Nikki Owen - Spider in the Corner of the Room

I step back and open my hand. There, on my palm, is a glass vial containing something I cannot ever fail to recognise. I blink, shake my head, but when I look again, it is still there.

Blood.

I grab the wastepaper basket and vomit into it.

Harry crouches down. ‘Breathe,’ he says. ‘Breathe.’

But my focus is shot, my whole world crumbling in front of me, an earthquake, a seismic shift. ‘I am the test child,’ I say, lifting my head. ‘I am the fucking test child. Me. All my life. An MI5 test freak.’ A scream rips from my throat and sick drips from my mouth, my nose. Harry hands me a tissue, but I push it back, standing, swaying as I do. ‘What the fuck? What the fuck?’

I grab at my hair, clutch it, scrape my fingers across my scalp over and over. The sheer scope of what we have discovered, of what we have just read is already putrid in my mind, rotting it, filling it with disease, decay. The reason I can decode encrypted patterns, the reason I can ascertain how to hack, read algorithms-it is all to do with the Project. Is all to do with the conditioning they put me through, conditioning I have never even been aware of because they used drugs on me, unlicensed drugs.

Test child. I repeat the phrase more and more: test child, test child, test child. My body becomes rigid, immovable. The words on the screen swim in front of my eyes, real words, written down, documented evidence of who I am, of what I am. How could I not know? How could I not know?

‘Come on, Maria,’ Harry says, ‘let’s get you sat down elsewhere.’

His hand touches my shoulders and I fly at him. ‘Leave me alone!’ I scream, stumbling, running immediately to the shelves, to the textbooks of words and facts, all jeering me, and I look at them and I think: do they all contain lies, too? Do they? Is everything I have ever believed in, ever held true all just one blanket deception? ‘Who am I?’ I yell at the shelves, deranged, out of control. ‘Who the fuck am I?’

And then I grab one book then another and another, flinging them to the floor, my eyes blurred, my throat red raw, blood pounding in my neck.

‘Maria, stop!’ Balthus shouts, but I ignore him, my body feeling as if it is not here, as if I am an illusion, a hologram, that if an arm was waved through me, static would crackle and I would completely disappear.

I can hear the two men near me now and, like keys being taken out of the ignition, it stalls me a little, energy seeping out of me, deflated, over.

‘Maria, look at me.’ Harry, he is by me now, I can smell him. I try to look at him but my eyes cannot escape the textbooks, the words. The acres upon acres of lies.

‘Maria,’ Harry says again and this time, whether it is the scent of cigars from him or the heat of his body, I soften, thinking of my papa, of how he discovered some of this. And then I realise something.

I look at Harry. ‘Do you think the Project will kill me? Bobbie says they will kill me, that MI5 will kill me.’

‘You’ve had a big shock,’ Harry says. ‘Come and sit down.’

‘No!’ My eyes fly to his. ‘What about you both?’ I gulp down air as if it’s the last pocket of oxygen left in the world. ‘This Project conditions people with Asperger’s to fight terrorism. Terrorism! Computers, secrets, codes…’ I stop breathing for a second, momentarily paralysed by the fact that Father Reznik-his codes, the problem solving he gave me all through my childhood, right up until university-that was all part of the conditioning. I shriek, slap my hand to my mouth. What if they were not games or tests but actual tasks, operations to help catch people. Kill people? I make myself look at Balthus.

‘If…if MI5 can go after me, they can go after you. This Project is secret for a reason. They could even kill Mama and Ramon.’ I shake my head. ‘They mustn’t know that you know. It can only come from me. Because that’s who this is all about: me.’

‘But, Maria, why do they want to kill you ?’ Balthus says. His question floors me. I look at him now, standing strong and solid in the middle of the office. ‘If it is you who has worked for them,’ he continues, ‘you who’s the prime conditioning subject, why would they want rid of you? Why now? It doesn’t make sense.’

I stay still, the question blinding me, muffling any response, like a bag over my head. He’s right. It makes no sense. To train me then kill me. What has happened to change it all?

‘Come sit over here now,’ Harry says.

I blink at him, let him guide me to the chairs by the desk, my legs giving up on me, my brain shot, torn, blown to oblivion. Balthus offers me water and I take it, but the glass shakes in my hand. I set it down and look to the window. Dark clouds, a patter of rain.

‘Who am I?’ I say, staring blankly at the rain, at the window, the world. I turn back to Harry, a crack cutting through my voice. ‘Who am I?’

‘Oh, my dear,’ he says. ‘Come here.’

And he pulls me into him and, for the first time in so long, I let somebody comfort me.

‘That’s my phone.’

Harry stands and searches for his bleeping cell. He has been sitting with me, his arms around me, and I have let it happen, let another human being comfort me. The last person I allowed to do that was my papa.

‘How are you feeling?’ Balthus asks as Harry speaks in whispers in the corner.

But I am unable to describe feelings to him, to anyone. It is hard to believe it is true, what we have discovered. I thought I knew who I was: I was wrong.

‘The one thing I don’t understand,’ Balthus says now, ‘is why you?’ He trails away, slowly sitting back. He slides one hand over his mouth, rubs it, places it in a fist on the table. I watch him and I think how one small fact can alter things forever, can merge one face to another-Father Reznik’s and Father O’Donnell’s. Father O’Donnell. I hold my breath as I realise. His name, I have acknowledged the priest’s name for the first time since his death. It dislodges me, this fact, whips the ground from beneath me and I open my mouth with horror. Because I question something now, something I may have, in the very abyss of my mind, feared for so long: did I kill him?

I dart my eyes to the floor, foot tapping, banging. What if it was me? If I close my eyes, more and more now I find that the faces of the two priests merge together until I don’t know one from the other, the good or the bad. Two sides of the same coin. And I am scared. Because, if this Project could do what they have to me since childhood, if they could condition me to decipher codes and catch cyber terrorists all without me knowing, make me trust people who turned out to be handlers, then what else am I capable of? What else have I done without my knowledge?

‘Balthus,’ Harry shouts.

We look at him. ‘What?’

Harry rubs his head, his cell by his side. ‘They pushed it through.’

‘What? Pushed what through?’

Harry walks over. ‘The hearing, Maria’s appeal. A date’s been set. Already. That was the List Office. Full court appeal hearing, Royal Courts of Justice.’

‘When?’ I ask.

‘This week.’

‘But…’ I stop, all of it going too fast. So much spinning past me. ‘It’s too quick.’

Harry nods.

‘But why?’ I say, blinking. ‘Why is it so soon?’

‘Could it be down to this Project?’ Balthus says. ‘Harry, do you think they could have fast-tracked it?’

Harry sighs, scratches his cheek. ‘I don’t know. I mean, this is highly unusual, to be so fast, so yes, maybe, yes.’

‘But why?’ Balthus says. ‘Why would they get involved in the appeal? Why now?’

And that is the question that hangs in the air. If the Project are pushing my appeal hearing through, why?