Zodiac Station

Thirty-seven

It’s not often you wake up to find you’ve been unconscious for two days. And survived a plane crash. And that someone wants to kill you.

I lay on the bed, staring at the grey ceiling, as pieces of memory fell into place. Each one was a minor revelation. I had no framework, no preconceptions at all. Just curiosity, like a tourist flipping through the guidebook of an unfamiliar city.

Heathrow Airport.

Zodiac Station.

Martin Hagger.

A crevasse.

The last piece I remembered was myself. Like looking up from the guidebook and finding the city all around you: suddenly, abstract facts meant something. I shuddered; I think I must have cried out loud in terror. It’s a frightening thing, remembering who you are.

I touched my neck and felt hair, stubble grown just long enough to lose its abrasive edge. I touched my head and felt a bandage.

I heard a door click open, and twisted my head round to see. Which was a mistake: someone had left a red-hot coal in my skull that rocked around when I moved.

Through the tears, I saw a man walk in, wearing a grey polo neck and corduroy trousers.

Dr Kennedy, my mental guidebook informed me.

‘How are we this morning?’ He certainly talked like a doctor.

‘Where am I?’

‘Wednesday morning. And still at Zodiac.’

Zodiac. Lying on the ground, ice crystals cold against the back of my neck. Awash with pain. A figure standing over me. A rock raised to strike.

I rubbed the back of my head. Gingerly. ‘I don’t know …’

‘Some short-term memory loss is quite normal,’ he said. As if that was reassuring. ‘It’ll come back in time.’

Another piece of the jigsaw dropped into place — and another surge of panic. How could I have forgotten—

‘I need to talk to Luke.’ I struggled up, fighting the pain in my head. The clock on the wall said ten past ten. ‘He’ll be at school.’

‘Greta’s spoken to him,’ Kennedy said. ‘He knows you’re OK.’

Greta. Another piece, though I couldn’t fit it into the main picture straight away. I lay back while he fiddled around putting some pills in a cup. I took them gratefully with a glass of water. I hadn’t realised how thirsty I was.

I caught him watching me. The panic tightened my chest. In that situation, you’re so vulnerable: anyone could tell you anything.

‘Do you remember the fall?’ he asked.

All my memories felt fake, like slide pictures in one of those old plastic View-Master things, clicking round as you squeeze the button. Click. Standing on the ice, reading a notebook. Click. An explosion in my skull; sinking to my knees. Click. A man standing over me, so big he blotted out the sun. Arm raised. Click. Leaning forward, face buried in his hood, watching me. A start as if he recognised me.

Click. White light.

‘I didn’t fall,’ I said. Experimentally, testing a hypothesis, but saying the words felt right. ‘Someone came at me.’

He tried to tell me there hadn’t been anyone else there except Annabel.

‘She’d gone behind the rocks.’ I need a wee. ‘Someone hit me from behind.’

‘You fell in a moulin,’ he told me. But there was a long pause before he said it. He didn’t look well. His face was grey; his hands were twitching.

‘Someone hit me,’ I repeated. Saying it again to affirm the memory. The View-Master slides had upgraded to video, strictly VHS, like the old tapes you find at the back of a cupboard. Skipping and jerking; bars of static raining down the screen.

Kennedy checked my pupils and tried to tell me it was all a dream. His face came so close, his beard rubbed my cheek as he peered into my eye. Shining the light through me, as if I was the View-Master and he could see the pictures inside. I could smell mouthwash on his breath.

‘I found a notebook,’ I remembered.

An unhappy look crossed Kennedy’s face. As if there were things he didn’t want me to remember. The panic inside me went up a notch. I wished I hadn’t swallowed those pills quite so readily.

He went over to the side and opened a cabinet. I couldn’t see him much — I didn’t want to move my head again — but I had the sense he’d deliberately turned his back on me. There seemed to be a lot of fumbling going on inside the cabinet.

I heard it snap shut. Kennedy reappeared and handed me a green notebook. The moment I touched it, I remembered a bright cave, light so blue I wanted to drink it. A backpack inside.

On the inside cover, I read a handwritten sentence, all capitalised. SOME SAY THE WORLD WILL BEGIN IN FIRE, SOME SAY IN ICE.

Robert Frost, my guidebook said. Strange, the things you remember.

I flipped through slowly. Pulling each page into focus hurt my head; trying to understand it was worse. As much as I knew anything for sure, it looked like a standard lab notebook. Lists of samples with places and dates, hand-drawn graphs and equations. And, not far in, a line that almost made me fall off the bed.

‘“Fridge wants to kill me,”’ I read aloud.

‘A figure of speech.’ Kennedy smacked his hand to his mouth and swallowed something. ‘Martin did some work for DAR-X. Fridge thought that was sleeping with the enemy. Fridge is a bit of an eco-warrior,’ he explained, in case I’d forgotten. Which I had.

‘And what’s “X”?’ I asked. I saw it on every page: Concentration of X, dispersal of X, flow of X. The punctuation — sharp exclamation points, heavy question marks — emphasised his frustration.

‘I was hoping you could tell me.’ Kennedy glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘If you’re feeling up to it, see if you can make anything of the notebook while I have a look at Trond. Good to give your brain something to work on,’ he added as he went out.

‘Who’s Trond?’ I asked. But he’d already gone.

Greta came in. A second later, I realised I’d known her name without thinking about it. That felt like progress.

‘You woke up.’

‘I’m starting to wish I hadn’t.’

‘What do you remember?’

‘I don’t know how much there is to forget.’

‘Do you remember the plane crash?’

‘Very funny.’

‘It’s not a joke.’ Briefly — she doesn’t have any other way of talking — she told me how they’d loaded me on to the Twin Otter to fly me home, how it had turned around with mechanical problems, and how it had crash-landed. ‘You were lucky you survived.’

‘Jesus.’ I lay down on the bed. Sweat soaked my cheeks.

‘Kennedy said you spoke to Luke. To tell him what happened.’

‘Somebody had to.’

‘I’m glad you did.’

‘He said he was staying with his aunt.’

She said it the way she said everything: every word a nail to be hammered in straight. But I heard the question. Or maybe I imagined it, from hearing it so often before.

‘His mother’s dead. In a plane crash, not long after he was born. That’s why, when you told me about the plane …’ I pulled up the sheet and wiped sweat off my face. ‘Both parents — what kind of desperate coincidence would that be?’ I forced myself to calm down. ‘Anyway, I’m alive.’

‘It sucks about your wife.’

Interesting reaction. ‘Most people say they’re sorry.’

‘I’m sorry.’

She was teasing me, I think, but not unkindly.

‘We’d already split up.’ Three years from falling in love to divorce, via marriage, a baby, an affair and a scandal. And her PhD. We packed a lot in, in those days. We were young.

I looked at Greta for some sort of signal to go on. She was staring into space, face fixed in an expression of furious concentration.

With a shock, I remembered another piece of the puzzle. Her and Hagger. There was I, wallowing in pity for something that had happened seven years ago; her wounds were still wide open. She didn’t want to hear about me.

Greta and Hagger. An image flashed through my mind: glass snapping, blood on my fingers. Greta had been there, I knew now. She’d said—

‘Hagger’s death wasn’t an accident.’

She gave me a cool once-over. ‘What do you think?’

‘How about the plane crash?’

‘They said it was the fuel tank.’

‘And?’

‘I filled the tank. It was fine.’

‘You think someone was trying to cut us off? So no one could leave?’

‘Or they didn’t want you to make it.’

It was just as well I was lying down. Blood pounded in my skull, each spurt a jolt of pain. Strong enough to rupture the thin bone where I’d banged my head and spray all over the medical room’s clean white walls.

‘Someone at Zodiac?’

It was a silly question, and Greta’s expression let me know it.

‘Why would anyone want to kill me?’ I ransacked my memories, pulling them out frantically like clothes from a cupboard and leaving them scattered over the floor. Nothing fitted. I looked at Greta. ‘What have I forgotten?’

‘What did you know?’

Not nearly enough. ‘Was my bag on the plane?’

‘It’s in your room.’

I leaned up, wincing. ‘Could you do me a favour? There should be a brown hardback notebook inside. Can you bring it?’

She came back two minutes later. As she handed me the notebook, an envelope tucked inside it fell out. It slid off the bed before I could grab it.

‘I’ll get that,’ I said. But Greta had already bent down to pick it up. She read the address on the envelope and gave me a funny look.

‘Aren’t you too old to believe in Santa?’

I shrugged. ‘A man’s got to believe in something.’

I took the letter off her. Father Christmas, The North Pole, the address said.

‘Luke gave it to me. I think he expects me to hand-deliver it.’

‘We’re five hundred miles from the pole.’

I pulled a face. ‘Next you’ll be saying Father Christmas doesn’t exist.’

‘Of course he does. But the elves drowned because of global warming.’

‘Who’s going to make the presents?’

Greta flicked back one of her braids. ‘That’s what happens when you fuck the planet. No presents.’

Abruptly, she checked her watch and headed for the door. No apology, no goodbye. That’s Greta.

‘Where do I start?’ I asked.

She didn’t stop, but she said something as she walked out. It sounded like, ‘Trust no one.’