Page 21 of The Cut
‘If the report doesn’t hit their inbox by the end of play, we don’t get a sign-off on the loan.’ Ben heard Lars light up a cigarette and take a drag. ‘And you know what that means.’ He exhaled angrily.
‘So, dig again and doctor the sample, put this on someone else’s fucking shoulders.’
Ben slammed his hand on to the wheel. They didn’t know about the loan recalls. Only he did. There was no way back and he had to keep going.
‘Just switch the sample. If you won’t, I will.’ Ben’s voice was threatening now.
Lars was silent for a second. He glanced around the office and leant in tight to the screen. ‘This conversation never happened.’
Ben killed the call and tried to steady his breath. He looked up to the rear-view mirror, his guilty eyes reflecting back at him. He’d bent the rules so many times in his life. He’d been flexible with the truth, he’d evaded and avoided for most of his career in order to get ahead. This wasn’t the first time Ben had doctored samples. A hollow feeling churned in his stomach.
The light over the fields had shifted from a golden sunset to fast-moving heavy clouds, threatening rain as his car slowed to turn on to the road for Barton Mallet. In the rear-view mirror, Ben noticed the bike that had overtaken him earlier tearing down the road behind him, burning the throttle. It sped up close, weaving in and out of his blind spot. The headlamp caught the mirror and blinded Ben for a split second. The growl of the engine brought a wave of nausea up into his throat. He passed the82turn-off for Blackstone Mill. A word had been graffitied over the sign in red paint, dripping like blood. Ben’s palms became clammy, he thought he was going to be sick. ‘Mill Killer’.
He was coming out. The locals would never tolerate Dave Patel returning to Barton Mallet, would they? Ben couldn’t tolerate it. Would he really come back here after he was released? Ben swallowed down a ball of regret. He should have got out when he had the chance. University and then his internship in Stockholm had offered him the perfect exit, but something had pulled him back. His family home had lain empty for a few years after his dad passed away, and those trips back to pack up all the boxes and bin bags full of his parents’ precious possessions gradually became less frequent. The place was full of stuff. Tools and knick-knacks that had meant so much to his parents, but after they were gone seemed like nothing, just junk. Eventually, the house had been sold and a clearance company had taken care of all the furniture. But Ben simply couldn’t stay away. He would take what he called his ‘nostalgia tour’ on the anniversary of his dad’s death. Flowers were laid up at the cemetery, but then he would sit in his car across the street from his old house, trying to figure out what the new owners had done to the place.
When a plot of land went up for sale on the scrub opposite Cheney End, Ben made an offer. Land that had once been his playground: cornfields for summer hide-and-seek, tree houses with rope ladders and snow igloos built into the rocks skirting the perimeter of Fosse Meadow. He would build a home. All his perfect design ideas, the space he had longed for, the organisation, the aesthetics he craved, but most important of all, that view over the fields and across the river towards the mill. It was almost as if he was keeping guard, watching and waiting for some kind of return. It was one of the reasons his wife had left when she did:83she didn’t want anything to do with Barton Mallet, she had cited ‘irreconcilable differences’. The difference being that she wanted to move on, and Ben couldn’t.
Ben slowed then stopped at a traffic light. His eyes darted to the mirror and the rider in the helmet, straddling the bike, waiting to speed off again. He sat back in his seat. The weight pressing down on his shoulders moved to his chest. Ben placed his hand flat on his sternum and moved it in a circle. Heart burn or heart break? Nothing that couldn’t be tempered with a shot of Pepto-Bismol washed down with a whisky chaser. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to calm his anxiety. He thought of her. But it wasn’t Dani who came into his mind, it was another face. A face that seemed to be tattooed on to the inside of his eyelids.
A blaring horn sounded behind him. Ben stared at the green light, paralysed. He inhaled sharply, glancing up into the rear-view mirror. The motorbike was revving its engine, waiting for him to move. What the hell were they doing? The rider was clad head to toe in black leather with a matt-black helmet, like an apocalyptic assassin fromBlade Runner. Ben pulled away, heading for the steep incline into the village as the bike engine growled again and shifted back into his blind spot. The bike was tailing him. ‘Tourists’ from Moscow trying to run him off the road. The Russian financiers were not people who negotiated. Had they been listening in on the call?
The emergency auto brake suddenly slammed down hard and the bike shot out in front, cutting across the road and hanging a sharp turn towards Mallet Hill. Ben was wrenched violently forward, the seat belt cutting into his neck. He grasped the wheel and fought to gain control of the car as it swerved violently across the road and mounted the verge. The wheels hit the kerb with an almighty metallic bang. A huge, jagged slab of granite rock84slammed into the door, the stone ripping into the carbon-fibre side panel. The airbag exploded in Ben’s face as the car shuddered to a halt.
The crooked tip of the Hanging Rock had splintered the side window, shattering the glass. Ben lay motionless, the side door airbag pressing him into the bucket seat. The car horn screamed a constant warning as Ben lay still, not breathing. But then his eyes opened, chest heaving painfully as he tried to breathe. Wiggling his feet, he attempted to move himself out from behind the steering column. His head was bleeding and he could feel blood trickling into his eye, but his adrenaline had gone to work. Ben scooted over to the passenger side, straddling the front seats, tumbling out and collapsing on to the pavement. He sat for a second on the tarmac, resting himself against the wheel.
He stared at the door panel. It had been ripped open like a tin of sardines, the window was shot: a couple of grands’ worth of damage to add to his list of worries. He sat in silence, staring at the wreck of his car. Maybe he was in shock, but he felt numb. He could sense something else being torn open, something ripping at the fabric of his life.
85
15
NOVEMBER 2023
‘My earliest memory is sitting in the neighbours’ garden, strapped in a pushchair. I must have been three years old. Mum was busy chatting in the kitchen and I had somehow shuffled the buggy forward. I wanted to look at the goldfish swimming in the pond.’ Nate swallowed, his complexion white as a sheet.
His face was projected through the darkness on to the cinema screen that covered the entire wall. A pair of unusually clear, light-brown eyes shone like windows into a young, uncertain soul.
A hand reached for the track pad built on the laptop; two fingers expanded the image. Zooming in closer. So close that the blood vessels in the teenage boy’s pale cheeks were clearly visible. He was blushing. The text at the bottom of the frame read, ‘Knot, Nathan. 14.’ The frozen image was released from its digital inertia and the boy continued to tell his story.
‘The wheels caught on the edge of the paving stones and the buggy tipped over.’ He closed his eyes tight. ‘I was suspended underwater, trapped. I couldn’t breathe.’ Tears streamed down his face now. ‘I nearly drowned. Mum wheeled me home, dripping in green algae.’ He wiped his face and smiled. ‘It became something they all laughed about … the green slime bit anyway, especially Lily.’
The boy on the film inhaled deeply as his eyes lit up. ‘I still have dreams about her – my mum, that is. We see her at Christmas … well, not last year but the year before. She gave me a scarf of hers that I keep in a drawer, it has her perfume on86it … that’s my secret. It’s a bit silly but no one knows about it.’ He wasn’t acting; this was all real and deeply personal. His voice lowered into a conspiratorial whisper. ‘I think Mum felt guilty that I nearly drowned and Dad blamed her for not looking after me properly. But it wasn’t her fault. Lily said they got divorced because of me.’
Nate paused for a second, gathering himself as he tried to swallow the sadness.
‘Ever since then, I’ve been terrified of water. Can’t swim, even now.’
The film was paused once again on the face full of pain, and this time something else lingered behind the boy’s eyes. Fear and guilt. The hands controlling the film reached for a laptop on a side table. The overwhelming urge to reach out to this boy, to heal and nurture him, took hold. But that would be overstepping the line.
Nimble fingers tickled the keyboard and a web page flashed up on to the screen. The RetroFX blog site. Logging on, the cursor found the last thread of the conversation they’d been having. Nate’s light was amber, which meant he wasn’t online. In the empty box at the bottom of the thread, a new message was typed.
How did the audition go? Did you nail it?
A fingers-crossed emoji.
As he pressed send, the freckled face of the girl with glasses and bouncing pigtails waved on to the screen, carrying her message to Nathan Knot’s computer.
Then Freckles, the lonely little girl, the emoji with the red hair who was just like Nate, stood up from her lonely chair, moved across her lonely office and stepped out of the darkness. She crossed to a drinks’ cabinet, threw a handful of ice into a highball87and poured herself a gin. The man in his forties behind the friendly emoji passed a hand over a well-groomed beard.
