The brain, p.23
Follow Her, page 23
‘Are you happy?’ I asked him once.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Before this I was shooting heroin into the rotting space between my toes. I once slept with a man for a hit. She saved me when she chose me.’
I turned away.
Frida’s team of researchers continued without me.
Rebecca watched me all the time. Eagerly. She bought me things. New shoes. Organic moisturiser. I still didn’t understand what was going on. I didn’t guess yet that there was a baby growing inside me.
‘We are the children of the next dimension,’ Frida said, eyes wild. Ruth filmed her on her phone. ‘The world is at the brink of climate catastrophe and you are thinking about your hair or what colour to paint your walls. You think war is something that happens to other people. Bombs and floods. They aren’t. Within your lifetime, those disasters will be in your house.’
The smell of pretty much anything made me heave. Water. Sunshine. The smell of trees and hedges still wet from the rain. I basically just lay in bed trying not to vomit by this point. No more meditations or swims or chatting. I fell into sticky sleeps like being trapped in a deep wet hole. I sweated honey, which for a while was the only thing I could stomach. I licked it off the spoon. Or wine gums: I could stomach those as well. I listened to the blood running through my body. My mind felt too big for my skull, like it was made of fat Essex mud. Thoughts sank in and never escaped. The smell of laundry drying made me vomit. The smell of the sea. Even the smell of water coming out of the shower made me vomit. Rebecca bought twenty different kinds of vitamins, looking for ones I could stomach.
‘Beltane and Samhain are the points in the year where the veil between this world and the Otherworld is at its thinnest, enabling communication between the living and the dead,’ Frida said, filming herself now. She had a new phone, the latest iPhone.
‘On these days,’ Frida said, ‘everywhere on Earth experiences roughly twelve hours of sunshine and twelve hours of darkness. Wherever you are, listen to the history of the Earth as I have taught you to do. Listen to continents drift, the echo of natural disasters ruining communities in a click and a bang.’
The last owls called to one another. Boat horns and gulls sounded in the distance. Crows landed in their families, watching us.
‘Everything is going to be perfect,’ she said to me, getting into bed and running her fingers from my neck to my belly button. ‘Don’t worry about a thing. We are going to be so powerful.’
I woke up in the dark. I yawned and walked to the bathroom to throw up. Frida wasn’t in bed with me. I scooped up metallic-tasting water in my hands, but it was disgusting. I was so thirsty and so disgusted by the bathroom water that I left my room for the first time in days. I managed to find my way downstairs through a dark, sleeping cottage.
It was pitch-black but I knew the house well enough not to need any lights. I continued down the stairs, running my fingertips over the old wallpaper, placing each bare foot carefully on the familiar steps, then through the living room towards the kitchen. I was so thirsty.
I put out my hand and the kitchen doorway came faster than I’d expected. I snatched my hand back and tensed it. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing to attention in the dark as I reached for the old leather sofa to the right of the arch, but my hand grabbed at a void and unbalanced me for a second. There was nothing there. I took a step forward and hit my shin on a sharp edge so stopped. I thought of the echoey chimney in the power plant, that stench of salt and chemicals. I was going to throw up.
I pushed the thought of that night away.
I breathed my heartbeat back to normal, like Frida had taught me.
It was okay. I decided to step backwards, slowly, then I would make contact with some furniture or ideally a wall and a light switch.
Back. Back. At every step there was nothing behind me.
After what felt like ten or twenty steps I couldn’t be in the living room anymore. I couldn’t think how or where I’d started.
A smell wobbled in the darkness. It was Ava’s cinnamon lip balm – with no other stimulus to see or hear, it was unmistakable. But there was more, too, around it. Feathers, period blood, snapped sticks after a storm, dead rabbits, Frida’s breath, crow feathers. Grace’s emollient cream and nail varnish.
‘Stop,’ I said quietly, to myself, and there was the wettest breeze on my skin in the darkness. It turned my skin cold.
I put my hand on my heart to feel it beating, but fear had taken me beyond panic and there was no heartbeat, no blood, no breath, no body. The air was wet like I was standing right next to the sea. Something was breathing near me. Or someone.
I put my hands out to break my fall because I suddenly felt dizzy, but instead of falling forwards my palms came into contact with a smooth, slightly vibrating surface. I bent forward and used it to ease myself on to the floor and put my forehead to the ground. A few seconds later my head wasn’t spinning so fast and I opened my eyes. I listened to a hum in the air and realised it was the fridge and freezer. I fumbled for the handle and opened it quickly, flooding the room with light. I was just a few feet further into the kitchen than imagined, although it was difficult to map out how I’d taken so many steps backwards without bumping into anything. I could taste pennies at the back of my throat, like I’d swallowed the contents of a pocket. I turned to sit down there.
I tried to think of all the things I loved. The mole on Frida’s left breast, the weight of stones in my pocket, the smell of rain on hot concrete, my kitten-patterned bedsheets when I was a kid.
My thoughts strained forward, placed into troubling italics, waiting for something.
There was a flicker of light.
I saw the little boy in the corner of the room. He was drawing on the wall. When I turned to look fully at this spirit he was gone again; a trick of light.
Then a face appeared from the gloom.
‘Grace?’ I said, but nobody was there. I looked out of the window and realised I could run. If I just started running I would reach the causeway before anyone realised, most likely. It could be high tide though.
Then: ‘Hey,’ Rebecca said in the darkness. ‘You’re scared. Let me help you.’
She came and hugged me, and I realised she was crying. I smelled her tears before I heard the tight, fast breath. I wasn’t sure why she was hugging me but I knew why she was crying.
‘I’m so sorry you lost your baby,’ I said, and she kept sobbing.
‘He’s not lost,’ she said. ‘He’s finding a new way.’
The Brent geese began to arrive in small groups that didn’t stay as summer finally became autumn. I dreamed of tripping over the top step of a tall staircase. Just as I was about to fall flat on my face I would tip my chin upwards slightly, holding my body stiff, and to my surprise the air grasped me. A seagull. A Brent goose. Elated, I would lift off and swoop down the stairs towards the open front door. It wasn’t a house from my childhood.
In the garden, fifty people meditated with Frida. Sixty. Seventy. The number kept growing.
One night I said that I needed to see a doctor and she shook her head.
‘Oh, Zo-Zo,’ she laughed. ‘You’re fine. You are brilliant. You are personally saving us. You are doing that.’
‘How?’ I said.
My lips were chapped. My skin was papery from dehydration. I could barely make it to the toilet to throw up.
‘We need to tell the police,’ I said. ‘The families need to be told.’
‘You want to go to juvenile detention?’ she said. ‘Ruin your whole life, everything we started here? You think they’ll believe us?’
‘You, my catalysts, my light. My brothers and sisters. We are here to lead humanity into the next level,’ she said.
We hit two hundred thousand followers and there was another bonfire party to celebrate, but I didn’t attend. I could barely get up without throwing up. Crows sat on Frida’s shoulders, and Merlin bared his teeth at everyone but her. I know that I was imagining it, but sometimes when she touched a flower or a tree I thought I saw it growing.
While she was exploding forward I was tunnelling backwards, folding in on myself. I was urgent and delirious. Wet, muddy, thin white legs. Thirsty but couldn’t keep water down. I dreamed that my legs were stuck together and I couldn’t get up off the floor, like an oil-slick pelican. I slept and awakened, slept again.
She smiled: dazzling, otherworldly.
And I smelled the rain.
And I felt that presence of the spirit child, who I was almost getting used to. I had a sense of him watching me with amused interest. He didn’t scare me.
Rebecca brought me water and vitamins and wine gums. She’d bring different foods for me to try. Granola bars. Ginger biscuits. Lollipops.
‘You’re up,’ Elena said, pulling up a chair for me one day when I made it downstairs with an urgent need for wine gums.
‘We’ve been so worried,’ said a stranger. I frowned at her, baffled.
A smell of stock and raw potato was turning into a solid knot around my head, and tightening. Coming downstairs had been a mistake. I was going to throw up.
‘I lived on ice cubes my first trimester,’ another stranger said. ‘Couldn’t cool down, couldn’t eat.’
‘My best friend couldn’t cut her baby’s nails because of a recurring urge to chop off her baby’s fingers,’ someone else laughed. ‘It was wild.’
I wanted to be outside in the fresh air but didn’t want to move a limb.
‘It’s quite all right to think these things,’ she said. ‘You’ll be okay, honey, anyway. I was all on my own in the middle of nowhere with a fat husband sleeping with someone else in London. We’ll all be here to help you with the baby. It takes a village, as the saying goes.’
‘How long have I been in bed?’ I said.
‘About a month,’ Elena said. I’d almost forgotten about what happened with Moth. It had been so eclipsed by the events later that night.
‘Don’t worry,’ Frida said. ‘We’ve sorted everything out already. You and me, we are the bosses. We are going to do crosswords on verandas, travel the world, help millions of people, and Rebecca is going to get her baby.’
‘This baby?’ I said, touching my stomach.
‘That baby is Rebecca’s baby. You are doing a beautiful thing.’
I could smell cinnamon lip balm.
‘There were monsters everywhere when I was a little girl,’ she said in the garden, while Ruth filmed. ‘They were under every bed in the house, inside every shadow. I just knew, in the same way we sense a person looking at us even without seeing them. I was terrified of these beings until I discovered that real monsters live out in the open, smiling at us on the news or tucking us into bed at night. Don’t be scared of the dead. It’s the living monsters that you need to watch out for.’
Now I knew I was pregnant I could almost feel cells dividing inside me, caught on some invisible primal tide. I held my breath for my period but knew it wouldn’t come. I hadn’t even realised it was late. My nipples ached and colours appeared deeper around me. The sea was bluer. The air saltier. The baby was the nucleus of a dangerous atom, an abrupt altering of my orbit. He was a little evolution growing underneath my heartbeat, beginning with a bang and quickly nestling into the marshy darkness of my womb to plot his takeover, to split, to lay down cellular blueprints for fingers and spine bones and ventricles. Having his gooey origins tangled inside me and anticipating his growth seemed an obvious advertisement for evolution rather than God, an extraordinary and deeply biological miracle.
An expensive-looking cot appeared in Rebecca’s room downstairs. I went down and stared at it, running my fingers over its curved edges. There were bags of organic packaged onesies, tiny mittens and hats.
All minutes and days and years are not created equal. Time doesn’t tick forward in the neat steady increments of a clock face; most of it just slips away and only certain moments remain suspended. I remember that summer almost minute by minute, like stop-motion animation watched frame by frame, but as we moved through autumn everything was a blur.
The mud froze and cracked, scummy with pollution. We burnt wood in the fireplaces. The geese came and went.
Frida wouldn’t hear of me going to the doctor. She said there was nothing they could do that she couldn’t do for me. She lay her hands on me, talking of energy fields and portals, but I still threw up.
I tried to read but couldn’t remember anything. The same pages, over and over. I threw up more.
My body hurt. My head hurt. There were flickers of other beings, maybe remembered from the pictures that used to be all over our now-white walls. I was scared.
‘It’s so animal, isn’t it?’ Moth said to me in the living room one day when nobody else was around. They were all out swimming. ‘There’s a species of lion that mates, like, twenty to forty times a day when they’re in heat. Female pandas are only turned on for a 24- to 72-hour window once a year, at some point between February and May.’
‘Stop talking about animal sex. I feel sick,’ I said. ‘And we both watched the same documentary. It was, like, the first conversation we ever had.’
It felt good to smile and have a semi-normal conversation.
‘Such a long time ago. It seems odd there was a time we didn’t know each other. Hey. Get this. Penguins are actually the most sexually messed up of all animals,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘They’re necrophiliacs.’
‘Stop it.’
‘You seem anxious. I don’t want the baby to be anxious.’
‘It’s, like, four cells tall. It’s not anxious. Are you thinking about it as a baby? Do you feel . . . connected to it, in any way?’
‘Frida says it’s the soul of Rebecca’s baby, you’re just keeping it safe because she couldn’t,’ Moth said, matter-of-fact.
‘But that doesn’t make sense.’
‘I don’t want to look after a baby. Do you?’
‘No. I mean, I’d never thought about babies.’
‘So, it makes perfect sense for Rebecca to have the baby. She wants a baby, she’s got money. She will do anything for a child. Anything. I know you’re going through a rough time but it’s for a good cause.’
‘What is she doing in exchange for my baby?’
‘Money. Clout. Contacts.’
‘And that doesn’t seem kinda gross to you?’
‘No. She said she thought about ending her life after the last miscarriage. Frida saved her again, brought her back here. And Frida is going to save millions more people with Rebecca behind her.’
‘So you won’t have any part of the baby’s life?’
‘I’m obviously not changing nappies,’ he said. ‘Spiritually, you and I are barely out of them ourselves.’
I watched a seagull remain near-motionless in the sky outside Elena’s greenhouse, wings vibrating slightly with the fun of running headlong into the elements. It reminded me of a postcard I’d seen somewhere of a kid with his chin tilted bravely out towards a spitting sea.
‘This child is going to have the most wonderful life,’ Rebecca said. ‘Frida says he will have a birthmark in the shape of a star on his back.’
Chapter Eleven
Leo sleeps next to me, his star birthmark glinting in the moonlight from under the curtains. Oliver never sent me the address where we were supposed to meet and he has not come looking for me. I keep expecting his knock on the door or a ping on my phone. I check the news constantly for his article. Every time Ben comes through the bedroom door I read his face, wondering if there is a picture of me in a newspaper. Perhaps Oliver has decided he didn’t need anything more from me; I’d given him enough in the garden that night for him to join the dots and go to press. But nothing has been printed yet. So I wait.
There has been nothing from Frida either. I’d asked her to answer the clue ‘theoretical boundary from which nothing can escape’, but maybe she didn’t remember. Maybe she meant much more to me than I meant to her.
Leo has the most beautiful black curls and I touch one in the dark. He thinks of Ben as his father, and people even say they look alike, but really he looks just like Moth. He’s only ten but he’s as tall as the average thirteen-year-old. He draws beautifully, as Frida predicted. The sketchbook next to his bed is full of mushrooms, courgette flowers, Lego men and boats. His freckles are dark over his nose, but they have disappeared into the fever flush of his cheeks now. I have never regretted his existence, not for a moment. He blows my mind every day.
My baby boy. He tosses in his sheets and sighs in the days after I was supposed to speak to Oliver. Ben brings home treats for Leo, reminding him to drink lots of water, and he takes Emma to and from school while I stay with Leo. I don’t work, lines of code left half written in my study under a painting of a sunflower that Leo did for me last year, and a drawing of our family that Emma made. I read to Leo in the dark while he gets better. Maybe the police stopped Oliver’s article from being published, so they could investigate first. Maybe it is the police who are going to knock on my door today or tomorrow, and take me from my children. I inhale the smell of my son.
Leo and I spent the first five years of his life travelling from place to place and only stopped because he needed to go to school. We had slept in the same bed together all that time. Ben knew we’d lived in a van for a while, but I’d made it sound romantic, like a choice. Not the gritty reality of city car parks and free-to-use caravan sites. Back then, Leo and I fell asleep to the constant buzz of traffic. Now there is the sea in front and underground springs and drains all over the fields behind. He goes to a good school. He is loved.
Not far from our little town, the bigger town of Scarborough has one of the highest homelessness rates in Yorkshire – I help out at a soup kitchen once a week. With my double-breasted wool coats and Barbour Chelsea boots, my iPhone and lipstick, the organisers don’t recognise me as the woman who, just five years ago, ate there fairly regularly with her son. Now I do the charity’s website and social media, raising money for them and helping as much as I can. The homeless guys who knew me back then don’t see the same girl serving them soup.
