28. All Bikes on the Western Front
‘One of your friends left an egg in my car,’ Eugenia says, when Briar goes to surrender their phone back into custody on Saturday morning.
They feel . . . strange. Hungover. Terminally confused.
Bastian’s revelation from last night weighs heavily on their mind, but it’s murky and ill-defined.
Without their memories, it’s like something from a film - something that happened to somebody else. ‘Hello? Jones? There was an egg.’
‘Sorry. Fresh? Fried?’
‘Hard-boiled. Pocket in the back of the driver’s seat.’
‘Right. I guess that was Hadley. Sorry. Didn’t realise she was packing eggs.’
Eugenia is very fresh this morning. Clean hair, crisp black shirt, glossy manicure. By contrast, Briar feels like a sack of old shit.
‘What is wrong with you?’ Eugenia says, sliding Briar’s phone into a drawer and locking it shut.
‘Um,’ Briar says, feeling like they’ve aged a thousand years since they left Temple on Thursday. ‘I had a bad night.’
She cocks one thick, perfectly sculpted eyebrow at them. ‘You know, you have been here for three weeks, and every time I see you, you have had a bad night, or collected a new injury. If you are this clumsy, why have I hired you for manual labour? I am not paying you to get drunk and fall over.’
‘I know,’ Briar says. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re okay?’
It’s hard to define exactly what Briar is right now. They just shrug.
Eugenia sighs. ‘Fine, don’t tell me. I am only your boss, and a very good boss, too. I have bought new walkie-talkies. They probably won’t work, but you may have one. Only bother me if it is very important. Channel three.’
‘Thanks,’ Briar says, accepting the box she hands over with a very professional-looking setup pictured on the front.
Until this moment, they hadn’t realised they were harbouring a secret desire to walk around with a walkie talkie clipped to their waistband or to talk into one sideways like film crew.
It’ll be fun, probably. If Briar is even capable of having fun any more.
‘Don’t lose it,’ she says, opening a notebook filled with impossibly beautiful handwriting and crossing something off a list.
‘When do you sleep, Eugenia?’
‘When the baby sleeps,’ says Eugenia, adding something to her list. ‘Temple is the baby. Go away, take a day off. And stop falling over.’
‘It’s a dangerous school.’
‘Not if you’re smart.’
That’s probably true. Briar imagines a reality in which they got here, kept their head down, didn’t agree to disrupt ancient deranged rituals, didn’t take extra curricular trips to pubs and formals and grand estates, discovered absolutely nothing new about their childhood, and did not try to fuck their ex-best-friend in an attic bedroom after the relief of a fake near-death experience.
Briar’s alternate universe ghost glimpses Bastian from afar and still hates him, hates the part of themself that loved him, and never understands what exactly went wrong.
It sounds terrible. It sounds peaceful.
In this universe, Briar walks back to Eden. Evie the pip waves at them from across the lawn, inexplicably happy to see Briar, as always.
‘Do you know Max and Ava?’ she asks, when she reaches them.
‘Nope.’
‘Oh. Ava sleeps in the bunk next to mine. Maximilian says Ava is his girlfriend, but Ava says she’s not allowed to have a boyfriend until she’s thirteen.’ She’s struggling to keep up; Briar is in no mood to slow down. ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’
‘Evie, I’m busy.’
‘So that’s a no then,’ Evie says. ‘Well, do you have a girlfriend? Or a . . . um . . . a friend who’s also a janitor?’
‘I don’t have anybody.’
‘That’s sad.’
‘Yeah,’ Briar says. ‘I’m a walking tragedy. Go hang out with your friends, Evie. I’ve got things to do.’
She looks a bit disappointed, but Briar can’t worry about that now.
At the dorm, they knock on Westby’s door. There’s no answer. They knock again, and choose to believe that the distracted noise they hear from within is an invitation.
Inside, the room is impressively wrecked on Westby’s side, his designer weekend bag open with the contents spilling out across both bed and floor.
The bed itself doesn’t look like it was slept in.
Miller is sitting on his own bed looking very piqued, reading a nonfiction book about entrepreneurship with an upsettingly hench man squeezed into a tight suit on the cover.
‘You didn’t say you were having guests,’ he says to Westby, and Westby waves him away with one hand without looking up from his desk, where he’s hunched over a vast array of open notebooks.
He almost upsets a full cup of tea; Briar walks over and moves it aside, and discovers that it’s cold.
There are two other unfinished cups on the desk and the windowsill.
One of them has a tiny fruit fly floating in it, steeping in lazy circles.
‘West,’ Briar says. Westby is in the middle of writing a sentence in his doctor’s note scrawl; he speeds up, like Briar’s coming to eat all his thoughts. His face looks strangely rubbery, and is alternately paper-pale and shades of scrubbed pink around the eyes. ‘Did you sleep?’
‘No,’ says Miller. ‘He was up all night, and he talks to himself when he’s writing, and every so often he just sighs. It’s very antisocial.’
‘West, why don’t you take a break? I’ll get you a coffee from the admin lounge. Still tastes like piss, but . . . stronger piss. I need to talk to you.’
‘No thanks,’ Westby says. ‘Put the kettle on, would you?’
‘Not the bloody kettle,’ says Miller, throwing down his book. ‘Not again. All night, Crispin! You’ve had fifteen cups! I live here too, you know.’
‘I do know. I think of you constantly.’
‘I’m going to put a formal complaint in with the Dame.’
‘Please do.’ Miller seems slightly confused by this, but having made the threat, he has to follow through, grab his jacket and storm off. ‘While you’re there, could you please remind her that silverfish are book-killers? They kill books!’
‘No!’ Miller says, letting the door slam shut.
‘Zippy little dinosaurs from hell. Something like four hundred million years old. Well, I don’t know where they got all their books from back then, because it’s all they seem to bloody eat.’
‘What?’
‘Silverfish!’ Westby exclaims. He finally looks up from his work, pushes the notebook away and sighs. ‘Miller is testing me.’
‘Did you tell him about your dad?’
‘None of his business.’
‘And . . . did you make fifteen cups of tea?’
‘The kettle makes enough for a pot each time, so that’s only five boils.’
‘Right,’ says Briar. ‘And you don’t think it might be time to take a break?’
‘A break? I’m having a breakthrough,’ Westby says. ‘I think. I don’t know. Five boils is very reasonable, over a twelve-hour period.’
He sighs, then gets up, grabs the kettle and goes in search of a tap.
Briar leans over the desk and squints down at one of the notebooks.
It seems to be some kind of complicated legalese; Westby’s Working, then, except that Briar can read it, so it must not yet be imbued with whatever power makes the books in the attic illegible.
They flip to the front and find the introduction, the part Tate had said would hold all the keys to the rest of the Working.
This part makes sense, too, even if it is a tad dense, and full of terms Briar would need to look up in one of Miller’s many dictionaries.
Westby re-enters the room by kicking the door open, then puts the kettle on and sits down on his bed, rubbing his chin until it looks carpet-burned.
‘What’s the resource?’ Briar says, tapping the notebook. ‘You’re trying to use the Work to create something, right?’
‘Oh,’ says Westby. ‘You can read it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, fuck my arse. Damn it. I really thought . . . but if you can read it, then it’s back to the drawing board.
’ All the manic, trembly energy drains out of him, and he flops back onto his bed, narrowly avoiding cracking his head on the wall.
‘God. Embarrassing, really, but . . . when it boils down to it, this is all I have. Or . . . had, I suppose. Past tense. Rest in peace.’
Briar had come here to talk to him about last night, to try to probe the parameters of a historic memory removal, but seeing Westby like this, they feel ashamed to have thought of it at all.
Briar points to the notebook again. ‘How does it work?’
‘Well, it’s very simple, really.’ He seems re-energised by this opportunity to lecture, as Briar had thought he might be, and manages to prop himself up on his elbows.
‘A Working is kind of like a contract. You hold it in your mind as you speak, and it’s .
. . it’s not that the words you say create the power, but that you anchor the Working to them, to get it out of your head and into the world.
With something like Conduct, it makes sense to simply demand what you want.
I won’t bore you with the details of contract law, because it’s not exactly the same, but .
. . it helps with the framing. Like a valid contract, thaumaturgy requires consideration.
You know what that is? Exchange of value.
There’s nothing I’ve ever been able to find in all my research that says that consideration can’t be something physical.
It just hasn’t been done. This started out as an experiment, to test the boundaries and see where it all falls apart, but so far it . . . hasn’t.’
‘Who’s the contract with?’ Briar asks, and Westby shrugs.
‘Frankly, we don’t know, but the idea is that it’s with God.’
‘God?’
‘Brings a whole new meaning to sanctity of contract, doesn’t it?
’ Westby says. ‘That was a joke, Jones. I miss when you barely spoke. I could pretend you were very impressed by me.’ He sighs.
‘I mean, for all we know, it’s a pact with the devil, but that’s where the name thaumaturgy derives from.
Miracle-working. Personally, I think it’s more .
. . a gentleman’s agreement with the universe. ’