Ian Hocking - Flashback

Paloma had turned and kicked when Cory shot her. Her blood had slicked the pillow and the changing screen. Some feathers still fell.

‘I am so sorry. Not my decision.’

Haunted, young Cory closed the door.

Water poured from the basin onto Jem’s bare feet. She closed the tap and waited for the overflow to swallow the excess. Then she immersed her hands to the wrists. The plates of her nails went red. She brought a handful of wetness to her face and enjoyed its cool bite. Then she twisted her skirt clockwise and unfastened the rivets on her hip. There was comfort, almost, in the familiar blood. She inserted the tampon and dropped the applicator into the toilet bowl, covering it with a few wads of paper. As she did so, she looked at the bathroom door. She could almost hear, deep beyond it, the plucked prongs of a music box. It scared her beyond Cory’s coldest promises.

In the larger mirror above the sink, her eyes seemed narrow. They became hawkish.

So she was a con artist. She had conned Saskia. She had even conned Danny. Now her mark was Cory. With the last of the water, she finger-combed her hair with her left hand.

In the lounge, where the fire crackled drily, Cory had slouched in the winged armchair. His eyes moved under their lids. Murmured words were caught in bubbles of reddish spit.

‘Paloma,’ he whispered. ‘Where is it?’ He licked his lips. ‘You know what. The Cullinan Zero.’ He coughed. ‘Tell me.’ His fingertips fluttered and Jem saw the discarded cane twitch. ‘I have Jem.’

She closed the door. The hallway was quiet and empty. This would be like her escape from the apartment in Berlin, easy doing it. She crept down the hallway and touched the keypad. A heartbeat throbbed in her palm. If only she could impart her desperation to the door, beg it to unlock. She remembered Cory’s lips on hers. Death as a suitor whose carriage kindly stopped. Death as Saskia, with full, relaxed lips, wanting her. Her short hair. Yes, Jem had shorn Saskia lock by lock. Wind had played with the clumps of hair.

Ssssss . Saskia.

Calm as, Jem, she thought. Arctic effing calm.

She looked at the door. Her attention snapped to Cory’s reflection in the cold, black finish and she sighed, sagged against the wood.

Jem made fists and turned towards him. She had never been so scared and ready to fight. She considered the idea that she was standing in the place she would die.

‘I have to go on alone,’ he said, into the distance, perhaps into the reflected world. A ruby tear squeezed from his eye as he smiled.

Con him.

‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you bleeding?’

‘Old wounds reopening, I guess.’

Cory moved closer. One shoulder touched the wall. His expression was regretful as he lifted the cane. With an organic, bloating action, it became a sword.

‘ Relaje , Paloma ,’ he said.

‘I have a question.’ If Cory was sleepwalking, the girl in his dream—Paloma—might have been his love, to judge by the hope in his eyes. ‘Who is Paloma? Who am I?’

‘Two things, can happen now. Truthfully, I don’t know which. Either I put this sword through your heart or I let you live. From the perspective of five years hence, or fifty, one of those things is history. Perhaps you died here. Perhaps you died a great-grandmother. I could set the event in stone. I could collapse the wave. But I want you to understand that it isn’t really me making the decisions. I’m thinking of night or day. If you can guess which, you will leave and I will never see you again.’

Her intellect braced for bodily revolt—tears, a moan, a whisper upon his mercy—but the muscles held. Her eyes did not leave his, though Cory still stared into the deep distance behind her, into the door. She understood that she had been dead the moment the shadows in her train compartment had gathered to form this man.

‘Day,’ she said, surprised by her confidence.

Only his bloodshot eyes moved. Changes crossed his face like the rushing pages of a book. The sword edge shifted.

Arctic .

‘Do you know what we call people like you where I come from?’ He smiled. There was blood on his teeth. ‘ Archaeology .’

‘Archaeology.’

‘Never follow me. Understand?’

‘I understand.’

‘Find your brother and return to England.’

‘I–’

Cool as.

‘–understand.’

‘Do you? Do you really?’

Cory let the sword drop. It transformed into a cane and he tipped his weight upon it like the old man he could be. Jem watched him tap a number on the keypad. Bolts relaxed. He inverted his collar and turned to Jem once more, looked at her, and walked into the snow.

Young Cory woke to a wintry Saturday in Buenos Aires. He breakfasted in a café, asked to use their candlestick telephone, and was put through to the Buenos Aires Herald . After five minutes’ conversation, he checked his pocket watch. ‘Hello? Repeat that, please.’ He paused. ‘Yes, it must run in the evening edition in the exact form I have given you. Do you understand?’

Cory hung up. He slipped a banknote under the telephone and left. He hesitated on the porch and fitted his hat. From where he stood, the grass of the Plaza de Mayo was blotchy with shade. Cory, both hands on his cane, turned to the Casa Rosada. In his first week here, a bar-top philosopher had told him that la Casa was pink because it represented a fusion of the red and white flags of the opposing political parties extant during its construction. This explanation was countered by a snort from the man’s older companion, who went on to give his version: gouts of cow blood mixed into the paint helped protect the palace from the humidity.

Cory respected a government honest enough to paint the house of its executive in blood.

His two-colour brogues swished at the tough grass as he crossed the plaza. On the Avenida de Mayo, he found the gates of el subte . His cane clicked down the stairs.

Jem stepped onto the porch. The snow was an inch deep. She approached the ironwork gate at the front of the concrete forecourt. There was a CCTV camera high on the wall. She pushed through.

Cars were parked either side of the boulevard. Nothing moved. No traffic drove through the slush. No Cory. She walked to the end of the block and found a yellow telephone box. She pushed a euro through the coin slot and dialled a number.

‘Well, it’s me.’

‘Good evening, Jem.’

‘He let me go. I don’t know why. Can you call me back?’

‘Wait a moment, please. There are twenty-nine mobile phones within fifty metres of your location. Nearly all of them are to be found within houses. However, one is near the front wall of the empty lot to your east.’

‘Somebody dropped it?’

‘Probably.’

Jem smiled at her mental picture of Ego, tucked away within Resources and Parsing , lonely in a corner of the library on Fasanenstrasse. The little bookmark that could.

She hung up and wandered towards the wreck of a petrol station on the windy side of the street. Her feet scuffed. She was cold and numb, and nausea was beginning to swill in her empty belly. It was a once-removed sensation. Her mind was relatively clear.

A glow: greenish. Jem approached and saw the lost mobile.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s me. How are you? Have you eaten? Are you cold?’

‘Fine, no, yes.’

‘Keep moving.’

‘Where?’

‘South, towards the intersection.’