“Don’t make yourselves comfortable.”
As if to reinforce Clive’s warning, a gust of wind rattled the classroom’s windowpanes. The city’s football stadium dominated the part of the skyline framed by those windows. Now a black cloud loomed above the ribs of the stadium’s cantilevered roof like a buzzard perched on a carcass.
Clive felt no guilt at sending his twelve students outside just as the weather was turning foul. He hated them. They were an imposition. He was meant to be a writer, yet he was stuck here, wasting time that should be spent writing, trying to teach these no-hopers to write.
He placed some photocopies on his table. “This exercise is a practical follow-on from last week’s lesson on creating characters. Take one of these handouts. Then go outside, walk around the neighborhood, find someone who looks interesting enough to base a character on. Follow them, observe them, imagine what their personality, background, life-history are like. Make notes on the handout, which lists the things you need to consider. Be back by quarter-to-three. The next homework assignment is to turn your notes about the person you observed into a 500-word character description. You can use the last fifteen minutes of class to start it.”
The students heard the first raindrops strike the windowpanes. But the task’s unexpectedness left them too surprised to complain. Clive was eager to get them out before they did complain. “Obviously, do your following and observing at a discrete distance. Don’t get arrested for stalking. Now…” He clapped his hands. “Go!”
Out they went. By the time they’d gone along the corridor to the school’s lobby, some were grumbling, but it was too late.
The last person to leave was a woman with long auburn hair who looked in her early thirties, though, from the information on her course application form, Clive knew she was older. She’d loaded the top of her desk with stationery—biros, notepaper, correction fluid, colored highlighter pens—which she was returning to an oversized handbag. He said, “You needn’t take that with you, Edie. It’ll be here when you get back.”
She sounded nervous. She usually did when she spoke to him. “Oh… I’d better bring it along… It might be useful…somehow.”
She was the only person in the class with a strong city accent. The others spoke in middle-class or posh accents that were less easy to identify geographically. Clive assumed this gave her an inferiority complex and was why she found him intimidating. Come to think of it, she seemed to find everyone in the class intimidating.
She tottered towards the door on high heels that just about elevated her from being short to being of medium height. She lifted the final handout but, before leaving, turned and looked at him worriedly. “Do you think this is…right, Clive?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well… It feels dishonest… It’s like we’re spying on these people and stealing something from them.”
“Oh Edie. Don’t fret. It’s what we writers do. We exploit everything and everyone around us for material. We eat it all up. Why….”
He laughed, showing his teeth.
“We’re practically cannibals.”
***
Edie was well behind the other students. She followed the twisting staircase down from the adult-education center, past the poolroom on the middle floor, to the building’s entrance, which was beside the façade of one of the street’s Chinese restaurants. A classmate stood in the doorway, peering out at the rain while it smacked the pavement with growing violence.
“Hello,” she said. “You’re Ralph, aren’t you?” Though he spoke poshly, she found this classmate more approachable than the others because he was so young. He barely looked out of his teens and had apparently chosen his clothes, a loose-hanging tweed jacket, corduroy trousers, and clumpy leather brogues, in the hope they’d make him look older and more mature.
“Yes. And you’re Edith.” Unnecessarily, he added, “It’s raining.”
“Oh, just call me ‘Edie’.” She removed a small umbrella from her cluttered handbag. “I’ve got a brolly if you want to share it.”
Ralph took her umbrella and opened it, and they stepped out of the doorway. Through the shimmering prism of the rain, they saw out a few figures further along the street who might belong to their class. One after another, those figures disappeared around a corner at the street’s end. “The market,” he explained. “I think they all decided to head there.”
“That’s a good idea.” The market was a roofed-over complex southeast of the city center, encompassing a block and housing nearly a hundred stalls, shops, and eateries. “It’s always crowded. There’ll be plenty of folk to choose from and we won’t look so conspicuous as we follow them. Plus, we’ll be out of this horrible weather.”
She realized he was holding the umbrella low for her. While it shielded her, the wind and rain swept over it, pelted his face, and tangled his hair. But before she could protest, Ralph pointed ahead and asked, “What about him, though? He might have potential.”
Another figure was prowling the street several yards in front of them. Definitely not a classmate—this one was hunched over and wore a frayed beanie hat, an anorak that’d once been white but was now gray with dirt, and a pair of saggy sports bottoms.
Edie felt uneasy. “Him? Well, I know him… I mean, I’ve seen him. He hangs around this neighborhood.”
“I’ve seen him too. He’s eccentric. I bet we could get an interesting character-description out of him.”
“But using him doesn’t feel fair. He’s probably been through a lot, poor man.”
They followed him further. Then the wind swelled and almost wrenched the umbrella from Ralph’s hands. By now the rain was strafing the street, making miniature watery explosions over the road and pavements. They ducked into the strip of shelter offered by the doorway of the nearest restaurant. A tang of Thai tom-yum soup assailed them as they huddled there. Though the council promoted this street as the city’s Chinatown, there weren’t enough Chinese restauranteurs locally to line its sides with eating places, so restauranteurs from other Asian communities had found premises too.
“God,” Ralph lamented, “Clive chose a fine time to send us on this mission.”
Edie didn’t reply. Awkwardly, she stared past him. Ralph turned and discovered that the man they’d been trailing had also taken refuge in the doorway. His face, only a yard from theirs now, was unshaven, weatherbeaten, and strangely squashed-looking. Because most of his teeth were missing, his head seemed to sink onto his jaw.
“You,” declared the man, “were following me.”
Ralph lied. “No, we weren’t.”
“Oh, I’m wise to how these things are done. First, you weren’t just behind me, but were keeping pace with me. You didn’t want to catch up and overtake me. Second, you were talking about me. I could tell. Ordinarily, people would be shouting over this storm. But you weren’t. You were keeping your voices low. A dead giveaway.”
Edie piped up. “John, please! Don’t be paranoid. We happened to be walking behind you, that’s all.”
The man’s indignation vanished. Amiably, he said, “Oh hello, Edie. How are you? Er… I don’t suppose you could make a donation to the cause today?”
Ralph was astonished. “John? You really do know him!”
Edie opened her handbag again, extracted a purse, and from that fished out some coins. She gave them to the man, too embarrassed to check first how much she was handing over. Meanwhile, he told Ralph, “Sure, she knows me. Talks to me every time she comes here to attend that writing class, up above the Pride of Shanghai Restaurant.” His eyes narrowed. “Do you go there too? Are you a writer?”
“Well, I don’t profess to be yet—”
The man sneered. “Profess? You look like a young professor, all right.”
“But I have ambitions that way.”
He became belligerent again and stabbed a finger towards Ralph. “Well, here’s something to write about. You can write a whole book’s worth about it. What…happened…to…my…wife?”
Edie sighed. “You see, a while ago, John’s wife disappeared. He believes she was abducted.”
“I’m investigating,” he elaborated. “Not just the abduction. Also, the abductors.” Furtively, he glanced either way along the street. “They’re all around, see? Among us. Selecting more people to abduct. They try to blend in, but if you know the warning signs to look for…”
Ralph interrupted. “What about the police? Have you reported your wife’s kidnapping to them?”
That prompted a scornful laugh. “The cops? What would they do? Those bastards haven’t just abducted her—they’ve erased every trace of her existence. Erased all memories of her from the heads of everyone who knew her. Nobody knows she disappeared because nobody knows she existed in the first place.”
Edie was desperate for this conversation to end and for them to be on their way. But, to her dismay, Ralph was mulling the man’s words over. Then he demanded, “How did they manage to do that?”
“A signal,” said John. “It’s some signal they send out at the moment of abduction. Removes the person from the collective human memory.”
Ralph peered down at the man’s left hand, searching the grimy fingers for a ring. “But didn’t some physical evidence of her remain?”
“No. The signal destroyed the physical traces of her too.” He considered it. “They send out a fucking strong signal.”
“But if the signal’s so powerful…” Suddenly, Ralph’s voice had the triumphant tone of a debater clinching an argument. “Why hasn’t she been removed from your memory?”
John, though, had an answer. He raised his left hand—definitely, Ralph noted, no rings on those fingers—and tapped his left temple. “My brain’s different, see. Differently wired. And while their signal did get her out of my memory, it didn’t get her out of the deeper bits, the subconscious. So, sometimes, I dream about her…” His squashed face seemed to deflate more. His voice became a croak. “That’s right. I know I had a wife once… Because I meet her again in my dreams.”
Ralph felt pressure against his hand and realized Edie was clutching it. When he looked down at her, he saw faint smears about her eyes. What? John’s babblings had moved her to tears?
The man had another change-of-mood. Something made him glance along the street behind him. His anguish turned to alarm, and he hissed, “Right, everyone, act calm. One of them’s coming.”
The storm hadn’t quite cleared Chinatown of pedestrians. A figure was approaching on the opposite pavement. It was tall and thin, lacked an umbrella, but was clad in a raincoat that descended to its knees. The raincoat had a plasticky greenness and, though the clouds and rain muted the light, it glistened brightly. Ralph tried to discern the figure’s face, but a cloth cap was pushed down over it, and the corners of the raincoat’s collar were pulled up around it.
For a hallucinogenic moment, Ralph thought the shafts of rain were bending towards the figure. The rain was crowding against it, splashing in a tumultuous halo around its feet and nowhere else… But the crazy moment passed, and he found himself contemplating an ordinary, rainy street with an ordinary, raincoated pedestrian on it.
The figure receded towards Chinatown’s other end. “So,” said Ralph, “that’s one of the abductors?”
“It is.”
“To me, it looked like a bloke in a green raincoat.”
Edie contradicted him. “Not green. It was blue.”
“No,” said Ralph, “it was green.”
“Blue.”
John sighed. “Yip. These disagreements happen when they’re around. Always a warning sign.”
***
Edie sat outside a café in one of the market’s alleys. While shoppers milled past her table, she worked with two highlighter pens on Clive’s handout. The details you could tell about a person by looking at them she marked in one color. The details you needed to use your imagination to answer she marked in another.
“Favorite drink, alcoholic or non-alcoholic…” she read, running the second pen’s nib across the words. She sat back in her chair. “How am I supposed to know that?”
She thought about John. Though they’d agreed not to use him as a subject, she wondered what his favorite drink would be. She recalled some beverages associated with down-and-outs. Buckfast Tonic Wine, Frosty Jack’s Cider, Carlsberg Special Brew…
“No. That isn’t right.”
She imagined John at the end of a day, sheltering in a derelict building. Opening a knapsack and taking out a bottle of wine—proper wine, not Buckfast—and two wineglasses. He set the glasses on the dusty floorboards and poured two miniscule amounts into them. Because the wine was expensive, far beyond his normal price-range, he had to pour it sparingly. Then he raised one glass in a toast. He was pretending his wife was with him. They were drinking wine together and everything in their lives was normal. The nightmare had never happened.
It touched her that John was devoted to his wife, even though, possibly, she’d never existed and was a phantasm of his madness. She wished her own husband had shown such devotion—the husband who’d knocked her up when she was 16 and cleared off, never to been seen again, when she was twenty one.
Ralph returned to the table. He’d been in the market’s toilets, drying his hair in the breeze from a hand-dryer. Now his hair rose in a weird nimbus, but she didn’t embarrass him by pointing this out.
He noticed she’d highlighted the words on her handout in green and blue. “When we saw the raincoat worn by that man in Chinatown…”
“The abductor?”
“The abductor, as John claimed. Maybe it wasn’t so strange we saw different colors. There are greenish-blue shades where it’s hard to decide which color you’re looking at.” He sat down. “Also, in Japan, there’s a color called midori.”
“Isn’t that a liqueur with melons in it?”
“Technically, it’s the Japanese word for green. Except that in Japan some things we would consider blue, like the sea, are called midori. So, different cultural conceptions of green and blue exist too.”
She repeated it. “Midori. You know some interesting things, Ralph.”
“Well, I’ve been…” He checked himself, sensing it was inappropriate to tell her he’d spent his gap-year in Japan. He didn’t want to brag about his travels in front of someone who’d perhaps never been further than a beach in southern Spain. “I read about it somewhere.”
She gazed into her mug of coffee. “I wish I’d had time to read. To educate myself. It’s probably too late now.”
He tried to cheer her up. “Well,” he laughed, “that John’s a character, isn’t he? Crazy as a box of frogs. When I pointed out the hole in his lunatic conspiracy theory, about how he could remember his wife when nobody else did, he said it was because his brain was differently wired. In other words, because he was mad. He used his madness to justify his mad story. Brilliant circular reasoning!”
Edie didn’t find this funny. She shuddered. “Don’t joke about it, Ralph. My poor mum wasn’t right in the head, either. She was in and out of hospital for years. Schizophrenia, she had. No laughing matter.”
Ralph blushed. To hide his red face, he bowed it over his mug and took a swig of coffee. “I’m sorry. Shouldn’t have made fun of him.”
“It’s frightening. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve inherited some of her schizophrenia.”
“You? Surely not.”
“Oh, I’m all sweetness and light now.” She sighed. “But after a couple of gin-lime-and-lemonades, I become a different person. A scary one.”
Ralph’s blush persisted and Edie felt embarrassed that she’d made him embarrassed. After a minute of silence, he declared in an unconvincingly upbeat tone, “Right-o. Time to get to work.” He turned towards the shoppers. “See anyone promising?”
Edie grimaced. “Oh, I hate this. Having to snoop on people.” But she tried to focus. “Okay, what about her?”
She’d noticed a twenty-something woman approaching. The hair had been shaven from the sides of her head, but a thick, defiant comb of it, dyed purple, remained on top. She wore spectacles, a black greatcoat, and Doc Martens. “Interesting specimen,” he commented. “Good choice.”
“You can follow her if you like.”
“No, she’s yours.” He spoke quietly as the woman was almost level with their table now. “You saw her first.”
Edie returned the worksheet and pens to her bag and clambered up. “Damn Clive for putting us through this. I feel like a criminal.”
“You’d better hurry.” Already the woman was receding, carried off on the torrent of shoppers. Then Ralph took a deep breath and was about to add, “Edie, look, I apologize. I honestly didn’t mean to mock John or your mum…”
But he was too late. Edie spoke instead. “Well, got to go. I’ll see you at the school at two forty five. Good luck with finding someone.” She departed, her eyes fixed on the strip of purple hair as it bobbed away in the crowd.
Ralph drained his mug, her final words lingering: “Good luck with finding someone.”
In her company, he’d begun to wonder if he had found someone. Not for Clive’s stupid task, of course, but as a friend. Someone he could talk to freely and naturally and without awkwardness. And perhaps, one day, that friendship might develop further… He shook his head. No, impossible. They came from completely different backgrounds. And the age difference. How old was she? She looked reasonably young, but… Could she be old enough to be…his mum?
Maybe that was why she’d shown an interest in him. She felt an urge to mother him.
Ralph tried to forget her and slough off his feeling of foolishness. For a minute he studied the handout, groaning at some of the wilder things Clive wanted them to deduce—the subject’s favorite superhero? Then he chose a passer-by, a man with pepper-colored hair and an even-grayer beard, in a plaid shirt and jeans. He rose and followed him. No ideas came, however, and he soon gave up. He switched to following an old woman whose varicosed legs, in their stockings, looked almost as lumpen as the bag of vegetables she was carrying. But again, he quickly gave up and changed to following someone else.
Led by one person after another, he wandered out of the alleys, with their fruit-and-veg stalls, hardware shops, butchers and fishmongers, tearooms, and greasy-spoon cafés, and into the arcade, which was the open and more touristy area of the market. Preserved old shop-fronts with antique signage ran along its sides. A few more shops, detached and single-story, formed islands in the middle of the floor. One sold footwear and had a giant red boot, like something from a nursery rhyme, planted on its roof. Higher up, rain sluiced off the barreled glass roof of the arcade itself.
Looking down again from the rain, he noticed a patch of green shimmering amid the crowd ahead.
He sped up and dodged past a few people, straining to get a better look at the figure. It changed direction so that it no longer walked across the arcade but along it, and Ralph changed course too. They passed the old-fashioned shopfronts on one of the sides. By now, between the heads of the shoppers who still separated them, Ralph saw a cloth cap above the greenness. This surely was the person they’d spied in Chinatown, the one whose raincoat they’d disagreed about.
Then a strange thing happened. The raincoat was suddenly a different color. It wasn’t green but—as Edie had claimed—blue.
Something muffled the noise of the arcade. It shrank to a murmur, then to a whisper, then to nothing. Perhaps this was to do with how the air was changing. Ralph had a notion it was becoming crystalline. Yes, crystals were forming around him, green ones that caught the building’s light, filtered it, gave it a greenish hue. He tried to pause and study this impossible phenomenon, but couldn’t. His feet kept moving of their own accord.
Doesn’t anybody else think this odd?, he wondered.
In fact, only he and the raincoated figure were moving now. The other people in the market had frozen. As Ralph traipsed past them, he saw how literally frozen they’d become. They’d acquired a glassy-green transparency and resembled human-shaped sculptures, carved from green ice. Meanwhile, the people directly in front of him didn’t even resemble ice. They might have consisted of green vapor because, magically, he passed through them.
His quarry, the figure, still had substance. It halted and slowly turned towards him.
Its raincoat was green again. Everything else, the crystals in the air, the ice sculptures at Ralph’s sides, the vaporous forms in front, became blue. Their blueness thickened and solidified until he felt he was traversing a blue corridor.
Ralph thought of one of his roommates, a postgraduate student with a fondness for hallucinogenic drugs. It’s Harry. For a laugh, he’s put something in my food or drink. Magic mushrooms or some shit. The bastard!
Then the corridor became both colors. One marbled the other. Soon, the swirls of blue and green animating its sides made it feel more like a giant kaleidoscope. At the kaleidoscope’s end lurked the figure, which was darkening. It shed all its color and transformed into a human shadow. The darkness within its outline was absolute, hiding everything, showing nothing.
Ralph heard a shrill, tearing noise. He felt it too. It tore through his thoughts, through his flesh, through his very being. Also, he no longer had a sensation of walking forward. He was falling. The kaleidoscopic corridor had stopped being horizontal. It was a vertical shaft, and the figure was at its bottom like a black, human-shaped floor.
Ralph saw things plunge past him, falling at a greater velocity than he was. Other people—a baby in a crib, a toddler in a onesie, a six-year-old boy in a familiar-looking primary-school uniform.
That’s me, he realized. Me at different stages of my life.
The tearing noise escalated to an immense, sanity-threatening screech. Around him, the streaks of blue and green in the shaft’s sides dwindled. As the figure drew closer, as he fell closer to it, they were replaced by streaks of blackness that spread from the figure like tentacles from an octopus. Past him plummeted more versions of himself—Ralph at the age of thirteen in a different uniform, that of his boarding school, and a mid-teens Ralph in skinny black jeans and an emo T-shirt.
The figure expanded and made the shaft black. A few remaining threads of green and blue wormed through the blackness alongside him, then vanished, and he saw nothing more.
The noise reached a crescendo. Ralph imagined the particles that made up his body were being torn asunder, as were the particles, whatever form they might have, that made up the time-stream of his life. His final thought before obliteration was: What do you want with me? But even if he’d been able to communicate with them, and they’d been minded to give him an answer, he wouldn’t have begun to understand their answer anyway.
After that, there was only a last radiating pulse of energy.
***
Edie felt it while she watched the woman with the purple comb of hair mosey in front of a second-hand bookshop. The woman was inspecting some paperbacks on an outside rack. Edie tried to get closer so she could see what the woman was interested in reading, information that might help with Clive’s assignment.
Then pain stabbed through her head. She blundered against a different rack and knocked books onto the alley’s tiled floor.
She was surprised at how quickly the pain departed again. It was as if she’d suffered a violent migraine, but one with a lifespan of just a few seconds. Then she noticed the books scattered about her, crouched, and started gathering them up and returning them to the rack. One book made her pause. Its creased, aged cover sported an image that transfixed her. It showed a huge rat with black-gray fur, black-pupiled eyes, and splayed, almost human-like claws. The author was somebody called James Herbert. The book was titled The Rats.
She realized the woman she’d been following was standing beside her. When she looked up, she found herself in her bespectacled gaze. “That’s one of his best ones,” the woman said. “Have you read it?”
Edie felt terrified. Had the woman guessed what she was up to? “No…” she stammered, trying and failing to sound natural. “I haven’t.”
The woman laughed. “Well, if you ever do, don’t get too attached to the characters.”
“What do you mean?”
“He keeps introducing new characters. Lots of them. He’ll introduce one and spend pages telling you about them. Describing their whole life-history. And then, when you feel you completely know them… Bang! He kills them off. Monster-rats eat them at the end of the chapter.”
“Oh. That sounds brutal.”
“It is. You never hear of them again. And you realize they had nothing to do with the plot.”
***
While he sat in the empty classroom, Clive also felt a fierce but brief pain in his head. “Jesus!” he cried, “What’s happening?” He snatched his hands from his laptop’s keyboard and clamped them to his face, suddenly imagining a blood clot or a ruptured blood vessel wreaking havoc inside his brain.
Then nothing was happening. He was shocked to discover he felt okay again. He lowered his hands. “What was that about?”
Spooked, he looked again at the screen. In the hour since he’d got rid of the students, he hadn’t even written a paragraph. The word-count in the bottom-left corner told him he’d managed a pathetic eighty nine words. He looked at the time in the opposite corner. Oh no. two thirty six. Those eleven pains-in-the-arse would be back soon.
Something else spooked him. Eleven? There were eleven of them, weren’t there? Not twelve?
He opened the class register and counted. Yes, of course. Eleven. How had he got that daft suspicion there might be twelve students?
***
In the same classroom a fortnight later, Clive went from desk to desk, giving each student a copy of a handout.
“This,” he announced, “is Edie’s most recent homework assignment. I want to share it with you all because it’s so good, both for the observations and for the effort she made imagining the character. The old-fashioned clothes he wears because he’s young and insecure and wants to look older. His determination to do the gentlemanly thing by holding the umbrella low for the person he’s walking with, while his head and shoulders get soaked. His absent-mindedness, suggested by his unkempt hair after he’s dried it using a toilet hand-dryer. The way he hangs his head over his coffee, because—insecurity again—he’s shy and blushes easily. And much more. Anyway, please read it.”
He made eye-contact with Edie. “Come on. Don’t look mortified. I’m not pulling your leg. It’s an excellent assignment.”
After three o’clock, when the other ten students had left, Edie dawdled in the room. She wanted to say something to him but didn’t know how to say it. Clive sighed and told her exasperatedly, “I wasn’t joking. I thought your assignment was wonderful. Have some self-belief, Edie!”
“But Clive,” she lamented, “I cheated!”
“What?”
“The character I described for my homework. It wasn’t Gwendolene.”
“Who’s Gwendolene?”
“The person I followed that day… I messed up, you see. I got too close to her, we ended up talking, and… Well, we swapped telephone numbers.” Indeed, she’d arranged to meet Gwendolene tomorrow evening. They were having a drink and then going to the cinema, where they planned to see a new movie based on a Stephen King novel.
Bewildered, Clive lifted a copy of the handout he’d distributed. “So, who’s this?”
“That’s the thing… I don’t know. I imagined him… No, it wasn’t just imagination. I had a dream about him. One of those dreams you only remember pieces of—ghostly, tantalizing fragments that float around in your head for days afterwards. But each fragment seemed to give me a few details about him, which I wrote in the homework.” She sighed. “It sounds crazy. Maybe I am crazy. Like my poor old mum.”
“Edie,” he said. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone you cheated.”
A couple of minutes later—the time he judged it’d take Edie to leave the school and descend the staircase—Clive went to a window. He spotted her head of reddish-brown hair on the street. She crossed the road and stepped onto the opposite pavement, where she paused to speak to someone. Clive recognized the person as the old dosser in the beanie hat and filthy anorak who stalked Chinatown, accosting folk, begging them for money, subjecting them to insane ramblings.
The dosser and Edie started walking along the street together, apparently in conversation. “She knows that nutter?” Clive marveled. “Curiouser and curiouser.”
How did she know him? Why did she associate with him, when surely, she knew what a looney he was? What were they discussing now? Suddenly, Clive turned from the window, eager to grab a pen and paper and write this down. He had the seed of a story.
Thus, he wasn’t watching the street when a third figure, wearing a green raincoat, appeared below. It walked in the same direction as Edie and her friend, a little way behind them, and moved at a similar pace so that the distance between them remained constant.
As if it was following.
