WALES 2022
STROLLING AROUND IN PUBLIC made me feel jittery and exposed, as though I’d got up from the operating table in the middle of a heart transplant with my chest hanging open.
As I’d so rigorously trained myself to do, I walked down the corridor on high alert, scanning every face, familiar or otherwise, for that lurch of recognition, that yank of the tether, that crackle of innate fear.
Not that it had saved me in El Salvador; my gaze had slid right over Rafael Quinónez.
Arden could be anywhere. Could be anyone. And all it would take was a momentary lapse in concentration and they could pounce. A knife in my back, a bullet in my head. It wouldn’t matter how brazen. They didn’t need to get away with it, because it would kill them too. Our lifestrings woven fatally together.
Four more days. I just had to stay unmurdered for four more days.
My every instinct told me to spend those four days deep in hiding, but I was needed at the hospital for the daily injections. And I’d learned from bitter experience that making myself a sitting duck was rarely a good thing. Far better a moving target, if I had to be a target at all.
I passed Mum exiting the ground-floor cafeteria with a takeaway coffee cup in each hand and a pack of almonds tucked under her arm. She held out a coffee cup, her nose pink from the constant stream of tissues, then gestured to the pack of nuts.
‘The doctor said Gracie needs to eat healthily, and god knows she’d rather flay herself alive than eat a vegetable.’
I snorted. ‘I don’t think cancer can tell almonds and fizzy laces apart.’
She shook her head with a tight smile. ‘God. The two of you are so … You make the whole thing seem funny. All the joking and sarcasm. Maybe it’s a generational thing.’
If only I could tell her that my original generation was born more than a thousand years before hers. Most adults and authority figures acted like they’d been around longer than me and thus had some greater understanding of life, but while I’d never lived past eighteen, and my frontal lobe had never fully formed, I’d still seen some stuff .
‘For what it’s worth …’ I said, ‘I think Gracie would appreciate it if you tried to do the same. Joke around a little. Remember how she cheered us up after Dad died? We owe it to her to try and do the same. So maybe crack a smile every now and again. Take the piss out of her head. Call her a hard-boiled egg, or, at the very least, learn to foxtrot.’
Mum smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. ‘I’ll try.’
As I left the hospital, I passed Dylan, the farmhand who’d been helping Mum out for the last couple of years. We waved at each other from opposite sides of the rotating doors. The pockets of his plaid lumberjack coat were stuffed with sweets and a film magazine – the perfect antidote to almonds and sincerity. He was in his early twenties, and loved Gracie like a little sister. Our whole family was a patchwork blanket of relationships that shouldn’t quite work but did. Housekeepers turned godmothers, postmen turned babysitters, every Sunday roast an eclectic mix of people who made us smile.
The sky over Abergavenny was a pale, romantic blue; winter had lost its teeth. It was warm for mid-March, and honey-sweet blossom drifted on the breeze. The main street was lined with low pastel buildings, the dramatic hills towering behind them in great arches of forest and grassland. There was an old-fashioned cafe with wicker chairs on the pavement, a bakery that smelled of strawberry tarts, and a barber’s shop buzzing with the sound of clippers.
I kept my gaze broad but focused, sharp, eyes homing in on any sudden movements, anything that looked slightly different to how it had yesterday, anything that made my attention snag . It was exhausting, living in this state of heightened awareness, the constant need for vigilance, but if it kept me alive long enough to save Gracie, it was worth every second.
Outside the florist’s, there was an unfamiliar face, and my heart skipped several beats.
A boy stood by the silver buckets of flowers, examining the bouquets. Tall and blonde, with close-together eyes and a slender frame. His slow gaze met mine with a sudden prickle of fire.
I quickened my pace. I knew pretty much every person my age in this town, and that blonde stranger was not one of them.
But he’d already looked away again, checking the price tag on a bunch of red dahlias. I exhaled long and slow, trying to steady my heartbeat.
I made it to the bookshop four minutes after my shift was supposed to start. I worked at Beacon Books, a small indie in the middle of town, having dropped out of school the minute it was acceptable to do so. After centuries of education in varying forms, I had entirely lost interest. Syllabuses were becoming less and less imaginative as the decades wore on; commutative algebra and subjunctive clauses, plant cell structure and periodic tables, the technicolour brilliance of life reduced to nuts and bolts and quadratic equations.
The same could not be said for Arden. Arden loved words, and ideas, and poetry, and plays. Arden loved to learn, to express, to weave long and meandering thoughts about the human condition. They always carried a little notebook in every life, jotting down these thoughts and ideas and poems, and while I’d never been allowed to read them, I found it hopelessly endearing. It was utterly incongruous with the relentless killer I knew them to be, but perhaps that’s why I found them so compelling – those little quirks and foibles that made them the same person, no matter who or where we were.
Whatever a soul was, it could be carried in a notebook.
It was why I’d badgered Mr Oyinlola, the owner of the bookshop, for months until he’d finally hired me to work alongside his daughter.
In every life, Arden was drawn to literature like a bee to nectar.
So if I was going to find them anywhere, where better than here?
Because this time, I wanted to find them first. I wanted the upper hand, not to be caught off-guard like I had been in El Salvador, nor to beg for my life as I had in Siberia. It didn’t really matter either way, since mutually assured destruction would always be the end state, but it had become a matter of pride.
In the great game of our existence, I didn’t want to lose.
After a half-hearted lecture from Mr Oyinlola about my tardiness, I got to work restocking the non-fiction section. I always kept a close eye on the jacket copy to see if any new titles might deep-dive into the strange phenomenon of conscious reincarnation, but other than a book about near-death experiences, nothing was potentially useful. I’d been trying to make sense of this cruel curse for as long as I could remember, but not even the darkest corners of the internet had anything insightful to say.
Every time the little bell over the entrance tinkled, my gaze shot up, expecting to see a sharp-eyed stranger of exactly my age walking through the door. My assassin. But today most of the clientele consisted of pensioners searching for wildlife annuals, harried parents towing unruly children towards the picture books.
As the sun cracked over the horizon like a brilliant orange yolk, I helped Nia cash up the till. Nia was a timid, serious girl with dark skin and owlish glasses, black hair shorn almost to her scalp. She had the most impeccable collection of chunky-knit cardigans I’d ever seen, and she never looked anyone in the eye.
Nia was highly knowledgeable about a few disparate interests, such as chess, birdwatching and nuclear warfare, and treated almost every other topic of conversation as though nothing had ever been so dull. I liked her very much, and had brushed up on my Oppenheimer knowledge to try to talk to her, but she kept me steadfastly at arm’s length. I didn’t take it personally, since she flinched away from even her father’s affectionate shoulder-squeezes.
Today, though, she initiated conversation as I was counting the ten-pound notes.
‘We finally got stock of this,’ she said, voice gentle and sweet as a flute, with a subtle tremor running through it. She reached under the counter and pulled out a familiar book with a plain black cover and gold-foil text. ‘I set aside a copy for you.’
As she handed it to me, I ran a finger over the title.
Ten Hundred Years of You.
Author unknown.
The same book of poetry Gracie had performed in the hospital.
Something sickly and fearful lurched in my ribs, though I couldn’t quite say why. A prickle of danger on the periphery of my mind.
‘Have you heard the hype?’
I shook my head numbly. ‘I’m not on social media.’
Not just out of some vague sense of preservation, but out of principle. Over the past lifetime I had seen the way it eroded democracy and gamified conflict, the way it splintered attention spans and polarized opinions to dangerous extremes, the way it devalued art and fed the leeches of artificial intelligence, the way it jacked adrenaline and manipulated dopamine and narrowed human awe to a singular flickering point.
‘Oh.’ Nia blinked four or five times in rapid succession, her deep-brown eyes fixed on a spot just over my shoulder. ‘Well, a travel journalist found this handwritten book of poetry about reincarnation in the Siberian wilderness. It’s apparently decades old, and they have no idea who wrote it, but they published the original in Russian and now it’s become a sensation. Translated all over the world. The best they could, anyway. The poetry is lovely and sad and strange, and then there’s the mystery of who wrote it in the first place – I read one theory that it was sent to earth by some kind of celestial being.’
I nodded a wordless thanks, hardly able to believe what she was telling me.
Siberian wilderness.
For centuries I’d begged to read their writing, to no avail.
And now the twin forces of fate and synchronicity had handed it to me on a platter.
This was Arden’s poetry. It had to be.