‘He broke out of them, and he’s spent the last few years in hiding. He’s not going to work in the same way as someone like her.’
‘No. It’s more than that.’
‘Have you tried to track him back? Work out where he’s really stored?’
‘I couldn’t probe without him finding out. And we don’t want that.’
‘You’re afraid of him.’
‘Of course I fucking am. If things go his way, he’ll fillet me and fry me like a little Fisty fish. Just like our rogue Pantheon friend would, if they got their hands on me.’
Jack laughed.
‘Don’t you dare find it funny,’ said Fist. ‘I thought that bitch East was going to kill me. I want to break the bastard that’s got it in for us before he or she or it gets a chance to break me.’
‘They want to keep you safe.’
‘And you said that’s bullshit.’
Another voice cut through their conversation.
‘What’s bullshit?’ Andrea wasn’t wearing makeup. The memory of the last time Jack had seen her naked face caught at his heart. Her dress was a deep, clotted red. Her skin was pale and far too young. Jack couldn’t answer. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she continued. ‘I just found a message I left for myself. It told me to watch this with you. It’s a screenshow, I think.’
Jack said, ‘Wait.’ But she waved her hand and there was music. At first, there was only a soft, insistent beat, scratching at Jack’s hearing. It tugged at his attention but it was very quiet, so he had to concentrate carefully to hear it. It caught noises that drifted in from outside in its meshes, pulling them into song.
‘What is this?’ asked Jack.
‘Ssssh,’ whispered Andrea. ‘Listen carefully.’
There was a burst of static. A broken riff lanced out and settled on the beat, like a glitched image of a bird diving again and again into choppy water.
[ It wants to share visuals,] hissed Fist.
[Let it.]
Images started appearing on one of the room’s blank walls. Most were black and white. The few colour ones pulled Jack’s attention to them. More instruments had joined the music. Speech was woven in with it too. Jack heard Harry’s voice. One of the colour photos expanded to fill most of the wall. It was a shoulder lying on rumpled sheets. A woman’s hand caressed it. A second or two passed and then there was a window, seen from below. Soft spinelight made the raindrops on it shimmer like diamonds. Another sudden cut and there was a handwritten card. It disappeared too quickly to be read. A cat pounced on a sock. Just as quickly, a new image flashed up. The music began to feel out of sync with the film. Speech darted out between rapidly shifting rhythms, broken clauses stripped of context. Harry was still talking. There was a light joy to his voice that Jack had never heard before. Caressing fragments whispered into the room – soft endearments caught late at night, loud in the sleeping silence of Station. Then Jack’s own voice started to appear in the mix.
He sounded so much younger. New images flickered by. A kettle boiled. There was a garden, with a soft toy hanging from a tree. Hands pulled a shirt out of a dryer. He recognised his own hands, and memories came. They pulsed through him as the images continued. Meshed with the music, each vignette called up more of the past, creating a record of his time with Andrea seen from her point of view. A clock shone out from a bedside table. It used to wake him every morning. A hand knocked over a glass of whisky. It had the Vista Club logo on it. Andrea had drenched herself. There’d been a taxi ride home, and then a fumble out of her soaked clothes before they made love. Harry had been away. It was the first full night they’d spent together.
The soundtrack muttered broken sighs and laughter. Sounds and images fused into a series of precise invocations. It felt like commands were being written directly to Jack’s memory, triggering a mode of exact recall that summoned the past straight into his mind’s eye. A kaleidoscope of yesterdays sparked into life, overwhelming the present and replacing it with something, richer, deeper and far more structured. For a few moments, Jack felt himself rolled all the way back to his time with Andrea. For a few moments, joy filled him and he forgot everything that had come after. Then, the film’s focus started to move on. Memory shards still pulsed hypnotically, but they no longer reached Jack so directly. He fell back into the present.
[Amazing stuff, Jack.]
[ Yes – really evocative.]
[ No. Look at Andrea.]
She was still rapt in the flickering world of the past. But her clothes and hairstyle had changed, looking more up-to-date. Her face had aged too, time’s passing recarved into it.
[ It’s bringing her back to herself. How?]
[ The music’s doing it, and the images. They’re triggering memory cascades that are rebuilding her most recent self. Quite the achievement!]
Jack thought about the other times he’d heard the same broken music. At the club, Andrea must have been restoring herself after her performance. And he’d thought she’d been rehearsing in her upstairs room. Perhaps she’d in fact been composing, weaving a few new hours of life into the music that would so effectively and precisely reverse any rolling back.
[Oh look!] said Fist. [ It’s all about the moon!]
Jack was snared again, although not in quite the same way as before. Now the experience was less personal. He watched a culture’s grief come to life before him. The lament still tore into him, though. And the music was about far more than dead children. Andrea had shot this sequence through with a flash-forward to her own murder. Corazon’s memories blazed in Jack’s mind. He turned away from the screen, letting the moment pass.
When he looked back, the flash-forward had ended. The film and music moved through the two years before the end of Andrea’s life. It touched on the slow death of her relationship with Harry, and the increasing artistic independence and confidence that paralleled that loss. Finally, it skipped back to her post-death self, filling the wall with images and the air with sounds that recapped her life as a fetch. At last it wound down and there was silence. Jack turned to Andrea, now once again fully herself. Her head was down and her eyes were closed.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked.
She opened her eyes and looked round at him, once again fully herself.
‘I hate having to do that,’ she replied. ‘Fucking clubs. Fucking Harry.’
‘Why do you let him stay here, then?’
‘Oh, Jack.’ She moved to one of the sofas. ‘He was my husband once. He’s a shit, but where else is he going to go? And he’s helped me a lot over the last couple of years, in his own way.’ She brushed her hair out of her eyes. ‘And I have so few other people to talk to. You’ve seen what the clubs are like. I hardly see my friends, they only care about the living. And my family prefer me much younger. Much younger. I was so far away from them as an adult.’
‘You’ve got me to talk to.’
‘And you don’t think I’m really Andrea, do you? I tricked you. That’s one of the first things you said to me. Do you still believe that?’
‘I didn’t trust you. You didn’t tell me the whole truth.’
‘You should have understood why that was impossible by now. Perhaps there are even people you haven’t told the whole truth to?’
Jack winced. ‘Maybe. You do seem to be so much her.’
‘Seem to be?’ she said. ‘Only that?’ Jack said nothing. ‘Which is why I wanted you to see all this,’ she continued. ‘Because I knew you’d say that. You’ve just watched my memories laid out as code, pulling me back to myself. I’m built on memory, Jack. And so are you.’
‘But I haven’t died.’
‘Think about your body. Every single cell is replaced, every seven years. You’ve been away for that long. What remains of the man who left?’