Ian Hocking - Flashback

Jem recoiled from this propriety. She repeated the line she had rehearsed with Ego.

‘I thought you were dead.’

Cory moved forward. Jem recalled the moment she had first seen her brother at the TV tower. He had seemed to swoop upon her, like a bird of prey to her arm. Cory’s eyes, this close, were bloodshot. He gripped her head by the ears. This was at odds with the elegance of the man in Saskia’s apartment. She gasped and put her hands over his.

‘Jem, do you understand the danger you’re in?’

He won’t kill me , she thought. Ego had been certain. She had information. She might be able to cooperate. But there was a blankness in his eyes that suggested the professionalism of an executioner.

‘How did you find me?’

Cory blinked. Wrong answer, the movement said. He lifted her head and dashed it against the metal rim of the window. Jem heard the sound as though it came from outside the train. She almost laughed. Cory had wanted to hurt her, but she was fine. He had underestimated the toughness of her nut.

‘I know exactly how much energy your head can take before the skin splits, or the bone cracks, or your brain is damaged. Do you understand?’

‘Yes–’ A sudden dizziness made her head feel hollow. There was a little blood in her eye. ‘Yes, you cunt.’

‘Where is the Ego unit?’

‘Where do you think? I posted it to my Aunt Mavis in Scunthorpe.’

Jem thought once more of the debonair spook who had told her the story of the Star Dust in Saskia’s apartment. She tried to count the distance between that image and the man before her, as one might count the seconds between lightning and thunder.

‘I’m going to ask you a question. Think carefully before you answer. Now, where is the Cullinan Zero?’

‘Wait. I…’

‘What?’

‘Saskia survived the crash. She knows, doesn’t she? About…’ She struggled to remember the word Cory had used. ‘The Coolinan?’

All movement ceased in Cory’s expression. He leaned forward, as if he was going to bite.

‘No,’ she said. ‘ No .’

He put his lips on hers. Jem frowned but did not recoil. Well , she thought, if that will … and her consciousness flatlined like a leaf pressed beneath the iron wheels of the train.

August, 1947, Buenos Aires

It was the evening after Cory had met Jennifer. Cory and Lisandro were alone in an alley alongside the restaurant where, not minutes ago, he had treated the boy to a farewell treat of ice-cream. Now he had Lisandro in his arms, crushed too tightly to draw breath—a snake’s trick—and the white knife pierced the boy’s chest.

He remembered Jennifer’s advice. ‘Cory, the boy has always been dead. He was dead before he was born and he was dead after he died. His life is just a blip on a line: a two-dimensional irregularity on the forever one-dimensional. Here’s the secret: That blip gets smaller when you zoom out.’ The last two words looped in Cory’s mind. Zoom out. Zoom out. Now he spoke them aloud.

‘Zoom out. Zoom out.’

‘Ah,’ said Lisandro. He might have been grasping a mathematical principle at last.

Zoom out.

Cory would never be the same. He knew this.

He watched blood well over his shaking knuckles as the factor probed the heart through those ribs, those little fishbone ribs dressed in cast-off clothes. The boy’s heart valves were fluttering. Cory could feel them. He levered the blade again. A tremor shook Cory’s neck and he felt tears run from each eye. Entrada. Lisandro: held too hard to shout. Abrazo. Ice-cream bubbling on his lips. Cory crouched and let the dead Lisandro come to rest in the puddles and feathers of the alley. Volcada. The boy had passed into the forever one-dimensional.

‘You shouldn’t have followed me,’ Cory whispered. He coughed to recover his voice. ‘But you were already dead. I could have read that newspaper at any time. It was archived long before I was your age. You were always dead.’

Cory checked the alleyway. With his augmentations, the rats were clear shapes among the rubbish. He saw no people. There was a blue pinstripe suit in his gunny sack, and he changed into it.

‘Forgive me, Lisandro. Le llegó la hora .’

He squatted and took the one-hundred peso note from the boy’s bloodied trouser band.

Where the alley opened onto the street, he paused. Martín, the overweight owner of the restaurant next door, was standing on its porch. He described a shape with his cigar to a group of men who were dressed for an expensive dinner, which ruled them out as customers of Martín. Cory turned and put footsteps between him and Martín and Lisandro. His suit’s blue pinstripes complemented the rich colours of this night, though his shoes were bone-white beacons.

Cory remembered the bloodied one-hundred peso note. He changed direction and passed into the crowd. The trinket sellers jostled him and he barked gruff idioms drawn from Lunfardo slang. The throngs multiplied, and he avoided the improvised clearings where dancers moved foot-against-foot, belly-to-belly. Abrazo, the embrace . Entrada, the entrance . Volcada , the capsizement: the dancer tilts his partner, then, at the last moment, catches her.

To judge by the light in the door’s frosted glass, Lisandro’s mother was awake. Cory did not knock. He pushed the bloodied one-hundred peso note under the door. Turning away, making zeros in the dirt, subtracting himself, he heard laughter behind the door, and it might have been Jennifer laughing at the sentimentality of a fool.

In her dream, Jem had accepted the invitation of a gentleman suitor to travel in his carriage through a twilit city. They passed roadside mourners: her mother, her dead father, Danny. She was cold in her nightgown and shawl. She smelled coal and chrysanthemums through the open window, and horse sweat. When the suspension ceased its rattle, the day had passed, and the gas lamps were like moons. Her suitor hooked his cane in his elbow and helped her from the carriage, and, with that, his winged collar became priestly and his dark eyes amused. As her bare foot touched the snowy road, the cobbles vanished. She wore Cossack boots again, and her nightgown had become a duffle coat. She turned to the horses but they had vanished, replaced by a stolen BMW. Its four corners winked. Groggily, Jem let Cory take her arm.

Through a tall gate and up a gravel path.

Watching a cat watch her as a keypad was tapped.

A hallway.

Darkly.

No sounds of clockwork.

(A poem.)

No smell of food.

( Because I could not stop for death. )

An unoccupied house.

Cory removed a glove and slapped her face.

Jem’s eyes opened fully and she coughed. There was a bitter taste on her tongue.

It was late in the evening of the day that Cory had murdered Lisandro when he stopped beneath a gas lamp to re-read Jennifer’s newspaper of the next day. He looked for clues about his immediate future. Finding them, he walked to the docks and located a tall, crumbling warehouse. He slipped into the shadowed alley on its eastern side. The alley formed a space narrow enough for him to launch off one wall and reach out for the lower rung of a fire escape. He swung for a moment. His heart surged. He climbed steadily towards the roof until his view became one of scintillating lights.

Cory slid his cane between the attic door and its upper hinge. The wood split and he moved inside. The attic was long and low. There was a zinc bath beneath a skylight. So too a bed, a couch, a changing screen, and a lamp. Cory stepped between the lamp and the bed. He pulled the cord and his shadow pounced across the prostitute.