The Other People: A Novel(13)

Satisfied, preparations done, she climbed into bed. Alice lay in the other double, cover pulled up to her chin, eyes already closed. The bag of pebbles sat on the table beside her.

Clickety-click. The Sandman is coming.

Fran shivered, despite the thick duvet and the warmth of the room.

She didn’t understand Alice’s odd sleeping episodes, although she had done her best to research the condition (narcolepsy, she had found out it was called). Unfortunately, there weren’t any easy answers. No simple cause and effect. One of those medical anomalies that prove science doesn’t have all the answers.

And nothing she had read could explain the pebbles. Fran had exhausted Google and racked her brains but couldn’t find anything comparable. Eventually, she had given up trying. What was it Holmes said? “When you eliminate the impossible, the only answer must be the improbable”? The problem was, dear Holmes, in this case the answer was the impossible. Stick that in your crack pipe and smoke it.

Alice stirred a little and snuffled into the pillow. During one of her “episodes,” she would fall straight into a deep, silent sleep. At night, when she should be sleeping peacefully, she was never at rest. Turning, crying out, moaning. Often, she thrashed around, screaming, gripped by terrible nightmares. When Fran went to try to comfort her, she pushed her away.

It hurt. But it was understandable. Despite everything they had been through, all that Fran had done for her, the bond they shared, it was not Fran she cried out for in the dead of night. It was not Fran she wanted to soothe the nightmares away.

It was her mummy.





Routine. You became a creature of it in a job like hers, Katie thought. The same hours, the same tables, the same bright fluorescent lighting bearing down. You had no real sense of time in a service station. No clocks. No windows in the café where she worked. A bit like a casino, or an institution of some kind.

It messed with your mind and your body. Katie would find herself eating cereal at dinner time and craving a steak at dawn. Then there was the scratchiness in her eyes and throat from constantly breathing recycled air. Oh, and the glamour of always smelling like stale food. She could never seem to get it out of her clothes, hair or nostrils.

Sometimes, when she emerged after her shift, blinking into the pre-dawn, she had to take a moment. The daylight, the fresh air, the noise. It felt overwhelming. It took her most of the thirty-minute drive home to adjust, recalibrate. To ease the stiffness in her muscles and mind; to relax into being human again.

Every action became so robotic in this artificial world you functioned like a slightly battered and badly maintained machine yourself, performing your tasks with minimal power input, brain engaged elsewhere. Put into neutral. Humming over but only half alive.

Unless something happened to jar you awake. Something unusual, something out of the routine.

The thin man was back.

This was more than unusual. This was wrong. Very wrong.

The thin man had his own routine. He visited approximately once a week; never more than nine days between visits, never less than six.

He never returned on the same day. Ever.

But here he was.

She had just finished her shift and was heading out, hoodie over her uniform, rucksack slung over her back, when she spotted him.

He sat at his usual table, near the front, behind a pillar, where he could watch people coming and going but remain unobserved himself. Often, he had his laptop open, but this morning he had what looked like a notebook and paper spread out on the table in front of him.

She frowned. Something about him looked different, too. Hair? No—that was the usual dark, unkempt non-style. Clothes. He was wearing different clothes. Earlier he had been wearing a grey sweatshirt and black jeans. Now, he wore a checked shirt and blue jeans. He had changed. Why? And why had she even noticed?

She shoved the thought to one side. That wasn’t the only thing that was different. Normally, like her, the man operated on autopilot. Breathing, moving, performing all the tasks required of life (except, perhaps, eating), but not actually living. That vitality, that energy, had been sapped from him.

This morning, he looked as if he had some of it back. She wouldn’t go so far as to say he had color in his cheeks, but he didn’t look as much like a walking corpse as usual.

Something had happened, she thought. Something that had forced him to change his clothes, alter his routine. Despite herself, despite wishing that he would disappear for good, she wondered what.

She walked over to the lanky, bearded youth she was working with on this shift (Ethan? Nathan? Or was it Ned?). That was the only thing that did change here on a regular basis. Her co-workers. The pay wasn’t bad, but the rotten hours, stifling environment and the need for your own car to get you here made the services a less than desirable workplace.

It certainly wasn’t what Katie had imagined herself doing with her life. Sometimes, she could see the pity in her young colleagues’ eyes. Most of them were only here to fund their way through university en route to something better. But she was stuck here permanently. This was her better life.

“You’re a trier, Katie,” she remembered the career adviser at school telling her, with a smug smile, comb-over slicked fast to his freckled head. “You work hard. You’re a good student. But let’s be realistic, you’re never going to be Oxford material.”

Patronizing dick. But then, he had been right. Because here she was, a single mum, working in a dead-end job that a robot probably would be doing in ten years’ time.