Simon wanted you to see her, of course, next to him. Wanted you to know that… Were you Theo Miller’s second, in Oxford? What was your name?
He wants to burn it all, of course. He was so angry he was just so… he had to kill his best friend, he had to kill Philip, good business, but the queen of the patties, he just said she needed to die she needed to be, for what she’s done you see, for trying to… stamp out dissent now so that when the Company comes back, and it will, and he’s just so very…
Lucy is… when they first told me about her, I thought maybe, actually, she’s being used by these men, but I’ll look after her, I’ll make sure she’s happy and doesn’t know that there’s this…
that they’ll
I don’t think they’d ever have hurt her not really I don’t think they
But you clearly think that they…
My husband isn’t a bad man. The Company isn’t bad. It’s still run by people. People are good. People are good. They’re all good people. My husband is…
Then she arrived, and I had to look after this… vicious child… so that her father would see, and understand, and realise that he needed to surrender. Your daughter is vile. She is… rude and disrespectful and stubborn and angry, I’ve never met a child so angry she is
I never had a child I once there was…
And I always imagined that it would be and I thought it was me but actually it’s him. It’s him, though he still says that it’s just something to do with my uterus. Those are his words—‘Your uterus, darling, you have this very special uterus’—and I thought fuck you, nearly had a fucking affair just to get myself knocked up and prove a point but then he…
Lucy is fine.
She doesn’t really understand what’s happened to her. She was in prison, and now she’s with us. Simon wants to sell her. Get the paperwork sorted and put her on a plane out to somewhere where he can get a good price for…
A good price for her.
The day you came to my house, after they took you away I sat with her and just
just sat with her for a while and
I thought perhaps I could mould her. Make her better. That’s something I can do, I mean, with children. They have such problems, and if they just understood that they were being ridiculous! I wanted to tell her that just because she felt trapped, she was just stuck inside her own mind—there are breathing exercises which can help with that kind of thing.
Breathing exercises!
I thought I could give her some breathing exercises and I was thinking that and then I thought
breathing exercises, to help her deal with the fact that my husband ordered her mother killed
her father taken away
is going to sell her to…
Breathing exercises!
Maybe some serum to massage into her temples too. A nice Chinese mint smell.
And I suddenly thought
I just don’t know anything about people, do I? I started laughing and she looked at me like I was insane and of course I was and I told her
I told her that I thought her troubles could be fixed with breathing exercises
and she looked very angry for a moment but then she saw that it was
and for a little while she was laughing too.
She was
she’s just a child.
I don’t pretend there’s a connection there I don’t pretend that we’ll ever have but
The vast majority of parenting appears to be ghastly. Poo and crying and refusing to eat things and breaking things and yet you ask a mother what the most important, wonderful thing in her life is and she always says ‘my child’ and you look at the wriggly little wretch in its smelly little buggy, dribble falling out of its mouth and snot out of its nose and you think, seriously, darling, because if that’s your joy and that’s your wonder then…
Well.
Maybe it would be easier to have a puppy. Or a cat. Lovely self-cleaning things, cats are.
I wanted to talk to you, Mr. Miller.
I thought that perhaps
in its way
I owed it to you. Or maybe no, not to you you aren’t
but to Lucy.
I owe it to Lucy, to this child who is
she’s only a child she’s
I owe her, monstrous though she is. To tell you, to tell her father—she’s going to be all right. I’m going to, and I don’t care what Simon says I’m going to
she’s going to be all right. I’ll make sure of it I’ll make sure she’s…”
Theo’s heads fell into his hands, and from his mouth came a sound, an animal groaning, a grunt of physical pain a roaring a loss of everything a howling a
“Oh my is that um…” blurted Heidi, jumping to her feet. “Well yes I suppose it must be…”
staggering away
leaving the father behind.
And then
“Up! Move!”
He couldn’t be buggered, and let the men carry him down the hall.
New grey tracksuit.
Wash face.
Wash hands.
Have a piss.
Eat cereal. His stomach couldn’t handle it, he had to go straight back to the toilet, blurgh, just
down to a cluster of three cars, engines running.
The middle black car, tinted windows, heavy doors, into the back into the middle seat seat belt on!
They drove away.
Chapter 80
Theo Miller sits at the centre of the universe, on the way to his execution, and knows that time has no meaning.
A convoy of three black cars, no number plates, no police interested in asking questions, rushes through a city still spewing smoke into the sky. The hospitals are running emergency services only, the supermarkets are guarded by a ragtag remnant of armed police who aren’t sure where their next pay packet will come from but sort of assume that if they do what they did before, maybe it’ll be okay eventually.
And as the convoy passes, Neila is in a mooring basin just off the River Thames, she sailed from Maidenhead three days ago. She’s been coming to this moment her whole life, and didn’t know it, and didn’t have the right questions to ask the cards. Checks her fuel line, checks the water. Her breath freezes in the air her hands are strong her back is straight, she is fine. She is fine. She is always fine, when she is by herself.
She lays out the cards
three of wands, the Magician, the Hermit, the Empress, two of cups, six of cups, the queen of wands, the knave of swords, the Hanged Man (inverted) and if only she knew the questions to ask of the future
if only her questions weren’t tied up with
—happiness, hope, love, loneliness, dreams—
if only her questions weren’t in some way seeking to undo the present, to deny the present, to pretend that maybe the present will make something better of itself even though in her heart she knows that the present just keeps on rolling it keeps on keeps on keeps on
maybe she would see the truth in the cards and on the water
as she sails towards the bridge and the north.
and time is
Corn has found the place where the bodies were buried. He hid and now he has left his hiding place there is a hand reaching up through the soil it could be anyone’s hand but of course it’s hers it’s
Theo walks through a winter forest, a gun in his hand, and in his memory his father lives and his daughter grows up beside him and Dani Cumali isn’t dead in the bed and Seph Atkins does not pull the trigger and all of this all at once is real and now in his mind and he knows no sense of the past and no sense of the future, lives it all now in this instant all of it lives in him and time is