Ross Armstrong - The Girls Beneath

It’s been a big deal, me coming back so early. They wanted it for me. And for my part, I needed it; I couldn’t stay at home any longer.

Brains need other brains to develop. If I’m kept out in the cold, in exile, mine will start to recede before it’s even rehabilitated. People go mad when left in rooms with nothing but their own thoughts to haunt them. Inmates in solitary confinement, deprived of sensory stimulation, have been known to forge their own deluded realities, even see things that aren’t there and hear voices. Try not speaking to anyone for a full day when home alone on sick leave, and you’ll feel the chill the icy hand of madness leaves on your shoulder.

That’s a microcosm of where I am. That’s the narrow end of it, a fleeting taste of the mouthful.

But they need to know I can be trusted. They’ve shown a lot of faith in a man still trying to get a grip on the newly coloured world spread out in front of him, because in truth, I’m not sure whether I can be trusted or not. Sure, I’ll give it a crack, but I’m certainly not making any promises.

‘Me and Bartu will check up on the missing girl. Sounds interesting. Anderson and Stevens, you do the talk at the school. That okay?’ I blurt out.

If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

‘Err… sorry, Tom. That’s not really part of your remit. You get to do… other things. Community work, which in some ways… is the most… important work of all.’

My face seems to tell Levine everything he needs to know about the validity of that statement.

‘Look, a couple of months on the straight and narrow and they want to bust you up a bit. Get you on the force maybe. Fast track. You’ve been told this, right?’ Levine says.

‘Yes.’

‘There’s so much… good feeling around you, Tom. Good press. Good public err… you know. You’re well thought of, Tom. You. And your story. It’s… uplifting. So, you know…’

I’m not sure I do. I mean, I think he’s telling me to behave or I won’t get what I want. It’s been a long time since someone’s had to tell me to behave. I used to stay out of trouble, stay in the corners, under the radar. Not anymore it seems.

‘So the school for you today please, Tom. The school,’ Levine says.

‘Yep. Course. Yep, yep,’ I say, folding my arms and smiling at the rest of the team. Faces and faces staring back at me. Stubbly ones. Pink ones. Pale ones. Happy ones. Sad ones. I’ve no chance of keeping them all in my head. So I just smile.

We get up to go. I think about the missing girl. It interests me.

*

Emre is somewhere between twenty and thirty. I can’t do any better than that for you, perception is difficult.

But his physical energy, his spirit, if you can imagine such a thing, is by turns fifteen and forty-five.

He’s springy but with a coolness that belies his youth. He could have a high IQ. Or perhaps it’s a centred temperament that’s learnt. Maybe it’s a religion thing, but I don’t know what religion he is so it’s difficult for me to comment on that, but he’s definitely smarter than he looks. I decide to tell him that as we walk toward the school.

‘Hey, I think you’re definitely smarter than you look.’

‘Thanks. You’re pretty blunt. Do you know that?’ he says, observationally, no side to it at all.

‘Yes, I know that. Thanks,’ I say, politely.

‘Is that you? Or your brain?’

‘Is there a difference?’

‘Were you like this before the accident?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘No. But I’m interested.’

‘What was the question again?’

‘Were you like this before the accident?’

‘Ah yes.’

‘Well… ? Were you?’

‘Do you know what, Emre Bartu? I have absolutely no idea.’

I don’t like it when people call it an accident. We don’t know if it was an accident. Not yet anyway.

I prefer The Incident. Or The Happening. Or The Bullet.

I listen to our footsteps and think about people. People like to think their personality is separate from their brain, as if their personality is in the mind.

The mind, that thing that is the actual self, is presumably located somewhere above the skull, floating free of the brain’s complicated mush of blood, cells, flesh, neuroglia and wires. This ‘mind’ is unbound, simpler, and yet capable of far more complexity than the biology and flaws that pervade within the strait-jacket restraints of the human brain.

The brain holds people back: from finding the perfect words over dinner that will make our friends revere us as debonair and articulate. If only the brain could take some lessons from the mind, that reliable thing that is uniquely us and always right. The centre of our genius that no one understands.

All that is utter cocking fantasy, of course. But we can easily fall back into the idiotic grasp of these thoughts if not careful. If we don’t remind ourselves that we have nothing else to think with, but this miraculous lump that contains who we are completely and is all our best idiosyncratic parts.

When patients wake from strokes, and sometimes during them, they often describe not being able to distinguish themselves from the world that surrounds them.

Their arm is the wall.

Their head, a computer.

Their genitals are the trees and landscape outside the window.

This is reportedly often a euphoric feeling rather than a scary one. It appears to me that this is getting closer to a truthful condition than the general way of thinking. Not misled by the structures we have learnt to see, that define us as the protagonists and everything else as the scenery, these patients accept their place in the world in those moments, on a par with everyone and everything, comfortable with the fact that they are no more than their anatomy.

‘Normals’ think of themselves as beautiful hand-crafted originals that always know best, who will prevail even as their bodies fail them. They think their brain contains only facile learnt sequences that make it easier to put your trousers on or cut a cucumber. If only they knew better.

One day I’ll fill Bartu in on all this. But for the moment I keep this enlightenment as an advantage over them all. Everyone is on a need to know basis, and I’m the only one who really needs to know.

My inner thoughts work so much faster than my mouth. I can think it all exactly as I want it. But it doesn’t come out quite that way yet. I speak in imperatives, everything slow, but with exclamation marks. I can virtually see them hang in the air after every sentence.

‘This is the school here, right? Really doing this are we?’ I say.

These words pierce the silence we’ve been in for a good five minutes. Bartu would probably have preferred this trip to be filled with witty repartee, rather than the dead air of one man thinking and the other waiting. He’ll have to forgive me. I don’t do patter easily yet. I don’t do off the cuff. Sometimes I forget to get out of my head.

A car with blacked out windows passes and my eyes follow it away.

He considers my question. Luckily, I’m pretty comfortable with silence as it’s the condition in which I’ve lived the majority of my life up until this point. Even pre-bullet.

‘Look, don’t worry. You don’t have to speak, if it’s uncomfortable or difficult. To the kids I mean,’ he says in an almost whisper.

‘It’s not uncomfortable. It’s just boring.’

‘Fair enough. I’ll do the talking.’

‘We’re not teachers. We’re officers of the law.’

‘We’re not really officers of the law.’

‘We’re community support officers of the law.’

‘We’re part of the uniformed civilian support staff.’

‘Same diff.’

He laughs. A genuine one, I think, not for show. People are sometimes afraid to laugh at me, or with me, but not Emre Bartu.