Ultra

This novel started off as a short story, progressed into a screenplay which included a tremendous amount of pre-writing. Fortunately I realised quickly enough that I was a lousy screenwriter (not enough space to expand!) and several years later, having exhausted myself finishing a huge rewrite of a sci fi novel, I treated myself to turning the screenplay into a novel. I set myself a target of only five pages a chapter, which makes it a fast, snappy read (I hope) and kept me interested. I was trying to write a "straight" novel, not sci fi, but the sci fi element was irrepressible. As a sample chapter, I've chosen is Chapter 27, about a third of the way into the book. It includes the main characters and is a quieter, dreamier chapter, about, essentially, dreams.

TWENTY SEVEN

They sat on the couch together, all three of them in a row, with Claire in the middle, watching the first half of the first part in the trilogy. At first Claire was entranced. She loved everything about the Hobbits. She thought Frodo was beautiful, even though he wasn’t meant to be. The book said he was fifty years old. He was not her idea of fifty, but it made it better. She hadn’t been able to imagine the Hobbit holes, nor could she get any idea of how small they were. It was lovely seeing it on the screen. But there was a moment, when someone was talking, when she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She fought and fought but they seemed to have heavy weights pressing her lids down. Finally she gave up, and kept them closed and thought, just a minute. I’ll just listen for a minute.

Nick beside her couldn’t keep his attention on the movie at all. He couldn’t stop thinking about the cut on Claire’s arm, the look on her face, the shock of it. He wasn’t sure if he was doing the right thing keeping it from Karin but in the last couple of weeks, she had barely been able to keep herself afloat. She thought she was better, that she was more in control, that things were settling down with Claire, that her life was back in track. But he thought he was watching someone coming down off euphoria and that Karin was coming down hard, that the reality of her daughter’s return was nothing as she had imagined it. Yet he couldn’t deny Karin her moment, the moment they got the call, the moment Claire had come home and sat at the kitchen table drinking tea with sugar. His thoughts drifted back to that moment, and then drifted earlier, and earlier, until he was in his own moment, the one he had begun to think of as a dream.

Because what else could it be? Tension, stress, it had all caught up with him. That first awful year in which no trace of Claire could be found, not one single clue, nothing that made sense. It wasn’t all that surprising that he’d dreamed something like that. Karin also had had terrible dreams, ones in which she was always running, always out of breath, always exhausted, her body moving through molasses, calling Claire’s name, over and over, her little girl lost, calling for her because she knew that if she stopped calling, Claire would never be able to find her way back. She had described to Nick in detail the anguish of the dreams, the same anguish she felt every moment of every day. Perhaps he had been lucky. He’d only had one bad dream. One hallucination.

After all, she was no longer lost to them. She was no longer dead. She was here. Traumatised in ways they couldn’t begin to understand, rather too pale and too quiet and too aware of every nuance of every emotion that ran through the house, but she was there. He became aware gradually of a weight on his left arm and saw that she had fallen asleep. All the thoughts that had been whirling around inside him suddenly rushed away and he experienced a feeling he hadn’t had since Claire was a baby. He didn’t know what it was, nor did he have a name for it. It felt like relief. On the screen, they had reached Rivendell, a place he thought Claire had tried to draw. She should see this. She should wake up.

A girl stood on the back lawn, five or six years old, wearing overalls that were too big. It was raining hard. Torrents came down from the skies. It was as if they had opened suddenly, after weeks of humidity and soaring temperatures, sticky nights and bad tempers. It was the end of July. The girl on the lawn was soaked to the skin. Her fair hair was dark and pressed to her face. There was a sudden thump, like a wooden door slamming, and she jumped, startled, breath catching in her throat.

Claire jerked awake. Karin felt it. She saw Claire open her eyes and focus on Rivendell, the golden waterfalls, the sparkles that seemed to drift through the air, so that you knew it was a place of exquisite and magical beauty. Karin hadn’t been paying attention to the film at all. There was nothing about it that roused her interest. It seemed too serious and she’d thought that Claire was too young for it, not only being under the age-restriction but innocent of the world at large. She had been thinking about Sitch. For the first time, in all the years she had known him, he had talked to her about going back to Hungary. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it. At first she had been appalled. He was her best friend. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. There wasn’t anyone she trusted as much, whose company she loved. Their affair, brief though it had been, had only served to heighten their intellectual bond. It was a friendship that could not be broken, not even by her marriage to Nick.

But now, sitting here, with music swelling and Claire’s head on Nick’s shoulder, it occurred to her that she wouldn’t miss Sitch that much. A life without his constant presence would be almost a relief. He knew too much about her. He knew everything, in fact. There were times when it was an embarrassment. There were things about herself she would rather forget, even pretend they had never happened. It didn’t help that he knew when once it might have brought relief.

“Do you want to go to bed?” she said suddenly, sharply, to Claire.

Claire sat up straighter. Nick felt a coldness enter his bones without her warm body next to his, and a vague sense of disappointment.

“No,” said Claire, her eyes on the screen.

But it was almost finished anyway.

She stood on the back lawn in the sunshine, her hands in her pockets. The cut on her arm was a constant sting. She stared at the big tree. It was already leafy and no longer looked that special. There were lots of flowers in the garden, some spilling out of pots, smothering shrubs and bushes she didn’t know the names of. The creeper was rampant over the door. She hadn’t yet found a key. It didn’t seem to matter that much anymore. Nothing seemed to matter. Everybody was right. She had to do her best. She was part of this family, whether she wanted to be or not, and she had to stay there. She had to be Claire because she couldn’t be Chloe. She didn’t know who Chloe was. The name inside her head felt like a dull thud. There was no longer any emotion attached to it.

She thought about the dream she’d had, the little girl in the rain, but she was sure it didn’t mean anything. Angela had talked to her about dreams and their meanings. There could be no literal interpretation but neither were meanings fixed. She had written down all her dreams about her twin, at Angela’s insistence, and for her to read at their sessions. She no longer knew what the dreams meant. There seemed to be less force behind them, as if they mattered less. But if they were the block Sichnik had said they were, then they weren’t shifting. She had looked up dream therapy on the internet and on one website read that a recurring dream meant that a message was being relayed to her. There was something important she didn’t understand, so it was compelled to keep repeating itself. But what was it that she didn’t get? At the time she had thought: my whole life. She hadn’t written down the dream about the girl in the rain. She didn’t want to talk to Angela about it. She didn’t want to talk to Angela at all. It was a strain trying to pretend she was getting better when she hadn’t thought of herself as sick. She put a hand over her arm, where the cut was, and wished it would stop hurting. She wasn’t going to talk to Angela about that either.

In the warm sunshine, she stood as still as she could and tried to make all the thoughts in her head melt away. She thought of them as ice cubes, melting in the sun, running down her face like the tears she couldn’t shed. Chloe, the Collector, Nick. The things he thought he knew. These were the things she didn’t want to think about. Ever again.

Inside the house, Karin swore and slammed down the phone. Claire heard her. Someone had called them a number of times and not said anything. Nuisance calls, Karin called them. She wanted to get them blocked. It would only cost about a fiver a month, she’d said.

“But how would you know what number to block?” Claire had asked.

“Oh, you just dial 1471,” Karin had said. “It tells you who the last caller was.”

In a flash, Claire flew into the house and up the stairs. Karin was doing something in the lounge. On the bedroom extension, Claire picked up the receiver and dialled.

“The number of the last caller is 0207...”

Claire grabbed a pen lying next to the phone and wrote the number on her foot, the nearest thing she could find. Then in her bedroom, she wrote it out again. In the bathroom, she scrubbed the pen off her foot, just as Karin called her for lunch.

It was easy to find an address on Google. It was for a hotel in Kings Cross. She wrote it down in a small notebook. Karin had bought it for her because it had a pretty cover and she hadn’t known what to use it for. A journal, possibly. Except that she didn’t have anything to write down. Thumbing through it now, she realised it was full of small but important information, things she thought that might be useful. In it, she began to draw a map, copied carefully from the A-Z.