September found me in Pimlico, on a bench with Margaret Kemble. The air was bisected by an iron hinge of autumn cold. Sparrows gusted along the curb, waltzing with the limp yellow leaves. Margaret and I were both wearing tartan scarves in 1ne Scottish wool, brought back from the Highlands by Arthur and Graham. Every so often, Margaret would stretch her legs to admire her new boots. She was dressed like a Southern belle cowboy, her reddish-blond hair spilling over her collar. There was a gap as large as a spread hand between her scarf and her lapels, which showed her décolletage. Margaret had large breasts, which I mention because she had not yet grown used to dressing them without stays, and they tended to draw the gaze. They had a lively upward swell—they seemed to want to have a conversation—and buried deep in the cleavage were a couple of raised acne dots, resembling (charmingly) pink wafer crumbs. Her skin was very fair and bright, like an expensive moisturizer. I note all this because I think male writers are often mocked for their lengthy descriptions of women’s breasts, but I do think some breasts provoke them, even from me.
She was due to retake the acclimatization examination the following week. I was helping her revise.
“What do you think you’ll vote in the next election?”
“Every man of them discourses on lies and petty connivery. I’d sooner vote for a mad dog.”
“You’ll get into trouble for that, but I’m going to allow it. Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No. If I like the person asking, and if she be comely, may I ask her if she ‘has’ a ‘girlfriend’?”
“You may.”
“Do you ‘have’ a ‘girlfriend’?”
“Stop cackling, you horrid woman. Are you on Facebook?”
“Facebook is for folk who prefer to have their minds 1lled with soft oats and whey. When this bridge year ends, I will get an Instagram.”
“Oh my God. Maggie, do not get Instagram.” “Here comes Sixteen!”
Arthur was striding up the street, bent slightly against a wind which didn’t exist. He was wearing a tweed jacket and looked like a period piece, but then again, so did Pimlico. I hadn’t seen him since the men had got back from Scotland and I asked him whether he enjoyed his trip.
He Aushed and mumbled, “Oh it was—lovely. Just—wonderful. Truly.”
He sat down next to me, his eyes on the ground. Margaret leaned across my lap and said, “Sixteen, do you ‘have’ a ‘boyfriend’? May I ‘add’ him on ‘Facebook?’”
While Arthur blushed deeper and muttered something about not teasing him, she looked up at me and said, “How did I fare?”
“Great. You’re a very modern woman. You’ve got your elbow in my crotch, by the way. I don’t mind, but you really ought to buy me a drink 1rst.”
“Behave, the pair of you. Before Forty-seven gets here. You know he’ll tell you oP.”
“He is there. With the canker of the devil’s own arse.” “Oh, Cardingham?” I asked, and squinted.
Graham was wearing his motorcycle leathers. The 1rst time he showed them to me—twisting his shoulders in the jacket so that the leather creaked—I thought I was having an allergic reaction because my tongue went heavy and my 1ngers started prickling. I glanced at Arthur. He looked like he was also allergic to leather.
“Hello,” said Graham. “Have you committed a heist together? You are looking very guilty.”
“You are looking like a frog who took a dip in ink,” said Margaret, the only one of us unmoved by the sight of a leather-clad Victorian.
“Good to see you too, Sixty-1ve. Thomas, you remember my bridge. I’m not sure if you’ve been formally introduced…”
“Ma’am,” said Cardingham, and it had such strong connotations of bitch that I was distracted from Graham, and Arthur and Graham, and Graham and Margaret.
“Hm. It’s nice to meet you properly, Lieutenant Cardingham.”
Cardingham’s features curdled. It occurred to me that Arthur (who was either gay or bisexual, had been marginalized in his own lifetime) and Graham (an explorer whose life had required Aexibility and forbearance) had ill prepared me for how a male “historical 1gure” might react to me. Cardingham was disgusted. He thought I should be below his boots and ashamed to meet his eye. Where Margaret had gained inePable ground, he had lost it. He burned with the anger of a child whose toys have been tidied away.
“Commander Gore’s spoke much on thee. Thou strikes me as canny, goodwife.”
Or did he say cunny? I wasn’t sure. His burr seemed awfully deliberate. Beside me, Margaret’s delicate little hands curled into claws.
When I was eight years old, I developed a keen awareness of the nonhuman world. Mai, Daddy, sister, home, school, teacher, bath, plate, chair, crayon, dress
—these were not, as I had thought, the building blocks of the universe but discrete entities in a world we shared with worms, mice, sparrows, woodlice, squirrels, moths, pigeons, cats, spiders. I had a wretched sense of 1ghting for space. They were everywhere, the nonhumans. They came from under things and out of shadows, they were higher than I could see in trees and deeper than I could penetrate in the soil. They could be in a room with me and I might not know it, though they’d know about me. A great, awful busyness was Aourishing all around me. I didn’t know how to process it. I became horribly afraid of spiders.
My parents, at the time, were trying to coax my 1ve-year-old sister out of her fear of the dark, which she expressed in whimpers. Not me. I screamed and
panicked. I climbed things, pulled down books and vases, sobbing hysterically. Some of the time there wasn’t even a spider, I’d just had the idea of a spider.
My mother, who had witnessed the sort of horrors that changed the way screams sounded, 1rst dealt with the panics by getting angry at me. Only now, as an adult, can I see that she was angry because I’d frightened her. It kept happening, and she tried to 1x it, but she made it worse. You see, she thought she could kill the spiders that scared me and prove how invulnerable a human was before an insect—but she’d been raised a Buddhist, and she was kind to animals, even the creepy ones. She’d botch it and hurt the spiders, which would then scuttle about half-maimed, raising more sobbing from me. And then she’d cry too, because she didn’t want to kill a spider, not really. She didn’t want to kill anything.
My father hit upon an eccentric solution. In the spring of the year I was eight, a fat tortoiseshell spider the size of a 1fty-pence coin had built her web in our garden, taking over the front of a bush. I hated that spider. I wouldn’t even step on the lawn once I knew it was there.
“What,” said my dad to me, “you don’t want to meet Missus Legs?”
“She got a missing leg now?” said my mother, exasperated. “What did you do to her? You squash her?”
“Missus Legs,” said my dad, mugging frantically. “The stately old lady who lives in the bush. Watching over her larder.”
“She got a ladder now, Cheesus Chrise,” muttered my mum. “Next thing she got a screwdriver, building a house, I have to phone the council for planning permission.”
My dad was undeterred. He was determined that his bit was going to win over my mum’s bit, which is at least half of successful co-parenting. He described Missus Legs as a 1ne old spinster, much respected by the rest of the insects—though she wasn’t technically an insect, he added pedantically—a hard worker, a craftswoman, a doyenne of the kill technique. He invited me to witness the disembowelment of a pesky, antisocial Ay, from a safe seat but with full commentary.
It worked. Missus Legs slipped from nonhuman to almost human—not a terribly pleasant human, of course, but a woman of means and not a little skill.
“Look,” said my dad, “do you see how she’s waiting in the corner? We can’t see it, but she’s 1ling her nails. She’s already done the hard work of making up the web, she spent four years at architecture school to learn how to do that, and now all she has to do is sit back and wait and let the prey come to her.”
I took the lessons of the patient Missus Legs into my adulthood. I rarely hustled, was indiPerent to grind. But I kept careful tabs and a great many secrets. When, at the Ministry, I found myself brieAy professionally isolated—with Adela absent, Quentin missing, Simellia cold in the corridors, Control’s focus on the “readability” experiments run by the Wellness team—I sank back on my web. Something had turned somewhere, something was wrong, but as I didn’t know what, I’d have to wait.
Though Quentin was AWOL, or possibly MIA, I kept 1ling my core reports with him in copy. I wrote to him: emails, texts, Teams chats, voice notes. I knew they were monitored; I counted on it, actually, because I wanted the Ministry to imagine I was open, aPectionate, and guileless. I let the messages ring with easy intimacies—nothing too personal, canteen gossip and remarks on what I was reading, mostly.
It paid oP in the early autumn. When I came down for breakfast one morning, I found Graham at the counter with a dictionary and a tin of protein powder, performing exegesis on the label.
“‘Bite silk minotaur,’” he said. “Er. Good morning?”
He held up a card oblong—a violently prosaic postcard with a picture of Buckingham Palace, which could have been taken at any point in the last 1fty years and sold at almost any shop in the greater metropolitan area. “That’s what it says on the back of this,” he said. “A code, perhaps? Is that how billets-doux work in this era? Do I have to defend your honor? Good morning, by the by.”
Quentin risked a lot with that postcard, including that I’d know that the truncated poetry on the back referred to a speci1c location available only on an app that assigned every square foot of earth on the planet three words. It was on the heath—a wide-open space, brave to the sky and the passersby.
There was no time or date. I went out to the heath after work, for the post- emails constitutional that I’d often described to Quentin in my unanswered
messages. I could see him from meters away. He looked so quotidian. He was wearing a baseball cap and the sheer ordinariness of the vision put my eyes on mute. A clever tactic, hiding in plain sight.
“Quentin. Nice drip. Why don’t you call me anymore?” “That’s con1dential,” he said.
“How are you?”
“I’m being monitored.”
“Oh? Right now? Cheers for the fucking warning.”
“No. But. Where I sleep. Where I go. I have limited permissions. The Ministry—”
He broke oP. Closer, I could smell sour breath and the alkali perfume of some kind of skin medication. He spoke to my collarbone. He was clearly unwell, or so I thought. I softened.
“Quentin. Are you all right? Do you need help?”
“Can I trust you?” he blurted out. I knew then that he was sickening, and the cumulative pressures of the time-travel project had crushed him. Quentin the former 1eld agent would never have asked me if he could trust me, because he would have known I could lie. I had to talk him down, soothe him out, so I took the role I knew it was most comfortable to cast me in—Simellia had already given me the lines.
“Yes, of course you can. I’m worried about the project too. You’ve read my 1le. You must have assumed that I know what it’s like to be the pioneer. The experiment.”
A sunrise of hope on his face. He nodded, eyes on that distant horizon where the genocide took place. What a strange character people make of me.
“Do you remember that sketch you gave me?” he asked. “Yes,” I said—neutrally, this time.
“I think it’s a weapon. I think it’s a weapon that doesn’t exist yet, except it’s here. And—I’m pretty sure I’ve seen what it does. It is. Fucking awful.”
I reached out and took his hand, in a way that I hope he found comforting, but also in such a way that I could subtly slide two 1ngers down his sleeve. His pulse sped against my 1ngertips.
“That’s worrying,” I said slowly.
He yanked his hand back.
“I know you don’t believe me,” he said quickly. “I wouldn’t either. But I can prove it. This project isn’t about scienti1c advancement. It’s about a weapon.”
The idea that the Ministry were operating aboveboard was simply silly to me
—progress is not achieved by coloring inside the lines—but it struck me that Quentin was a risk to the bridge–expat environment because he was either a cadet whistleblower or else paranoid and delusional. Either way, because he was my handler, I felt him like a woodworm in my ark. If he was right, and if he squealed, then I’d be among the excoriated and punished, and my options would diminish to turning in the circle of lashes. If he was wrong, well, I’d let a madman walk away unhandled, and I doubted there were promotion prospects in that.
“Look,” I said to him, “the bridges are integral to the project, and I’m the bridge of the most successfully adjusted expat. They can’t touch me. Bring me the proof. And then I can take it from there.”
I forgot to tell you the end of the spider story. I started visiting Missus Legs. At the time I was working my way through Alice in Wonderland, and I’d go out to read to her, stumbling over Lewis Carroll’s sinister lullabies. I liked the dignity with which Missus Legs appeared to listen, her cherubic stillness among the gossamer panes. And then—so fast I could only express it in plosives—kkkkk! bbbbb!—out from her corner to seize a stuck Ay. I’d slam the book shut and watch her work.
I reached the lament of the Mock Turtle during the season of butterAies. A cluster of pupae on the branches of my dad’s yellow rosebush split to reveal scraps of wing. As the butterAies dried and stretched, I noted the grotesque Aamboyance of their coloring. ButterAies demand so much attention. A spider just wants to eat.
I reached out and pinched a half-1nished butterAy. It felt almost furry—the microscopic scales, hours old, disintegrating under my 1ngers. A tug, a Aick, and
I’d thrown it into the web. It struggled for a very long time before Missus Legs was done.
I’d tell this story when I was drunk, to friends at quiet dinner parties or to the men who’d called at my port in the years before I knew Graham. Invariably, they’d think it was a story about my little girl brutality. Who feeds a butterAy to a spider? But I always thought the story was about something else. Of course I was still afraid of spiders. I was eight years old. Missus Legs had a dozen eyes and sucked the life out of the living. Yes, I was still afraid of spiders. I had simply found the only way my child’s mind could conceive of placating the fear. Join up. Take a wing. Get to work.
Autumn stomped on. The days moldered and dampened, like something lost at the back of the fridge. No matter the weather, there were puddles of brackish rain slung across the pavements.
In early October, Margaret caught a cold.
Over the course of more than three hundred and 1fty years, the common cold had mutated. Margaret’s body was astonished into severe illness. She was removed from her bridge accommodation to a Ministry ward.
Adela called an emergency meeting in her usual meeting room.
“We need to infect all of them,” said Ralph. “Get Sixteen-sixty-1ve to sneeze on them, and then keep them under observation on the wards.”
“It could kill the Sixteen-hundreds,” said Ivan, who was Cardingham’s bridge and whose voice was laden with the suggestion that this wouldn’t be an altogether bad thing.
“The only time they’ve been on those wards was after the traumatic extraction process,” said Simellia. “It could be triggering.”
“Oh, triggering,” said Ralph. “And we don’t want to trigger them.”
“No, we don’t, Ralph. We want them to remain as mentally and physically robust as possible. It is quite literally our job to ensure that.”
It was a fractious meeting. Nothing exposes the seams of a group faster than the fraught world of care. More than death, care reveals too much about a
personality to ever be discussed neutrally. Vaccines, palliative care, capacity to consent to treatment, what constituted serious illness, the use and abuse of a taxpayer-funded system: try them on a dinner party and watch the pack animal bite its way through the skin.
I suggested that, to assure Margaret she would be coming off the wards and not pushed backward through the extraction system, we could arrange for the other expats to video call and talk to her.
“Yes,” said Simellia distantly, “I can arrange that.” “Oh, I didn’t mean that you should have to—”
“Thanks, Simellia,” said Adela wearily. “If there’s no AOB, I’d like to make my recommendations to the Secretary…”
Adela was of the “never been to the GP in my life because I’m not a pussy” school of care, and nothing changed. If the expats were dangerously ill, they’d be removed to the wards and never mind the trigger; if they could get a grip and deal with it at home, they should.
Simellia organized a group video call to Margaret’s bedside, negotiating with the Wellness team as if they were hostage takers. The four of us tried to comfort an upset, disorientated Margaret over Zoom. (The expats were disappointed by how clumsy the software was; they had not expected lags, pixelation, or sound issues in this, the brave new future.)
“They have pierced me with needles! I fear ’twill dispatch me…. Were these not the very tools with which we were plagued at 1rst?”
She held up her white arms, rattling with IV cannulas. Arthur and Graham both Ainched.
“I remember those,” said Arthur hoarsely. “But I didn’t until now…. Forty- seven, do you…?”
“Yes.”
“That ward… Maggie, can you tilt the camera? Good God. Was I in that ward?”
Graham didn’t respond, but he turned very pale. Simellia caught my eye, and for a moment we were united again, touching glances across a room. Then she took her face back and began to briskly discuss a schedule of calls with the on-
site member of the Wellness team, who blurred the background as soon as they had control of the laptop.
Margaret only spent six days in the Ministry before she was well enough for release. Those six days were bitterly anxious, and I rendered my nailbeds dog food–ish. But once she was out, I felt silly for my lack of faith in modern medicine. It was just a cold, I told myself. Of course she would recover from a cold.
Arthur came down with the bug next, but his temporal closeness to contemporary colds meant he was able to remain with Simellia for the miserable duration. Shortly afterward, I caught it.
“Don’t come near me,” I warned Graham.
“I’m 1ne,” he said airily. “A mere catarrh in clement weather? I went snow- blind in the northern wastes. I have no fear of a cough.”
I sniPed gloopily through a mask, a hangover from the coronavirus pandemic some several years beforehand. I was trying to cook borbor, but the mere act of measuring stock for the rice was exhausting.
“Let me do it,” he said.
Through snot and eyeballs as hot as peppered eggs, I gave him instructions for cooking borbor, which I kept calling congee. I referred to the youtiao as cha kway and the spring onions as scallions, as I was too sickly to remember which languages I was supposed to be using. I left him to let it simmer, and despite my idiosyncratic instruction, he produced something serviceable. He brought it up to my bedroom.
“Are you decent?” “Literally never. Kkuugh.”
“Might you… attempt decency?”
“You won’t be able to see anything, if that’s your concern. Hkk. Gggh. Oh, that looks nice. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You seem tense. First time in a lady’s boudoir?” “I have sisters. Had. What’s that?”
“Hair dryer. Hnnghh. Kkkgh. Yuck. Sorry. It 1res hot air directly at your head.”
“How useful. What’s this?”
“My alarm clock. It plays me birdsong in the mornings. Hkk. That half- moon lights up to resemble sunrise, so I don’t wake up in the dark.”
“What a clever invention. What are these?” “Contraceptive pills.”
“Contra…?”
“I take one a day to prevent pregnancy. Ggggh. Not that I’m having any sex.” He put the pills down hurriedly, Aushing, and muttered, “‘Having’ ‘sex,’
what a revolting term. I hope I never hear it expressed again.”
For a day or so, things were, once again, misAavored and uncomfortable between us. Graham’s relationship to sexuality was a mystery. I had no idea if he’d ever had a sex life, or if he wanted one. The most his Ministry psychoanalyst had been able to get out of him on the comparative boisterousness and acquisitiveness of twenty-1rst-century sex was that he found it terribly eighteenth. I had a copy of his medical records from his extraction, and he hadn’t tested positive for, or been treated for, any STIs. Given the prevalence of prostitution in Victorian England, the nonexistence of reliable barrier contraception in his era, and the fact that he was a sailor, this suggested he was either a virgin or very lucky. But then again, I knew enough about his biography to know that he was very, very lucky.
Inevitably, he caught my cold.
I was 1rst alerted to this because I heard the muAed snap of the bed frame at ten in the morning—by which time, he had normally been up for several hours. I knocked, received a coughing 1t in response, and opened the door.
“I’m not dressed!” he croaked, sitting up.
“You are perfectly well-covered,” I said—a lie. The V of the T-shirt he wore— the 1rst time I’d seen him in a T-shirt—came to a point on the Aat of his sternum, revealing curls of black hair like a page of question marks across his chest.
“You… do not look well,” I added. “Don’t tell the Ministry.”
“If you get any sicker—”
“I am 1ne. I simply need a day or so to mimic you and remain indolent.”
“Don’t sass me from your sickbed.”
I reached out, and he drew the covers up to his throat in a parody of chastity. “I’m going to check your temperature,” I said, and Aattened my palm over his
forehead before he could Ainch out of my grasp. He looked up at me—cautious, watchful—and visibly tried to anticipate my next move.
His skin was shockingly hot to touch. “You have a high fever,” I said, pulling my hand back. His sweat glimmered on my palm.
“I am 1ne. Truly.” “I’m going to call—” “Don’t.”
“Maggie and Arthur. They’ve had it already. They might be able to compare how badly gone you are.”
Margaret and Arthur arrived within half an hour.
“Forty-seven!” wailed Margaret, Aopping onto the bed. “You look beastly!
Hanged be, this sack is soaked!”
“He’s running a horrid temperature. Look. Feel his forehead.” “Sixteen, get these women oP me,” he said, a little desperately.
“Perhaps some tea?” Arthur suggested. Margaret and I traipsed out, with Margaret pulling at her sleeves.
“Oh, monstrous! His face is as soiled linens!” “I can hear you.”
“You mun remove those vile garments,” Margaret called to Arthur. “With a blade, should he resist it. Their vapors will worsen his malady.”
We went downstairs. Margaret suggested that an apple would be a welcome victual (her words), so I put the kettle on and started to cut an apple. Margaret told me that modern apples tasted both bland and unpleasantly tart, and I started explaining intensive farming. Upstairs, we could hear the low voices of the men.
There was the sound of heavy footsteps, then the domestic thunder of water: Arthur, presumably, was running a bath. More low voices, this time at a ricochet speed that suggested argument. Then, suddenly, Arthur said, or rather snapped, “You can barely bloody sit upright. I’m not going to leave you to drown. For God’s sake, Gray—” and then he said something else, soft and fast. I couldn’t
hear the words, but I raised my eyebrows in sympathy because I recognized the melody of pleading.
The voices stopped for a few minutes. Margaret and I exchanged glances. Then there was a hollow splash, which sounded very much like someone being dropped bodily into a tub of water. Margaret grinned. Upstairs, I heard a petulant “I can wash my own hair, thank you.”
“Maybe we should eat this apple and cut him another one,” I suggested. “It’ll just go brown.”
Margaret bit into a slice. She had bright, even teeth. I wondered what she was using to clean them in the seventeenth century that had left them so pearlescent. She swallowed, and the white column of her throat contracted prettily. I got confused and went to make the tea.
“I have attended many ‘screens’ of the season at the British Film Institute,” Margaret announced to my back.
“Oh yes? What are they showing?”
“Films from the land of Korea,” she said. “They place the script in English at the base of the screen so that we might follow. I have seen many romances.”
“Have you watched much old Hollywood stuP? I think you’d really like it.” “What is ‘Hollywood’?”
I smiled. It was so hard not to treat the expats like blank slates onto which I might write my opinions. I understood the adage “knowledge is power” whenever I looked into Margaret’s face, the sultry peach color of her mouth and her acne glowing with unprinted newness. There was something hauntingly young about all of them, a scarcity of cultural context that felt teenaged, and I didn’t know if my fascination with it was maternal or predatory. Every time I gave Graham a book, I was trying to shunt him along a story I’d been telling myself all my life.
Margaret propped her chin in her hand and said, “Is Carol a 1lm of ‘Hollywood’? I took much pleasure in that.”
She twinkled at me, and I twinkled back. She was just too charming; untwinkling was not an option. When she was alone with me, she pitched her voice slightly lower than she did around the men. Even for her, girlishness was a habit that was hard to break—for safety, for camouAage. I knew that.
Sometimes, just under my tongue, I felt the exclamation marks I put into my speech, demarcating the sentences I didn’t mind being broken oP from my agency, as long as I was assured I would be protected from the outcome.
Graham was adamant about not informing the Ministry about his illness. It was the closest I had ever seen him to entreating. I thought about it a lot. I liked being entreated by him.
With the remedies of house and hearth, it took him a week and a half to get back to full strength. In this time, Arthur, Margaret, and I plied him with care and got on his nerves. He didn’t like to be touched or fussed over, and, after the 1rst few days, became tense with irritation when we tried. Arthur and I took it personally (Arthur was once almost reduced to tears). Margaret didn’t, so she was the only one who could get away with forcing him to accept help.
Despite how interesting I found Graham’s pleas for secrecy, by failing to report a signi1cant change in physical health or my meeting with Quentin, I was pushing my luck with the Ministry. I avoided going in for a couple of weeks, hoping to blend into the beige background of generalized bureaucracy. Toward the end of Graham’s convalescence, the Vice Secretary emailed me to let me know I’d been assigned a new handler, and I assumed I’d gotten away with it.
I took the tube in. The streets were beset with the cacophony of constant rain
—enough that the local councils had started prepping for a Aood.
Adela was sitting at Quentin’s old desk, hands neatly crossed over a small pile of paperwork, with an air of a wind-up doll about to be set into motion. She was visibly waiting for me, and her demeanor suggested that I’d missed my cue.
“Adela. Good to see you.” “Sit, please.”
“Er. Thanks. When will I meet my new handler?” “I am your new handler.”
I goggled at her. I must have looked like a demented bowling ball, because she added, “In light of Quentin’s defection, the Secretary and I considered it wisest if you and Eighteen-forty-seven were kept close to Control.”
The roof of my mouth abruptly dried. I unstuck my tongue from it like a strip of jerky.
“What do you mean, his defection?”
“He has attempted to make unauthorized contact with a man who claims to hold the rank of brigadier. Something to do with an irrelevant sketch by Eighteen-forty-seven.”
Time happened to me very quickly, and then very slowly. Panic as much as grief warps the way internal time works; I just had the wherewithal to wonder if this would be worth raising with the Wellness team.
“You know I gave the sketch to Quentin.”
“I do. I know you’ve met with him too.” She didn’t sound angry. Not even expectant. But she left her sentence trailing for me to catch.
“Look,” I said, “I think Quentin’s—a bit delusional. I’ve been trying to persuade him that I’m trustworthy. I don’t want him to lash out and leak things and endanger the project or Gra—Eighteen-forty-seven. You say he’s been slipping stuP to Defence via the Brigadier?”
“The man who appears to hold the rank of brigadier, yes. And his associate Salese.”
“What does ‘appear to hold the rank of brigadier’ mean?”
“He’s a spy. Not for Defence. I mean that he does not work for the British government in any capacity, and never has. He works for one of our allies— technically an ally—certainly not a country we were expecting to send intelligence agents into our sovereign territories. We knew from the beginning, but I thought—that is, the Secretary, Defence, and I thought—that it would be prudent to monitor him and establish the parameters of his mission before we alerted them, so that we could contain any fallout. Unfortunately he has since gone underground. As, it appears, has Quentin. You have been working with a traitor and aiding a saboteur. But you are… a good bridge.”
Even this, she said with brick-wall calm. I sensed retribution judiciously withheld, and I was bitterly grateful for her restraint. The way she watched my reaction reminded me of the stingingly intense way that the Brigadier had stared at me. As if they were both double-checking the whereabouts of my jugular vein.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, and lifted a thumb to my mouth to bite the skin.
“Don’t!” said Adela sharply.
I jumped an inch in my chair. She grimaced and bunched her hands into 1sts, so the knuckles bulged like marbles.
“You need to break that habit,” she said. “It’s a dangerous tell.”
You’re angry, maybe, that I could have been this callow. You think you would have seized the lever here, swung the tram over the empty track instead of toward the row of bound prisoners. You ask me why I wasn’t more suspicious. But naturally I was suspicious. Adela was shifting, elusive—her very face was inconsistent. Her reasons were bad, half-veiled. Then again, whose upper management am I not describing? Who trusts their workplace? Who thinks their job is on the side of right? They fed us all poison from a bottle marked “prestige,” and we developed a high tolerance for bitterness. I would have been more frightened if the pressure lifted, like an indoor cat struck by sudden rain.
Navy-blue nights wrapped the glum and shortening days like a bandage. Fine capillaries of winter threaded through the autumn air.
Because Graham lived with me—because he was the parameters of my life—I ceased to think of him as a man who was supposed to be dead. He was real to me. He got me into very real trouble. Shortly after my meeting with Adela, he put Arthur on the back of his motorbike and they sped over the boundary lines into the countryside, where they spent the day picking sloes for sloe gin and treading in mud and I spent the day panicking about the Brigadier 1nding them. Adela gave me a dressing-down for failing to ensure he had requested permission to leave. She was tonally indistinguishable from a parent reminding their bee- stung toddler that they’d told them not to shred the Aowers.
I gave Graham history’s squeakiest bollocking. He hardly paid it attention. He wanted to know how it was possible for the Ministry to know that he had crossed the boundary, or indeed where he was, and I was tongue-tied.
“Don’t worry about it,” I muttered.
“I wasn’t, but I will from now on,” he said.
Life is a series of slamming doors. We make irrevocable decisions every day. A twelve-second delay, a slip of the tongue, and suddenly your life is on a new road. I wonder what the winter of the bridge year would have looked like if I hadn’t frosted Simellia, or if I’d been less skeptical of Quentin. I hardly dare linger on the ways I changed Graham, forcing him down strange tracks as I uttered a new word or concept with accidentally Edenic signi1cance.
You can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up. It’s the same with oppression. You don’t gain any special knowledge from being marginalized. But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining the scaPolding of your oppression. You’ll 1nd the weak joints, the things you can kick in. When I look back at myself on the bridge year, I see that I thought I was doing something constructive, escaping exploitation by becoming exceptional. In fact, what I was doing was squeezing my eyes shut and singing la la la at the gathering darkness, as if the gathering darkness cared that I couldn’t see it.
One evening in early November I came home to the luscious mingled smells of cooking and smoking. Graham was sitting at the dining table with a cigarette between his lips, tapping at a laptop. He no longer needed several minutes to 1nd the letter “M,” but he typed with his index 1ngers alone, pecking out sentences.
“Hello. That smells nice. What is it?” “Hello. It’s stock for pho.”
“Phở.”
“Fur.”
“Close enough.”
Graham had developed an interest in Southeast Asian food. He asked me questions about what my mother cooked, ferrying tiny melamine bowls under
my mouth to check Aavors. Sometimes I saw the same concentration on his face as when he sketched the alien shapes of the transmission towers. He took in anecdotes about my childhood meals as if they would contribute to a portrait of a whole woman. He ignored the fact that mostly I cooked assorted chicken pieces on rice. I could tell him things about galangal, and he found that very profound.
I glanced into the saucepan. “Should it be boiling?”
“Oh—no—could you turn it down, please?” “Done. What are you doing?”
“Some form of naval college examination,” he said diffidently. “Oh,” I said, equally diffidently, and poked at the broth.
At the end of the bridge year, the expats had to begin the next stage of assimilation—they had to get jobs. He wanted to rejoin the navy, despite its unrecognizable modernization. I wanted him in a role that didn’t require him to be at sea for months, possibly years, at a time. It was too soon, I told myself. Whatever Adela said, he wasn’t ready, he’d barely left London, let alone land. But I wanted him to stay for other reasons too. It was humiliating to know that about myself and to say nothing into his implacable placidity.
I wandered over to look at the screen and got a shock. On the laptop was a segment, not (despite what the browser’s address bar said) from a navy-issue pro1ciency test, but from one of the 1eld agent exams. I recognized it—I’d failed it twice during my stint in Languages.
It occurred to me that a 1eld agent who didn’t set oP scanners, who might be undetectable by modern technology, would be a boon to the 1eld. I thought of the strange slack he’d been granted, his welcome on the shooting ranges, the indulgence he’d been shown as he wandered around the Ministry asking people what they were doing, and why, and how.
I didn’t realize I was falling back in horror until I saw the wall become the ceiling.
“Here—what’s wrong—”
He caught me and it was, immediately, the most he had ever touched me. My nails sank into his wool-clad upper arm.
“Nothing… dizzy spell…” “Sit down.”
“No. I don’t need to. It’s all right. I’m all right.”
I wasn’t all right. At close range, I could smell his skin, even through the cigarette smoke. His grip on me loosened. His hands hovered along my back, lighter than the passage of dragonAies over water.
“I am going to ash on you,” he murmured. “Put it out.”
One hand Aattened between my shoulder blades. The other dispatched the cigarette.
“Can you stand?” “Yes.”
“Might you… unhook your claws, then?” “Oh. Sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
This was also the most I had ever touched him, and I wondered if he had noticed, if he had been measuring touch the way I had.
In the background, Graham’s laptop had been providing an inappropriate soundtrack (Motown again). It clocked into its next track, which was the Beatles cover of “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me.” I started laughing—partly because it was the most ludicrous song that could play at that moment, and partly because it felt quintessentially Victorian of him to hate the Beatles, which he did.
“Oh, it’s these awful caterwaulers,” he said, dropping his hands.
I laughed again. I wanted to think about anything other than Graham as a 1eld agent at the Ministry.
“They’re good! This version’s better than the original. Better for dancing.” He raised an eyebrow. “It is impossible to dance to this appalling wailing.”
“It isn’t. Here.” I moved a hand up to his shoulder. He hesitated with his whole body, like a piece of paper lifting abruptly in the wind. It passed. He took my other hand and touched my waist with a heartbreaking vagueness.
“See?”
“This is not dancing. This is—swaying.”
“And even that you’re doing oP-rhythm.”
He sighed. God, he was a dreadful dancer. StiP and keyless. Victims of hangings kicked with more vim. I’d never in my life wanted anyone as badly as I wanted him.
We drifted across the kitchen, and he spun me, missing every beat in the song. When he drew me back in, he held me more 1rmly. The tips of his 1ngers tested the small of my back. I could see the green rings in his eyes, vivid and strange as aurora borealis.
“You’re a musician. How can you have no sense of timekeeping?” “You are a larger instrument than a Aute.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls.”
He tugged me suddenly toward him, and my heart jumped into my throat. I made a noise. In fact, I said, “Woof.” Later that night I’d lie in bed with my 1sts balled up by my temples, thinking bitterly, Fucking “woof.”
He was so close I couldn’t make out the individual features of his face—just the curve of his mouth, softened by a small smile. He lowered his head, and I felt his breath stir the hair by my ear.
“Behave yourself,” he said. “Or I will put you in the stock.” Then he let me go.
Christmas was coming in, the way it does in London—Aat rain, Aat wind, and the folding down of the horizons. The city looked like it was painted by a lesser impressionist. Things died in their usual way: the plants, the sunlight.
I was at the Ministry when we got the weather warning, running through the pornography protocols with the Wellness team assigned to Graham. We all had access to the expats’ internet search histories. Arthur googled so much (“macarena,” “brewdog,” “clubbing,” “ballroom,” “vogue,” “vogue dance,” “madonna,” “poppers,” “rimming”) that Simellia had been referred to the Home Office deputation for their guidance on adapting to life in the UK. Margaret looked up naked women almost as much as Cardingham did, but she also looked at a lot of clothed women. She’d had a two-week stint as a “Swiftie”
but ran out of energy for the speed at which the discourse mutated and her basic disinterest in the music, much to Ralph’s relief. She’d found out about 1lm torrenting with alarming rapidity.
The reason that Graham was of especial interest to the Wellness team was that Graham had worked out that the laptop at his disposal was reporting to the Ministry. I’d been waiting with a mixture of dread and keen curiosity for his 1rst pornographic search, which we’d been cautioned to expect and had material from the Wellness team to deal with the arrival of. It was a gruesome brie1ng. We had to notify Control immediately if the material contained children, animals, or corpses, but were reminded that all the expats except Arthur came from eras in which the age of consent was twelve and marriage was not unheard of at 1fteen. Violent pornography was not considered problematic (the Cardingham clause) but had to be accounted for alongside the ordinary behavioral reports and psych assessments. We did not have the option to have the contents of their X-rated browsing redacted—this defeated the purpose of monitoring them— but on-site counselors, the Ministry assured us, were always available if we saw anything we found upsetting.
When Graham got online, as he did not call it, and learned to peck at the keyboard with the elegance and speed of a badly burned amphibian, I imagined what might turn up on my reports from the Ministry’s search history database
—“bosoms,” “tight lacing,” “stockings”—and spasmed with embarrassment. I was sick on the anticipation that I’d learn he was sexually cracked in some way, or worse, only interested in blond debutantes. One of his 1rst searches was charmingly housewifely: “Most challenging recipes”; “How to make cheese souAé”; “What is miso paste?”; “Where to buy miso paste”; “How long has Japan been open to Europe?” A day or so after I’d read this report, I received another that listed the following search terms:
“Hello horrible cat”; “Do you see all that I see?”; “Or do you read my mind for recipe ingredients?”; “Will you bring home coconut cream?”
That the time stamp on these search terms suggested it had taken him a full six minutes to type this out did not undermine the sense he had slid his pawn to
my queen. Yes—the evening I saw the 1rst search, I’d bought miso paste on my homeward grocery shop, head empty as a scooped melon. I was so used to miso as a culinary concept that I didn’t register my basket as subconsciously inAuenced; only Graham, dazzled by the Orient, noticed.
When I got home, he asked me, “Well? Did you bring the coconut cream?” and smiled with real warmth at the way shame changed my posture. I could never eat miso anything again without tasting failure.
The psychoanalyst Graham worked with—or rather, withstood being asked questions by—was a Freudian. I found this charming and always made an ePort to dress up nicely for debrie1ngs with him, as I imagined that he had all sorts of crackpot ideas about women, and I was hoping he’d diagnose me as a sexual sadist or something chic like that.
“Repression at this level can cause serious damage,” he was saying. “More even than defensive othering, it could seriously inhibit Eighteen-forty-seven’s ability to form meaningful relationships in this era.”
“Granted, but he knows we’re watching.”
“Perhaps you haven’t introduced him to incognito windows?” “Of course I have. But we can still see those.”
“He doesn’t need to know that. Frankly, I’m concerned that his methods for expressing need are so controlled. It suggests a profound trauma somewhere in his past, buried beyond processing. I’d like to go through the highlighted points in his biography….”
I thought of the Battle of Navarino—Graham would have been eighteen at the time, and would have witnessed such interesting sights as the cannon- disemboweled bodies of sailors hanging oP the rigging—and then I thought about losing an entire life and home and family in less than a minute, and then I thought of my mother. Repression can be a useful tool for feeding your family, sending your children to school, in spite of—
“We’ve covered this material,” I said, at the same time as one of the operators stuck their head around the door and chirruped, “Weather alert!”
“What’s that?” “Storm coming.”
“Shit. Thought we had until Tuesday?”
“They’re saying it’s coming now. You’d better get oP home or you might not be able to get home. How’re you getting home?”
“Bike.”
“Oof. I wouldn’t.”
You don’t become a regular cyclist in London without developing a carapace of “fuck my haters,” so I cycled home anyway. As the operator predicted, this was a mistake. The wind shook me like a beetle in a matchbox. After bashing myself against a number of surfaces, including the pavement, I hopped oP and began walking my bike home.
It was full dark and starting to rain by the time I was about two miles from the house. Thunder sounded. The big cutlery cupboard in the sky had fallen oP the wall.
Our street was in the early stages of overAow when I reached it. A lively river Aoor, applauding with raindrops, had replaced the road. I could make out the nauseous glimmer of high-vis jackets. There was shouting, some of it cheerful. The council had already delivered the sandbags—sent by trucks with wheels so big they looked like a rude joke—and people were 1xing up domestic barricades. Blitz spirit, the newspapers called this sort of thing, as if either climate catastrophe or the Blitz was a national holiday. This stoic jollity was how we’d introduced the Second World War to the expats, by the way—Arthur had been so distressed to learn we’d gone in for global seconds that it seemed like the kindest option. We emphasized the scrappy heroism of Dunkirk, the selAessness of evacuee hosts, and, of course, the Blitz spirit. Still, we had not told them about the death camps.
Someone in the middle of the road, giving directions, had an outrageously powerful storm light. I mermaided bad-temperedly toward the light. I was only really approaching this person so that I could be told oP for biking and feel even worse. I was astonished when I heard, “Oh! Poor drowned cat.”
“Graham?!”
He smiled at me from his private halo. “Hello,” he said. “I heard the storm warning on the radio and thought I’d better do something.”
“‘Do something’?”
“Where’m I putting this lot, Mr. Gore?” someone called from the truck.
Graham waded toward them. I followed—slowly, hampered by my bike. “Where’d you get all this equipment?” I shouted to him.
“What’s that?”
“The high-vis? That bloody great light?”
“Fantastic, isn’t it? The walls need to be three foot at least, Anton.” “Don’t got enough bags for that.”
“Where’s the driver? I’ll speak to him—” “Graham,” I said.
He turned and smiled at me again, gallantry on automatic rerun.
“You’d better go inside,” he said. “You’ll catch a cold in those wet clothes.”
He swished toward the truck. The bike and I rattled after him. I felt like a compass experiencing a sudden shift in magnetic north.
“Graham. Is that Ministry gear? Why do you have it? How do you have it?
Because I know very well you weren’t issued it.”
“I thought it might be useful,” he said. That was all the explanation I got, because at this point a pipe must have exploded and the street turned into a waterslide.
We got through the storm with minimal damage to the neighborhood. It was my 1rst time realizing we lived in a neighborhood, not just in a Ministry former safe house. Graham had been aware of the neighborhood for longer than me—he knew, by name, several people in the street, our neighbors. He talked to them, which I thought was perverted. Between this and the number of unissued Ministry items I began to spot around the house, I realized I had not been keeping as close an eye on Graham as I should have been—or rather, I’d been paying attention to his aPect and not his actions.
When Graham was theoretical to me and I’d been researching him as a dead man, I’d run across a blog post by a well-known Franklin expedition historian. It was about a missing chronometer, Arnold 294, which was listed as “Lost in the Arctic regions with Erebus” in naval records despite having last been used on the Beagle, on the coast of Australia, in 1837. I knew Graham’s service record like an
alphabet, so I knew he’d been 1rst lieutenant on the Beagle just before he was ordered to Erebus. The historian came to the same conclusion: Lieutenant (as he was then) Gore was the reason Arnold 294 vanished in the North.
There must be missing records, the historian suggested, because it would be very odd for Lieutenant Gore to have retained the chronometer. Early in our cohabitation, I asked Graham about the discrepancy, and he put up a winsome smile.
“Oh,” he said, “that was a terribly good chronometer.”
“So you applied for permission to keep it, or what? How did it work?”
“Well, sly cat,” said Graham, “as you are always insisting, I used my initiative.”
I laughed so much that I forgot to push it. I should have learned my lesson from this conversation, but it seemed that no one else in Graham’s life had, including his captains. People liked him and so they imagined that he agreed with them—all likable people know how to be a Aattering mirror—and he could make himself a perfect man of wax (I recalled, once again, Captain Fitzjames’s pen portrait of a very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers). I had a vague sense that his belonging was conditional, and that it suited rather than behooved him to be allied with the navy or the empire or the Ministry, but I didn’t think about this much further. He was allied to Graham Gore, he was pragmatic, and he seemed to like me. That was enough.
I was going to visit my parents for the weeklong Christmas break—the only holiday the central bridge teams were granted. The expats, minus poor Anne Spencer, were repairing to a cottage on the Kent coast, with a couple of members of the Wellness team to oversee their festivities. To me, it sounded like a work social hastening to an apocalyptic event, but Graham visualized a cottage by the sea as a man who has walked through an abattoir visualized a scalding shower.
“It will be nice to see a 1re made of 1re. Walls made of wall,” he said. “When men were real men, eh. What’s this house made of, then?” “Plastic pipes and chipboard.”
A few days before we parted ways, he invited Margaret and Arthur over for dinner. He was making an extravagant seafood risotto, which called for both sparkling wine and brandy, when Arthur arrived.
“Hi, Arthur!”
“Hello, dear girl. I brought you a liquid apology.” Arthur handed me a bottle of plum-colored liquid. “Sloe gin?”
“Sloe vodka! I’d never drunk vodka before. I thought it might be an interesting experiment…. I am sorry Forty-seven and I got you into hot water when we went hawthorn-picking. I had no idea we’d crossed the boundary line. I just cling on and let him do the directions.”
I mumbled something vague and conciliatory, but fortunately Arthur was not nearly so curious as Graham about why the Ministry were able to track them to the three square feet they stood in; I think he was more embarrassed that he and Simellia hadn’t ever hosted us, and probably never would.
Margaret arrived and collared me by the front door. She was dressed, with her usual eccentricity, in periwinkle velvet Aares and a cashmere jumper embroidered with an angry-looking duck.
“Pledge you will not chide me,” she whispered, fastening her hand around my wrist.
“I’ll pledge nothing of the sort. What have you done?” “I have engaged ‘Tinder’ on my phone.”
“Maggie! You only just passed the acc exam.”
Margaret waved her phone at me. There was a slightly scuPed holographic sticker on the back, from some children’s TV show aimed at stoned adults. It felt funny to live in a world where she knew what it was and I didn’t.
“I’m wise enow to write love letters,” she said. “I have been so wise passing long. It is but a new medium.”
“What’s the backstory the Ministry gave you? That you went to 1nishing school in Switzerland and now you’re doolally?”
“Yes. I bestrode the mountains in my dirndl and caroled with the birds and sheep. Now the city miasmas have undone me, and I am a scrambled egg in woman’s casing.”
“Yeah, right, sounds plausible. Show me your pro1le, then. Huh. Well. That’s a good pic. Quite… direct.”
“At least pledge not to mention to the men. You know well how those clodpolls mutter.”
I toppled her into the kitchen, still talking. Margaret was not looking forward to spending her Christmas in Cardingham’s vicinity.
“Perhaps a pox will take him ere we leave the city. Or a car will snap his legs.
Or—”
“That is very unchristian, Sixty-1ve,” said Graham gravely, handing her a glass of sparkling wine.
“I mark you did not oPer to board with him.”
“Well, Arthur and I shared a room in Scotland. I know that his snoring is tolerable.”
Arthur blushed a bewildered pink and cleared his throat.
“I say, chaps, I brought along a fantastic little device. I think you’ll 1nd it interesting.”
He fumbled in his bag. He extracted two pieces of something which looked electronic, in a stolid 1980s sort of way, and connected them. A wireless whine 1lled the kitchen.
“Is that a theremin?” I asked.
“An adaptation,” said Arthur, proudly. “Will you pass your hand along it?” I waved my hand over the device’s sensors. It squealed mournfully.
“Sixty-1ve, you try.”
Margaret stuck her hand into the theremin’s sensor 1eld. Nothing. I reached out and gently laid my hand over hers. The theremin sang wheezily. I pulled back, and it stopped.
“All right, Sixty-1ve… tell it you’re there.”
Margaret tossed her shining hair over her shoulder and frowned at the theremin. After a few seconds, her hand trembled, and the theremin squeaked.
“I cannot master it so well,” she said, pulling back. “Each time I reach for my ‘hereness’ I fall back into my ‘thereness.’”
Arthur hovered his hand over the charged space. The theremin stuttered between silence and song.
“You’re controlling whether it can sense you?” I asked, amazed.
“Yes! It’s not easy. As Maggie says, it’s a bit of a bother to keep your ‘hereness’ and ‘thereness’ lined up.”
“How do you know how to control it?”
Margaret and Arthur exchanged glances. “It’s… hard to explain,” said Arthur. “We didn’t know we could feel it at all until we arrived here.”
Graham came over and stood between us. He ran his 1ngers through the air above the machine, as if dabbling them in a stream. The machine popped once but was otherwise silent.
“Is there any system to these noises?” he asked.
“It’s just the C major scale,” murmured Arthur. “Starts on the left.”
Graham reached out with both hands and grimaced with concentration. He spread his 1ngers and bit his lower lip. Then, abrupt and cackling, came the opening notes of “Greensleeves.” We burst out laughing, and he treated the three of us to one of his rare, full-wattage, full-dimpled grins.
I took the slow train back to my family’s house. The vague grays of the long London suburbs gave out onto tamed greenery and dual carriageways, to squat interminable supermarkets at the station edges and the bridges to towns without grandeur. The landscape abbreviated. Then I was home and the feeling of home closed in on me.
My sister had got back before me and she greeted me at the front door with a frown and soapy 1sts. “The camping stove is leaking oil everywhere, and I’m trying to wash the oil out,” she said, by way of explanation. “Give me your bag. You look tired as hell.”
“Hello. Nice to see you too.”
On Christmas Eve, my family eat yao hon—Cambodian hot pot. The hot pot we keep warm at the table by means of an ancient camping stove; the discs of rice paper for yao hon we soften in bowls 1lled with hot water, which more than one guest has mistaken for a 1nger bowl. From the dining room, I could hear my parents bickering over the camping stove’s remains.
I called, “Hi, Dad; hi, Mai,” and there was only the barest modulation in their back-and-forth as they came into the hallway to hug me.
There were more piles of things around the house. The paperwork had started breeding in captivity. Plastic takeaway boxes stood on supra-cluttered surfaces, crammed with hand sanitizers, Band-Aids, elastic bands, bottle openers, and Post-its covered in parental hieroglyphics. My sister jogged upstairs and underarm-bowled my bag into my bedroom. I heard the crash of a column of papers.
“How’s the spying?” my dad asked jovially.
I Ainched before I remembered: on my ascendance to the time-travel project, the Ministry had created a shell role for me in Languages, as a translator on a top secret project. My family assumed I’d been promoted to the role of Miss Moneypenny.
“Yeah, good,” I said. “Phone tapping the innocent and that. Cleaning my gun at my desk and so on.”
“Do they give you a gun?” asked my mum, alarmed. “Guns are dangerous, do you know?”
“It was a joke, Mai. I’m just joking.” “You joke with a gun?”
“Mai,” said my sister wearily. “It’s 1ne. She’s just not very funny.” “Okay,” said my mum philosophically.
My sister was ratty with me because, about ten days before, we’d fought, in the brief but explosive way that we did. She’d published, in a well-read online magazine, a story based on an incident from our childhood, of our mum accidentally leaving the hand brake oP our parked car and the car rolling into a neighbor’s Ford Astra. The neighbors came out to berate and threaten my mother in increasingly racially loaded ways—dangerous, irresponsible, stupid woman can’t understand me, what are you even saying, accent, gibbering, maybe it’s different where you’re from but here we have values. My mother was distressed and her English deteriorated, which didn’t help her case. When my sister and I ran out the front door to see what was going on, I started crying—I was nine or ten—and the neighbors claimed she’d pinched me to make me cry, for sympathy. They didn’t let up until my dad, a white man, came ambling up the street, home
from work. Suddenly they were happy to back oP and see the insurance paperwork.
I hated this memory, had vaulted and bricked it up many years before, and I’d been horri1ed to see it written up, all our wounds open to the dirty world. I’d phoned my sister. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” I barked. “Do you think our mother is material for your writing career? How could you be so sel1sh?”
My sister spiraled into aggressive defensiveness. Something something write what I want something something radical ugly truth something something vengeance in record something something our voices our narrative.
“You humiliated her,” I snarled back. “You humiliated all of us.” She’d hung up. This was our 1rst time talking in person.
My sister maintained that her work was a sort of reclamation, a space-taking practice in protest of a childhood spent in squeezed spaces. That all she was telling was the truth, as if the Truth was a sort of puri1er that turned mud and plasma into clean water by judicious application. I didn’t know who read her writing, other than people who already agreed with her. To me, it felt like she’d chosen to hang a target around our necks. I didn’t understand how anyone could 1nd power in a show of vulnerability. Power was inAuence, was money, was the person holding the gun.
As I watched my family begin the complicated process of resuscitating the camping stove, I had a sense of terri1c coldness, as if a wall had fallen away and left the room exposed to the December night. Perhaps I should have a gun? The Brigadier undoubtedly had one, maybe even Salese, and now I knew they were threats—or, at least, entirely unsanctioned. What had the Brigadier gleaned from his access to the Ministry? Did he know where my family lived? My mother, who had seen enough terror for six lifetimes? My father, so anxious about conAict he hoarded decade-old parking tickets? My sister, who thought herself brave, who thought rolling soft-side up would shame the dominant animal? Was I safe? Wasn’t I Ministry?
The expats texted me over the Christmas break. Arthur sent me multiple texts that he persisted in writing as telegrams (47 + BRIAN ON FLUTE + GUITAR STOP WOT A RACKET STOP ATTEMPTED CAYLEE STOP OBVIOUS MISSPELLING STOP ABSOLUTE
DELIGHT END), and jolly, out-of-focus shots of the assorted company. Margaret rarely texted, but she sent me strange, seductive photos of things that had interested her: the sheen of the 1relight on a broken tree bauble, a bowl of oranges, a speckled mirror that held a reAection of the moon.
I received only one text from Graham, who had turned his phone on for the occasion.
Dear horrid cat,
Being unused to and out of practice with this machine, I must make this brief. We are having a splendid, if somewhat pagan, time. I have strong-armed the company into
attending the midnight service this evening. 65 cannot and will not behave. 16 and I have taken over the cooking of the trimmings but we dare not attempt the bird. I will telephone you on Christmas Day, to ensure you are in one piece. This missive took me half an hour to write.
Believe me to be your affectionate friend,
G. G.
He didn’t call until late in the afternoon. I’d spent the day in a food torpor, playing with a pretty golden pendant in the shape of a striding hen that lay just under my collarbones. It was a Christmas gift from him. The note that accompanied it explained, in his idling cursive, that it was chicken necklace, friend to chicken bag. I’d given him a silk aviator scarf and a copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, since he was on his twelfth reread of Rogue Male.
“Happy Christmas!”
“Happy Christmas. You sound rather languid. Did I wake you?”
“No, no. I always spend Christmas in a bit of a coma. Thank you for the beautiful necklace.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I like the way the chicken is running.”
“She is on her way to an important meeting, as you so often seem to be.”
I heard the soft scratch of a lighter, then paper crackling with Aame, then his inhale.
“Are you outside? I can hear you smoking.”
“Oh, can you? I’m sorry, how rude of me. But please don’t make me put this cigarette out.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it. You’ve got the hang of using the phone, then.”
I heard him draw on the cigarette. “It’s certainly less complicated than navigating you in person,” he said amiably.
“Oh yeah?”
“When you’re standing before me with your—your—funny little mouth.”
That startled us both into silence. He cleared his throat and said, “Well. It’s pleasant to just—talk to you. Though it seems I can get even that wrong.”
“Oh, no, you—I mean I’m—that is—er—are you having fun?” “Yes. Are you?”
I breathed out, relieved and disappointed. “Yeah, surprisingly. It’s much more fun to argue with my family in person instead of in my head. Oh…”
He exhaled quickly. “Ah,” he said. “Don’t feel awkward. Everyone here has lost a family. We have jury-rigged a new one. It’s almost like Christmas in the wardroom.”
“That’s… good.”
“What sort of people are they? Your family?” “Oh, very ordinary.”
“That’s not true, I am sure. I wish you would tell me more about your mother’s people. Do they have special traditions at Christmas?”
“Well, they’re Buddhist. So, no.”
“Oh. Well. Is your family’s home in the place where you grew up?”
“Yeah, we moved here when I was eight, and they’ve been here ever since.” “You must have been a strange little girl.”
“How dare you.”
“I can hear in your voice that you are smiling,” he said. “What is it like there?” “We’re close to a forest. About a mile from a lovely lake I used to paddle in
during the summer. I’ve been hissed at by several generations of geese.”
There were a few seconds of silence on the other end, and I thought he’d lost the connection, until he said, “I’m smiling too.”
“Oh? My ears aren’t quite as good as yours, I can’t hear it.”
“I will endeavor to smile louder.” He broke oP, and huPed softly down the phone, a noise between a sigh and a laugh. “You know, when you are out of my sight, I fear I’ve imagined you. And I—”
My heartbeat skittered. He coughed unnaturally and seemed to reconsider his train of thought. “Tell me what it was like, growing up there.”
“Well,” I said, “what do you want to know about?” “Anything. Everything.”
Every time I told Graham something—about myself, about my family, about my experience of the world we shared—I was trying to occupy space in his head. I had ideas for the shape I should take in his imagination. I told him only what I wanted him to know and believe about me. But afterward, I’d sometimes feel ill, like I was glutted on sweetmeats and dizzy with wine. It seemed a reckless indulgence: to have the appetite to admit, for certain, what I was and was not.
The great project of empire was to categorize: owned and owner, colonizer and colonized, évolué and barbarian, mine and yours. I inherited these taxonomies. This, I think, was the reason I played fuck-about-Fred with my ethnic identity as much as I could. “They” are still in charge and even when “they” are saying marginalized instead of mongoloid they are still acknowledging that we are an issue to be dealt with. When would it be my turn to hold the carrot and stick? My sister had grandiose chat about dismantling the carrot-stick complex altogether, but this manifested in being upset all the time, tweeting enthusiastically about debut authors of color who never seemed to publish second novels once the publicity cycle ended, and being underpaid.
Loyalty and obedience are fostered by stories. The Ministry and its satellites were staPed by people who believed they’d smoke one last jaunty cigarette in the eye of a gun. The truth was that we were shackled to the idea that the orders were good and the job was good. Keep calm is just another order like Shoot that
man or Delete the rest. We carry on. Most of us would beg a bullet for kindness. Graham, I think, was one of the few people I’d ever met who could face death with that de1ant cigarette, and that was partly because he was a nervous smoker. Maybe I was tired of stories, telling them and hearing them. I thought the dream was to be post-: post-modern, post-captain, post-racial. Everyone wanted me to talk about Cambodia, and I had nothing to teach them about Cambodia. If you learn something about Cambodia from this account, that’s on you. When Graham was still in my life, I stared at myself in the mirror a lot, trying to see myself as a stranger. I had a non-internalized relationship with my face. It was not unusual for me to look at my face and think What on earth is that? It bored me not to look the same as whoever I was with—isn’t that the whole point of being mixed-race? Oh, England, England! The thing you do best is tell a story about yourself. Graham Gore went to the Arctic believing that a noble death is possible because of all those stories and then he became a story. Oh, England,
you wanted to make stories out of me.
When I 1rst joined the Ministry and they’d pressed me through HR, a woman ran her 1nger down the column with my family history. “What was it like growing up with that?” she asked. She meant it all: Pol Pot Noodle jokes on 1rst dates, my aunt’s crying jags, a stupa with no ashes, Gary Glitter, Agent Orange, we loved Angkor Wat, regime change, not knowing where the bodies were, Princess Diana, land mines, the passport in my mother’s drawer, my mother’s nightmares, fucking Chink, you don’t look it, dragon ladies, fucking Paki, Tuol Sleng was a school, Saloth Sar was a teacher, my grandfather’s medals, the 1ring squad, my uncle’s trembling hands, it’s on my bucket list, Brother Number One, I’ve got a thing for Latinas, the killing 1elds, The Killing Fields (1984), Angelina Jolie, Do you mean Cameroonian? Do you mean Vietnamese? Will you say your name again for me?
I considered.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What was it like growing up without it?”
6
The group’s leaders—an elderly man and two younger hunters—request permission to board the Erebus. At least, this is the assumption, given that Franklin’s expedition lacked an interpreter, leaving Captain Crozier of the Terror to attempt translation. Crozier doesn’t speak the exact dialect of these Esquimaux, relying instead on bits of shared vocabulary.
A party of ten natives comes aboard. Their behavior is different from what the crew has come to expect—typically, the natives are curious, confident, exploring the ship, engaging with the men, miming trade. This time, they gather on the quarterdeck, their faces expressionless as Crozier stumbles through a somber attempt at apologies. Gillies and Des Voeux have laid out gifts at their feet—needles, tobacco, mirrors, and buttons. No knives.
Eventually, Crozier returns to the officers of the Erebus, who stand nearby in their own uneasy cluster.
“Gore,” he says quietly.
“Sir.”
“The man’s wife wants to see you.”
“The man’s—?”
“Wife. He was married.” Crozier lifts his soft gray eyes, with a hint of steel in them. “No children, if that’s any consolation.”
Gore steps forward obediently.
The widow stands at the front of the group. She is small, with black hair and brown skin, her cheeks still flushed from tears shed the night before. Her eyes are dry now, with lashes that grow downward, giving her gaze a strangely veiled effect. Her mouth is strikingly beautiful, a color that Gore will remember and struggle to name for a long time. She looks at him, a gaze that seems to place him against the horizon—not insignificant, but like something that can be pressed down with a thumb.
“I’m sorry,” he says in English, forgetting to ask Crozier how to express it in her language. She continues to look at him.
He feels he should kneel, offer his throat to her hand’s edge. Or perhaps offer his hand to replace her husband’s. A wild thought pounds in his head—after a life of makeshift families in wardrooms, of killing and claiming lands on maps, maybe God has brought him to this woman. Years of pulling a trigger to finally understand her expression.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats.
She looks at him. Even after the group leaves with their gifts, her stare remains with him. When he washes up in his cabin that night, he feels it slip under his shirt, growing into his skin.
