes, and he traced the pronounced
profile of her naked breasts beneath the thin cotton of the t-shirt. Then she
stood uneasily and went to the window. She picked up a vase full of lavender
from the sill, breathed its perfume and beamed with pleasure, then pulled off
several of the flowers and crushed them to a pulp before crossing the room and
dropping into the sofa. He finished his wine and joined her.

‘I’ve been drinking too
much,’ he admitted, his eyes fixed on the ornate ceiling rose. ‘Been seeing
things, hearing things that can’t be real. Just now. In my own home. Been
trying to blank all the news out too, everything that’s happened.
You had no idea
what was going on
?’

‘It is a different world
down there. All that matters is that she survives.’

‘ ...
She
?’

‘ ... All that matters is
that
I
survive.’

‘ ... Didn’t you ever pick
up a paper?’

‘I can not read, had no
education. Never had any friends. I have no childhood memories at all.’

He turned his head towards
her.

‘I remember waking. In a
cold room with wet walls, hardly any light. I think it was somewhere near
Rakovnik, in the north, but I am not sure. I felt empty, soulless, like a box
with nothing in it —
a box waiting to be filled
. In the space, the room, was another
girl. Her name was Stella. She was tall. Her hair was long, golden. She was
full of beauty.’

‘Beautiful?’

‘Yes ... beautiful.’

‘The friend you came to
London with?’

‘I
didn
’
t
come with her?’

He nodded his approval.

‘I lied to you, Thom. I
didn’t beg at Baker Street or Moorgate. The truth is I don’t know how I got
here. All I remember is you talking to me. It felt like you’d woken me from a
very long, troubled sleep. I didn’t even know what my name was until Stella
told me. So you see, I’m a mystery, Thom. In fact, I’m a mystery to myself.’

He went to the kitchen and
came back with a bottle of Talisker and two shot glasses. ‘I think you’ll like
this,’ he said.

When he came round half an hour had passed.
She’d moved up the sofa next to him and her head rested on his shoulder.

‘Do you have dreams, dreams
that scare you?’ she asked.

He grunted.

‘I have dreams. Mine are
bad, I dream that I kill people, lots of people.’

‘Huh ... strange, I have
dreams that I save lots of people.’

She fell asleep and he
picked her up, carried her through to the spare room and lay her down on the
bed. He pulled the duvet over her and switched out the light.

At an indeterminate point during the night
he was woken by light flooding into his room from the hallway, against which she
stood, silhouetted.

‘I don’t wish to sleep any
more,’ she said.

‘ ... Bad dreams?’

‘No. I want something, need
something. I have very strong feelings, feelings I haven’t felt before. They
disturb me because I cannot understand them.’

He swallowed hard and swept
back the quilt. She looked at him, puzzled, for a moment then followed her
instinct and slipped in beside him. He peeled off her T-shirt and bottoms and
threw them aside feeling her naked, febrile skin meld to his, her eager breath
whisper around his ear. He closed his
 
mouth over hers but she responded immaturely, slobbering like a
pubescent girl. But despite her sexual naivety there was a raw, animalistic
purity to her lovemaking that left him breathless, as did the temperature of
her inner body, which was uniquely frigid, ungiving.

She looked deep into his
eyes, a faint sneer playing at the corner of her mouth as he entered her. It
seemed calculated, deliberate, as if an unwritten script were being acted out.
A piercing white light flashed within the featureless wells of her eye sockets.
And then she began to writhe in ecstasy, lifting him high with her pelvis and
crashing him down, lifting him up, crashing him down, thirsty for his seed, and
when he’d filled her icy, alien hollows, when
 
they’d finished, she held him and cried like a baby,
refusing to let go. He had made love to two different women.

Creation
, an ugly voice rasped in her head, as she dozed on the chest
of
 
her semiconscious lover.
‘Creation,’ she repeated. Then the repulsion began — abhorrence of every
atom of his being.
Concentrate
! commanded the presence.
Only half thy purpose has been fulfilled.
Concentrate on his organ of circulation
,
halt his mortal pump. End him
!
Now
!

She listened, kissed him
gently on the lips and obeyed, detestation flowing through her veins, hatred
distorting her face.

He convulsed and grabbed at
the agony in his chest as his heart faltered. But she steeled herself. She
defied the presence, incurring its wrath, willingly
 
absorbing the terrible pain it inflicted upon her in
retribution, and he began to recover.

‘I don’t know what you are
or why you want me to harm him, but he has shown me kindness, love, and I will
not hurt him for you,’ she whispered ...
Thou wilt do as I say
!
Kill him now
,
fucking disobedient whore
!
...
‘No, I
will not, and I’ll wipe your memory of him clean. You will never ask this of me
again.’

Then the voice was gone,
and her head fell blissfully silent.

She placed her ear close to
his mouth — his breathing was slow now, normal. Somehow, she found she
was able to look inside his body and saw that his heart, though clearly
strained, was undamaged. But it looked an unhealthy heart to her. She rested
her head directly above it and fell into a tortured sleep.