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Chapter Ten

FOR THE BULK OF HER TWEENS AND TEENS, MOST OF KATH Collingswood’s teachers had either been indifferent or mildly antipathetic to her. One man, her biology teacher, had more actively disliked her. She had known it pretty early in their relationship, and had even been able to express and evaluate his reasons to herself with some clarity.

His opinion of her as sulky she conceded, but considered no more his business than his disapproval of her friends. He thought her a bully, which was, she would say, 65 percent fair. Certainly she found it easy to intimidate more than half her class, and did so. But they were minor cruelties perpetrated without glee, vaguely, almost dutifully, to keep people off her back.

Collingswood had not much reflected on how easy such misery-mongering was for her, how often nothing but a glance or word, if even that, had palpable effects. The first time she thought about it was when she stopped that teacher’s mouth.

She was thirteen. Some altercation had left a classmate crestfallen, and Mr. Bearing had shaken his whiteboard marker at Collingswood like a baton and said, “You’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you? A nasty piece of work.”

He had turned, shaking his head, to write on the board, but Collingswood had been abruptly enraged. She was completely unwilling to submit to the description. She had not even looked at the back of Mr. Bearing’s head, had stared furiously at her nails and clucked her tongue, and something like a bubble of cold had swelled in her chest, and burst.

Collingswood did look up then. Mr. Bearing had stopped writing. He stood still, hand to the board. Two or three other children were looking around in confusion.

With a sense of great interest, with a sense of pleased curiosity, Kath Collingswood had known that Mr. Bearing would never call her a nasty piece of work again.

That was that. He picked up his writing. He did not turn to look at her. She put off till later the questions of what had happened, and how she had known that it had. She had leaned back, instead, on the rear legs of her chair.

AFTER THAT MOMENT, COLLINGSWOOD TOOK MORE MIND OF HER unspoken interventions: the times she knew what her friends or enemies were about to say; when she silenced someone across a room; found a lost thing that was frankly unlikely to be wherever she uncovered it. She started to think things through.

Not that she was a poor student, but Collingswood’s teachers might have been impressed to see the rigour with which she had pursued this research project. She started with a little tentative poking around online, put together a list of books and documents. Most she was able to download from absurd websites, copyright not being particularly apropos for such texts. The titles of those she could not track down she laboriously copied and requested from surprised, even concerned, librarians and booksellers. Once or twice she even found them.

She picked her way, more than once, through a weed-littered old carpark and bust windows into a small long-deserted hospital near her house. In the quiet of what had once been a maternity ward she dutifully acted out the idiotic actions the texts described. Certainly she felt stupid, but she performed as required, recited all the phrases.

She kept a record in her notebook of what she had tried, where she had read it, what if anything had occurred. BOOK OF THOTH = BOOK OF BOLLOCKS MORE LIKE, she wrote. LIBER NULL = NULL POINTS.

Mostly there were no effects at all, or just enough to keep her at it (a scuttling noise here, an unwarranted shadow there). But it was when she got exasperated and restless and thought fuck it to her studies, when she was resultingly imprecise, that she made the best progress.

“That’s it for today. You can go early.” Packing up her books with the rest of the class, Collingswood watched Miss Ambly’s shock at her own words. The woman touched her mouth in bewilderment. Collingswood flicked her fingers. A pen spun off Miss Ambly’s desk.

And later: “What’s it doing, sir?” some girl asked of a bemused teacher, pointing at the class goldfish, which was swimming with highly unnatural motions. Collingswood, unnoticed, continued what she had started on an exasperated whim, scratching her hands on the desk as if DJing to a classmate’s ringtone, which rhythms quite unexpectedly dictated the fish’s back-and-forth motion.

That had been years ago. There had been a lot of work since then, of course, much tinkering, plenty of experiments, but Collingswood’s baseline impatience continued to truncate her researches. She came to understand that this would ultimately limit her. That she was without question a bit of a talent if she said it herself, and yes she could make it her career no problem, but she would never be one of the very best. Since those days, she had met one or two of them, those very best at this. She had known them the moment they had walked into the room.

But her limits had unexpected effects, and not all negative. The lack of the sternest rigour to perform these competencies at the highest level blurred them, mixed their elements, gave them little swills of backwash. Mostly ignorable effects or demerits, but only mostly.

In the case of the alarm system she had installed in Billy’s doorway, for example, she had primed it specifically for ingress. That it might trip, even faintly, in the case of egress, was a product not of design but of Collingswood’s powerful but slapdash methods.

That would have bothered a perfectionist. But then that perfectionist would not have been alerted when intruders removed Billy from the flat that they had never broken into, as Collingswood, lurching awake and for several moments confused, her heart gonging and an aching in her ears, was.

Chapter Eleven

THEY WERE IN A BEAT-UP CAR. THE MAN GOSS DROVE. IN THE back, the boy, Subby, held Billy’s arm.

Subby had no weapon and did not grip hard, but Billy did not move. He was frozen by the man and boy having unfolded in his room-the intrusion, the drugged dragging of the world. Billy’s thoughts stuttered in loops. He felt dragged across time. A smear of pigeons was behind the car, pigeons that seemed to have been following him for days. What the hell what the hell, he thought, and Leon.

The car smelt of food and dust and sometimes of smoke. Goss had a face wrong for the time. He looked stolen from some fifties. There was a postwar cruelty to him.

Twice Billy’s hand twitched and he imagined a quick bundle and rush, throwing open the door and rolling into the street, away from these arcane kidnappers. Begging help from the shoppers in that Turkish grocer and the Wimpy hamburger place, running through, where were they, Balham? Each time the thought came Goss made a tch-tch noise and Subby’s hand would squeeze, and Billy would sit still.

He had no cigarette, but every few breaths Goss would exhale sweet woody smoke that would fill the car and go again. “What a ruddy night for it, eh?” he said. “Eh, Subby? What’s that pootling about? Someone’s out for a walk what oughtn’t was, don’t you coco? Someone’s woke up, Subby.” He wound down the window, an old hand-crank handle, looked up at the sky, wound it up again.

They hauled through streets of which Billy had lost all sense. They must be out in zone three or four where shops were keycutters and independent stationers. They passed no major chains. No west-coast coffee, not a Tescos. How could these be streets? Garages, timber-yards, judo gyms, cold pavements where rubbish moved quietly. The sky closed its last crack and it was night. Billy and his abductors were following rails, shadowing a lit-up train. It ushered them somewhere. They stopped by a dark arch.

“Chop chop,” said Goss. He looked up suspiciously and sniffed. He pulled Billy from the car. Billy thought he might puke. He reeled. Goss exhaled one of his smoky exhalations. He unlocked a door in corrugated iron and pushed Billy through into the black. Subby tugged from somewhere.

Goss spoke, as if Billy and he were in dialogue: “Is he then?” “Don’t know, might be, you got everything?” “Alright now, get the door, ready?”