Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

‘Jones,’ she said. ‘Sleep well.’

‘Yes. Thank you. You sleep well also.’

There was a moment of neither moving. Jones seemed to be looking for a cue.

She stood opposite him a minute, and thought of hugging him and then laughed aloud, a little nervously, and turned round and went into her room before she had time to register his quizzical expression.

Bree lay on her back on her bed in her clothes and looked at the ceiling. She thought of Cass. It was some time before she went to sleep. She wasn’t aware of falling asleep at all. But she woke still in her clothes and with the lights on, where she had been lying earlier, with a disoriented feeling. That meant she had been asleep. The clock on the wall said it was 2 a.m. She could hear a noise.

Cheap thin motel walls, she thought, as her startlement abated and she got a sense of where she was. Barely more than partitions. It would be some couple going at it. But the noise wasn’t the grunt and huff of sex, not even the stagy wailing some women seemed to put on when they found themselves in motel rooms with thin walls next to Bree when she was trying to sleep.

It was the high, animal, keening sound of someone in distress. Bree rolled her feet onto the ground and reached into her bag for the small, light handgun she carried and had never had to fire. She knew that this was a serious job. If this thing was as powerful as she understood it to be, she knew the DEI would not be the only people looking for it; they probably weren’t even the only government agency looking for it. There were interests at work in it that would use violence. Red Queen had as much as told her so.

She sat with the gun in her two hands, getting her breathing steady, listening. The sound rose and fell, came and went. It wasn’t the sound of someone being hurt. It was the sound of crying: the jagged hee-hawing of someone winded by grief. It was coming through the wall separating her room from Jones’s. It sounded too high to be a grown man’s voice.

Bree got up, rolled on the outsides of her feet to her door, and slowly turned the handle. Outside the air was still muggy. There was a dirty yellow halogen light illuminating the porch, and mosquitoes blatting against it. She eased the door behind her closed – a soft click, and a moment of panic before she remembered her key card was safe in her pocket – and she could no longer hear the bellow of the air conditioner.

She took a couple of steps down to Jones’s door. It was closed. The sound was coming through the thin plywood. She kept the gun in her right hand, but let it fall down behind her thigh. She knocked, softly, with the knuckles of her left hand on the door.

The sound stopped, abruptly. She stood breathing there for a minute, then knocked again.

‘Who is it?’ It was Jones’s voice. She had, momentarily, a flash of remembering the knock knock jokes.

‘Jones?’ she said.

‘Bree?’

‘Yes.’

The door opened. Jones was there, and from behind him there came a gust of old cigarette smoke. He had his trousers on, and no top. He was well muscled. In one hand he had a toothbrush and in the other a lit cigarette, and his eyes were red and sore. He looked at her a moment, winced, and resumed brushing his teeth. Foam appeared around his mouth.

‘Jones?’

‘What?’ he said, removing the toothbrush. He put the cigarette up to his mouth and took a pull. The end was dabbed with shiny foam when he took it out. Then he turned round and went back into the room. His room was exactly like Bree’s, except that beside the laminated no-smoking sign on the bedside table was the polystyrene cup from the bathroom, filled with butts.

Jones tapped his ash into this cup, went into the bathroom and spat noisily.

‘I was just going to bed,’ he said.

‘What the hell’s up? Was that you crying?’

Jones looked at her as if slightly affronted.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Easy, Jones,’ Bree said. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘My mother is dead,’ Jones said.

‘Oh, Jones. I’m sorry. Shit. You should have said. What happened?’ Bree moved in, awkward because of her bulk and because of Jones’s semi-nakedness and his being a colleague and being covered in toothpaste and waving a cigarette. She thought she ought to hug him but contented herself with reaching up and squeezing his shoulder. Jones’s face crumpled, then recovered. He sat down on the bed.

‘Jones, look, we’ll – where’s home? Do you want to drive there? Did you just hear?’

Jones sat down on the bed, and Bree sat down with him.

‘No,’ said Jones. ‘My mother has been dead for twenty-four years.’

Bree didn’t say anything for a bit, then she said: ‘ Twenty-four years? ’

‘My mother has been dead for twenty-four years.’

‘I heard you, Jones. I mean: what? What’s making you cry? Twenty-four years is a long time.’

‘She’s still dead,’ said Jones.

‘Jesus, Jones. Of course. I know, but it’s like you just found out -’

‘It is like I just found out. I always cry before I go to sleep,’ said Jones. ‘I have emotions. I don’t have an imagination: I can’t see things that aren’t there. But I have emotions. I had something and it made me happy and I lost it and now I don’t have it.’

‘Tell me about her,’ said Bree. Bree thought of Cass again, and then stopped the thought. ‘What do you remember about her?’

‘Everything,’ said Jones.

‘You’re -’

‘I remember everything she ever said to me. Everything she ever wore. Every time she touched me. Every smell and taste of her.’ Jones sighed. ‘I have an eidetic memory. That is my condition. Everything that ever happens to me I remember it exactly. If I didn’t have that I couldn’t function.’

‘But.’

‘Why would I not be sad when I am alone?’

‘Jones, people get over things. They have to. You can’t just -’

In the light from the wall lamp, Jones’s face was a sick yellow. He looked miserable. He got up and went to the sink, rinsed his toothbrush and stood it in the other polystyrene cup.

‘I can’t. I know that this is not like other people. It’s not important. It is what happens to me. But I have no way of “getting over things”. I have no expectations, no desires that live in what you call the future. That is what apsychosis means. Everything I want is in the past. Everything I want to happen has already happened. Everyone I love is already gone, and I can remember everything about them.’

Bree didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything. Jones lit another cigarette from the butt of the last. Bree felt sad and annoyed and a bit awkward.

‘Would you like me to leave you alone?’ she said.

‘I don’t…’

‘OK, I get it. You don’t know what it would be like. But you must know – from your experience – if you’re happier when you have someone with you or if you’re happier when you’re alone.’

‘I’m happier when you are with me,’ said Jones.

‘OK then,’ said Bree. And she kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed. When he finished smoking he turned off the light and lay down, apparently without self-consciousness, on the bed next to her. The keening noises he made rose a little, then settled, as Bree put one of her arms over him and held him as he fell to sleep.

Isla walks up between two rows of beanpoles towards the cabin. She thinks: nobody is here.

A cane chair, empty, sits outside the cabin. The windows are shuttered. There is an outer door, with a gauze screen in it, that looks like it once had some paint on the wood. It’s very slightly ajar, and she pulls it open. She waits a minute, listening to nothing, then knocks on the inside door. She waits, turns on her heels and looks around her. There’s no reply, still, from inside, so she walks round the side of the cabin. There’s a sloping roof coming off the wall a bit below shoulder height – mossy slates, sheltering a pair of tall red gas canisters and a neat stack of chopped wood.